The Gods of Tango (25 page)

“Nobody. I can smell the tobacco.”

She went hot with embarrassment.

“Don’t worry. We all smell like our jobs around here, whether it’s metal, tannin, bread, or shit. If you come work for me, one day, I swear to you, you can quit the factory and then you’ll just smell like music.”

Dante laughed. “Really? What does music smell like?”

“You tell me.”

Dante met Santiago’s gaze. He was serious. She had never met a man who talked this way. He loved music as recklessly as she did. It seemed madness to trust a stranger in this city. He could be tricking her, luring
her into some sort of trap. Naïve new immigrant, easy to stab for a few coins. And yet his vision pulled at her. It made her want to follow him anywhere, out into the night, like the children in the story of the pied piper, blinded by an irresistible song.

“
Che
, Dante.” It was the guitarist, come up behind her. He grabbed Dante’s shoulder. “You coming or what?”

Santiago waited, watching them.

Dante rose. She meant to walk to the stage. She meant to ask Santiago for more time, to come back tomorrow, in a week, when she’d had a chance to think. But the guitarist’s grip was too tight on her shoulder and what if this stranger didn’t come back and found another violinist for his scheme and together they played music that sang after they died? She would never forgive herself. This man had opened a portal in the chaos of this city, and if she didn’t step through it now she’d never know what lay on the other side.

“I’m coming,” Dante said.

The guitarist let go of her arm. “About time.”

She strode up to the stage and grasped her violin and bow. She felt Santiago watching her from the bar. Her instrument case was backstage, but there was no time for that; no matter, she’d get another one, a new skin. “I’m leaving,” she said and headed down to the bar.

“What!” the guitarist shouted behind her. “You can’t just leave, you—”

“Quickly,” Santiago spat when she reached him. He grasped Leda’s wrist and pulled her through the crowded café. The guitarist was close on their heels, pursuing them through the thick crowd of men, and when Leda turned she saw the glint of his dagger and the red rage of his face. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected but she hadn’t expected a knife.

“Don’t look back, you idiot,” Santiago said. “Come on, come on—”

This is madness, Leda thought as she ran to the door with him, spilling across its threshold, heart pounding as they made their escape into the night.

CINQUE

Ladies and Gentlemen!

She wanted it always, every bit of it, the blistered fingers and sore feet and arms aching from holding up that damn blessed violin, the long endless chain of nights performing until the sun came up as if only their music could make the light return. Her new orquesta’s sound tightened over the months, fusing into a shape that could curl and soar and sting. They played and played for arrogant and easy crowds alike. Then she’d walk home on streets dipped in the liquid gold of morning, looking around, dazed, amazed at the city that had taken her in and given her a way to survive. At least so far. Because no day was promised, nights even less so; it was not a soft city, it was full of edges on which you could cut yourself or trip and fall quick and lost right down to hell. Which made each breath of Buenos Aires air an act of grace. There were mornings when Dante came home to her matchbox of a room and lay her head down in wonder, one more night, one more stony dawn, a gift so large it almost seemed untenable. She earned her bread with her violin, a miracle that seemed as large as loaves and fishes. She was able to quit the factory, as Santiago had said, and live in a manner she hadn’t known was possible: from music. And
for
music. For what happened when bodies filled the dance halls and the tango gripped them like a beautiful curse, propelled them around the room in pairs, bodies caught in the fierce language of dance, the room disappears, the world disappears, all things give way to a single bright circuit of light between two dancers. She
knew how it felt, she’d danced it too. She also knew that the feeling of the world reduced to two, and two alone, was an illusion. Because no couple generated the dance on its own. There was no tango without music, and the music came from her, from them, the music makers: she pressed her strings and fifty women’s shapely ankles moved in time, fifty lovely backs arched, fifty thighs lifted along trousered legs, oh, blessed kick, hook, sliding. Oh, bodies pressing as she pressed the sweet neck of her instrument and watched from the stage. Hold her close,
compadre
, Dante would think, flick your leg between hers, press her so gently to the left that she believes the turn is born from her own will, hold the small of her back like it’s the core of every pleasure on this earth, and I will give you my sound, over and over, night after night, my sound will move you, my sound will guide you, my sound, through you, makes love to her.

