What experts we are at hiding poison, she thought as the wedding party reached the door of Mateo’s house, Palazzo Mazzoni, the largest house in the village. His wife, Crocifissa, had set out the tablecloths, plates, and silverware hours before, and now she and the other women vanished into the kitchen. Leda tried to join them but her aunts glared at her and blocked the door.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“Not today.”
“Not in that dress, you don’t.”
The living room smelled of rosemary chicken, tomato sauce, and freshly baked sweet cakes. The men settled down to smoke, the children went outside to play, and Leda found a chair in a corner, though she would have liked to join the children in the dirt. She fixed her gaze on the oil painting that hung over the fireplace, of a vineyard beneath a clear blue sky. At one edge of the vineyard, an unusually tall fig tree caught sunlight in its leaves. She remembered that tree. It used to stand at the edge of Zio Mateo’s land, at its border with that of a neighbor, Don Paolo. They had disputed over their property line, a fight they’d inherited from their grandfathers. In particular, Don Paolo had wanted the rights to the fig tree, whose fruits were his mother’s favorite. After a long battle, a local judge had decided in Zio Mateo’s favor, though Don Paolo’s mother would spread the rumor that the judge had been bribed. Once he’d won the settlement, Mateo had taken an ax and cut down that fig tree with his own hands, because he wanted to, because he could. And then nobody in the entire village could enjoy its fruits ever again. In the painting, however, the tree’s broad leaves continued to reach upward, their five sections resembling fingers splayed open to the air.
Leda shifted her weight restlessly. This living room made her think, how could it not, of Cora, who used to live here, who used to call this home. How could there be a wedding day without her?—especially since it was Cora’s brother she was marrying. Cora her soul-cousin, her almost-sister who’d opened the world to her when they were very small, before the nightmare, when their spirits were so large they could have eaten the whole sky and called it breakfast, licked their fingers and been ready for more, Cora who’d seemed to understand the world from the inside in a secret way that Leda was hungry to know also, who’d brushed Leda’s hair and warmed her milk when Mamma was too tired to notice, who’d sung her the lullabies that mothers sing for girls, who’d taken her to the river to fetch water and shown her how to brave the shallows, ankle-deep, calf-deep, even thigh, she was so bold, Cora, bright as hellblaze on a Lenten night, skirts hitched up in heedless fists, and laughing. Leda, two years younger, stood at the shore, scared to wade too deep, staring at her feet through the cold translucent river as it ran and ran and kissed her skin and Cora splashed her and said Go on, go on, what’s a little water in your skirts? Cora teacher of secrets, such as how to pluck a chicken (soften its skin, she said, so the feathers are glad to slide out; they don’t fight you if they’re warm enough; dip the bird in boiling water and let heat work its magic, then get a good grip, strip it bare) and also how to read. She read aloud to Leda on winter evenings in this very living room, in that dark-honey voice of hers that made each syllable sound delicious. She loved the books that chronicled journeys most of all. The Odyssey. The Inferno. A History of Joan of Arc. In the end she’d put the volumes down and started to tell the stories in her own words, a mix of telling them from memory and embellishing the bones. Odysseus unlashed himself and swam out to the sirens. Joan escaped from prison before she could be burned. The road through the inferno became riddled with the dead of their own village, the grocer’s wife, the long-gone priest, their ancestors whose names still bristled on the pages of records in the church. Even hell could seem appealing to a village girl itching for adventure, a village girl like Cora. Listen, Leda, she’d said, imagine traveling to places where you recognize nothing, not even your own face. Just imagine. And Leda did imagine. When Cora was nine, at the stone washing tubs on the village plaza, she learned about the bleeding of women. Leda was seven then. They say it hurts, Cora whispered, and Leda was terrified. Don’t worry, Cora said. It’ll happen to me first, and by the time it’s your turn I’ll know how to help you. But it didn’t happen that way. By the time Leda’s blood came, Cora was gone.
Within an hour, the wedding party had swelled with guests. The entire 107-person population of the village seemed to have come, as well as a few guests from the two nearest villages up the mountain, Monte Rosso and Trinità. As there was no groom to speak to, everybody wanted to talk to Leda, congratulate her, and ask questions about Argentina that she could not begin to answer. The married women formed a knot around her that refused to be undone.
“Are you ready? You’ve packed everything?”
“She’d better have. The carriage comes at dawn.”
“At dawn!”
“Your trunk must be full to the brim.”
“Is it cold there in winter?”
“No no, Giovanna, it’s summer there now—incredible, no?—so when she gets there it’ll be warm.”
“Ah!”
