The Gods of Tango (28 page)

Ladies and gentlemen!
shouted La China as she spread her arms wide onstage.
El Sexteto Torres!

Their sound exploded into the hall. It was wider, rounder, more lavish than ever before. Amato’s intricate trills and rhythmic chords on the piano filled the space beneath the soaring violins, sustained their flights, and meshed with Joaquín’s rhythmic spine. The bandoneón’s melodies traversed a richer weave than ever, growing bolder, holding dramatic pauses worth weeping into, swirling out sumptuous lines to pierce you and push you into motion at the same time, make you forget your unpaid bills or lonely heart or even your dying mama, make the whole world collapse into a single sphere composed entirely of La China’s dance hall, warm with music and all of life compressed into its walls. Santiago had been right: they had the crowd by the balls or by whatever other part they wanted. Men gripped their dance partners more closely; the bar sold more drinks with every passing night; La China, to her delight, had to hire more girls to keep up with demand. She had offered them a three-month contract by the end of the first week. They celebrated at a neighboring bar, where Santiago insisted on paying for their chorizo and whiskey and even for the girls.

“You’re sure, Negro?”

“It’s a special night.”

“Morning, you mean.”

“If it’s morning, that’s all the more proof of how hard you’ve worked.”

They had descended on a large round table in the corner, and already the whores were smiling their way, though they stopped short of coming over, having plenty to attend to, for the moment, in the rest of the crowd.

“Is it really work,” Joaquín said, “when we get to spend the whole night with the tango?”

“That’s like calling it work to spend the night fucking your wife,” El Loro said.

“That
is
work,” said Pedro, and the men laughed.

“What do you know about it? You’ve never been married,” Amato said, and Pedro glanced up nervously, afraid he’d offended the only married man at the table.

But Amato was smiling crookedly.

Pedro looked relieved and kept on. “Why would I get married? Music is enough of a ball and chain.”

“True,” said Amato.

“Oh, but she’s beautiful,” Santiago said.

Music as lover
, Dante thought
. I feel that too. But what kind of lover? A woman? A man?

“And she doesn’t talk back,” said Pedro.

“Oh yes she does,” said Joaquín, nodding solemnly as if referring to a great mystery.

“All right,” said Pedro, “but she doesn’t expect you to be home at this or that time.”

“That’s because you’re out with
her
,” Amato said. “Doing her bidding and treating her like a queen.”

If the tango itself could dance with me, would it lead or follow?

“She lets you have plenty of other women,” said El Loro.

“True,” said Joaquín.

“Only half-true,” said Santiago. “She lets you as long as she always comes first.”

“Oh yes,” said Amato. “She’s a jealous one, that music.”

“But sexy, right?” El Loro said cheerfully. “The sexiest!”

What are you, tango, and what on earth am I?

“Now you’ve gone too far,” Amato said. “Music doesn’t have a pussy.”

“Or tits,” said Pedro.

“Tits,” said Joaquín.

And then, just like that, the six men reached a place of unity. The air between them brightened. They all laughed. Santiago refilled their glasses and raised his. “To music.”

“To tits.”

“Music.”

“Tits.”

“Music!”

“Tits, tits!”

They quibbled and laughed and Dante laughed along with them, at first to blend in, although at some indiscernible moment her laugh stopped being false and became something real. They toasted, in the end, to tits, and for an instant as the whiskey poured fast down her throat she felt like part of their tribe, a tribe of men, all of whom, in unison, loved tits and music; she was just like them, and not alone; she wiped her mouth on her sleeve just as the rest of them did, amazed to feel a kind of lightness in her body, in her shoulders, a fleeting liberation from shame.

When shame pressed on her she sometimes heard the old voices as they’d rippled out one afternoon years ago, while she hid behind a tree at the plaza’s edge:

Shameful, shameful.

Pfft
, that girl.

Cora Matta.

A disgrace.

Covering herself with mud like that.

Like a rutting animal.

Like a whore.

Drat, I’m out of soap and all these sheets still left to wash.

Here, use mine.

Or mine.

Or mine.

I will, God keep you for it.

Cora.

It’s witchcraft, I tell you.

Devil’s work.

And that last night in the plaza.

Was she chanting? Were you there?

I was there. All I heard were the demons.

What demons?

A flock of them, circling her. The sound of them flying drowned out everything else.

What are you talking about?

Yes, tell us. What do flying demons sound like?

I don’t want to repeat the sound, it’s terrifying.

