But then the two. The horror of the two.
She was almost at the front of the line. They were waving people through even faster now, she could see the Argentinean doctor looking in the mouth and ears of each man, putting his stethoscope to each heart to listen for what it carried from one continent to another, then removing it quickly, satisfied that, after three seconds, he’d heard enough. She prayed for a safe passage and for Bruno to make love to her that night and for God to hear the clamor of their bodies and in His infinite mercy send them a child. A son or daughter would redeem her life and give her proof of God’s forgiveness. If a child didn’t come it would be proof of His rage. Because her body knew how to conceive: this she knew without a doubt. One. Two. A shout of light inside her and the blood not flowing. The sachet of herbs from the cobbler’s wife was so bitter, so small. The tea from it stung her throat night after night—she brewed it when all her in-laws had gone to sleep—and then blood roared from her and the grocer was angry that she wouldn’t come to the back of his store for three weeks and wouldn’t tell him why. He thought she didn’t want him anymore. Am I too old for you? he said. He was not too old, his touch was ageless in its wanting, his sex always firm with joy and ready for her as it was not, he said, for his wife anymore. He had four children and he was her husband’s uncle; of course he would not want to know about the teas, the bleeding, and the deep-in-the-night tears for an innocent soul who could not could not come to earth because its destiny would be shattered from the start. And so she told him nothing, even when she returned to him and to their afternoons of pleasure so intense they made her glimpse the golden edges of the underworld. They always made love in perfect silence, attuned to the slightest noise from the shop. Silence gave their movements more ferocity. One afternoon they accidentally broke open the sack of flour that was beneath them, and because the grocer didn’t realize it he kept on thrusting and she sank and sank and sank into the whiteness. The second time Fausta went to the cobbler’s wife, a year after the first, the old woman looked at her with mournful disgust and said, Fausta, I do not give this cure to the same person twice.
Please, said Fausta, you have to help me.
You can die from this, you know.
Please, please.
You can’t go on this way.
I won’t.
Promise me.
I promise, Fausta said without thinking.
You know that I am not a gossip, said the cobbler’s wife. I’m the only woman in this whole city who can hold a secret. But if you break this promise and go back to that man, then I will tell two women, and by night all of Salerno will know.
At that moment something inside of Fausta died. She was trapped. She had nowhere to run. If she did not make the promise she would give birth to a disgrace that would swallow her whole, as well as her husband, both of their families, and a new baby doomed to live forever in the shadow of its mother’s crime.
There was more blood this time, and far more pain. She did not die. But it was the end of her life. She lay in bed for four days, despite her mother-in-law’s diatribe: you lazy girl, how sick can you really be, what about us? What about your job?
I want to leave my job.
You what?
I want to leave the grocery store.
But why on earth?
I …
Did you fight with my brother?
… yes.
Fausta, you can’t stop working. With all the food we put on the table for you? My brother can be harsh, but I will talk to him.
Her mother-in-law went to the grocery store that very day and everything was arranged. When Fausta returned to work, the grocer did not look at her. They spoke only of the essentials and never of what was already becoming a figment of the past. Soon he was unlovered by time, reduced to being her boss, her uncle by marriage, how had she ever desired that graying man?
That is when she began to age. Her body became matronly, thick waist, heavy hips. Her passion closed in on itself until it vanished altogether. She lived that way, a goodwife, half-dead, for three more years, hoping for nothing except the tenuous dream of Bruno’s return. But then the letter came telling her to come to the New World, and now she was here at the gate of the Américas, a dozen paces from the gatekeepers. The doctor would not hear the hidden cemeteries of her heart. He would not see, on examining her teeth, the unsaid words haunting her mouth. How many secrets were being smuggled, on this day, into the New World? She looked out at the dock, with its wooden awning under which she could hear the roil of a gathered crowd (Bruno surely among them). The awning had no label, but it seemed to her that it should wear a gargantuan sign emblazoned with the words LAST HOPE, because that was what this place was to so many of the people on this ship, you could see it on their faces full of hunger, and why else would they have come?
She was next in line. The man in front of her stepped forward and opened his mouth for the doctor. Fausta tried to imagine her own future, as a trick to calm her nerves. She would have—how many children? Was there still time for three? Boys, all boys, and they’d distract her from the sorrows of daily life, they’d redeem the ones who had to die. She was getting nervous now; these thoughts weren’t helping. She shifted her tactic to picturing the future of that girl Leda. She was lucky, that girl, she had it all ahead of her; a pristine canvas; as young as Fausta had been when she married. She could see Leda’s vibrant future stretching out before her. Four children, maybe five. A long marriage that might have its torrential fights but ultimately would become solid and happy, a bulwark against the world. Joy in her role as a mother; and, one day, many years from now, that Leda girl—no longer a girl—would take her whole big family back to Italy, where she would watch her great-grandchildren play in the orchards of her youth.
As she stepped forward and opened her mouth for the physician, Fausta held these predictions in her mind like talismans.
Leda had no trouble with the doctor’s exam. It was perfunctory, and went by with surprising speed. The examination of her papers was equally smooth. The men were quick and businesslike, there were so many people to admit to their nation, all in a day’s work.
