"The Ballroom of Romance" by William Trevor
brwr...@gte.net
"The Ballroom of Romance"
by William Trevor
The above title is in honor of the short story of the same name featured in
the 1994 anthology ["first Vintage Books edition, December 1995"]:
"The Vintage Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction," edited by Dermot Bolger.
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From what I remember, this interesting - though downbeat - story is about an
isolated dance-hall in a small Irish village in the early 1950s. The story
(cited above) describes the weekly dances held in the dance-hall and the small
"soap operas" that occur among the villagers during these dances.
The story reminds me of two times and places.
The first is China. The Irish villagers in the short story described above
relied mostly on bicycles for transportation - same as was true for Chinese
citizens in 1985 and 1987 China. (In 1985 I studied Chinese language and
culture for a semester in Nanjing, China; in fall 1987 to spring 1988 I taught
English for nearly a year at an agricultural research institute, once again in
Nanjing.)
The other time and place (reminiscent of the Irish short story) is described
at the end of this post. It's a "hypothetical" situation which I believe must
have actually occurred.
***********************************************************************
<notes that offer a broader perspective: call it "Dance Scenes of the World">
Some of my movie favorites include "Black Dju" and "Salut Cousin!"; both were
featured in a European Film Festival at the American Film Institute (at the
Kennedy Center in Washington, DC) during the fall of 1996 (I believe that's
when they were shown, anyway). "Brothers in Trouble," another favorite of
mine, was shown during a Pakistani Film Festival at the Freer Gallery of Art
(also in Washington, DC) last fall (1997).
I just moved to a different city (not far from DC) so most of my things are
still packed up; I don't know where my old movie programs are right now. So
I'll try, as best as I can, to describe these films from memory (briefly).
By the way, the unifying thread to all these movies is that they contain
interesting dance scenes, so please bear with me for my own personal "dance
story" at the end of this post. (I'm pretty sure, though not completely
certain, that "Black Dju", the first movie described below, contained a dance
scene or two.)
"Black Dju" is about the experiences of a young African (Guinean, I believe)
man asked by his family to go to Luxembourg to search for his father, who had
accepted employment in that European country as a construction worker and then
mysteriously disappeared. His family was worried sick about his father. Also,
the family was in near-desperate straits: their small town was economically
depressed, and the family relied on the father's monthly checks as their main
means of subsistence.
So Dju (I hope that's his name - the name of the son) had to wander
desperately, near-broke, through Luxembourg in search of his father. Partly
due to his persistence in "nagging" the local police to help him find his
father, Dju was finally befriended by a friendly but somewhat temperamental
much older white cop with a drinking problem. The policeman agreed, on his own
time, to help Dju search for his (the young man's) father.
-------------------------------------
"Brothers in Trouble" is about the troubled experiences of a group of illegal
Pakistani (male) immigrants in London in the late 1960s or so. They all lived
a furtive existence "stowed away" in a townhouse together, and the men were
forced to accept the most menial and demeaning of jobs even though most were
well-educated professionals back in their native country of Pakistan.
The group's de facto leader, an older Pakistani man, befriended a young white
(female) prostitute who moved into the townhouse (she shared a room with the
older man). Because she was so young and attractive, envy among the group of
men eventually caused deadly conflicts among them - partly because they had
such limited access to women in the England of that time.
-------------------------------------
Salut Cousin! is about the experiences of two first-generation Algerian
cousins in Paris. One, a recent immigrant and a "country bumpkin", struggled
with his limited means as a salesman of women's clothing; his "city slicker"
cousin with a drug problem (I think) who had unrealistic aspirations to become
a well-known rap singer (from what I remember); and his growing attraction to
a young African woman, a fellow immigrant working as a physician's assistant
or nurse to a traditional African herbalist/doctor.
-------------------------------------
"The Brylcreem Boys" is about the conflicts between British and German
prisoners of war stationed at a POW camp in a small town in Ireland during
World War II. These POWs were allowed limited-access, limited-duration passes
into the town during some evenings and weekends.
The two main (male) characters, a British and a German prisoner of war,
quarrel with each other for the affections of a spirited, charming young Irish
woman who also turned out to have great dancing ability. She showed her dance
skills at a small Irish bar by dancing some sort of jig or "stomp" dance that
looked somewhat like American square dancing.
--------------------------------------
So here's the (historical) lead-in and very brief description of my very own
"dance story", which will be followed up soon with a recounting of some events
in the Ireland of 800 A.D. or so.
It's all a distant memory from a "hypothetical" witness....as usual.
