The Gods of Tango: A Novel

by Carolina de Robertis

  ALSO BY CAROLINA DE ROBERTIS

  FICTION

  The Invisible Mountain

  Perla

  TRANSLATION

  Bonsai, by Alejandro Zambra

  The Neruda Case, by Roberto Ampuero

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2015 by Carolina De Robertis

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  De Robertis, Carolina.

  The gods of tango / Carolina De Robertis. —First edition.

  pages; cm

  “This is a Borzoi book.”

  ISBN 978-1-101-87449-3 (hardcover) —ISBN 978-1-101-87450-9 (eBook)

  1. Violinists—Fiction. 2. Gender identity—Fiction. 3. Buenos Aires (Argentina)—History—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3604.E129G63 2015 813’.6—dc23 2014023450

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Jacket image: Mary Evans Picture Library

  Jacket design by Stephanie Ross

  v3.1_r1

  For Luciana

  And all things conspire to keep silent about us, half out of shame perhaps, half as unutterable hope.

  —Rainer Maria Rilke

  Convert the outrage of the years into music.

  —Jorge Luis Borges

  Since the house is on fire, let us warm ourselves.

  —Italian proverb

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  Uno · Think of Nothing, Think of Home

  Due · A Corner of the Possible

  Tre · The Good People of New Babel

  PART TWO

  Quattro · Noise and Blades and Death and Also This

  Cinque · Ladies and Gentlemen!

  Sei · A Cup of the River of Forgetting

  Sette · Heartbreak of Mountains, Lust of the Sun

  PART THREE

  Otto · Bright Jagged Thing

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Reading Group Guide

  Dante died a happy man, although a strange one, known for living with a coffin in his house. The gossips of Montevideo had spent years speculating about the reason for the coffin. He’s a vampire. He’s mad. He’s terrified of death. He keeps his violin in there, under a witch’s spell, that’s why your soul breaks open every time he plays, the old bastard. But as for the true reason, they could never begin to guess.

  His last moment came in the kitchen, a sudden blurring of his heart, as if a giant paintbrush had pierced his chest and smeared its inner walls with white. He couldn’t breathe; he reached for the table’s edge and grasped only air. Something clattered far away. It was not pain, exactly, just a pressure that urged him to collapse into himself, almost sweetly, plunging all his secrets into rubble. His last thought was not of secrets, or of music, or of God, or even of the woman who had flooded his life with joy. It was of Cora. Cora, my darling, carissima, come closer. Are you here? Take my hand. If there is light then steer me to it. If there is not, I’m not afraid, not if there is you. You. There you are. Radiant. As you were before it all began.

  He reached for Cora’s hand and Cora smiled and opened her mouth and out poured an explosion of light.

  PART ONE

  UNO

  Think of Nothing, Think of Home

  Leda arrived in Argentina on February 4, 1913, on a steamship that only twenty days before had made Italy disappear, swallowed by that ravenous monster called the horizon. On her last morning on board, she dressed with care and latched her trunk tightly so that nothing, no sleeve, no village dust, no errant memory could spill out when the porter came to carry it to the deck. Then she sat in silence for a while. Her bunkmate, Fausta, had left her bedclothes tousled and unkempt. No doubt she was already on deck, craning for a glimpse of Buenos Aires. If Leda didn’t find her in the crowds, she might never see her again, a strange thought after twenty nights of sharing quarters with a woman who wasn’t kin, whom she’d never met before the voyage. Strangers. Strangeness. These two things filled the crossing to América. She wondered what her mother would say if she were here, in this stuffy little room with her. Here you are, then, or It smells like a sty in here, or For God’s sake, Leda, straighten your hat. She told herself that she would see her mother again one day, as well as her father and cousins and uncles and aunts and her great-grandmother’s ceaseless dragonfly hands—though none of it was true: in the years and continent to come, Leda would see many things that would astound her, break her into pieces, and reassemble her in shapes she hadn’t known a human soul could inhabit, but she would never see her family again.

