They entered a dim foyer. Just beyond it, double doors let out into a long, open patio crammed with washing tubs, tables covered with fabric and other sewing supplies, dilapidated crates, laundry flapping on haphazard lines, women scrubbing and cutting and shelling and sewing and sweeping, and children, children everywhere, playing with wooden spoons, sharpening knives, mending ragged clothes, helping to scrub and cut and shell and sew and sweep, wiping snot from their grimy faces with their hands. They looked up and stared as she stepped into the glaring light.
“Leda!” a round-faced woman called out. She stood, wiped her hands on her skirt, and approached, arms open. She was stout and erect, with an edge of metal in her, like the matrons in Alazzano who could tear a person to shreds with their wagging tongues, though Leda tried not to think of them as she received the woman’s customary kiss.
“I’m Francesca,” the woman said. “We have been waiting for you!”
All eyes were on her, it was too much, she was so tired. Some were smiling, but others—the children, always the most honest—simply gazed as though she were a fascinating specimen just fished out of the water, the virgin widow, the grieving bride. Some women seemed to look at her with pity, others as though sizing up the wares at a market plagued with thieves. There were so many of them, did they all live here? And without men? But no, it was the middle of the day, the men must be at work. And so there were even more people than this. She smelled urine and stale oil. Arturo had disappeared through one of the many doors that lined the courtyard, carrying her trunk. The courtyard was like the heart of a labyrinth, with doors on every side, no clear way out. Some of the doors were open, others closed. She wondered whether one of them led to her room, if in fact she had a room and was not meant to sleep here in the unroofed center among the crates and washing tubs.
“These are my daughters,” Francesca was saying. “Palmira, Diana, and Silvana.”
One by one, the three daughters—one Leda’s age, two younger—approached and kissed Leda’s cheek. The other women in the patio introduced themselves and kissed her and pointed out their children, some of whom kissed her dutifully while others hung back in defiance, and all of their names swam into Leda’s mind only to vanish immediately. She could not retain a single word. She hoped her smile was convincing. The women were chattering around her about how pretty she was, how young, how was the boat, how did she feel, until finally Francesca took charge and grasped Leda’s arm with all the firmness of a mother. “Come. I’ll show you your room.”
She had a room. It was the last one on the right. The air inside was thick and hot, unventilated, and then she knew why all the families congregated in the center patio. It wasn’t that they lacked their own spaces but that, inside, there was not enough air. Her room contained a wooden table, two chairs, a chipped armoire, a washbasin, and two narrow beds with rusted metal frames and burlap blankets, with an empty chamber pot under one. There was no stove. The walls had long ago surrendered the whiteness of their paint.
Arturo and the neighbor boy were in the corner, where they’d just placed the trunk. Arturo gave the boy a coin and sent him away.
“Sit, sit,” Francesca said, drawing out a chair. She exuded authority. Her accent was unfamiliar, though it sounded Northern Italian. From Genoa, maybe, or Milan.
Leda sat.
“You must be hungry,” Francesca said. Eyebrows raised in expectation.
“Please, don’t trouble yourse——”
“Arturo,” Francesca said, “tell Silvana to make the lady a plate.”
Arturo nodded and was gone.
“That boy, Arturo. He’s got a good heart. You can trust him, and I should know. He’s not my son, but I’m the closest thing to a mother that he’s got here. Same went for Dante. And for you.”
“Thank you,” said Leda, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say after such pronouncements. And then, stupidly, “I’m Leda.”
“Yes, I know.”
Francesca studied Leda for a long and silent minute. Leda looked away, at a spot where the paint had peeled from the wall to reveal the wood beneath.
“You must want some time to refresh yourself,” Francesca finally said. “I’ll leave you. There’s water in the jug under the basin.”
Then Leda was alone. She stared at the jug. She should use it to wash her hands, her face, but she could not rise. She could not move. The closed door made the air inside untenably thick, but she needed privacy more than she needed physical comfort. Outside, in the patio, she heard the sound of water sloshing in tubs, and the giggling of girls rose above the din of voices. Were they laughing at her? They shushed each other, but kept laughing.
