The Gods of Tango (39 page)

And then Carmen appeared.

She was not wearing black. Her dress was red, blood red, to match the ruby necklace at her throat. Her mask was golden and left her mouth exposed, that red mouth, smiling, triumphant. Soon she was dancing with a tall young man and Dante itched with jealousy: it should be her down there, on the floor, holding Carmen in her arms, not that man, not anyone else. But how could that be when no one knew what was between them? And what was this thing between them, anyway? Carmen a flame in the crowd, gliding, dancing, living the tango, and Dante forgot the troubles in the orquesta, the rift in their sound, Joaquín, Santiago, what was said and what was not, as she pictured herself falling into Carmen’s redness, against her breasts, and disappearing into this new woman who could wear any color and do anything she wished, what a woman, that Carmen, blinding like the sun. Dante played like a demon, horsehairs broke out of her bow and swept the air as her violin sang the way it had long ago for a soon-to-be-exiled king in a voice that had now become her own, exquisite, resonant, blanketing the crowd.

By the time the ball was over and Dante could escape upstairs, dawn already glowed in the windows.

Carmen was waiting for her, standing in front of her desk, still wearing her glittering golden mask. “Well? Did you like it?”

“Yes.”

“Everyone did.”

“You’ve come out of mourning.”

Carmen smiled. It was a languorous, drunken smile. “Keep your mask on.”

Her voice was commanding, flush with the night. She took her dress off before Dante could make it across the room and it was better this way, no more talking about the night, to choose instead the present
moment as though there were no other, to choose this woman with her whiskey skin, for now, at least, another swig of life. The lust that rose in her was harsh and bright, she grabbed Carmen and carried her to the divan, flung her down and took her with more force than ever before, their masks colliding, Carmen writhing in what could be outrage or thrill, she didn’t say stop, she didn’t say yes, she didn’t say a thing in any language known to man unless you counted the languages of monsters and wolves.

Explosive pleasure, as if she’d touched herself. As if semen could burst from her hips right through her hand.

Afterward, she collapsed on top of Carmen, who wrapped her arms around her. “Dante. Dante.”

“Are you all right?” Dante murmured, but before she could hear an answer, she fell into a pitch-dark sleep.

She awoke to a hand between her legs, inside her trousers, where it grabbed—she shrank back in panic—and darted back as though it had touched a viper. Dante opened her eyes, all muscles tense. Carmen stumbled off the sofa and across the room, where she stood with her back against the wall.

Dante stared at her. The fog of sleep unfolded to the fog of horror. It was a dream, it had to be a dream. She stabbed herself with a fingernail. No waking. She scrambled to button up her trousers.

“What are you?” Carmen said.

Dante couldn’t stand what she saw in Carmen’s eyes. The sun had risen higher now, and drenched the room in a terrible light. “I told you not to touch me.”

Carmen reached for her dress from the floor and held it up to her body to cover it. “What. Are. You.”

“What do you think I am?”

Long silence. The room spun. The world, crumbling, faster than she’d known was possible.

“My God,” Carmen said. “My God.”

Dante wanted to say but did not say
you had no right how dare you
words stuck in her throat.

Carmen made a keening sound, at once pure and pained. Then she set her stare on the great window, on the slice of gray sky above the buildings. Here it was, the moment Dante had dreaded these four and a half years, and to her shock the walls were still in place, the sky still vaulting over buildings. She’d thought, somehow, that discovery would break everything around her, the walls, the window glass, her limbs. She couldn’t tell which outcome was worse.

“Carmen.”

“Get out.”

“Let me explain.” An empty promise. What was there to say?

“Out!”

Dante ran out of the room, down the stairs, through the kitchen, and out of the service entrance into the wailing city.

SETTE

Heartbreak of Mountains, Lust of the Sun

She could not go back. She had to go back. She had nothing in the world if she did not have Leteo.

She sat inside all day, in her small room at La Rete, listening to La Strega sing as she washed clothes in the patio. La Strega, smasher of ships, wringer of linens, song always ready to rise from her throat. Dante’s head throbbed with pain. She should sleep, she had to work that night, but she could not lie down, could not take off her shirt, could not move.

