The Gods of Tango (37 page)

When he was finally done, she said, You’re sure that’s what you want?

I’m sure, he said.

People will talk.

And let them, Santiago thought, but all he said aloud was, I can understand, señora, if this worries you—

Oh no, I’m not worried. She fixed an even stare on him, her face a sculpted fortress. And it looks like you’re not either.

No.

You’re a smart man, Señor Torres. She’s the best of the lot.

Santiago nodded, startled.

I’ve already told her to come back tomorrow night.

Unsteady. His legs were unsteady. The floor seemed to be moving, too quickly, beneath his feet.

It’s fortunate, she went on, that we agree.

My band this is my band not yours you don’t
—he forced a smile. Yes, señora.

You may go.

He lurched out of the office and down the stairs to the street. He had half an hour before the orquesta’s regular time to gather and prepare for the night’s work; his men were probably still in the Lair, stewing and chafing, waiting to see what came of his request to hire the girl. He would not go back in there. Not yet. The avenue seethed with noise and traffic; he hurled himself into its flow. Walking never failed to clear his mind, and he needed it now, the clearing. That woman. That sleek anaconda of a woman. Lurking behind Don Carrasco as though the man were nothing more than a flimsy paper cutout of authority. Once, incredibly, Santiago had wondered about the widow, about whether she and Dante—but how ridiculous, it couldn’t be, what an absurd suspicion, a single encounter would have broken that quiet lanky kid in two. He couldn’t stand the thought of anything hurting Dante, the boy he’d scooped up from the gutters, lost, reeling with talent, aching with pain he thought no one could understand. Santiago walked on. The streetlamps poured their light over cars and kiosks, old men and young fops, sleek boutiques and damp gutters. That woman, the widow: who knew what she was capable of, sitting up there in the turret of her castle, acting as if she owned him, Santiago, or, more accurately, as if her grandfather had owned his grandfather as in truth he might have and this meant that anything he, Santiago, did or felt or
was
belonged to her even now. It rose in him then, the great red rage, bright, familiar, a whipping flame of it that burned to shout out of his mouth or pour down his arms into the world as violence or else through his bandoneón, how many times the bandoneón had saved him, cleansed him, his fingers itched for that
now. That smirk on her face, as if she could buy not just a cabaret but his orquesta—
his
orquesta, which he’d slaved to build up all these years—and, beyond that, as if she could buy the soul of tango itself. These rich bosses treated the tango as if it were a flimsy amusement, nothing more, easy to mold to their whims. And the tango was changing as a result, he couldn’t deny it, the piano would never have been added without the rich, this was the world now, the world of tango, and if he didn’t play the game by its current rules, it would continue without him, and that was a thought he could not stand. And so he would embrace change and keep tango alive.
Is this even tango anymore?
Pedro’s voice in his head. Pedro, of course, was an idiot: he was good enough with his instrument and a hard worker but he was too sullen and talked before he thought. But the question rattled. Not because of the singer-girl, not because of the widow, but because Pedro had no idea—nor did any of them in the Lair—how much the tango had already changed, how much of its history was unsung, erased, in danger of being lost forever.

A music born among the children of slaves is like an orphan: it will never know its real parents, will never hear the full visceral story of its birth. That’s what his uncle Palo had told him. Palo used to drum when Santiago was a boy, every night after dinner and for hours on Sundays, on drawers turned upside down, on barrels salvaged from the port, drumming as if the slap of palms on hard things could fill his children’s bellies for the night (though it could not), as if the dead gathered in a circle around him listening and reveling and stepping in time. And there were so many dead. Palo’s three older brothers had died in the Paraguayan War, conscripted by the Argentinean government, taken off by force along with all the black men of their generation, because, Palo told young Santiago, they needed a way to not only win their war but also rid this country of us in the process, two birds with one stone. Buenos Aires was too black for them, one third of the population, that’s enough blackness to swallow you up! to get strong on you! and so they sent our fathers off to war and opened floodgates to European steamships so that
white men would pour into the city to replace us, and their plan worked, the bastards, look at our city now. Look at San Telmo. It’s like an outpost of Italy around here. Not that I’m complaining: your father was a good man and if he hadn’t come here from Florence, he wouldn’t have met my sister and you wouldn’t have been born. History is dirty but you’re a good thing to come out of it, one of the best.