The last time she’d seen Dante, he’d been distracted by the carriage pulling up to his door, the dust on its wheels that whispered of the road to Naples, the approach to his ship, the ocean that awaited him that very night and across which he’d find, if he was fortunate, a place—some crevice in the rock face of the world—that he could call his own. The whole family was gathered at the door of his house to see him off, but he only had eyes for the carriage. The sun bore down on all of them, made them sweat. There was hunger in Dante’s eyes, not so different from the hunger she’d seen there during their nights under the olive tree, but stronger. Sharper. In the last minute, he’d accepted the kisses of his father, mother, brothers, sister, uncles, aunts, and cousins until at last he reached Leda. He smiled. His kiss on her left cheek, then her right, was firm and tender.
No goodbyes for you, he said, because we’ll be together soon. I’ll see you on the other side.
A knock sounded on her door. Arturo entered with Francesca’s youngest daughter, who was about nine years old, carrying a glass of wine and a plate of bread, ricotta, and tomato slices drizzled with oil and salt. Leda had not seen fresh tomatoes in two weeks. She could have wept. The girl saw the expression on Leda’s face and hurried to set the plate down on the table.
Arturo stood with his hands clasped in front of him. “Do you mind a little company?”
“No,” Leda said, although she did. “Please sit down.”
Arturo sat in the chair across from her. The young girl stood, hovering awkwardly. Leda understood her predicament: she couldn’t leave a young widow alone with a man in her room. There was no third chair at the table. Leda gestured toward her trunk. “Please,” she said. “You too.”
The girl smiled gratefully and perched on the trunk, a few paces from the table. She was really a wisp of a thing. She had a delicate face that seemed perpetually startled.
Arturo looked uncomfortable. “Please, eat, don’t let me stop you.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You have to keep your strength up.”
She looked down at her plate. The tomato was beautiful, red and damp with its own juice. She wanted to stroke it with her forefinger. But she could not imagine eating. The three of them sat in silence, enfolded by the sounds through the wall, voices, steps, a woman’s complaint, a man’s whistle.
Finally, Arturo said, “Dante.”
She looked at him. He was younger than she’d realized, twenty at most.
“Maybe you’d rather not hear about it until later, until you’ve had a chance to rest.”
Her mouth suddenly tasted sour, but she said, “No. Please tell me.”
“He was murdered in cold blood.”
She felt the breath trap in her lungs. Her cousin had been an idiot. He’d argued with the wrong man in a bar. He’d gambled away his money to a ruthless man, like his own father might do, digging the hole for his own coffin. Or else he’d walked down a dangerous street and been killed by strangers for the change in his pockets, as she had heard could happen to men in large cities like this one, and like Naples. The blacksmith of Alazzano had a great-uncle who’d bled to death right in the heart of the Neapolitan Spanish Quarter, stripped of his coins, his hat, his shoes, his wedding band, and the gold fillings of his teeth along with the teeth themselves. That is why,
the blacksmith used to say, you should never be seduced by the city.
“He died bravely,” Arturo said, more forcibly. “Fighting for the liberation of all workers.”
She stared at him. She didn’t understand; she hadn’t heard a word about Argentina being at war.
“Should I tell you the whole story?”
No, she thought, don’t tell me, I don’t want to hear another word of this, I want you to put me back on that steamship and send me sailing off to nowhere.
“Please,” she said. “I’m listening.”
There was so much Arturo wanted to tell her, more than he could ever put into words, because he did not trust words the way he trusted silence. He rarely spoke of his own life, had never been asked, by anyone, to forge a narrative from the raw material of his lived days. But now, tonight, here she was right in front of him, his friend’s cousin, his friend’s bride, this young woman with an expression on her face like a cornered cat, and he had to talk, had to give her the whole full-bodied story, wanted in fact to pour it directly into her mind, as no language in the world was built to do—the whole of it, the luminous with the horrible. No doubt he’d fail. But he had to try. He owed it to Dante, and he even hoped against hope that he could free himself of the nightmares in which Dante appeared to him, mangled and ardent, if only he could sit across from this girl and find a way to turn a lived experience into speech.