What was this thing pouring through her at a boil?

Shame.

Loss.

Fear.

The urge to die.

There was nowhere else to go.

And she
should
die. Didn’t deserve to breathe the world’s air into this revolting body.

She looked around her room for methods. No beams at the ceiling for hanging rope. No poisons. She had her facón, that was all: it would be enough if she slashed the blade across her wrists.

Carmen’s face. The look on her face.

Santiago, waiting tonight for a violinist who never appeared.

The orquesta, all five men, backs turned to her.

Her secret spilled out to the musicians, would they beat her? rape her? spit on her? these men whom she’d come to see as her brothers.

Her secret spilled out to a shocked crowd.

The service entrance guarded by a cook with rough hands.

Or by dogs. Claws and teeth ripping her apart in the dank alley.

Her body—traitor body—torn to shreds.

She couldn’t go. Better to cut herself open before the rest of the world got a chance at her.

She took the facón out of her trouser leg and passed the blade along the inside of her wrist, a practice stroke. And then she heard Carmen’s voice in her head:
I tried but I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t bring myself to die
.

For three hours she sat with the blade in hand, looking at it, looking at her wrists. La Strega’s songs continued outside her door, Italian folk songs, a ballad of a fisherman’s wife whose heart is broken, her husband leaves to fish one morning and never comes home, and she sits at the shore and waits, and waits, and waits, and the sea does not change, the sea has no end, the sea swallows everything. Her voice was pebbled with sorrow. She repeated the chorus, over and over, as the water in the laundry bucket sloshed in time. I’ll die, thought Dante, I know I have to die, but first I just want to hear the song, one more time, one more, one more, and then light had fallen and hunger began to rise. A shock that she could still be hungry. That she could still want food, want anything. Rebellious body, determined to lust, determined to live.

The day’s light faded. Dark enfolded her. And when her throat was dry and her back sore and her stomach growled into the silence, she heard what she didn’t know she’d needed.

Cora’s voice.

Wait, Leda. You can kill yourself tomorrow. Go to Leteo tonight
.

I can’t,
carissima
, my almost-sister.

Why not?

They won’t let me in.

And if they do?

There was no monster at the service door, no cook to stop her. Backstage, the musicians welcomed her as if nothing had changed, no second looks, no different treatment. They could not possibly know. And in any case, their minds were elsewhere: Joaquín and Santiago sat next to each other, warming up on their instruments, Joaquín’s posture contrite, Santiago’s forgiving. There was no exchange of words. The others watched them with careful optimism.

Dante played that night with fingers clammy with dread, but Carmen didn’t appear in the great hall. Around her the musicians, above her dead birds, before her the great hall with its vast peacock in which she couldn’t bear to see her own reflection and its statues still wearing masks as if refusing to believe the revelry was done. After work, she followed the other men to the brothel, to drown her sorrows, if her world was about to be destroyed why not wallow in a bit of pleasure? She lay down beside a lovely naked girl and hummed her a slow tango while the girl pretended to sleep. But Dante’s sorrows were not drowned. She went home and slept and woke up still alive, bewildered at the fact.

She returned to Leteo, prepared for her doom. But again Carmen was not there. A spike of relief, the joy of another set. At intermission, Don Carrasco came to see them.

“Doña Ruiz,” he told them, “is resting after the great ball.”

“Of course,” Santiago said politely.

“She has gone to the baths in Salto, Uruguay.”

Dante felt something unlock within her.

“Ah,” Santiago said.

Ask how long she’ll be away. Ask how long I have
.

“I hope she feels well?”

“Indeed.” Don Carrasco looked confused, as if his sister’s state of health were a puzzle he was failing to decipher. “She’s left detailed instructions for everything. The decorations are to stay up in the great hall. And you are all to continue as before.”

“Thank you,” Santiago said.

Don Carrasco nodded and left.

“Well!” said Amato. “What was that all about?”

“He seemed to know as little as anyone,” El Loro said.

“She’s an odd one, all right,” said Joaquín.