*********************************
<historical sidebar:>
"The Irish did not especially mean to be deviant, but their world hardly
abounded in models of Christian orthodoxy. After [Saint] Patrick, they
experienced an influx of anchorites and monks fleeing before the barbarian
hordes, and these no doubt provided them with some finer points on eremitical
and conventional life. 'All the learned men on this side of the sea,' claims a
note in a Leyden manuscript of this time, 'took flight for transmarine places
like Ireland, bringing about a great increase of learning' - and, doubtlessly,
a spectacular increase in the number of books - 'to the inhabitants of those
regions.' But not a few of these men were bone-thin ascetics from such Roman
hinterlands as Armenia, Syria, and the Egyptian desert. The Ulster monastery
of Bangor, for instance, claimed in its litany to be 'ex Aegypto transducta'
('translated from Egypt'); and the convention of using red dots to adorn
manuscript initials, a convention that soon became a mark of Irish
manuscripts, had first been glimpsed by the Irish in books that the fleeing
Copts brought with them..."
(from "How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic
Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe," by Thomas Cahill
[1995])
- I can't find the specific page right now, but I seem to remember that the
period of time described above was prior to 800 A.D.)
---------------------------------------------
Here's the "hypothesis":
So perhaps the Ireland of about 800 A.D. was a bit more cosmopolitan (both
racially and culturally) than we might otherwise assume. Some of the Irish
citizens of that time might have been descendants of some of the supposedly
celibate ascetics, for example.
Or perhaps the usual "cast of characters" that I've mentioned in previous
posts were all Irish at that point in history, and later (in this day and age)
have now become people of other races and nationalities. Because we've all
known each other once, and in some cases twice, before, we must have
recognized each other in this lifetime by instinct - even before we met.
That's how we all ended up not that far from each other geographically, I
suppose.
And as for me: maybe I was completely Irish then, or maybe I was Italian and
Irish. Or French and Italian and Irish.
Or something like that.
-----------------------------
So here's who I think I was before:
I was a monk because religion was my refuge. I think I was abused as a child
(in ways I don't remember exactly now). So I ran away from home to join the
monastery.
I discovered that most of the men already there in the monastery had escaped
home too, for about the same reasons I did. They all had sensitive, poetic
natures that (for some of them) hid dark streaks of anger, bitterness, and
occasional self-destructiveness.
I wasn't quite as artistic as them, but they liked me anyway because I had a
loony sense of humor. I was the "class clown". Humor was the drug for my deep
depression.
Most of my artistically inclined fellow monks happened to be homosexual or
bisexual. That's perhaps one of the reasons why they all had to run away from
home, I guess; they just weren't understood at home. As for me, I think I
"secretly" had a girlfriend who had also escaped home because she, too, had
been abused as a child. She was young, too, about my age then: 23. I don't
remember now exactly how she made a living. Both of us were constantly broke,
anyway. (Heaven only knows how I managed, as a monk, to have a "secret"
girlfriend. Everyone looked the other way, I suppose, because I think I was
popular both in the village and in the monastery - though it was quite hard
for me to tell that at times, people being what they are.)
------------------------------------------
So here's the "usual suspects" again, same as they are now and same as they
were before then.
But in this particular post, only a few individuals are described (for
streamlining).
*************************
So there's my cousin, the one with the funny puns and rhymes: the Italian or
Filipino,
the one who always dreamed of someday making a living in the "big city"
or
who dreamed of escaping to a quiet little life in a small town by marrying
into a large and hopefully supportive Irish, French, and German-Dutch family.
<Who knows which of the two he was then, really?>
So there's my neighbor, the Turkish-Iranian carpet merchant with an
entertaining sense of humor.
So there's the dance DJ and/or traveling musician: the Asian with a wicked
sense of humor, various allergies similar to mine, and a love of cartoons.
So there's the village barber, the South Asian with both an artistic and a
comedic touch.
So there's my fellow dance fan, the South Asian who gained a special
understanding of Latin thanks to an elderly couple then residing in the
village.
Maybe my two closest female friends were there then too. Who knows. I think
they were friends of my girlfriend's, so I didn't know them all that well
then.
*********************************
So there I was, isolated in the countryside with fellow monks who I liked (and
who liked me) but who I didn't always get along with, anyway.
So just like when I was in the "town" of China's Nanjing, sometimes late at
night I walked (and/or cycled) out of the dark, very quiet countryside to go
downtown. I'd meet up with my city friends so we could check out some sights
together.
If there were any dances then, I might have tried some dancing.
If there was any standup comedy then, I might have cracked a few lame jokes.
If there were any good local plays then, I might have checked out a few.
<No active participation for me, though: I'm no actor!>
Then I always went back to the monastery, to my writing and oil painting and
assistance in the transcribing of the Bible.
The more I looked at the holy document, the more I had the feeling I'd seen it
all before.
I didn't tell anybody that, however.
After all, they would all think I was crazy...
right?
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