He began with the ship from Italy, where he first met Dante. They were both seventeen and both ambitious, two traits that were enough to turn them into friends. They spent long hours playing cards, complaining about the food, chafing with boredom, and looking out over the water dreaming of their new life in América. At least, that’s what Arturo dreamed of. He couldn’t have said what exactly went through Dante’s mind. Dante had a confidence to him, a kind of swagger, that was uncommon in emigrants his age. It was even more surprising considering that Dante had nobody in Buenos Aires and would be staying at the Hotel de Inmigrantes when he arrived, while Arturo had a distant relative, Carlo, who’d promised a place to stay and help finding work. Only later, when their friendship ran deep, would Arturo suspect that Dante’s outer confidence was a story he shouted to the world—with his stride, his strong voice, his eyebrows arched with I’ve-seen-all-of-this-before—so that he himself could hear it and begin to believe it was true.
On one of those slow afternoons, Dante told Arturo about the girl he was going to marry. Her name is Leda, he said.
She’s from your village?
She’s my cousin, she grew up next door. She’s going to wait for me. He said it with the satisfaction of a man prepared to work a long hard day and go home in the evening to bread still hot from the oven.
Arturo looked out over the endless water. It was almost evening, and the sun hung wearily in the sky, its reflection broken over the waves. He wondered what the sun felt at this time of day, whether, in its descent, it longed to stay suspended—a hopeless struggle against gravity—or to sink away in sweet relief. He tried to picture this girl Leda. She appeared before him, beautiful and pure, with flowers in her hair, dipping her cupped hands into a river. Breasts visible at her neckline as she knelt. He envied Dante his certainty. He’d heard about the lack of immigrant women in Buenos Aires, and despaired of ever finding himself a wife, but there was no one back home to send for. He had girl-cousins, but none would wait for him, except perhaps Giulia, who was too silly to be taken seriously; he couldn’t picture her cooking a family meal without burning the pots, let alone surviving whatever the New World held in store.
Maybe, Arturo said, you have a sister you could bring over for me. Do you have any sisters?
No, Dante said sharply.
Arturo felt his face grow hot. I was joking, he said, though this was not quite true. I’m sorry.
One is married, said Dante. The other is dead.
The silence between them grew thickly knotted, and Arturo felt the dead sister slide through the space between them, or, rather, he felt her absence, like a gauzy fabric with the power to suffocate. She must have died young; there was more to the story; he would not ever ask again. They gazed out over the long and darkening water as it lunged toward the impossible horizon.
At the Buenos Aires port, Arturo didn’t recognize his second cousin’s uncle Carlo and walked right past him, still scanning the crowd.
Arturo! It’s me, Carlo!
Arturo turned. Carlo had gone gray in the fourteen years since he’d left Italy, and had a scar now from his right ear to his chin. He wrapped Arturo in an embrace so tight that the pain squeezed his eyes shut. Arturo saw the scar on the backs of his own eyelids, enormous, glowing, a great red slash. When he opened his eyes, he caught sight of Dante walking away. He called out. Dante, come back!
Dante turned.
You weren’t going to say goodbye?
I’m sorry.
This is my uncle Carlo.
The two men kissed in greeting. Dante looked uncomfortable, and, as often happened, Arturo could not interpret the expression in his eyes. Before his friend could escape again, he told him the address of his new home. Come see us, he said. We might be able to help.
Dante nodded with an indifference that made Arturo think he’d never see him again. They kissed goodbye and left the port with their trunks on wheeled carts, Dante to the Hotel, Arturo and Carlo to the nearest tram station.