“Even if it isn’t warm, Dante will soon get the heat going for her.”
Laughter.
“Poor bride, already married but she still has to wait.”
“It’ll be worth it.”
“Oh yes. Don’t worry, Leda.”
“Take it from us: you’ll be just fine.”
More laughter.
“Leda, I brought you hazelnuts from my orchard. For you and Dante to eat together when you arrive.”
“How romantic. He can crack them open for you.”
“Heh, heh, heh.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“But he’ll still do it.”
“Do what?”
“I have to explain it to you?”
“Don’t you know anything?”
“That’s not funny.”
“Now, ladies.”
“Well, she’s always—”
“No fighting, now.”
“Leda, here, I have something for you too: olives from last year’s harvest. For your Dante.”
“Our Dante.”
“Yes, our Dante, he’ll always be our Dante. Remember when he got caught stealing your oranges? What was he, five?”
“Four.”
“Santa María. What a precocious boy.”
“Unstoppable, that one. Even when he was up to no good.”
“Especially then.”
“Well, he never gave me any trouble. He always had a pleasant word when he came to the bakery. ‘Sì, signora. Per favore, signora.’ A little gentleman.”
“Until he became a very tall gentleman.”
“Nothing little about him now, I’ll bet. Heh, heh.”
“That’s not for you to know, you crow.”
“You’re lucky, Leda.”
“You’ll be just fine, Leda.”
“You two will build quite a kingdom for yourselves in Argentina.”
“Not for nothing that the country’s named after silver.”
“Just don’t forget us.”
“You will write, won’t you?”
“Of course she will.”
She didn’t say a word and no one asked her to. Night had fallen and the women’s faces flickered in the light of kerosene lamps. The musicians had been playing across the room, but they had taken a break to smoke and their flutes and violins lay silent on their chairs. Leda’s fingers itched to pick up one of the violins, as she had when she was a child, mimicking her father’s hands along the neck, plucking the strings, discovering notes, hiding so that no one would stop her, stealing time, chasing melodies with which her father used to flood the living room, before, before. The women were eating second and third helpings of cake, and white powdered sugar smudged their lips. They were smiling with their mouths, but only some were smiling with their eyes. Leda felt strange, as though everyone, including herself, were acting out a tacitly agreed upon theater script from which the most important lines had
been erased. Unsaid words infused the air; she could not decipher their meaning. She felt a sudden terror at the thought of not seeing these faces every day. What would the world be without them in it, these women who were pressed around her now, giving her laughter and olives and assurances and other things they would not name aloud—what were those things? a kind of hunger, a dull knife—as though they wanted to take the journey with her, as though their souls longed to flee across the ocean as stowaways in a corner of her trunk. I can’t carry so much, she thought, I can’t pack these secret parts of you. She felt alone. But this was what she’d wanted, wasn’t it? For four years now she’d longed for escape. At thirteen, she’d begun to dream of packing a bundle of bread and clothes and trekking to Naples, on foot, or begging rides in carriages. But of course she could not. She knew the dangers of the road, of the city. She had also imagined climbing Vesuvius and hurling herself down its great black throat. But Vesuvius was far, how could she get there? Two weeks after her fifteenth birthday, Dante had offered another way out. He had announced his plan to leave for the New World over Sunday lunch with the family, and the afternoon sun had shot through the grape trellis to streak his face as he spoke. Afterward, she had slipped him a note, meet me under the tall olive tree behind our house at nine o’clock.
When she arrived that night, he was already there. He stood in the light of a half-moon.
“Not here,” she said. “We have to go in.”
She slunk under the slender cupola of branches and gestured for him to join her. Now they were sheltered from prying eyes, though still not entirely safe. He waited for her to start the conversation.
“When are you leaving?” she asked.
“In three weeks.”
“Why Argentina?”
“Why not Argentina?”
She fidgeted. “Are you excited?”
“I don’t know. I think so.”
“Scared?”
“No,” he said, too quickly.
She wondered what he was running away from, whether there was more than the second son’s empty pockets and the lure of change. His sister’s death. The things he’d seen before that in dark corners of his home. “I would be. Excited, I mean.”
“Not scared?”
“Maybe. A little.”
They were silent. His shadow so black and whole against the leaves.
She gathered her courage. “Send for me,” she said, “if you want a wife.”
He made an odd sound, sharp air through teeth. There was so little moon beneath the leaves. She waited. Then he said, “You’d come?”
“I’d come.”
He was quiet for a very long time, a card player studying the unexpected hand he’d just been dealt. “We would be gone a very long time.”
“Yes.”
“Probably forever.”
