The Gods of Tango (20 page)

“You use what you have,” La Strega said. “To ward off chaos. And chaos is everywhere, it’s work that’s never finished, like this laundry, like feeding hungry mouths. In Scylla the old people used to say, Odysseus’s journey never ends. Well! No one knows that better than immigrants.”

People did not eat together at La Rete, separated as they were by gulfs of language, food, and culture. La Strega cooked for bachelors for a modest fee. On Sundays, each group adhered to its own traditions, shedding the pressure to translate every word into Spanish, allowing each mind to rest inside its mother tongue. Sunday lunch was a separate affair, taken in individual rooms or at far-flung tables in the central patio on hot days. And, afterward, no tango and no dancing. Leda tried to hide her disappointment.

She went out searching for the tango. On a Sunday, after lunch, she took a walk in the afternoon light, keeping her ears pricked for music. She found it down the block and around the corner, at a yellow-shuttered window. Violin, guitar, laughter. She stood outside the window for a long time, listening, trying to make herself invisible. The street was empty. April had come, and a cold autumn wind bit at her neck and ears. She turned up her collar and leaned against the wall. They were amateurs, these musicians, with none of Nestore’s control—their rhythm was erratic, the guitar a little out of tune—but their enthusiasm made the song beautiful. Violin as lead voice. Violin soaring. Steps of dancers. Steps of someone approaching the front door. She didn’t want to be found here, a strange lingering man. She walked on quickly and did not turn back to see who opened the door.

She began taking these walks every Sunday. She learned there was
music in many conventillos, after church and food, like the third point in a holy trinity to mark the Lord’s Day. Or so it seemed to her. Perhaps nobody else saw the music as part of any trinity, or as part of anything holy for that matter. Perhaps it was just one brief portal of escape from the grind of long days and suffocating nights in crowded buildings so far away from one’s familiar land. A respite. A halcyon moment between the battles of the week just past and the ones that lay ahead. Whatever the music meant to people, the people clearly longed for it, turned to it, demanded it, made it sing in the dilapidated buildings they called home. Leda walked the streets and listened at each window for tangos, and, when she found them, she leaned against the wall and soaked them up. She never stayed outside any particular home too long, and she never wandered beyond the few blocks that made up the neighborhood of San Telmo, which in her mind had taken on an almost mythological power to shield her from anyone who might recognize her as Leda (although she thought about them often, and couldn’t help wondering whether they thought of her, Palmira, Arturo, Francesca, and, above all, to her surprise, Alfonso Di Bacco, the roaming baker, who stayed with her so vividly that she decided to take his last name).

Valentino, one of the bachelors—a short man with a beak nose and a surprisingly loud laugh—helped her find a job at the cigarette factory where he worked. Twelve-hour days of crushing tobacco in a great machine, so much of it that when she closed her eyes to sleep at night she saw levers pressing over and over into shredded leaves. She stank of raw tobacco and her feet ached from standing all day. But it was work, and, though at four days a week it wasn’t enough to pay for her room and La Strega’s food, she still had the money her parents had sent her (and how were they? waiting for word? no, don’t think about that, don’t think about them) to supplement, and, for now, that was enough to buy her time.