When Dante appeared at the conventillo on the fifth day, Arturo was overjoyed. He’d begun to feel shaky in this strange city without his friend’s effortless confidence. Even if Dante’s swagger was false, it lulled Arturo, flecked his fears with bright spots of calm.
How was the famous Hotel de Inmigrantes?
Dante shrugged. Nothing worth any fame.
I’m glad to see you.
Is there room for me here?
Arturo wasn’t sure, but he said, mio amico, if there isn’t room we’ll make some.
He’d been sleeping on the floor of the middle room on the right, which was populated only by single men, and so had come to be called la Camera di Scapolo—the Bachelor Room. When he arrived, six bachelors already slept there: four of them shared two beds, head to toe, and two more slept on the floor, on straw pallets woven by Francesca’s daughters across the patio. Arturo slept along the far wall, if you could call it sleep, the restless hours spent prone in that hot airless room. With Dante added, it would be even harder to breathe. But the other bachelors welcomed Dante, in part because one of the men, a brooding Ligurian, would be staking out a room of his own soon with a cousin about to arrive, and in part because there were never enough pesos to go around.
Dante slept beside Arturo, as his brother had when they were little boys. His friend’s breaths were a soft slow loop of sound that carried him gently toward sleep.
It wasn’t hard for Arturo and Dante to get jobs. One of the men in their room worked for an export company that needed strong young bodies in its warehouse, having just lost a few to illness or death. Side by side, they loaded and unloaded cargo at the docks, eleven hours a day, sweat pouring down their bare backs in the unrelenting sun. They came home streaked with dirt, bones screaming, to a hot dinner from Francesca and her daughters, who fed the bachelors for a small fee. Arturo worked until his back throbbed and blisters riddled his hands and feet. He worked until he started to see—and this he would never admit to a soul on earth—his mother’s face, bent over him, cooing a song of comfort, rubbing his worn skin, enfolding him the way she had long ago when he was a little boy and his father had finished beating him and gone to bed. When he was seven, one of the beatings broke Arturo’s arm, and it had never set right, always gave him trouble, even now. His mother had tended to him at home rather than calling on the village healer and incurring further gossip on the family. When she’d wiped up all the blood, iced the bruises, and made a rudimentary cast out of old cloth, she embraced him, hummed into his ear, and crushed his face to her breasts. This memory was the warmest thing his mind possessed. M
amma, Mamma, my arm hurts at the end of every Buenos Aires day. And something else hurts worse, at the center of my chest: it is an empty place that will never be filled as long as I am far from home in a crowded noisy city that never shuts up or slows down. He had not expected to miss his village the way he did—not the fear, not his father, not the days when there was only a crust or two of bread that his older brother might rip from his hands, but the sun and air and space, the luxurious green. He hungered for trees. He had taken them for granted, like breathing. Now they were gone, replaced by the relentless noise and stink of a city where there was nowhere to be alone, nowhere calm, nowhere pure—though he didn’t dare complain. There were young men in his village who would cut off a limb for the chance to come to the Américas, who looked on with envy during his last days after his mamma had shown him the wad of cash she’d miraculously gathered, thanks to skipped meals and relatives and fervent prayers to the Virgin, for his escape. And look at the other men who surrounded him here. Look at Dante, working with grim ferocity, and never a protest in his voice or even in the muscles of his face; that man had a strong will! and goals! and he was going to build something if he had to push his body past its breaking point to do it.
I don’t understand, Arturo said. What keeps you going?
They were on their walk home, and for a moment he heard only the round beat of their shoes against stone streets.
Ghosts, said Dante.
What ghosts?
None, no ghosts, don’t be stupid, he said quickly. I just want to eat and to raise a family, like everybody else.
This was all he would admit to. But on two separate nights, Arturo had woken to his friend thrashing beside him, caught in a nightmare, talking in his sleep. No. No. Cora! The first time, Dante struggled as if under attack. Arturo shook him and whispered as loudly as he dared.
The Gods of Tango: A Novel Page 6