Come on, we have to know.

It’s like this.
Whooooooooosh
.

Do it again.

Whooooosh
.

Ha ha! Again.

Oh, shut up.

Well, I don’t know about any demons but I certainly heard Cora. She was muttering.

Ah! Muttering what?

I don’t know. It didn’t sound like Italian.

The devil’s tongue.

A curse no doubt, a curse on Alazzano.

I saw her levitate.

No!

Yes. Right there in the plaza.

How high?

Higher than a tall child.

No!

Evil, evil.

She hovered above the stones like a witch.

She’s cursed us.

Our church is marred forever by what she did there.

Shhp! Don’t even mention that. The poor nuns doing their best.

I heard they scrub it down three times a day now.

I heard that too.

But what can scrub out a thing like that, a naked screaming girl?

I don’t know.

Nothing.

They don’t let her out of the house anymore.

They weren’t letting her out before, she still got out.

But now she can’t escape.

Why not?

I heard they’ve got her tied down and someone watching her at all hours of the day or night.

You can’t tie down a demon. They can fly anywhere, right out of the body.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

Thank God they’ve started the exorcisms.

Not a moment too soon.

I’ve seen them going into the house, Father Domenico and the nuns. I’ve heard the chants.

I’ve heard the screams.

Demon-screams.

Of course.

Holy Mary, mother of God, help them with what they must do.

Summer arrived on a brutal heat wave that felled dogs and old men alike. In the peak months of January and February, the Torres Sextet traveled to outlying towns to play the outdoor stages of Argentina’s Carnaval. They took the train together, through the long flat countryside. They
slept three to a room at tiny country hotels, some with dirt floors, some with hand-laid tiles, some with rooms where a single small window let right into the chicken coop. The first time they arrived at a hotel, Leda’s heart constricted when she saw the washbasin in the corner with the large pail: everyone to bathe in the same room. She couldn’t bathe in front of them, but if she didn’t bathe, all summer, in this demonic heat, what would they think? Fortunately for her, the musicians slept like the dead all morning. They lay down at about seven or eight a.m., just back from work, and didn’t wake till lunchtime. She willed herself to wake up first, prayed for it, set the tension in her body like the spring of a clock. And her body complied: she always woke first. She crept out of bed and washed herself without removing her underwear or the bandage from her breasts, scrupulously keeping her back to the sleeping men. For the first two weeks she managed this before anybody stirred, and by the time they did she was already dressed, shrugging casually,
go ahead compadres, I’ve already bathed
. El Loro and Amato stripped easily, baring their bodies: El Loro’s lithe, muscular back, Amato’s hairy chest and paunchy belly.

“How do you do it, Dante?” El Loro said. “Don’t you sleep?”

She shrugged. “I wanted a cigarette.”

“That’s not what it is,” Amato said, and, as always, his voice rang with authority.

El Loro turned to him, expectantly, for the answer. Dante, for the ten thousandth time, went tense with fear of being unmasked.

“It’s that he’s young,” Amato said. And he laughed.

El Loro looked perturbed. “But I’m young too.”

Amato slapped El Loro on the back. “Sorry, my boy. But Dante’s younger.”

One morning, in the third week, in a small town outside Rosario, Dante put on her shirt after bathing and turned to see El Loro, eyes wide open, staring at her intently.

“What’s the bandage for?”

Dante had imagined such a question might come one day, and she’d had a few years to think of an answer. “For the scar on my chest. It never healed right.”

Loro didn’t seem to blink. He was completely awake. He was a sweet-faced boy, really, the kind mothers doted on beyond reason. He’ll make a bride very happy one day, Dante thought. “What’s it from?”

“A knife wound.”

Loro said nothing. He watched Dante thread her belt through her pant loops, buckle the belt, sit down to put on socks. The day was blistering. If only musicians could wear sandals. Even barefoot would be better than this. Finally, El Loro said, “Did it hurt?”

Dante busied herself lighting a cigarette. The tobacco scratched at her lungs. “I’m alive.”

El Loro closed his eyes and slept or seemed to sleep for another half hour. He never mentioned the conversation again.

She also couldn’t urinate the way the men did, on dirt roads or up against the walls of buildings. While their venues in Buenos Aires had always had a private bathroom, however small and filthy, these country bars relied on the fields behind them. She tried to stop drinking, but the men protested: it’s hot, you’re crazy, have a beer. And so she took to pretending to drink, then sneaking outside at intermission to pour beer into the dirt. Her heart pounded with the fear of being caught, but she never was. She grew accustomed to playing the second set with the ache of a full bladder, and holding her pee until they made it back to their hotels, which always had outhouses where a man, it could be agreed, had decent reasons to squat.