  She was sitting on the trunk that had accompanied her from home. So few things stowed away inside it. Folded dresses. A cluster of books. A jar of olives cured by the baker’s wife. Hazelnuts wrapped in burlap. Her father’s violin, passed down for generations, gone from Italy for the first time, a gift for her new husband.

  It was her grandfather who’d told her the tale of this particular violin, over and over, as if the telling could stave off loss, as if the weight and scope of human history were not found in books or in those mythic universities in Rome and Naples that no one in their village had ever actually seen but, rather, were encoded in objects like this one, a violin touched by hundreds of hands, loved, used, stroked, pressed, made to outlive its owners, storing their secrets and lies. Imagine, said her grandfather: this very violin belonged to the King of Naples until 1501. Oh, it’s true, don’t you doubt it. How long it was in the royal family, nobody knows. But there is no question that, whoever it belonged to before, it did belong to Federico d’Aragona, the last King of Naples of the Trastámara line. He was a quiet, kindly man never meant to face the kinds of forces that he did—two nations, Spain and France, vying for his throne; a lineage still shaking from the too-brief reigns of his father, brother, and nephew before him. Are you following, Leda? He tried to rule but all it takes is for your enemies to join forces with your unlucky stars and then suddenly there you are, encircled, nowhere to run, and what is there left for you to do? I’ll tell you what’s left, a simple choice. Either you can die right there or you can flee to another land and start a new life with nothing but your skin and what’s inside of it. That’s what Federico did: he fled. Right into exile. Not freely, mind you, but as a prisoner flanked by soldiers. But before he left, before the soldiers came for him, he opened his bedroom window, stood overlooking the sprawling lands of Naples, and played his violin. He played a dirge that seemed to rise straight from the red core of the earth. The only person who heard it was a count who later told anyone who would listen that it was the saddest and most beautiful song he ever heard in his life. When the king had finished playing, he gave the count the violin.

  You keep it, he said. I’m done with music.

  The count protested at first. But what about your sons?

  King Federico only shook his head. The violin has to stay.

  Whether or not the king ever p
layed another violin during his years of French exile is unknown, a detail lost in the folds of time, so, Leda, I can’t give you that piece of the story. But the count kept the violin and passed it down within his family, which eventually, in 1815, sold the instrument to my great-grandfather in order to pay off debts, and my great-grandfather received, along with the thing itself, the story of the King of Naples’s dirge, which of course gave the instrument a higher value (whether or not it was actually true, Leda thought as she listened, but she said nothing since it was clear that her grandfather would not harbor a drop of doubt). And so the hands of the king had played this very violin, on that last day of Naples’s independence as a kingdom all its own. What exactly did he play, that Federico? How did the song sound? We’ll never know. That’s what happens to melodies: they get lost in the air. Just like memories. And the body. Memories and melodies and the body dissolve after we die. A musical instrument is not like the body, not at all; like the soul, it carries on.

  Leda went up to the deck. It was a hot, humid day, and beads of sweat clung to the foreheads of men, who far outnumbered women on the ship, and who were mostly young, though few as young as her own seventeen years. There was hope in their wide gazes and a frenetic anticipation about them; 368 tightly strung human wires. The women were mostly wives on their way to meet their husbands in Buenos Aires, just like Fausta (and like me, Leda thought, remember, remember, I’m a wife too). The deck burst with people, just as it had the day they’d left Naples. There were no longer any lazy card games with which to kill the hours. Boredom had sloughed overboard into the sea. Everybody was on their feet, crowded against the rail, craning their necks in the direction of land.

  Argentina. She pressed into the throng, toward the rail. To her right, a young woman murmured a rosary. To her left, a man in his forties was drying his tears, while the younger man beside him smoked a cigarette with indifference or, Leda thought, a convincing performance of indifference. His demeanor seemed the most theatrical of all. She smelled sweat and tobacco and the hopeful tang of cologne. In front of her, three or four chaotic rows ahead, two men were exclaiming to each other about the land they saw.

  “Che bella. Beautiful.”

  “Yes. Beautiful.”