“Probably ran off with some lover.”

“God help the man!”

“He’ll be eaten alive!”

Laughter.

They returned to the stage. Carmen, far away, across a border. The thought made Dante feel light enough to almost float away. Once Carmen came back she had the power to rip open the ground under Dante’s feet, divest her of everything she’d become. What would she do then? Run away, or fight back with weapons of her own? What were those weapons? She could threaten to expose Carmen as having an illicit affair with a dirty conventillero. Surely that could cause some embarrassment in her world. But the embarrassment of an aristocratic woman, especially one with her own money and cabaret, not to mention a track record of flouting convention, was nothing compared to the ruin Dante faced. It would not be an equal fight. Better to run, she thought as she lifted her violin to her neck and launched into song at Santiago’s cue. But until then, she had this: a stage, these lights, wine, fire, music.

She became bolder. She played fiercely, night after night. She had nothing to lose and so she held nothing back, spent all of herself while she still had a self to spend.

She’d lost hope and that losing made her free. How hard we all work to hold ourselves up, she thought, to play the role we’ve chosen or that’s been chosen for us and we fall asleep right in the middle of our days with our eyes open, we talk and laugh and shit and fight and walk around fast asleep, caught in a dream in which the part we’re acting threatens to devour the hidden self. And maybe after a while it succeeds. Maybe the
parts of us that never come to light get eaten over time and disappear. The parts of me I no longer am—village-Leda, skirts-Leda, never-ever-touch-a-naked-woman-Leda—I don’t know where they are, they’re gone, and now parts of the Dante I’ve been are also threatening to go, careful Dante, fearful Dante, El Chico, the Kid. Always vigilant like a thief who knows he’s done for if he’s caught out in the night. But now I’m done for anyway so why not wake up from the dream and take a good look at the world around me before it falls apart?

Colors were keener. Lamps were brighter. At times she wanted to kill something, anything, whatever lay close, a rage that blurred into the urge to kill herself. At other times she burned with love for everyone, even the arrogant customers who looked at her with scorn or condescension, they just didn’t know better, didn’t know how to see, but every single one of them had once been a small child who needed help to wipe his face, and the tango sang for them, too, didn’t it? It sang for everyone, no matter how closed or broken. It sang for her, Dante, for her bruised soul. It sang for Santiago, keeper of music, stoker of its flames. It sang for Rosa, sang through Rosa, who onstage was neither man nor woman, or perhaps was both at once, a hybrid creature privy to the heartbreak of mountains and the lust of the sun, or so it seemed when you stood inside her voice.

She was a powerful singer. A brilliant singer. Nobody could deny it anymore, though the musicians still didn’t treat her as one of them, not even Santiago, not even Dante herself. Santiago may have taken this way out of politeness, afraid to intrude, but still the effect remained: Rosa slunk out as soon as her women’s clothes were on, as if she didn’t belong to their tribe, as though she had no place with them offstage. But wasn’t she a part of their sound, just as much as any other? Didn’t they have her to thank for the new reaches of their fame? All this time Dante had accepted the dynamic, acted the same as the other men, but their behavior had come to disgust her. She disgusted herself. In her new clear sight, she looked like a coward.

One night, she gathered her courage and, just as Rosa came out from behind the curtain, called out, “Rosa! Have a whiskey with us.”

The room went quiet with surprise.

Rosa looked like a hunted deer. “No, thank you. I should get home.”

Dante had already reached for the bottle and poured a glass. “Come on, have a seat.”

Rosa sat. The musicians stopped talking, their irritation palpable; they’d planned to head to a brothel after the bottle was done, and this would have been their time to argue over where to go as they all had favorite girls in different places. The air grew tense. Rosa didn’t say a word as they finished their drinks quickly and got up to leave: first Joaquín, then Pedro and El Loro and Amato, who turned at the door and glanced at Santiago: “Coming?”

Santiago looked angry. “No.”

Amato shrugged and was gone.

The room seemed empty, just the three of them, Santiago and Dante and Rosa.

“You did the right thing,” Santiago said to Dante. And then, to Rosa, “I’m sorry.”