The orquesta was called El Cuarteto Torres, after their leader, El Negro Torres, whom Dante still called Santiago because this was how he introduced himself, always as Santiago, a given name that quickly disappeared behind the Negro that stuck to him and called from every mouth and every crowd, nothing to be done about it, a man does not name himself in a city like this one, the city names the man. In this city you didn’t even have to be a black man to be called El Negro, but if you were indeed black, even the way Santiago was, with the wide curls and olive skin Dante had at first mistaken for Mediterranean, then you were El Negro this or El Pardo that and there was no escaping, just as short men became El Petiso, fat men El Gordo, bald men El Pelado, on and on. The nickname becomes ravenous and swallows your first name whole. At first, Dante occasionally forgot and called him Negro, like everyone else, but she noticed that, although he didn’t seem to mind his nickname, when she remembered to call him Santiago there was something else in his reaction, a flicker of glad surprise. She knew what it felt like to want
to define yourself. It was a slippery goal, never fully secured. She gave him what she could by using the name he chose.

Pedro was their second bandoneonist, not as agile on the keys as Santiago but always solid, a keen rope of sound. He often played with his eyes shut, wisps of his overgrown hair sticking to his sweaty skin, giving him the appearance of a strange amphibian creature, neither animal nor human, wet, transformed. Then he’d open his eyes and step offstage and the toughness would return to his face, the clenched jaw, the defiant chin, like a seasoned gangster or a boy who’s been roughed up one too many times. He was young, twenty-three at most, a drifter from the rural cattle lands outside the city. No one knew how he’d gotten himself to Buenos Aires, or why (though that was easy to imagine, as of course everybody did: the noise; the music; the work; the broader selection of whores; who wouldn’t come if they could?).

El Loro was the fourth member of the group, and played the violin alongside Dante. He became El Loro when he was three years old because, as translator for his parents—Jews arrived from Russia—he was forced to chatter and repeat himself incessantly in both languages. Just like a parrot,
un loro
, his conventillo neighbors said. El Loro was younger than Pedro, at twenty-one. He was born on a ship halfway across the Atlantic, which, according to a busybody matron who’d insisted on attending the birth, doomed him to roam without anchor for the rest of his life. What the hell, he said, laughing as he told the story over whiskey and stew after work at six a.m., what’s an anchor anyway? Just a chunk of metal to drag around. El Loro lived with his parents and sisters and brother in a small room, and shared all his earnings with them. He was friendlier than Pedro. When he talked, he swept the air with arcs so wide they seemed to enlarge the room. As a violinist, he was undisciplined, exuberant, bringing an energy that drove the group and was well tempered by the steadiness of Dante’s sound.

“You lose the tempo when you get excited,” Santiago told El Loro. “Control yourself. Come back to the bones. Follow Dante.”

“Of course. He’s like a rock, that Dante,” El Loro said, a little sulkily.

“He is.”

“How does he do it?” El Loro said. “A kid like him?”

El Loro and Pedro glanced at Dante for an answer. She shrugged and turned away to busy herself with her instrument case.

“Don’t worry about how he does it,” Santiago said. “Just be glad he does.”

She didn’t know how she did it, where the steadiness came from. Everything in her life was unsteady: pesos, bread, work, her hole of a room, the intense proximity of neighbors who must not under any circumstances discover what she was. Her life could be upended in an instant, and this truth often made her feel fragile, brittle-boned. And yet, when she stood on a stage (or in a corner when there was none) and played, something else awoke in her, a sureness so vast it seemed to belong not to her but to some mountain, some monster, some ancient thing. Not a sureness of survival—never that. A sureness of motion. A sureness of rhythm. A sureness of sounds bound together by desire.

