The Gods of Tango (10 page)

Arturo finished. Leda sat silent, staring at the long flame of the lamp. She saw Dante inside it, small, orange-tinged, eyes shut tight, hands clutched to his bleeding chest (or perhaps it hadn’t been his chest? Where did the bullet land?). She would have reached her hand into the lamp to save or at least comfort him, but he was unreal, out of reach. Arturo seemed to be waiting for her to speak. He seemed to need something from her, but she didn’t know what, and in any case she doubted she could give it. The day had gutted her, there were no words left, no thoughts, nothing but dark.

“You still haven’t eaten,” he said.

Leda said nothing. Just the thought of eating made her nauseous.

“Francesca will make a scandal if we take this plate back to the kitchen with food still on it. Won’t she, Silvana?”

The girl on the trunk nodded, then resumed her absolute stillness.

“That’s how she is.” Arturo turned back to Leda. “She’s going to send in dinner later, too.”

“Thank you, but this is more than enough for the night.”

“Maybe you’d rather be alone.” Arturo gazed into the flame. “But I have two more things to tell you. First, his clothes are in there.”

He gestured toward the armoire, whose closed doors suddenly acquired a new aura; they were not ordinary wooden slabs, but gates of death.

“We didn’t know whether you’d … want them. Of course, you’ll probably want the space for your own dresses. If you ever wish for them to be taken away, just let me know and I’ll do it.”

Leda nodded.

“Not now, then, I assume.”

She shook her head. The thought of losing Dante’s clothes seemed unbearable.

“Very well. Secondly. This room is paid for you, for the next two months. We took a collection among members of my labor union. No, don’t look at me like that—what else would we have done? Dante was a good man and everybody knew it. We all watched him sacrifice to bring you here. And our brothers in the struggle know he gave his life for all of us.”

Leda tried to smile.

“So, in any case, you have some time to figure out what you want to do. Whether you want to look for work, or go back home. Do you think you’ll go back home?”

There was a strange lilt in his voice, a forced attempt to sound casual. Leda had no idea how to answer him. “I don’t know. I don’t have the money to go back.”

“Your family might send it. Or you could earn it yourself, over time.
But I should also say”—here, again, the pinch in his voice, trying too hard to sound offhand—“that if your father gives his blessing for you to stay here, well, there aren’t a lot of unmarried girls, decent ones I mean, here in this city, but there are some. Francesca and her daughters are seamstresses. They might be able to help you find work. Don’t you think, Silvana?”

Silvana nodded again.

“Grazie,”
Leda said. She had said the word so many times in the past few hours that it seemed to have lost all color.

“Well, no need to decide tonight. We should leave you in peace. You must be tired.”

Leda nodded.

Arturo looked disappointed. Really, he was like a puppy, she thought. A puppy too bewildered to realize it was lost. She watched him hesitate, then stand. Silvana followed suit.

“Just promise that you’ll eat before you sleep,” he said.

“I promise.”

“Good night, then, Leda. Get some rest. Leave tomorrow to tomorrow, it’ll be there waiting.”

They left. Leda didn’t move for a long time. Then she pushed the plate to the far corner of the table, turned down the lamp, and drank the wine in two fast gulps. She heard the chime and clang of dinner being cooked in the kitchen, the voices of women and girls as they chopped, washed, stirred. She heard men’s voices as they arrived home. Shouts. Mumbles. Laughter. She was fortunate to have landed among people who treated her with such generosity. She should be grateful. But she didn’t know these people, didn’t know how far their goodwill would stretch, what it was made of. She stared at the wall. It was riddled with stains from grease or moisture. She couldn’t imagine sleeping. The rest of her night lay before her, empty, insurmountable. Dante, dead. Where was he buried? What a disgrace, she’d forgotten to ask. Loss piled up inside her, along with innumerable fears, of the night outside, the crowded city, the
thoughts in her own mind. She wasn’t sure that she could face the day to come.

What if she didn’t? If she died?

She considered this possibility. It would be an escape. But how? She had no poison. No knife. She could find a knife in the kitchen but wouldn’t know where to stab.

