The Gods of Tango (40 page)

Rosa knocked back the rest of her whiskey. Santiago refilled her glass.

“Why did you do that?” She said it with eyes on her drink, so that it took Dante a moment to realize she wasn’t talking to Santiago.

“You deserved it,” Dante said. “You’re part of this band.”

“I’m not,” said Rosa.

“You are,” Santiago said.

Rosa leveled her gaze at Dante. “I don’t need your help.”

That gaze, it punctured her, she was defenseless against it. “All right.”

They sat for a long time in a silence that started out taut and eased with each passing moment, each sip of whiskey, the three of them pulled together and apart and together again by the room’s breath.

When the bottle was empty, Rosa stood. “Thanks for the drink,” she said and walked out without looking back.

Santiago crossed the room for a new bottle, then sat down and refilled Dante’s glass. They knocked the shots back quickly.

Santiago said, “You did the right thing.”

“It didn’t do any good.”

“Don’t give up.” He filled her glass again. “You’re important to this group, Dante. Don’t forget it.”

She didn’t know what to say. His words took shape inside her, formed a tenuous glow, fluttered. They drained their glasses more slowly this time, not looking at each other. In that moment, she felt strangely close to Santiago, as though the air between them could hold anything, even her secrets. For the first time she was aware of his body, planes and angles in the dark space beneath his clothes. It wasn’t possible for her to love a man, not anymore, not with everything she’d become and all the things she’d cast aside that men needed from women—but if she could ever love a man again she could see it would be a man just like Santiago. The whiskey had gone to her head. Her hands itched for naked skin. She wondered what Santiago was thinking. He was gazing intently at the wall.

“Sometimes,” Dante said suddenly, “I want to swallow the world.”

“All of it?”

“Yes.”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know. Swallow it again. Or let it swallow me.”

“I know exactly what you mean.”

“That happens to you too?”

“Of course. That’s why I’m here.” He gestured broadly at the room, the bandoneón case at his feet.

“It’s too much sometimes.”

“It gets easier with age.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“Unless, of course, it kills you first.”

Dante laughed.

Santiago laughed with him. Their laughter rose and glowed and rippled, reaching every corner of the Lair.

The next night, after the show, when Rosa changed and left quickly as usual, Dante got up to follow her without thinking, without saying goodbye to anyone. The musicians called out to her, but she ignored them. She followed Rosa at a distance, through the kitchen and out into the dark back alley. Rosa walked quickly, to the wide street and then a sharp right toward San Telmo, where she lived only four blocks from Dante, why had they never walked together? Why was she speeding up? And then Dante realized that Rosa didn’t know who she was, and that a strange man tailing a woman on the street was a threat. What an idiot, she’d forgotten. She ran to catch up with Rosa, who herself began to run.

“Rosa, it’s me!”

Rosa slowed. “You scared me.”

“I’m sorry. Can I walk with you?”

“I don’t own the streets.”

They walked side by side. It had rained earlier that night, and rivulets poured quietly in the gutters, flecked with cigarette butts, a few dead rats, shards of light from the iron lamps. The sky hummed with clouds.

“Whatever you want, the answer is no.”

“I don’t want anything from you, Rosa.”

“Then what are you doing?”

Step, step, step against the cobbles. What a question. She had no idea of the answer. “You just seem so alone.”

“I like being alone.”

“I understand. I like being alone too.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Then why did you follow me?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t.”

Rosa said nothing. They walked in silence, listening to the creaks and horse clops of Buenos Aires on the brink of dawn.

“Maybe,” Dante ventured, “there are different ways to be alone.”

“Maybe.”

“Some are nourishing and some are poison.”

“There’s poison in being with others too.”

“That depends on what the others are doing, no?”

“It depends on who they are.”

At her door—a conventillo whose façade was chipped, stained, exquisitely wrought—Dante said, “Thanks for letting me walk with you.”

Rosa nodded, still wary.

“I don’t want anything from you. But I’d like to walk together again.”

“We’ll see,” Rosa said and slipped inside.