“Yes. I know.”
“And there would be a long wait before I could send for you. Months, maybe more.”
“I understand.”
He seemed to be gazing at her now, though she couldn’t be sure in the near dark. “You’d wait for me?”
She was restless; she didn’t want to wait; if migration was the only way to push open the confines of her world, then she wanted it to happen now, she wanted to embark right along with Dante, cross the ocean and begin scraping her destiny out of foreign rock. But he was asking something different. About the other village boys. Resisting them would be no sacrifice at all. “Yes. I’ll wait.”
Dante was silent again. Now that her eyes had adjusted to the dark, she could make out the contours of his face. He was studying her closely. Seeing her in an entirely new way. “Leda,” he said and took her hand.
“Dante.”
“Are we engaged?”
“Do you want to be?”
“Yes. I do.” He didn’t sound certain. He sounded as though he were trying to persuade someone sitting just above them in the branches. He said it again, more firmly. “I do. I want a wife, somebody who knew me here at home. I want you to be with me where I’m going.”
He stroked her palm with his thumb, gently, waking her skin. He was a good man. He was Cora’s brother. This was what Cora would have wanted, wasn’t it, for them to launch out into the world together, expanding it through their sheer insistence on life, on youth, risk, escape, if only she were here to see it and perhaps she was, her spirit hovering near them, watching with a happiness that could wash Leda clean of guilt. And wash Dante, too, if he shared her guilt over Cora. She thought he must. She longed to ask. She did not dare. “In that case,” she said, “we’re engaged.”
In the weeks that followed, before his departure, they met every night under the olive tree. By then the engagement had been established, Papà had given his reluctant blessing—though her mother would not speak to her for a week, she acted as though Leda weren’t there, as though her daughter had already disappeared into another world so unreachable it might as well not exist—but even so the night meetings were illicit, more than the etiquette of courtship was designed to bear. And yet no one ever stopped them. Perhaps the fact that they were cousins increased the trust that Dante would remain a gentleman; perhaps they were given looser rules as a way to soften the harsh separation that lay ahead. With every night that passed, Dante seemed more steadfast in his resolve, as though he were a scrupulous student assigned the task of falling in love. In that dark leafy chapel, Leda let him kiss her, stroke her body through her clothes, and, after a few more nights, touch her naked breasts for as long as he wished, first standing, then him kneeling before her, and then, in the final week, both of them on the ground. His touch soothed her. It made her feel ripe and strong. The moon stitched a lace of light through the branches that weakened with every passing night. On their last night together, there was no moon, and their bodies plunged through darkness. His hands and mouth were on her breasts, and he hardened against her, as he did each night, he made no attempt to hide it from her anymore and in fact he pressed it against her thigh through their clothes as though it had something to say. Its shape filled her with alarmed curiosity, what did it look like? what did it want? what if somebody walked by and heard his ragged breath? His body seemed to burn with a question she could not answer. He rubbed harder against her thigh, she didn’t stop him, she didn’t know how to stop him or even whether she wanted to or not, she kept her legs closed and he did not try to open them but his hands grew forceful on her breasts and he was louder now and biting her, what is this, she thought, what is this, my cousin made beast and now his body goes taut, push, silence. His weight rested against her. She held him. She felt starved for something—for what?
A kind of knowledge.
She longed to know how that had felt to him, what it was like inside his skin.
They were quiet for a while, and then he said, “I can’t wait for you to join me.”
“If you work hard, it won’t be long.”
“I will. Of course I will.”
And he did.
Or so she gathered from his letters, which for a year and nine months brought brief trickles of his life in Argentina that made her long to also hear the rest of it, the raw silent parts, every bit of the great river of things unsaid. She didn’t sleep on her wedding night. By the time she and her family arrived home, there was only an hour and a half left before the carriage would arrive to take her and Papà to Naples, where her ship would depart in the evening. The instant they entered the house, Mamma disappeared into her bedroom and closed the door. All night she had barely looked at Leda, and on the walk home she hadn’t said a word.
Tommaso and her father had carried her two smallest brothers home in their arms, sleeping soundly, while her seven-year-old sister, Margherita, had stumbled home on her own feet, holding Leda’s hand, insisting in a plaintive voice that she wasn’t tired, though as soon as Leda tucked the covers to her chin, the child was lost in dreams.
Leda returned to the kitchen, a dim room dominated by a wooden table the family always
crammed around to eat. Tommaso and her father stood by the stove, awkwardly, as if awaiting instructions from a long gone fire.
“The boys are asleep?”
“Like stones,” said Tommaso.
The Gods of Tango: A Novel Page 2