When Santiago was six, his father died in a construction accident, and after that Palo always kept him close. Uncle Palo lived in the room next door, and played candombe—three drums of different sizes locking rhythms to form a complex throbbing whole—as well as tango, in those earliest days when the music was just beginning to assume the name. He played with other men in the neighborhood, in the patio of the conventillo as the women washed plates and pots and clothes and as boys sharpened knives and made rope to sell in the plazas and girls shelled beans or wrung out linens in tubs the size of coffins. In the 1880s, when Santiago was small, Palo had played with El Negro Casimiro and El Mulato Sinforoso, who were among the first to take the tango out of tenements into bars and cafés, playing a couple of songs and passing the hat, happy to gain a coin or two and warm men’s spirits in the process. They became famous in San Telmo and La Boca for the exuberance of their violin and clarinet, back in those days when the tango was still joyful and unkempt, still riddled with the old dances of Africa and rhythms that sped your blood. Palo’s wife didn’t like it when he went out with Casimiro and Sinforoso—all those sailors and whores, she said—so, after a few years, Palo stopped going. Santiago started on the drums with his uncle Palo, but, when he was twenty, he heard an old German neighbor’s bandoneón and immediately fell in love with its velvet voice, its sweet piercing melancholy sound. He began helping the old neighbor with errands in exchange for lessons, and soon came to love everything about the bandoneón: its steady weight on his lap, its elegant inlay, the complex navigation of all those tiny keys, the strength it took to press the air out, compressing, expanding, pushing music out of hidden darkness.

But you’re not German, a neighbor said. What are you doing with that thing?

I like it, he said, lacking words for the whole truth.

His uncle Palo rose to his defense. Leave him alone. It’s an odd box, sure, but he sounds good playing it, and anyway, new instruments aren’t to be feared if they help keep music alive.

He has a point, the old German neighbor interjected, lighting a cigarette.

And in any case, Palo pressed on, look at Sebastián Ramos Mejía!

He said the name with sunlight in his voice. Santiago had never met Sebastián, but he knew that he was an old man, the son of slaves, who performed in cafés and, rumor had it, had brought the bandoneón to the tango as never before. That his uncle Palo would place him in a category with this man made Santiago feel hot and large inside.

Over the years, Palo drummed to Santiago’s bandoneón, and the sounds they made together were more beautiful than anything they could have made on their own.

Uncle Palo lived to the age of sixty-two, when pneumonia tore through the conventillo and took many small children and old men. Santiago was thirty-three then. At the burial, as the men of his family shoveled redolent dirt over the coffin, he thought of Palo Torres and the world that would soon forget him, forget his name, the sound of his voice, his drumming, his steps on cold flagstone. Palo, a giant of a man, condemned to erasure from the books of time. Santiago pledged, then, spade in hand, to take Torres as his stage name, and to make music with such ferocity that his name would force itself into the world of tango, or, if not his name, at least his sound, which carried Palo’s sound under the surface.

This was the commitment that fueled him still, kept him striving even when the odds seemed insurmountable. He never married and now, at thirty-nine years old, he still couldn’t think of marriage, for fear a wife might split his heart away from music, blunt his hunger. Sometimes,
when he was tired and the other members of his band had gone back home, he wondered why he was doing all of this and whether he should give up the fight, maybe find a wife and settle down into a life of nights by the hearth with a full belly and feet up, children other than the scattered bastards he suspected might be his but had never seen, children who could climb all over him and accost him with shouts of delight—and in those moments of doubt, he called up his uncle’s voice, saying, the tango is ours, remember that, remember where it came from. For every person who knows the roots of tango there will be one hundred people who do not and maybe one day those who do know will all disappear. But the secret lives on, it beats in the drum, and in these syncopations even when the drum is gone, in the steps of dancers who’ll never know they’re mimicking the steps of an old religion that arrived here in the festering bellies of slave ships like the only bright thing left in hell: a god and goddess dancing side by side the way they used to do before the tango made them face each other and embrace. Then those white people wonder why the dance makes them feel so alive. Don’t worry about that. Don’t ever try to tell them. Just give them the music and let music take care of the rest.