This new life brought many freedoms. She could smoke, she could walk the streets at night, she could curse and spit into gutters. She could hold
down a job that paid twice as much as anything a woman could do with her clothes on. But there were also new demands. She had to be extremely careful with her posture (head up, shoulders squared) and her gait (long sure strides, no swaying hips). She had to exude confidence, if not outright bravado, at all times. She had to keep her voice carefully calibrated, using only the lower half of its natural register. She could use the chamber pot in her own room now, but as she couldn’t wash her menstrual rags and hang them on the public line, she had to smuggle them out in burlap sacks, mixed with basil to hide the metallic smell, and take them to the streets, where she left them, guiltily, in a different alley each month, like a murderer’s bloody refuse or some twisted heathen offering. (It was thanks to Fausta’s advice that she used the basil, and every time she smuggled out these incriminating sacks she could hear her old bunkmate’s voice,
use basil, cover bad things with it, so the evil eye will go away
. But what if Fausta could see her now, creeping into alleys, dressed as a man? Would she see Leda as protecting herself from the evil eye, or as the evil eye itself, a demon to be warded off? And what about Fausta herself—how was she faring with her husband in the wilds of this city? Had she found what she wanted: thyme, coriander, motherhood, pesos for daily bread? Leda longed to know, and yet the thought of running into Fausta filled her with dread.) She could never drop her guard, not even for a moment, because, as it turned out, men sized up other men, not just sometimes but constantly. She’d never realized the full extent of these invisible transactions until she was involved in them. Sometimes they were blatant, sometimes subtle, delivered with pursed lips or darting glances, sometimes behind a smile or coupled with a kiss on the cheek, all the while calculating your odds in case it came down to a fight. Because being a man meant facing possible violence at any turn. If you were helpless, it did not serve, as it could for a woman, to make you seem more innocent, more pure. It would not inspire a gentleman to come to your aid when you were in distress. And she lacked the muscle of the men around her; not only did she know this but the men around
her knew as well. There was no way to conceal the narrowness of her shoulders, her lanky build. To make up for this, her persona had to be even tougher. She bought a dagger in a pawnshop—a
facón
, the shopkeeper explained: the kind of knife the gauchos used in the Argentinean countryside—and she wore it tucked into her trouser leg at all times. As she walked, the blade moved against her calf, and she drew comfort from its hard presence. Forward, back. Forward, back. Her small yet potent companion, scissoring a silent rhythm against her skin. Its slim pressure fortified her. In the big city, you had to hold your own if you didn’t want to die.

Sometimes, deep in the night, she unbound her aching breasts and sat alone in front of a cracked mirror, staring at herself in the light of a single candle, amazed at what she saw. A not-man. Not-woman. A fallen-woman-risen-man. She couldn’t tell what was stranger: that a man existed inside her, or that the world accepted his existence. She wondered why no one saw through her disguise. Perhaps people could see only what they expected, what fit inside their vision, as if human vision came in precut shapes more narrow than the world itself, and this allowed her to hide in plain sight.

Hidden but not silent. Now she practiced out loud, in her little room. Nobody seemed to mind or even notice in the din of La Rete’s days. A wild freedom to let her hands sing tangos, to refine her sound, which grew a little clearer and brighter each day as she practiced in that cramped rectangle where sunlight shone only through the slit beneath the door, that humble stinking space that she could love because it was her own, and where music possessed her, her first lover, her only lover, perhaps forever, since even if by some miracle she managed to keep living on this knife’s edge, undiscovered, surviving, besting death at its own game, she obviously could never have a man. She didn’t mind the sacrifice. It seemed enough for a life, to give yourself to music the way nuns give
themselves to God. To vow. To surrender. Only music, after all, made life bearable. Only with music did she feel—what was it? Free? Happy?

No, it was something else.

Awake.

Music, arrow to pierce all barriers. Music, the great equalizer. Music, invader of centuries. Nectar of demons, whiskey flask of God.

It rained heavily that winter, the winter of 1913. Children got sick and died of pneumonia in their rooms. Brothers and sisters were forced to sleep in the courtyard to evade contagion, in the cold, in the rain. Each time a child died, the mothers wailed and the bachelors shook their heads sadly and returned to their card games. On nights when the central courtyard filled with water, the men huddled in their room and taught young Dante games from France, Lebanon, Andalucía, Catalonia, as well as how to curse and communicate in Spanish. Without realizing it, they initiated Dante into the secret sect of men. The leaning back and sitting with legs spread apart. The space under the surface of their words, suffused with instinctive understanding. The talk of women, low enough to keep out of female earshot because they were good men after all and wouldn’t want the ladies to hear what they wanted to do to whores. The vivid language they had for lust. Dante would never have guessed the vocabulary for private parts could be so broad. No food or object was exempted from the sexual imagination. Corncob, carrot, pole, post, spear, knife, sausage, broom, cigar, pestle, melons, apples, fig, cake, cup, pot, slit, cut, hole. Her brain raced to absorb this new cosmology of the body. The men didn’t seem to know what to make of this strange young man who was really still a kid, they said, with his face that refused to grow even the smallest semblance of a beard. They called him El Chico, which meant the Kid in Spanish but also the Small One, a nickname she tried and failed to refuse. He was a strange fish in their waters, that Chico, an odd quiet boy with no relatives anywhere in the
city, who played the violin behind closed doors and insisted on bathing upstairs in his own room, which required two men to haul the metal tub up the stairs, full of water already gray from a family or two’s ablutions.

