Even the communion bread tasted different here. Less airy, more tart.
After church, they returned to the conventillo, and the men brought tables and chairs and crates out from their rooms and arranged them together in the courtyard, for a communal lunch. Mimicking a family on Sunday, Leda thought.
There was meat on this day. There was wine on this day. The scent of basil and tomato sauce veiled the smell of filth. Wine bottles circulated around the tables and poured into each cup.
“Signora Chiara, your bolognese could drive the archangels to sin.”
“My daughters made it this week.”
“They are saints.”
“It’s true, girls, don’t blush—your mother has taught you well.”
Across the room: “So then I told her, listen, who do you think you’re—”
“Such beautiful flowers on the altar today!”
“Lent is coming. Enjoy them while they’re there.”
“With Lent coming there are a lot of things we should enjoy.”
“Oho!”
Laughter.
“Gentlemen! There are girls here!”
“Sorry.”
“Oh, Francesca, come on—”
“Because if she tries that with me one more time I’m telling you I’ll—”
“Leda! How do you like our Sunday lunch?”
At the sound of her name, the tables went quiet. Leda felt all eyes on her. She should say something, but found she couldn’t. Expectation thickened the air.
“Is it as nice as back home?”
“Of course it’s not,” Francesca said. “Nothing ever is.”
It wasn’t true—Leda had not felt such warmth and ease at Sunday meals in Alazzano in years—but Francesca’s words punctured the mood. The conversation continued more subdued, weighed down by private thoughts of homes far away.
After lunch, the men pushed the tables back into the rooms while the women made coffee. All the chairs and crates remained on the patio. Carlo went out and returned a few minutes later with a neighbor, the same old man Leda had seen on the first day, playing the violin on the street. They were walking arm in arm, like brothers. The old man had his instrument.
As soon as they arrived, the chant began.
“Mu-si-ca! Mu-si-ca!”
Other bachelors joined in, then Diana, then Palmira, until all sixty-three residents of the conventillo were clapping and chanting, Leda among them, caught up in the collective sound.
Carlo disappeared into his room and returned with his guitar. The chant rose into a cheer, the rhythmic claps into applause, then silence. Carlo sat beside the old man, by the door to the kitchen.
He counted to four.
And then it happened.
Music. It surged out of string and finger in harsh communion, weeping from the terrible pleasure of the bow. Guitar strings shook and deepened the well of sorrow.
Carlo sang. Something about the night clutching his heart, something about a woman, a bad woman, she couldn’t quite make out the Spanish. The sound ensnared her. It invaded her bones, urged her blood. She didn’t know herself; it now occurred to her that she knew nothing, nothing, nothing about the world, could not have known a thing when she didn’t know the world contained this sensation, such sound, such wakefulness, a melody as rich as night.
A tap on her shoulder. Arturo. “Would you like to dance?”
She hadn’t noticed that people were dancing. But there they were, scattered on the patio, not in a row or circle but in pairs, face-to-face, the bachelors holding a girl or another man. They glided around the center of the patio.
“I don’t know how to dance like that.”
“Of course. You’ve never danced the tango.”
Tango. A name for the sound. She repeated it in her mind. Tan-go.
“Don’t worry, the man leads so it’s not too hard for you. Come, let’s try.”
She didn’t want to but couldn’t say no. She stood, awkwardly, just as the song ended. Arturo was broad-bodied and exuded a soapy cologne. He clasped one of her hands and placed the other on his shoulder. To her relief, he didn’t look her in the eyes as a new song began, slower than the first, and he gently forced her feet back in time. She tensed at first, afraid of colliding with others, feeling herself stumble, but when she relaxed a little the music seemed to gather and take shape inside her body, propelling her, giving her form. The sound rose and fell in waves and she was riding them, with Arturo, suddenly together, were their neighbors watching? what did they think? what did Arturo want from this dance? She could feel his patience with her, the novice, and, underneath that patience, hunger. For comfort. For a woman. For a wife. And it was a way to survive, wasn’t it, to marry a sweet-smelling sweet-dancing man and rope your own destiny to his, cross your fingers and pray he doesn’t capsize? Just what I need, she thought, another rope, another man. It seemed a horrible thought, unwomanly, but she couldn’t help it; all she wanted was to sit and watch that old man’s hands on the violin.
Arturo raised her arm into a high salute just as the song ended. She excused herself as gently as she could.
“We could dance another?”
“I’m tired,” she lied.
“Of course,” he said, looking deflated.
She sat down near the musicians, who played for another hour and a half, which she spent unmoving, transfixed, straining to memorize each motion. In the middle of their performance, the men exhausted their repertoire and started again at the beginning. This gave her a chance to revisit the melodies, to slide her mind along them, to memorize their curves. There it rises. There it falls. There the violin grows bold and carries the music higher, the old man draws the notes out, the bow points at the sky, the old man’s gaze is distant while his strings do the wailing. Nestore, his name is Nestore; the dancers call it out to cajole him to keep playing. He complies. He does not look at the dancers, does not acknowledge her, sitting and staring. He is steeped in a private aural world. He drew out longer notes than her papà ever had; he was more forceful with the bow; she hadn’t known the violin contained such wildness. She was reminded of the tarantella, which skipped along its notes and pulled you upward, out of yourself, come and play! But these pieces, these tangos, didn’t only lift; they also plunged you downward, deep inside yourself, to the unexamined corners of your heart. Come, they whispered, come and look, see what’s here and dance with it, this is music too.