It was time to go back to Leteo. To face his musicians with their countless fears. The new girl, this Rosa, she had a new way of keeping tango alive, and he welcomed it, even though he had no idea what it would bring. You can’t cage the tango, he thought, and as he approached the service entrance he suddenly was not thirty-nine anymore, but six years old, scrubbing rat shit off crates in the conventillo, hearing Palo argue with Casimiro and Sinforoso in the warm way of good friends.

Tango, Casimiro said, is the sound of Africa.

No, said Palo. It was born here. Tango is the sound of América.

But it has the sounds of Africa inside it.

Look at us: we have the blood of Africa in our veins, but we were born here. Are we African?

Of course.

And our children? Are they African?

Why not? Argentina will never accept them as her own.

Sinforoso shook his head. Listen, he said. You’re both wrong.

What!

What!

But they leaned in close to listen.

The tango began with drums, and drums are prayer, they’re still underneath the rest of it.

Yes.

All right.

And so?

And so, my friends. Tango is the sound of the gods.

A NEW ACT!
the posters shouted.
LIKE NOTHING YOU’VE SEEN!

ONLY AT:
CABARET LETEO
.

No names. No more description. Even “Orquesta Torres” was left off the leaflets, the posters, the marquee. The strategy worked: on the designated night, the crowd was so thick the waiters rushed to nearby restaurants and rented their chairs to line the walls.

Because what on earth, for a Buenos Aires gentleman, is like nothing else he’s seen?

The musicians came out first, at half past midnight, and played an instrumental song. Dante, in her stance at the center of the string players, between Joaquín and El Loro, felt the crowd hum with disappointment. A few couples got up to dance, but their movements were halfhearted, rote, was this all there was, El Negro Torres’s band, solid and predictable? By the second song, a few more couples were on the dance floor. By the third, the crowd fidgeted, whispered, smirked with disappointment.

After the third song, Don Carrasco came to the stage. The crowd went silent in expectation. Don Carrasco had tucked a red rose in his lapel for this occasion. He was unaccustomed to the stage and his hands shook as he spread them wide in welcome.

“Ladies and gentlemen! I present to you, the star of our evening, the best kept secret of Buenos Aires, a lady like no other, a legend about to be born: Rosa Vidal!”

The crowd responded with polite applause.

She came to the stage.

The applause stopped abruptly, as if swords had just severed hands from wrists.

She stood at the center of the quiet, shoulders squared, in her vest and jacket and trousers and hat, smiling into empty hostile space.

At Santiago’s nod, the band began to play “El Terrible.”

Rosa opened her mouth and sang. She strutted. She boasted and cajoled and belted out the words, and, when she turned and Dante glimpsed her profile, she gleamed with sweat under the stage lights. Her stance was masculine in its vigor but female in its curves, a glorious sight.

At first, at the end of the song, no one clapped. Then a smattering of applause began at the back, shot through with murmurs and the sound of chairs pushing back, clusters of people rising to leave, walking out as the next song began and Rosa assured two hundred stricken faces that she’d gladly give everything away for the woman of her dreams, who was the night, who was laughter, who was dangerous.

“Well,” Rosa said after the second song was done, “it seems that some good people had another place to go.”

Dante glanced at the other musicians. There was no script or plan for this. They were supposed to launch right into a rendition of “Mi Noche Triste.” Joaquín looked tense and was just starting forward from his bass toward Rosa as if to restrain her, but Santiago, seated in front of him, raised a surreptitious hand to stop him. Rosa reached into her pocket for a cigarette and lit it, unperturbed. She exhaled smoke. Smiled.