The Gods of Tango (46 page)

“Santiago,” Dante answered. “He always knew.”

Santiago surged in her mind then, as he did every time she said his name and also when she didn’t; he hovered in the room, mocking her grief, demanding life, demanding music, urging on her fingers as she played.

They were among the first in their neighborhood to buy a gramophone. With it, they could dance tangos in their living room, Dante leading, Rosa supple in her dress, their bodies fused in motion, moving, not just to the music, but inside of it.

Now Rosa could sing whatever she wanted, however she wanted. New songs came out every day, scripted with female singers in mind. The freedom was dizzying. She experimented with singing in a feminine dress, but she never abandoned her suit and trousers. Together, Rosa and Dante wrote their own tangos, coded with their passion in secret, slanted verse, and recorded them, as sung by the one and only Rosa Vidal. Soon her voice had enthralled not only the radio listeners of Uruguay but audiences in Brazil, Argentina, the United States, and a Europe just returning to its shaky feet after the war. She began to tour. Dante occasionally went with her (though not to Argentina, where she was wanted by the law), but most of the time she stayed home. She didn’t mind; she had no need for crowds. Her favorite way to play, now, was standing at the window of her second-floor apartment in the center of Ciudad Vieja, on Calle Ituzaingó, just her and the violin and the strip of sky above the buildings, pouring music down to the bustling street for anyone who cared enough to catch it, and, often, many did. Men slowed their walks, craned their necks up, peered out through the polished windows
of Café Brasilero. Women hanging laundry on the flat rooftops swayed their hips. Children appeared on balconies, jostling for the best view, forgetting their fervent little battles for a moment. She gave them songs, played for all of them, for no one.

Sometime in those years, the Shift occurred, though Dante would never be sure of the exact moment, just as one can’t know precisely where the river ends and the great Atlantic begins: but one day he simply knew it, simply found himself a he, at home in the pronoun the world gave him each day, not because his body had changed, not because his story had changed, not even because he didn’t see himself as a woman, but simply because the gap between inside and outside, self and disguise, truth and pretense, had narrowed and thinned until it became invisible to the human eye.

When Rosa turned forty—in 1936, the year after Gardel’s plane crash wrapped all of tango in a shroud of tragedy—she asked for a special gift. “I want to dance with you, and play the part of the man.”

Dante balked. “I haven’t worn a dress in over twenty years.”

“You don’t have to wear a dress. You can still be you, still be Dante. I just want to lead you.”

Dante closed the shutters, checked them over and over.

Then he let Rosa lead.

It was still, at the root, the same dance: the same two bodies, connecting, gliding together, two aching souls reaching for each other and finding more than could be told. And then, in the fourth song, or maybe it was the fifth, they switched roles, without speaking, their bodies deciding, hands moving from waist to shoulder or shoulder to waist and pouring the dance in the opposite direction, which was, they discovered, not an opposite at all but a continuation of the very same dance, the same
essential language of the body, of two bodies wishing to be one, forming a kinetic poem out of longing. They switched again, again, until their bodies knew before their minds did which way the dance would flow. This malleable secret tango became their truest. They danced it in private for the rest of their lives.

Later that same year, when Rosa was away for an engagement in New York City, where her voice would join an enormous orquesta and fill a hall normally reserved for the solemn symphonies of old Europe, Dante received an unexpected visit. He almost didn’t answer the knock on the door. When he did, he came face-to-face with a girl with a round face, a prim bonnet, and a frank gaze.

“Good morning. I’m looking for Dante Di Bacco.”

“Yes, that’s me.”

The girl stared even harder. “Can I come in?”

Inside, the girl looked around at the tidy living room, the potted geraniums in the windowsill, the warm little kitchen down the hall as if she’d just arrived from another planet. Then she blinked and gathered herself. “My name is Miriam.”

Dante felt the air stop in his lungs. He stared at the girl, tried to drink her in, as though she might dissolve any moment.

“Miriam Di Bacco.” She said the last three syllables with the extra emphasis of a challenge.