After the musicians had finally stopped, she helped with the dishes in the kitchen, and with every plate and pot she dried she thought her way back through the tangos, replaying them in her mind so she could memorize their shape. She thought of her father’s violin, buried in her trunk under dresses, silent now for years. The gathering continued in the night, but Leda feigned tiredness and retreated to her room. The voices of her neighbors muscled in through the closed door. She changed quickly out of her best Sunday dress, with its petticoats and buttons, and into her loose cotton nightgown. She opened her trunk and dug through the dresses—she still kept them there, while the armoire had remained unopened, undisturbed—to find the instrument case. She placed it on the table. The latches opened willingly. The violin seemed to glow with its own inner light. She caressed it gingerly, searching for the howls and croons that might be latent in its body, its long black neck.
Can I? she tried to ask the instrument. May I?
The instrument lay still and did not respond.
In the small compartment beneath the violin’s neck, she found a square of fresh resin for the horsehairs of the bow. To turn them to silk, her father used to say. It looked just like the resin he made, back then, from the olive trees behind their house, and which he let her rub along the horsehairs to prepare them for his songs. He must have made this resin in the months before the wedding. Which meant that he’d been thinking about this gift for some time.
Was it possible that he’d suspected this might happen? That he’d given her the violin with the thought that it might end up i
n her own hands? For Dante, he’d said, and certainly Dante had played a little here and there, but it was she who’d shown true passion for the instrument, who’d begged for lessons and been turned down, who’d reveled in the permission to rub resin and oil strings. Let it bring you both a little beauty, he’d said. What kind of beauty? That of a listener, or a player? Her father was a kind man, but not a brave one. If he wanted her to break the rules, he would not tell her outright, but perhaps he would sabotage himself, leave the jail key in reach as if by accident and walk away.
She placed the violin under her chin and wrapped her hand around its neck. It had been a long time, six years at least, since she had stolen time alone with her father’s instrument, and yet her body fell into place around it with glad ease, remembering the pose, the rush of it. It took more pressure than she remembered to hold the strings down. She decided not to pick up the bow. She could not let herself be heard through the thin walls; she would play silently; she would hear the music with her fingers and her mind.
A tune. The first tune. Where had the old man put his fingers?
Here. Here. Here.
The joy of it. Savage. Terrifying. Music as piracy. Music without sound. One hand mimed the motions of an invisible bow, while the other curved around a neck that it had always loved, had never stopped loving, a sensation as fresh as it was deeply familiar. She was a little girl out in the olive grove, hiding with her father’s instrument, surrounded by the smell of damp night dirt. She was an adolescent widow, adrift in a strange land, mapping new music with her body. She played this way for hours until finally she fell asleep with the violin’s curves pressed against hers.
The sewing income would not be enough to keep the room. Once the money from the collection at Dante’s death was gone—two months, three at most—she’d have to either move or return to Italy. And, Francesca explained to her as they sewed side by side, there was no use in looking for better-paying work. The factory jobs for women had dried up; the labor unions had long stopped fighting for their rights in the workplace, because women took jobs away from men and, also, because women workers weakened the cause, since their fathers and husbands could force them to work during strikes. And so there were no factory jobs for girls. There was domestic work, but you had to speak the language or else the mistress might well not pay you and blame it on the language barrier, pretend not to understand. As for waiting tables, that was now against the law; too many restaurants and bars were places of ill repute, and the women who had been working there were those kinds of women, or at least were accused of being those kinds of women, of which there were so many in the city that it could have been true. And anyway, it was unseemly for a decent girl to work in such a place—no self-respecting mother would send her daughter to work in one, no matter how desperate they were—so now only men could wait tables. As for those women, rumor had it they had plenty of work for better pay than anything else a woman could do, though of course, in the process, they destroyed their mortal bodies and their immortal souls. There had even been one girl who’d lived here in this conventillo who, well, suffice to say, would never be welcome back. And so, that left needle and thread, piecemeal work, which paid only enough to supplement a household, not to support one, which was why every woman with a healthy husband should bow down and thank God every day—and here Francesca stopped, awkwardly, remembering who she was speaking to, realizing her lack of tact. She lowered her head over her work. All three of her daughters felt her embarrassment; even Silvana stood still, scissors open around empty air.
Leda attempted a smile at the girls. Palmira looked down at her needle; Diana glanced at her mother; Silvana smiled back and closed her scissors, swoosh, as though to cut the humid air into a shape that could be worn.
Leda kept sewing, stitch, stitch. She was not upset by the reference to widows; she was far more unsettled by the grim news about her pay. She thought about those women. The ones who collapsed down the ladder, to the lowest rung of dignity. How much more money did they make than the good women who sewed? What were their lives like? Was it possible that, one day, she’d have to become one of them? She tried to imagine it and felt a bolt of something that was not quite terror, not quite disgust, but a baffled vertigo, the sensation of looking into the abyss below the edge of the known world.