“You sure do shit a lot,” Pedro teased her.

The other men watched her, curious, as if they’d noticed the same thing.

She smiled, every muscle on alert, and looked Pedro full in the face. “Better than staying full of it.”

The men laughed, Pedro smiled grudgingly, and Dante felt a wash of relief.

It was beautiful to travel with these men. She came to know each of them better, Amato’s snores, El Loro’s sweat, the warm spike of Pedro’s laugh, which came rarely but stayed a long time when it did. Sometimes, on long dull train rides, they told stories about their lives. Amato told them about the many orquestas he’d worked with, and the singers he’d played behind, because, you know, he said, it’s happening more and more, this business of singing along to tangos, and the best of them all is that Carlitos, you know the one, Carlos Gardel? All the men had heard of him, but none of them had heard him sing. He sang in a duo, Gardel-Razzano, and had come up from the same streets and conventillos they all knew. Amato had backed him during a stint at a dance hall, and swore the man had a voice like sweet fire that he knew just how to calibrate and he was a smart bastard, too, courting café owners like they were village girls, though now that he’d hit the fancier circuits he’d become more deferential. Just last year he’d toured Uruguay and then Brazil and been received like a prince, his face on flyers plastered all over the cities, interviews with all the best papers, only to come back to Buenos Aires and get shot last month, in a fight at a party, you know the kind, Amato said, our kind of party. From the highest high to the lowest low. That’s tango for you, said Pedro. Maybe, Amato said. But anyway, I went to see him as he was healing up, just a few weeks after I joined all of you, and I sat beside his hospital bed and told him, in no uncertain terms, you have to heal, Carlitos, you bastard, you can’t take that voice from us, and do you know what he told me? He said that, in Montevideo, at the end of the show, the audience—well dressed and fine—had leapt to its feet and demanded an encore, shouting his name,
tocate otra, Carlitos
, shouting and clapping and roaring until he returned to the stage and gave them another song he had to come up with quickly because he hadn’t planned for this, he’d never done an encore in his life. And when he went back to his dressing room, do you know what he did? His voice went very quiet when he told me, because, you know, the wound was delicate and it hurt his chest to talk. He said to me, I wept, Amato. I wept like a baby.

Amato’s stories opened room for others. Dante was amazed to learn
that she was not the only one who’d broken with expectations to become a musician. El Loro had, in his own words, broken his parents’ hearts; they were grateful for the money he brought home, but had hoped that he’d become a doctor and support his family, marry a good Russian Jewish girl, not spend his nights out in dens of sin—on Shabbat, no less, making his forebears in the Old Country turn in their graves—and his summers playing a fiddle on dirt roads. What decent Russian girl would take him in this state? He laughed as he told the story, but Dante heard the catch in his throat. And then Joaquín spoke up: I think I know what you mean. Joaquín had never talked about his life outside music, and all the men looked at him in surprise. Joaquín told them, as wheat fields sped by outside their window, that he was a lawyer’s son, groomed from a young age for a life of classical music. His father loved music more than anything, and had grown up playing piano as if galaxies depended on its sound to keep on spinning, but he had studied law at the insistence of his parents, who were immigrants from Spain. His greatest dream was to send a son to the conservatory, and he did, never expecting that the son would drop out of school to play a wholly different kind of music that, for all its popularity, would always be the music of the lower classes, of those who had no culture, who didn’t know Handel from Bach. Dante, listening to this story, bristled at the worlds
no culture
, and wondered for a fleeting moment how Joaquín saw her, and the rest of the members of the band. But then she brushed the thought away. Joaquín had come to the tango for the same reason they all had: out of passion. The other men weren’t bothered by this part of the story, or else they didn’t let on. El Loro nodded as though grateful for another tale of parental pressure. Pedro listened intently, not saying, not needing to say, that he had no parents to pressure him into anything, orphan that he was. Amato roved invisible piano keys across his lap as he listened, always practicing, halfway out of the conversation; Santiago rolled a cigarette and lit it, seeming unperturbed—this was nothing, after all, that he hadn’t heard before. He’d surely heard much worse things said about the tango, his
tango, their tango. His hair had grown out a little, and curled black and wild against the rapid sky outside.