  Again and again they said it, as though repetition would solidify the truth of the phrase, make it strong enough to sustain them as they disembarked. Their voices wove through the wails and murmurs in the crowd. She gently jostled forward. A man in front of her moved away, apparently having seen enough, and she slunk into his space before it could close, before anyone could notice. She was starved for the sight of land, not just any land, but this land—Buenos Aires, her new home. Over the past three weeks, she had spent many hours alone at these rails, staring out at endless ocean, trying to imagine what Buenos Aires would be like. Over and over she tried to picture the city, but her mind’s eye could conjure only the lush tropical ferns and trees of the Botanical Garden, where Dante had taken a photograph of himself when he’d first arrived, to send to the family back home. It had been passed around the table at Sunday lunch, to clucks of admiration and bemusement.

  He’s really there, in Argentina.

  He looks happy.

  He looks too skinny.

  Look at those parrots, they’re big enough to eat him!

  Don’t be ridiculous, Mario. Those are fake. Just painted wood.

  How can you be so sure?

  I have eyes in my head.

  You don’t know anything, you idiot.

  I was just—

  No fighting today, for the sake of God, Leda’s mother said.

  How about we let his bride take a look?

  That’s right! Leda, do you want to see?

  The photograph arrived in Leda’s hands. In it, Dante stood surrounded by strange ferns with enormous fronds and two garish parrots that, although she believed her brother’s insistence to the contrary, seemed intensely alive. His mouth curled into a smirk, and a cigarette dangled from his hand, unlit. I own this place, his posture seemed to say. Of course, just because that was the place where he’d found a photographer to take his portrait didn’t mean the whole city looked that way. She knew this; at least part of her knew this. But the image still glowed in her mind.

  Now, on the steamship, she wondered how it would be with Dante, tonight, her first time. How he would touch her, and for how long. Whether it would hurt or give her joy, the way it did for brides in ballads. Whether she would think of the white figs in their orchard, how they glistened when you pressed your fingers into them. Whether she would think of nothing. Whether she would think of home.

  A cluster of men in front of her had had their fill of the approaching land, and when they moved, she stepped forward to the rail and leaned against it. Wind whipped her face and stung her nostrils with saline air. She feared the wind might tear her blue hat right off her head, despite the several pins she’d used to place it, and losing the hat—the finest thing she’d ever worn, with real pearls stitched on, fit for a bride, her mother had said—would be unbearable, so she reached up and gripped it with both hands. The throng around her seemed to melt away (as it surely did for everyone else: 368 Italians, all wandering their own private visions of Argentina in their minds) as her eyes roved the distant city, Buenos Aires, lying low across the water. The buildings were still so small that she could not discern anything about them, except, of course, that they existed—that while she and her compatriots still had no idea what they would find when they disembarked, they would at least find something, a true place that might show them what they’d ridden across the open ocean for; that the Américas were more than some fable concocted by ship lines and ticket agents and relatives with their carefully calibrated letters home, even if seeing that the Américas exist does not at all reveal the true mystery, a mystery much harder to resolve, namely, what the Américas actually are.

  Leda stood for a long time, watching Buenos Aires glide toward her, and, because she did not yet dare to imagine its buildings, how she would fit inside and between them, she pictured herself in that garden with Dante, strolling past exotic ferns and sleeping curled together beneath them as they might under the wings of a great forgiving swan.

  Leda’s wedding had been quick and simple, finished before the tang of communion bread could fade from her mouth. Since bride and groom were on different continents, they were married by proxy, with Dante’s father, her uncle Mateo, standing in at the altar for his son. Leda wore a simple linen dress she’d borrowed in haste from a cousin. It was too short for her—Leda was the tallest girl in Alazzano—and bunched awkwardly at the hips, but overall, with white carnations in hand and hair and her mother’s borrowed pearls at her throat, she looked enough like a bride to satisfy the throng of relatives and the melancholy priest. She would have worn her mother’s bridal gown, as was the custom, but there was no time to tailor it since Leda was to marry immediately and board a ship to Argentina the following day, and though her mother in her youth did not yet have the formidable girth she did now, she did have curves back then that her wedding dress made clear, a voluptuousness that put Leda’s hipless, flat-chested form to shame. How could I have given birth to a girl with nothing on her? her mother would sometimes say. They both knew the answer; on her father’s side, there had been two great-aunts famous for their tall and sexless forms. They lived their entire lives as spinsters. People called them the Nails because of their long thin bodies, harsh temperaments, and tendency to stick together as though they belonged in the same box. As Leda stood at the altar, listening to the murmurs of the priest, she thought she could palpably feel her mother’s relief that her daughter was getting married and therefore saved from life as a Nail, though she could not tell whether her mother’s relief outweighed the sorrow of losing that same daughter to an unknown country far away. Ever since Dante’s letter had arrived, send Leda, I am ready, the air around Mamma had been sharp and heavy as an impending slap.