She stepped onto the gangplank. Below her lay the dock, a long platform packed with people whose faces tilted eagerly upward to receive their wives or cousins or nephews or neighbors from Italia, their voices raised in wails of joy and chanted names—Francesco! Emilia! Alessandro! Vito!—as though the calling were a kind of invocation, as though their loved ones could appear here from Italia on the power of the crowd’s voices alone. The migrants on the gangplank surged with a current of excitement, and she was not Leda, in that moment, but a single drop in a river pouring from ship to dock with a force of its own, longing to merge with a new soil, unified in its direction, down, down, down. She searched the crowd with her eyes. A swarm of faces looking up at her, then quickly past her, at the rest of the immigrants slowly pouring down the gangplank, she was not their arrival—Paolo! You’ve arrived! Paoooolooo—though the faces were Italian, as were the words they called out—Blessings of all the saints! A joy a joy—she listened keenly for Dante’s voice, but could not hear it.
Her foot touched land. It was a concrete slab, not yet the feel of Argentina’s earth, but it thrilled her. Three men from behind her excused themselves as they walked past, directly to the warehouse that held their baggage, there was no one waiting for them and they would make their own way. They would take their baggage to the Hotel de Inmigrantes, a place that Argentina had designed especially for immigrants who arrived with nowhere to stay, where they would receive room and board for five days while they began to look for work—a help, surely, but still she pitied them, so alone, so far from home.
To her left, two brothers found each other. They wept and laughed and slapped each other’s backs.
Just beyond them a man was greeting his wife with a long and tight embrace, they were swaying and murmuring to each other, no longer at the port of Buenos Aires but in a private uni
verse all their own.
Dante, where was Dante. She looked and looked but could not find him. She wove through the crowd in search of him, pushing past the many bodies. It was too loud, there were too many voices shouting their excitement, her fellow emigrants were scattering and no longer part of a merged river, she was alone. She began to feel afraid. Was it possible that he was late, or had forgotten the day she was coming? Or that he was playing a trick as he sometimes liked to do, when they were children, crouching behind a rock when Cora went to call him in for dinner, making her climb the hill in search of him when all the while he was just at the edge of the garden?
She stood against a wall, from which she could watch the remaining immigrants disembark. The crowd dissipated. Her husband was not there.
She had no idea what to do. She would do nothing. She would wait for Dante to come.
Soon only a small cluster remained on the dock. A stranger had been watching her, a young man whose clothes were worn but clean. His glances made her nervous. She stood up straight and tried to look dignified, pure, a married woman with somewhere to go. The excitement of arrival had disappeared, replaced with a kind of horror at the sheer size of Argentina, its vast unknown expanse, and she here at the lip of it, alone, female, easy prey.
The stranger approached her, hat politely pressed against his chest.
“Signora di Mazzoni?”
She turned to him, blankly. She had never been called a signora before, and for a strange instant she thought he was confusing her with her mother. “Yes.”
“I’m here to receive you. I’m a friend of your cous——your husband, Dante.”
“Yes? Where is he?”
“I am truly sorry, signora. Dante is dead.”
DUE
A Corner of the Possible
The stranger’s name was Arturo. He said he would take her home.
At first, he tried to explain everything, to tell her the story of what happened to Dante, but his words came out jumbled and Leda could not make sense of them, something about a mistake, a hero, the Buenos Aires port—nothing made sense, the very dock she stood on had become the outer edge of chaos, the air around her rioted, broken, too bright. All she could say was, I’m sorry, I don’t understand you, I don’t understand. And so he gave up and suggested that they get her trunk and go home. She followed him to the warehouse where the baggage was held, not a woman walking, but a ghost of herself, a shadow.
Her trunk was not difficult to find, as they were the last to arrive. The customs official who inspected it had a bulbous nose and a quick smile. When he found the olive jar from the baker’s wife, he grinned. He said something in Spanish, shaking his head, then opened the jar and put an olive in his mouth. Leda did not understand him, though the bones of his words were familiar. Listening to Spanish was like listening to someone speak her native tongue through murky water.
“He says you can’t bring them into the country,” Arturo said.
She should not have cared, it shouldn’t have mattered, but in that moment Leda felt as though the man were taking her last scrap of Alazzano, of her old life; and this so he could have it for himself, this man who didn’t even speak Italian and could not possibly care about the distant valleys of Campania or about lost cousins, first one, now all of a sudden two. It was not that she wanted to eat the olives herself—in that moment she couldn’t imagine eating ever again—but she wanted to keep them close, intact. She felt as though the customs official were eating a green piece of Dante’s body. But she could not speak or move. She stood watching as the man put another olive in his mouth. His face lit with satisfaction as he ate it. He said something to Arturo. Arturo spoke back, and, though Leda couldn’t understand everything, she could understand various words, inflected as they were with Italian sounds: husband and died and come from Italia, then something else, then only.
The official studied Leda with new interest.
Arturo said something else, with the word exception and the last syllables inflected politely upward, in the tilt of a question. Asking the man to let her keep the olive jar.