She thought of Arturo, who had just buried his friend, now having to bury his friend’s bride as well.

She thought of her mother waiting and waiting for a letter from Argentina.

She thought of the violin in the trunk, cast adrift on a foreign continent with no one to pass down its history or give it voice.

The chatter outside her door began to subside. It was a Tuesday night, after all, there was work to be done tomorrow. Her own plans loomed amorphous, indecipherable. She could kill herself or she could look for work. She could talk to Francesca about sewing, take up a needle and show her what she could do. She could walk down the street and hear and see and smell it, try to understand this new city, this Buenos Aires. She could mail a letter to her family, as she had promised them she would do as soon as she arrived. How would she write that letter? What could she possibly say?

She should start trying.

She went to her trunk for pen, ink, and paper, and brought them back to the table. The page was ruthlessly blank. She stared at it for a long time, and when she finally began to write, her hand shook.

Dear Papà and Mamma
,

Terrible news—your nephew is gone—he is not here—

No, she thought, that’s not right, he is my husband. Before he is their nephew, he is my husband. And the word
gone
is wrong, it’s not as if he left on some adventure. She crossed out everything she’d written, drew a line below it, and began again.

Dear Papà and Mamma
,

I am sorry to tell you that my husband, Dante, my cousin,
was shot in cold blood by a
has passed away,
I am alone and don’t know how I will

Wrong. Wrong. She crossed everything out, again, and turned over the page. Her pen hovered over it. Nothing came. Zio Mateo seemed to leer at her from the shadows. She tried to imagine him sad for the loss of his son, but could not picture it, when at Cora’s funeral, his daughter’s funeral, he’d looked on with a face so closed it could itself have been a tomb. She threw her pen to the floor and stared and stared at the blank page, whose whiteness was interrupted by the stains and bulges of crossed-out, decimated lines on the underside, a forest of words in which she could become irretrievably lost.

Cora’s corpse appeared two days after she died. The spring floods had swelled the river and made it carry her downstream, to the low bowl of the valley beneath the village. By then, her face was blue and gray and bloated almost beyond recognition. Her undergarments were stuffed with black stones and a single iron crucifix almost twenty centimeters long.

She had escaped from the hut where she’d been living for six months, up the hill from the village, under strict lock and key, far from everyone except a quiet old monk from the nearby Franciscan monastery who came to tend to her. Nobody had dreamed that she would try to escape, let alone succeed. She had clearly planned ahead. When the monk arrived that afternoon with her bread and cheese, she was waiting for him with the iron crucifix in hand, the only heavy implement in her crude room, which, on previous days, the monk had seen her cradle like a baby and sing lullabies to in her babbling mad-girl’s voice, and no matter how much he’d scolded her for the blasphemy, he had not succeeded in making her stop. All of this he told Cora’s father, Zio Mateo, on the evening Cora went missing. Leda was not in the room when that conversation
occurred, but she heard the whispers of it and she could imagine how Zio Mateo had looked when the monk told him about this, sneering with pity and rage the way he did when people failed to do his bidding. So you knew, then, Mateo said to the monk, that she could unfasten it from the wall.

The monk nodded, ashamed.

But you never stripped her room of it.

She had so little, the monk said. I hoped that Christ’s presence would help her soul.

Her soul? How does your head feel now, old monk? Had enough of Crazy Cora’s soul?

The monk rubbed his scalp and looked penitent. The blow had been swift and unexpected; she had struck his skull from behind as he was setting her plate on the wooden table. He had lost consciousness, and when he recovered it, the girl was gone.

Her two brothers went to look for her. They thought she might be sleeping in the forest, on a bed of leaves, murmuring words wild enough to make the dirt beneath her go insane. She had to be found. She had to be helped. She had to be punished, too, of course, but that part went unspoken. At night, Leda imagined Cora running and running through the valley and then out of it, through forest and over hills and past villages that speckled the earth with their sadly clustered lives, all the way to the foothills of Vesuvius, and Vesuvius would gather her into its black hollow core and find a way to set her free.