Santiago was a mystery; he seemed driven by forces beyond the human world. There was no other way to explain the singular intensity with which he worked. He talked little about himself, and yet Dante felt as though she’d known him for a long time, as though she could tell him anything and he’d at least listen, if not understand. Thanks to him, she was no longer alone, but part of a group, a foursome floating through the world on a shared raft, and she trusted it, trusted where their leader was taking them even if he himself had no rudder and no map. She couldn’t say exactly why she trusted him. His assurance, perhaps, or the pure vigor of his vision. Santiago didn’t want to just play tango: he wanted to vault it into rarefied realms where its existence still went unacknowledged. His orquesta couldn’t just be good; it had to become a legend. This made him a harsh leader sometimes, demanding, though not ever cruel as she had heard other orquesta leaders could be. He never insulted or lied to his musicians, never attempted to cheat them of their
pay. But he rode them like a ghoul. There were no breaks in rehearsals; mistakes onstage were crimes. Sometimes Pedro and El Loro grumbled and threatened to leave, but the truth was that they knew they could be replaced, that there were many men who’d taken up instruments recently with dreams of conquering the tango world. Yes, granted, Pedro and El Loro had a unique combination of rough talent and the kind of dedication that suggests insanity, which gave them good chances, but even so, they wouldn’t risk it. Dante never thought of leaving, never questioned the bright conviction in Santiago’s voice when he said, We’re going somewhere, I’m telling you, keep with me and keep the faith. In any case, she didn’t care too much where they were going. The luminous present moment was enough.

They played everywhere. They played where they could. There were lush times when El Cuarteto Torres had two or three offers at once and could choose the best venue among them and, more often, leaner times when they had to fill in with the kind of place where they left at dawn sticky and tense and relieved to have made it out alive. There were gleaming dance halls where tips for the musicians slowly filled a crystal bowl; cafés whose candlelight hid the stains on tablecloths and whores’ clothes; bars where old bullet holes riddled a web of cracks in the walls, the work, perhaps, of a violent and furious Arachne. They played through the night, played to push the sun up over rooftops. They played for poor men and for rich men out for adventures among the poor, for women paid to dance and women paid to dance and fuck, and, when they were really hard up, for women paid to fuck so much they never came out to dance. For all her months and months of this work Dante could not get used to the women. They plagued her. Plagued her dreams. She woke up hot, gilded with the sweat of lust and grief and shame because so many of the women had eyes like those of dead fish and the other men seemed not to see this, or not to care, thinking, perhaps, she’s already broken, it doesn’t matter what I do, or simply look at that can’t wait to fuck her. But she herself could not get past the thought
of these women’s pain. It seemed a crime to want them. She lay in the dark trying not to think of them, trying not to think of Cora on her back eyes shut against the shadow of her father. Dante could not stand the thought of hurting a woman.

Oh, you liar. The beast inside you. Waking you in sweats like this, what do you think it wants?

Not to hurt, no, no—she fought the voices in the fetid darkness. To see yes, to touch yes, to sink inside of the way men do, God, if only—but not ever to hurt.

You think they’d know the difference, those girls? After all they’ve been through? You’ll just be one more monster to them
.

She fought these voices night after night, could not find resolution. She was guilty. She railed against her own guilt. She tried not to lust, to stop wanting the women, and failed. She came to an uneasy truce with herself: she could look at the women from a distance but not touch them; she’d protect the whores from her touch. The only exception was the sparrow-girl, to whom she returned as though to a secret shrine until the day she arrived at La Moneda to discover that the sparrow-girl had disappeared. Nobody knew what had happened to her, or was willing to say.

“Find yourself another one,” the bartender told her, shrugging, “and either buy a drink or let me do my job.”

Dante tried not to think of the sparrow-girl racked by illness, stabbed in an alley, or simply worn to death by long nights. Girls like her got swallowed up and spit out by this city every day. Perhaps that wasn’t what had happened; perhaps she’d run away, escaped on a boat across the river or a train to the pampas, those yawning plains that supposedly arose beyond the city. Dante hoped it was true. She wished she’d known the girl’s name; she hadn’t wanted to give it and Dante had been reluctant to press her for it.
Find yourself another one
. An easy fix. Already the other whores were looking her way, angling for centavos, but Dante could not face them, so she ducked out and walked quickly home.