The customs official ate a third olive. Then he said another thing, more slowly, drawled out. The word young, then alone, and then more sounds punctuated with a slow shake of the head that was at once mournful and shot through with a thread of pleasure.
She had missed something. Arturo’s back straightened, a hunter on alert. His answer had steel in it: not alone, he said, and here he spoke with such deliberation that she understood him clearly. She has me. I was a friend of her husband’s.
The customs official’s tone became unmistakably mocking. He spoke rapidly, and somewhere in the middle she thought she discerned the word lucky.
Arturo’s mouth grew tight and he opened it as though about to speak. He glanced at Leda, who pretended that she hadn’t understood anything. Her blank expression seemed to comfort him. Yes, sir, he said.
The customs official closed the lid of the olive jar and waved his hand. The olives would stay, but they were free to go.
Outside the warehouse, Arturo lifted her trunk onto a wheeled cart and led her to the street, where they boarded an enormous public carriage with no horses to pull it. A tram, Arturo called it. A young man who was also boarding helped Arturo hoist the trunk up into the main car. Arturo’s hand was warm and damp when he helped her up the three stairs. He insisted that she sit on her trunk, to be comfortable, though her knees pushed up against his knees and the calves of other men, all standing around her and holding a pole above their heads. It was mostly men on the tram, and the few women had seats. The sharp smell of sweat overpowered the air. The posture of the standing men, with their arms high to grasp the pole, struck her as very strange, but she understood the reason for it as soon as the tram lurched and rattled into motion. A new seasickness engulfed her as they began to navigate the city.
“It won’t be long now,” Arturo said. “We’re not far from La Boca, where we live.”
The tram lumbered through the crowded streets. Leda’s neck grew sore from craning her head toward the open windows, but she could not tear her eyes from what she saw: an intricate maze of buildings so tall they plunged the cobbled alleys into shadows and, inside that maze, men smoking on doorsteps, men shining shoes on overturned buckets, men shouting their wares, men driving carriages and shouting at their horses, men walking so fast, where were they going? and she, where was she going? The air suffocated, thick and hot and rank. Dante. She couldn’t absorb the news; it kept rising up and slapping her in the face like that garish children’s toy that springs out of its box. It made her face ache, her bones ache, her mind ache. A man got onto the tram wearing strings of garlic draped across his chest, hundreds of heads of garlic, like copious pearls or bullets. Was he selling them? Collecting them? Following some witch’s instructions to break a spell? He stood a few paces from her and her nostrils filled with garlic. She closed her eyes. The noises blurred around her. She felt a hand brush the back of her bare neck and jolted awake; don’t rest, don’t doze; Arturo was in front of her and seemed to have noticed nothing. Behind her faceless hordes of men. She could still feel the fingers on her nape, damp, crawling. She sat tense for the rest of the ride until the tram finally pulled to a stop where Arturo gestured for them to descend.
The street teemed with pedestrians and drawn carriages. The buildings seemed made of an odd combination of materials: wood and metal sheets and corrugated iron, slapped together and brightly painted: red, orange, yellow, blue, green. She smelled fresh-baked bread and horse piss and onions frying on a fire. An old man played a violin on the corner while, at his feet, a small boy rolled cigarettes with the concentration of a priest preparing bread for communion. The song had a vigor that belied the old man’s stony face; its melody rose and fell and refused to resolve, roving with a kind of desperate beauty that cut into Leda’s heart. What was this music?
She turned to Arturo, but he’d stepped ahead to ask the boy for help with the trunk. They lift
ed it together, Arturo working hard to make the task look effortless, to hide his exertion. They walked to the middle of the block and stopped in front of the worn red door of a building pressed against its neighbors, so that they looked like one long house. Judging by the distance between this set of doors and the next, her home seemed to have many rooms and two floors—two floors! For this Dante took so long to gather up the money! Why did he think they needed so much? He could have called her over earlier.
“Here we are,” Arturo said. “This red door.”
“You live nearby?” Leda said.
He looked surprised. “I live here. With you.”
She had mistaken his kindness. How could she have been so stupid. She thought quickly: he looked stronger than she was, but she was taller, she could outrun him, but she wouldn’t know which way to run.
He saw her expression and went red. “No, no—in another room. With my mother and sisters.”
The boy was watching keenly now. Leda tried to ignore his curiosity. “All of you, here? In this same house?”
“There are many of us here. Many families in one building. A conventillo. Dante didn’t explain?”
“No.” She had always imagined, even in the humblest incarnations of her new life, that she and Dante would have a house to themselves. A private space at the end of the world, far from their own family, that was her dream, even if it were a one-room hut with a dirt floor like those occupied by the humblest citizens of Alazzano, the ones who cleaned the homes and stables of landowning families like her own. It had not occurred to her that the space would be immersed in the noise of other families, that their fellow immigrants would crowd into the same refuge. How naïve she had been. I do not know this place, not even from my dreaming, she thought as she followed Arturo and the boy through the front door.
The Gods of Tango: A Novel Page 5