“Why do you want to do that?” the men said.

“You got a scar you don’t want us to see?”

“Moles maybe?”

“Or the size of your pole.”

“Like we haven’t seen small ones before.”

“Or big ones. Maybe that’s the secret? Eh, Chico?”

The men laughed. El Chico just smiled and said nothing.

She engaged the assistance of a hale young man, usually Guido, La Strega’s son, who at first refused Dante’s coin of thanks at the end of the chore, though after a month in which it became clear that this strange tenant’s phobia of bathing in front of other men would not abate, he slipped the silver in his pocket with a nod and a mumbled “please don’t tell my mother.”

From the men’s talk, she learned of new places where she could find the tango. Night places. Cafés that stayed lit and loud all night, where decent women never went and where men had better know how to watch their backs.

I can’t go, she thought. I have to go.

She’d start with La Moneda, a little place squeezed between a pawnshop and a bakery, which the bachelors often talked about and which looked innocuous enough, at least by day. It was Valentino’s favorite place. She’d keep her dagger close. She’d go alone.

She arrived at one a.m., just as La Moneda was beginning to fill. It was larger inside than she would have imagined from the street, as the storefront was small but let into a long narrow room crammed with little tables over which men drank and played cards and crouched without speaking to each other. The wall behind the bar screamed with bottles. The air was thick and smelled of onions and unwashed mouths. Men
everywhere, claiming chairs, leaning against walls, three deep at the bar. There were also women, though fewer of them, interspersed among the men. Women difficult to look at, harder not to look at. These women bared their throats. Their lips were painted red, and pulled back into smiles. They leaned close to men, touched them, draped themselves over them like human shawls.

Music flowed from the back of the room, though it was too crowded for her to see the musicians. Guitar, flute, and one more instrument she couldn’t place. It sounded like an accordion, only more subtle and intense, a tempered howl. She recognized the song; it was one of the first she’d learned from Nestore. She moved toward the bar.

“Well?” The barman was impatient.

“Yes?”

“What’ll it be?”

She wasn’t prepared, didn’t know how to order at a bar. She scanned the bottles against the wall, tried to think fast, look certain. “Grappa.”

The barman nodded and walked away, returning soon with Leda’s drink. The men around her wasted no time in gulping down the contents of their glasses, so she did the same, thrusting her neck back as she drank. The grappa burned. The music swirled and rose to a peak, then ended with a flourish quickly drowned out by applause. Another song began. No one seemed to be fighting, there were no brawls, no brandished knives, though surely there were many that lurked hidden. She herself had her facón in her trouser leg, at the ready. She ordered another grappa and reveled in the hot trail it made through her body as it went down.

A few paces away, a girl in a green dress stood close to two men, one of whom had his arm around her waist. The second man touched the girl’s breasts. She pushed his hand away and said something into his ear. The man laughed and stroked her breasts again, harder this time, grasping in a way that surely hurt, although the girl showed no reaction and this time didn’t stop him. She stood looking indifferent as though the man weren’t there at all. She was a slight girl, sparrowlike, though her
breasts were surprisingly full. Leda was staring. She shouldn’t be staring. She turned away, toward the dancers pressed into the center of the room. Some men danced with women, but many danced with other men. The reason was obvious; there weren’t enough women to go around. Maybe six or seven women altogether, and dozens and dozens of men. And the women: the way they danced. Moving like regal snakes. Backwards in the man’s arms. That one in the red dress that’s been washed too many times (and she thought of the Red Woman she’d seen in Naples, on the street, the urge to leap out of the carriage and lose everything), she was a good dancer, better than her partner, even though he was leading. Her face was a stone mask of concentration as she glided, dipped, rose, slanted against her partner as if melding to him. When the song ended, her dance partner whispered something in her ear and the woman shook her head and turned away. In doing so she caught Dante staring at her. Smiled. Held his gaze for a few seconds, then made her way to the bar and sidled right up to Dante.