But it did not happen that way. It was Dante who found her, Dante who thought to look downriver, thought to trace the trajectory of the drowned. He pulled her corpse from the water, still light enough to gather into his arms despite the extra burden of wet hair and clothes and skin, let alone the stones he did not yet know about. He carried her pressed against his chest, one arm under her knees and the other at her back, as if she were a princess condemned to sleep by an evil spell, though unlike such a princess Cora hung at a stiff and awkward angle and refused to
bend or drape or fold. The walk home was laborious. He did everything he could to avoid being seen by village gossips, taking a long, circuitous path through the forest, and entering their house through the back door. None of it made any difference. The news spread quickly and expanded in the telling.

This part, too, Leda could imagine with precision: Dante walking up the hill with a disfigured body in his arms. The sweat on his neck from exertion. The bruised corpse, soggy in a manner never felt among the living. Those last and terrible moments of touch. The need to put her down on the ground to open the back door, if nobody inside saw him coming and opened it for him. The need to report on how he found her, once inside, Dante’s voice a dull scrape against the quiet.

The full story was not told and not acknowledged in Leda’s house. Cora had not run past the crumpled body of an aging monk, with the focused gait of a murderer. She had not reached the river and filled her pockets and undergarments with stones and even heaven help her with the holy cross itself, all pressed against her nether skin for the express purpose of pinning her underwater. She had not walked into the river with a will to die.

But in the village, it was told and told—in the plaza, at the apothecary’s pungent shop, at the public washing tubs, where women gathered to scrub stained sheets without mercy. Tongues burned with the story.

That girl, what a burden she became to her family.

And look where she’s ended up.

You know how they found her? A holy
cross
, right in her—can you imagine?

No.

You mean—?

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen. Disgusting.

A disgrace.

But she was crazy. We have to remember she was wrong in the head.

That girl was possessed by demons.

I heard she howled like a dog when the moon was full.

I heard her eyes turned red as blood when she attacked that poor monk.

She almost killed him.

I heard she tore her own clothes off like a common whore.

Oh, we
all
saw that.

You remember, don’t you, poor Sister Teresa—?

Oh sweet María yes.

She’s never been the same since, you know.

What she put the nuns through. All of them.

Pffft
, that girl, she brought evil spirits down on us.

It’s because of her that the woods are haunted.

I still won’t walk out there alone.

Nor I.

Nor I.

Bless the nuns, they did their best.

Oh yes, the way they—

—cleared the woods.

Yes.

Of that girl’s evil.

For the good of all.

And the girl’s mother: how she must have suffered all these years to think her own womb could make such a creature.

No greater horror for a woman.

But her fault after all. What kind of mother breeds a girl like that?

And now, the worst sin. The taking of your own life.

To think that a Mazzoni daughter will be buried outside of church grounds—the shame of it!

But, despite the gossip, Cora was not buried outside church grounds. Zio Mateo made a gift to the church, and the priests quickly agreed with him; yes, yes, you’re absolutely right, it was a terrible accident, she fell
into the river and how scared she must have been, poor girl, a tragedy, and thank you for your generosity, Don Mateo.

She was buried in a spare ceremony that nobody attended beyond the immediate family. Leda felt the spurn of it and longed to spit in the face of every gossip-woman in the village who did not come. The air was restless that day, full of wind and bluster; four roses abandoned the coffin’s surface for a hapless flight between the spindly cemetery trees. The Mazzoni family tomb lay ready, its marble slab pulled aside to reveal the insatiable open mouth of the ground. A small cluster of relatives, all dressed in black, wept dutifully as the priest muttered his prayers. The women clung to their hats and their black veils fluttered restlessly. Leda stared at the coffin and tried to understand how the radiance that had once been her cousin could be enclosed in that box of wood. Not possible. Though that life-joy had long been gone. She remembered Cora two years ago, before the madness, when she was still the girl who shone too brightly and leapt off too-high rocks. That was the Cora she wanted back. That Cora was not in the coffin. She had vanished without dying, an ending worse than death.