“Now, of course, you could come and live with us, in our room,” Francesca said, “as a sister to the girls.”
Relief flooded Leda—she would not have to leap. As a sister to the girls. Would she sleep beside Palmira? Would they share a blanket in the winter, as sisters do, huddling to keep warm, feeling the light brush of each other’s breath? The thought filled her with heat and panic and something else, impossible to name. Then there was the matter of Francesca, crusader against dirt and vice, a good woman, exemplary, so good it had worn her down to hard bone. Could she stand to live under such a woman’s fist?
“You’re too generous,” Leda said and glanced at Palmira, who was focused on her work. Rebellious hairs escaped her head scarf on gusts of nonexistent wind.
“But,” Francesca kept on, “you should go home, Leda. First chance you get. Family is the homeland of the heart.”
“I bet you can’t wait to go home,” Diana said.
Leda nodded and kept stitching, stitching, stitching, and she envied her needle for its ease in knowing where to go. This will be a collar, here is the sleeve, follow the pins and the shirt will come together of its own accord. I am nothing like this needle, she thought. There are no pins to show the way, I’m wandering blind.
Later that afternoon, Leda went out to the market, her small chance of escaping the conventillo by herself. Francesca had warned her very clearly to head right down the block to the stores and vendors, then return quickly home. But she was starved to see more of the city. The conventillo caged her in. She hadn’t planned to break the rules and stray, but, after filling her basket with loaves from Alfonso Di Bacco, who extolled her beauty and dispensed paternal advice as he had come to do each day—where there’s life, there’s hope; choose neither linen nor a man by candlelight; the best word is the one that goes unspoken—she stood at the corner and stared down the block at unknown buildings, unseen doors and rooms and lives, carriages pulled by horses clop-clopping their way to places they knew and she did not, their manes gleaming in the late sun before they dove into shadows, and she thought, what harm can it do to walk a little in the light of day? Can it really be so dangerous? She set out down the block, crossed the street, and kept walking. People, streaming everywhere, women in doorways, old men in cafés or pushing ramshackle handcarts, calling out not in Italian but in Spanish, that strange language that sounded like the Italian of an alternate planet. A planet of drunkards, perhaps. Already she understood more glimmers of it, which meant she was either learning Spanish or getting drunk on this place, or both. The streets were crowded with people, innumerable people who’d arrived before her in the land of promise and already staked their space. Land of promise, you have promised too much already to the thousands. She walked on. Her ear caught shreds of other languages. She heard a woman in a doorway speaking sounds unlike anything she’d heard before, at once angular and melodic. For all she knew it could be the tongue of demons or the gods. Further on, children called to their mothers from inside the house, in Spanish, Italian, another unknown tongue. Two girls with baskets walked purposefully past her, gossiping in French. At a café, an old man told a joke in the Neapolitan dialect to a group of men who laughed appreciatively. More Napoletanos. She had imagined, in her brief visit to Naples, that that would be all she’d see of the city, but Naples had followed her across the ocean. It surrounded her. It had invaded Buenos Aires. And isn’t that strange, she thought, the way one city can swirl inside another; the way you can be in one country yet carry another country in your skin; the way a place is changed by whoever comes to it, the way silt invades the body of a river. She was that, a speck of silt. The thought thrilled her but it also made her want t
o weep without reason, or for reasons utterly unknown to her. With every immigrant she passed she longed to stop and stare into his or her face and ask with nothing but her gaze And you? What are you here for? Why did you come?, as though just looking at them might unlatch the trapdoors to their hidden stories. And the stories would be infinite, no two alike, burning with hope and loss and vigorous despair, told in more dialects than even God could possibly speak, and yet, she suddenly saw, it was possible that somewhere beneath the surface all their hidden stories held the same thread, a single hum of longing, I came to live. Surely this was true for all of them, including her. And, Buenos Aires, tell me, is there any chance that I can forge a space for myself somewhere in the folds of you? (She turned a corner and kept walking.) Will I ever rove these raucous streets with familiarity and with no fear? She walked and walked. The thrum of her feet, the thrum of the city. She felt hypnotized, expanded, and all the things around her—doors, people, brightly painted walls—threatened to tear her open with their sheer existence. She had never felt more awake in her life. The voices of the city blended and poured into her, filling her up, radiant, sweetly fatal, and that was when she understood that whatever this city was, whatever it held, she wanted it. All of it. She wanted Buenos Aires inside her, around her, covering her skin like a film of sweat. She wanted the breath of this city in her lungs no matter the danger, no matter the other story about the good girl who stays locked inside with needle and thread until she can get back to her home village, to hell with that story, she wanted freedom, wanted to taste this place even if it killed her. She felt exhilarated and afraid of her own exhilaration. Was she going mad? Cora, is this how it was for you? She stopped, leaned against a wall, and closed her eyes. Her mind warred between collecting itself and falling even deeper into thrall.
The Gods of Tango: A Novel Page 10