  “For richer or for poorer?�
� the priest said.

  “Sì,” said Zio Mateo.

  “Sì,” said Leda, and her voice echoed from the vaulting ceiling, making the saints shiver in their alcoves.

  The vows continued. Zio Mateo did not look at her. He had always had an impenetrable mind. He was the kind of man who seemed to live somewhere other than inside his own face. At family gatherings he either brooded in silence or launched long impassioned monologues that no one dared interrupt. Now that she was marrying his son, she could not read his expression, it had no message for her, no blessing and no unblessing, just a slightly bored acceptance, as though he were fulfilling a minor legal duty in whose outcome he was not invested. As though he did not think about his younger son in Argentina, did not wonder about the sweat and noise of Dante’s days, the slow push of his nights, the married life he was about to start. As though he’d grown tired of his role as patriarch and this ceremony didn’t matter, had no weight inside him except as a burden. The weary, beleaguered patriarch doing his duties at the altar. But he was a lie, an impostor, it disgusted her to give her vows to him, this man who had set in motion a family curse so strong that not even death could break it, a family curse that now could mar her marriage before it even began. She reminded herself that he was just a stand-in for the husband to whom she was actually binding her life, but the revulsion remained, knotting her stomach, darkening the wide church air.

  It was winter, an unusual time for a wedding, and when the party of fifteen or so walked down the church steps onto the plaza, cold air pricked Leda’s face. She had imagined that the world might look different than it did when she first entered the church, that it might glow with some secret light to which only married people were privy, that her eyes might have gained the power to glimpse some hidden texture of the world that might make it more comprehensible, more able to align with the world she carried inside. Countless times she had been told you’ll understand when you’re grown up—and here it was, the threshold of womanhood. But the spell hadn’t worked. The world was the same. Her brother Tommaso was talking, as always, making her father laugh, but she could not follow what they were saying to each other. Papà’s arm was interlocked with hers, and she was comforted by this, her father’s gentle touch, almost timid, a lost bird. I swear it’s true, her brother said, it hit him right in his youknowwhere. Her father laughed again, perhaps a bit too hard, a sound forced from his throat. Her mother walked behind them, emanating chaos. The three little ones swarmed around her, along with other children and their mothers. What were the women talking about? She picked out the words grandson and oranges and never ever ripened. Their voices rose and fell in melodious, competing waves. Zio Mateo and his oldest son, Mario, walked in front, silent. The wedding party crossed the plaza, their steps echoing on the same cobbles as always, rounded, gray, slightly uneven, stones her ancestors had walked across to go to mass, or play chess, or wash clothes in communal tubs, ever since the first known Dante Mazzoni had fled his native Puglia in 1582—after siding with the French Bourbons in a failed attempt to overthrow Spanish rule, which left him suddenly on the wrong side of the law—and settled here in Alazzano, a tiny village in a valley of figs and ghosts and olive groves. Now the Mazzoni family owned half the land around the village, and yet was crushed by debt and other demons that were making the youngest generation slowly disappear, some overseas, some into oblivion. Although it was not accurate to say the Mazzoni family owned the land. It was one single member who owned it. Zio Mateo. Leda’s father was the younger brother, Ugo, owner of nothing, not even of the house he lived in by the grace and generosity of the brother who had inherited everything and thanks to whom her family, Ugo’s family, could eat and farm and breathe.