Had Alma given her the last name? Or had the girl claimed it? Questions galloped into his mind, hundreds of them at once. “Would you like to sit down?” he said.

They spent the afternoon drinking
mate
, and talking. Miriam told him that, when she was nine, she’d intercepted an envelope from Uruguay and opened it to find a wad of cash and a brief note: “for Miriam, as always. D.” Until then, she’d always been told that her father was dead, though the two other children in the brothel told her that her father must
have been a customer, just like their own. She confronted her mother and, after a fight that lasted several days, was able to learn that the D. in question was a certain Dante Di Bacco, who lived in Montevideo.
And is he my father?
Miriam had asked her.
Is he? Is he?
Alma had stared at her for a long time before finally saying,
yes, Miriam, he is
. From then on, the money had gone directly to Miriam’s upkeep (before then only God knew how it had been spent) and helped her to go to school, as well as, ultimately, to escape her mother’s profession when she ran away at fourteen, a wad of Dante’s cash in her pocket, intercepted from the mail. She found her first job across town, in Palermo, with a Lebanese rug merchant who let her sleep on the storeroom floor because he believed in giving the wretched a chance in this world. The storeroom floor was better than her mother’s room, she said, though she stopped short of saying why, and Dante didn’t ask. She worked hard and dreamed of meeting her father one day. She saved money for years before setting out to look for him. The name change had been her own idea, not yet legal but, she said, real in her mind.

“How long will you stay?” Dante asked, his heart in his throat.

Miriam eyed him, equal parts defiance and hope. “How long can I?”

She was still there when Rosa arrived the following week, still there a year later, part of their family for three precious years in which they came to know her coppery laugh and her quick temper and her wildly generous soul—and in which Dante came to know the dizzying joy of being called Papá, never saying anything to the contrary, allowing Miriam’s truth to define their world—until, in 1940, she completed her studies in nursing and returned to Buenos Aires to minister to the poor of her old neighborhood, San Telmo. The day she left, Dante and Rosa stood in the Montevideo port and waved and waved until the boat disappeared at the horizon, and even then they held hands for a long time, saying nothing, staring out at the great river in amazement.

The tango reached a Golden Age. Orchestras grew to dizzying size, and traveled all over the world to grace the best of stages. Musicians with classical training or years playing jazz, or both, pushed the tango’s edges into new terrain, to the outrage of some and the thrill of others. Rosa and Dante were now considered part of the Old Guard, a term that amused and bewildered them, as they remembered so vividly a time when their sound and everything they did was radical and new. Some of their peers, over drinks in Montevideo, bemoaned the changes, claiming that what people now called tango was not tango at all, and sometimes Dante, too, worried that the soul of tango as it used to be would be lost in the cacophony. And perhaps it would. But then his mind always returned to Santiago, his embrace of changes—the loss of drums, a woman’s voice, the advent of piano and bass—because, in his words,
change keeps the tango alive
. And alive it was, throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s, riding the tide of Juan and Evita Perón’s nationalistic fervor until the generals took Argentina into their iron hands in 1955 and clamped the tango down as though it were the very soundtrack of rebellion. As if music could be crushed like a condemned building or a stubborn anarchist. But it could not. It always rose and returned, vital, immense, fortified by new instruments, new shapes, new musicians crazy enough to give their lives to it like underground, unsanctioned priests. Dante played on and Rosa sang on as the tango rose and fell and flowed and ebbed with the decades, with the times, with those who grasped the songs and carried them into rebirth.

As Dante grew old, he looked around him, at the life he’d built, the friends he’d made, the city he’d come to love, the man he’d become. It was a good life, one he often wished he could wrap in a blanket and carry back in time to the girl he’d been, to show her what was possible, to watch her mind break open in shock. In his sixties, he took to talking to his cousin Cora, on walks along the waterfront, in the shower, in
his sleep. He started thinking about the grave, the things you couldn’t take with you, and the things you could. That was when he bought the coffin, a simple construction of solid Uruguayan oak, and kept it in his living room, shut and empty, a bench for piles of sheet music or for guests. Word spread among their friends, and throughout the city, of the eccentric old tanguero in Ciudad Vieja obsessed with death. Only Rosa understood the real reason for the coffin, an obsession not with death but with narrating your own life, because if you don’t script your own way once and for all, your story will be written by someone else, and your actions will be guided by other people’s dreams of who you should be rather than by the bright jagged thing you really are.