The next night, Dante followed Rosa again; she felt pulled toward her like a magnet, she didn’t ask herself why, her body sprang up from the sofa and she followed the urge without thought. Rosa didn’t stop her, not that night, or the one after that. They began to walk home together regularly. They spoke in ellipses; they spoke of God and grappa, stars and horseshit, odd thoughts that floated in from nowhere to puncture each other’s consciousness. They never spoke of their work together, the stage, their music. Long silences stretched over the rhythm of their steps. Dante found herself looking forward to their walks almost as much as to the hours onstage. She didn’t know why, except that, as she counted the disappearing days of her freedom, she craved the company of people who woke her. And Rosa woke her. She was a mystery, a puzzle with no solving, frank and labyrinthine, distant and honest all at once.

“Do you want to go for a drink?” Dante said once, as they passed a bar.

“You know I can’t go in there. I’ll get treated like a whore.”

“Not if you’re with me.”

“Then I’ll get treated like
your
whore.”

Again she’d forgotten. In her time as a man so much of her had gone to sleep. “Let’s just walk.”

They started walking a little longer, some nights, passing Rosa’s door and Plaza Dorrego and the San Telmo marketplace with its great fortress walls, chained shut for the night, walking on past peeling doors where workers were emerging for their early factory shifts and women nursed babies at windows, squinting at the sky for clues of what the day might bring. The more they walked, the more their silences spoke and hummed, knitting them together, turning their steps into a single percussive song. Because they were walking, they barely looked at each other; because they barely looked at each other, Dante began to feel at risk of saying more, too much, saying almost anything to this woman who was like no one else. Be careful, Dante. Don’t let it spill, not any of it. After two weeks of walking—during which Carmen had not come back and Dante stayed free, the world intact—she asked a question she’d been holding on her tongue.

“How did you do it?”

“Do what?” Rosa said.

“Become this. What you are.”

“I auditioned, you were there.”

“No, before that. How did you become yourself?”

Silence, the low pulse of their steps. They approached a boy, five years old at most, sharpening knives in a doorway. He stared at them as they passed, blade still swinging. “I just did.”

“There’s more than that. I’m sure there’s more.”

“There’s always more. Every person has a story as long as the ocean.”

“Yes! You’re right! I’ve crossed the ocean—”

“I’ve never seen it.”

“It’s beautiful. It’s terrible. It goes on and on. That’s the version of your story I want.”

Rosa laughed. Dante could get addicted to the bite of that laugh. “Well, you can’t have it.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t tell it.”

“Of course you can.”

“Anyway, there’s nothing grand about it.”

“I don’t care.”

“I don’t have the words.”

“Try.”

“It would take hours.”

“I have hours. We’ll walk. The city is big enough for that.”

Rosa seemed shaken for the first time since Dante had met her. She was quiet for so long that Dante thought she’d failed, that she should find something else to talk about. Then, in a circling way, Rosa began.