Dante died when he was seventy-two years old. Rosa found him in the kitchen, facedown on the morning paper, which featured photographs of a huge funeral procession in the United States for Martin Luther King, Jr. Dante’s morning
mate
had been knocked to the floor, and the shredded leaves had spilled out of the gourd onto the tiles. Below the article about Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral was another about the Tupamaros, a guerrilla revolutionary movement in Uruguay. Dante would not be there to watch that movement expand and then be crushed by the government as it hurtled toward dictatorship. It would be Rosa who would see those changes; she would hide revolutionaries in her basement and as she did she’d think of Dante’s cousin, the first Dante, the way he’d died as an anarchist martyr—and she’d think of El Loro’s youthful passion years ago—the eternal march of outsize dreams. She would harbor these young Tupamaros, not because she was one of them or because she believed them for a second when they said the revolution was right around the corner, but because she was moved by their fresh faces and the fever in their eyes. It’s unstoppable, this fever, she would think, and not so different from other fevers I’ve known. Rosa would survive until democracy returned to Uruguay as well as to her other
nation, Argentina, the giant across the river, and when it did she’d write a tango celebrating freedom, but she wouldn’t join the public marches, wouldn’t let her song reach other human ears. She would sing it quietly to the houseplants, and they, the plants, would absorb her old-woman crooning with glad hunger.

But all of that would come later.

Now, at Dante’s death, she washed the body herself and clothed it so that no one would discover the secret her beloved had carried all his life, following his instructions to the letter. Only you, Dante had told her, more times than was necessary, if I go first I don’t want anyone to see me but you. I see you, you bastard, Rosa thought as she sponged the wrinkled body, I see you, all of you, this corner and that curve, that flap of skin that was so taut when we were young, I watched it pucker and stretch over the years and after all this time I still want to touch it, how could you leave me, selfish brute, you should have bought a coffin with room for two. She lay her head down on Dante’s naked chest and closed her eyes, as if that could lock the tears in. It could not. When the sobs subsided, a strange feeling settled over her, a vast and preternatural calm, and she rubbed the tears into Dante’s skin and finished her task with steady hands.

By the time the doctor arrived, the corpse was dressed and laid out in its coffin. Rosa had taken care of everything: neatly groomed hair, hands clasped gently over a crisp tuxedo, the bow tie perfectly straight, a letter from Dante on the kitchen table, requesting that his remains go undisturbed. The doctor, a good friend of Rosa and Dante’s who’d seen them through two decades of winter flus, was happy to confirm the cause of death without violating the unusual wishes of the deceased. The funeral was crowded with well-wishers from the tango world, their neighborhood, from all of Montevideo, and all of them agreed that Dante made a good-looking dead man. How about that, Dante? Rosa thought at the corpse as the coffin lid closed for the last time with a tidy click like the clasp of an instrument case. Just what you wanted.

The corpse remained silent.

But silence, Rosa thought an hour later as she watched the coffin sink into its tomb, is a kind of music too. It was a clear cold day, the sky so blue it might be outlawed any moment for its beauty. Music is composed of silence too, and now her Dante was wrapped up in a shroud of it, I did that, Dante, I wove the shroud for you. Go home,
querido
. You should have stayed longer, I want four hundred years with you and more, but fine, all right, you can go and I’ll stay here, not four hundred years but for however long this aging body lets me, and while I’m here I’ll remember everything that’s wrapped in there with you and won’t ever be spoken—the shape of you, what we did, what we made, our songs and you bastard you sweet bastard how we sang them, how we laughed at the Fates, wildly, madly, as if the world were ours, what a sound, Dante, can you still hear it?