She’d come to Buenos Aires by herself just two years before, with cash given to her by her mother to soften the blow of exile. Her mother hadn’t used that word,
exile
, but Rosa called it that in her own mind. When Rosa left Melo, the town of her birth in the rural north of Uruguay, she was eighteen years old and had never traveled further than the fields just across the river that ran a half hour’s walk from her home. Those fields beyond Melo were green and rich and rolled out in all directions to infinity. When she was a little girl, her mother had been mistress to a wealthy
estanciero
, a landowner, who had kept them both in a pretty blue house on a clean street where Rosa’s mother was spurned by the decent families but always kept her head high and her dresses fresh and elegant, buttoned to the neck. Rosa knew, growing up, that the estanciero was her father, but that she should never call him that, should never call him anything other than Señor, which she rarely had the chance to do because when he visited she stayed quiet in her room as she was told and didn’t come out no matter what she heard, and, on some visits, she heard many things. Her mother always made sure that Rosa had a plate of food and an empty chamber pot when Señor came, unless he came unannounced, at which times Rosa went right to her room and didn’t ask for a thing and held her pee as long as she could (and only sometimes
did she fail). Still, it was a good life: she went to school through the third grade; their house had a little garden where she sang for hours to fairies she saw clearly in the specks of light on grass; she got to sleep in her mother’s bed when Señor wasn’t there, which was often, because he lived with his real family in a big white house on his
estancia
(she had no way to prove the house was white but she knew it was, it had to be). Then, when Rosa was thirteen, Señor stopped coming and stopped paying for their pretty blue house, and Rosa and her mother had to move in with her mother’s brother, a good man of course but there was never enough space, they were always a burden, as his wife never hesitated to let them know no matter how many floors Rosa scrubbed or meals she cooked or bones she had to steal from the dog. Rosa and her mother started washing laundry for the wealthy families of Melo, enormous baskets that they hauled down to the river at the edge of town, which every day received flocks of women wringing linens against the rocks and filling the shallows with the shining, fragile bubbles of their soap. She learned to carry great baskets of laundry on her head as the black women did, even though her mother told her not to, you look like a slave when you do that,
hija
, you are not a slave, never forget it. The black women weren’t slaves either, though Rosa knew some of them had been before they escaped across the border from Brazil, and in any case they looked powerful to her with their baskets up high like enormous woven crowns. But she didn’t tell her mother this. Her mother was prone to mood changes so quick they made you dizzy. She was still beautiful, only sixteen years older than Rosa, and determined to find a man to care for her again. When she did, Rosa was happy that she and her mother would have a house of their own again. The new house was not blue, nor was it pretty, but it was enough—until, two months after they moved in, Rosa’s mother sat her down and put more cash on the table than Rosa had ever seen at once and said, he doesn’t want you here. I’m sorry. This is for you. Take my advice and get as far away from Melo as you can. Rosa was not a child anymore—she had just turned seventeen—and so
she didn’t shed a single tear on the whole train ride south to Montevideo, the great capital, which startled her with its size and its river so wide you couldn’t see the other side and had to wonder how long a boat would have to sail before you’d see land again. Buenos Aires was the city on the distant unseen shore, even larger, it was said, than this one. City of tango. Montevideo was a city of tango too, as Rosa soon learned from the washerwomen at the shore of the Río de la Plata. One of the women took pity on her and shared her workload in exchange for a few centavos. A girl like you, she said, should never be alone in a city like this one, where is your mother? Dead, said Rosa, because it was easier than the truth. The women clucked and shook their heads. Rosa rented a tiny room in a run-down building where several families shared a long hall and a single bathroom, and it was there that she first heard tangos played and fell in rapture with the music. She danced with a vivid joy she paid dearly for when, a few nights later, one of the men, a guitarist, a factory worker, father of five, broke into her room and gave her reason to sleep with a knife on her nightstand for the rest of her days. She left that building and found another, and in her first night in her new room she lay on her hard bed and thought of her mother, of the estanciero, and of the father of five, all asleep right this moment in different beds. She made a vow not to rely on any man. She would survive alone, or die. There were good people in the new building, and tango. The knife stayed close, she did not dance, but she did sing. And in the singing she found an even greater joy than in the dance; when she sang, she led rather than followed, pushed open the walls of sound and made room for her voice in the raw world. She earned a reputation as the songstress of her street. In Buenos Aires, people said, you’d be famous, on fancy stages, can you imagine? She began to imagine. She began to dream an absurd dream.

“And now I’m here,” she said, and stopped. During the telling they had reached the port at La Boca. It was a shock to see it again, the great warehouses, the slapdash houses built from salvaged wood and corrugated iron, painted in a bright patchwork of colors that announced their
hope and chaos. Dante and Rosa stood at the rail, the water below them a dark mirror under the growing dawn. There was no moon. Dante had broken her own rule of never coming to this neighborhood, dangerous as it was to her disguise, but Rosa had set the pace and she hadn’t dared do anything that might interrupt the story. Words like water to a parched man. It was her own story and not hers at all.