The Gods of Tango: A Novel

by Carolina de Robertis

  “Señorita?”

  She opened her eyes. A man stood before her, hat in hand. He had a kind enough face but his gaze was too raw. He said something in Spanish that she did not understand. Then he smiled and placed his hand on her arm. Her skin prickled. She tried to pull away, but his hand followed and gripped her tightly.

  Leda tore away from him and ran.

  She was lost. One turn, two, and she was on a block she’d never seen before. Old men played dice on the sidewalk, bickering in a strident Italian. They spoke her language but now she was afraid to ask for help, and the thought pushed in before she could stop it, I want Mamma. Mamma, where are you? But Mamma was not here, she was unreachable, twenty steamship days away across a great blue ocean of impossible. Leda tried going the other way. Her arm ached from the basket’s weight, she shifted it to the other side and kept walking and walking until she reached the end of a street that let out to the port, and there she saw the ships and cargo, men working high up on ladders, hauling crates, sweat beading on their faces, and one of them—Dante!—turned as if to call to her, but no, he was not Dante, his gaze moved blankly on and he wiped his face and resumed his burden. Dante was dead and did not work here anymore. You are alone, Leda. Alone.

  It took her another hour to find her way home.

  “Where were you?” Francesca scolded as soon as she arrived. “You can’t just wander around this city. You don’t know what happens to women out there.”

  That night, Leda couldn’t sleep. She tossed and turned, feverish with thoughts. She thought of the city, pulsing beyond the walls of her conventillo, bursting with life and noise and peril. She thought of Palmira, asleep across the hall, covers thrown off her warm body. She thought of Dante and the moment at the port: it was him, it was not him, he would never be at the port again. His absence stabbed her. She wondered what he’d felt when he walked the streets she’d walked today. Whether they’d amazed him as they had her. She longed to ask him. Longed to close the gap between his life and hers.

  She went to the armoire and opened its doors for the first time.

  His clothes were all there, as promised. Musty air welled toward her, tinged with the scent of mothballs, dry sweat, and decay. At first, she touched the clothing with trepidation, not wanting to disturb its sleep; but then she found herself taking out a pair of trousers, a shirt, a vest, a jacket. She laid them on the bed in the shape of a man. They were empty clothes, nothing more. She touched them again. How had they felt against his skin? And then, before her mind could ask her body what it was doing, she was taking off her nightgown and putting on the shirt, trousers, vest, in an act that would surely scandalize the living if not the dead. Her hips slipped smoothly into the trousers. Her body flushed with hot alarm. What if someone walked into her room now? No, that would not happen. No one ever walked into her room after she retired for the night. Still she could not shake the sense of an unutterable danger. Dante, can you forgive me? Am I violating your memory, or paying it tribute?

  It was shocking, how comfortably his clothes fit. The shirt swelled a little over her breasts. It felt strange to have two layers of fabric between her thighs. How different it must be to walk with the sheath of trousers between your legs rather than a crowd of petticoats rustling around them. She tried it, stalking the room, hesitantly at first, then more boldly, imagining how Dante might have strode on his way to work in the mornings, full of muscle and determination, full of hope. And if he passed another man he would not modestly bow his head and avert his eyes, but rather nod to him, chin high, shoulders squared against the world. Wasn’t that how men did it? She wasn’t sure. She knew how it looked from the outside, this walk of men, but not how it felt from within. She tried it, walked an imaginary street, passed an imaginary man, nodded, not slow-forehead-down, as women did, but quick-chin-up. She felt preposterous, but she also felt something else: a delectable rush.

  She took the clothes off, quickly, then stared at them, bunched on the floor. What had she done? She would never do that again. In that instant, with all her soul, she swore that she never would.

  She broke the vow the following night.

  This time, she put the clothes on slowly, buttoning with fingers still sore from a day’s sewing. Then she looked at herself in a hand mirror, tilting it up and down her body in the lamplight. She looked like a man. She felt like a man—or, at least, she felt the way she imagined a man might feel: emboldened, like she could walk all the way to the end of her neighborhood and people would leave her alone. Like she could walk into a café in the middle of the night and the barman would serve her, casually, like she was just a normal customer, like all she was asking for was a damn drink.

  But she was not a man. She was a woman.

  Wasn’t she?

  What kind of woman does this thing you’re doing right now?

  The question rose out of the air and coiled around her. She didn’t want to think about the answer but she also didn’t want to take off Dante’s clothes.

  You should take them off. You disgusting girl. Take them off.

  She stood still for a long time. Something broke apart inside her. She sensed that the longer the clothes stayed on her body, the more irreparable the change would become. And yet she made no move to take the clothes off. Instead her hands reached for the instrument case and took out the violin.

  She played.

  The moves were becoming more familiar to her hands. With men’s clothes on, her hands moved more smoothly, with more strength and confidence, and this surprised her. It was difficult to keep silent—she longed to hear the motion of her fingers, to test the quality of her sound. But she did not break the silence; the silence was her shield, her refuge. And soon her fingers’ music filled her mind and drowned out the hostile voice that had demanded she take the clothes off. The voice slunk into the corners of the room, where it crouched, shrunken in momentary defeat, helpless in the face of silent music.

  These became the two pillars of her clandestine ritual: every night she put on Dante’s clothes and played the violin in silence. She did it with the fevered secrecy of obsession. Every night her fingers curved further over the strings to better press at one without dampening the others; her arms strengthened as one held up the violin’s body and the other stroked the air with an unseen bow; her ear attuned more deeply to the music. Because, when one plays in silence, it is not only the fingers that shape the notes but the ear also, ear as instrument, forging notes and, out of those notes, the curve of melody, with the raw aural material of the mind. On those nights, Leda’s mind felt larger than her skull, which she envisioned as a chapel like the La Boca church, a wide space in which she could pull God’s secret humming down from heaven or wherever it lurked—the low unbridled wordless song, the absentminded pleasure he took in his own voice—and let it pour down her arms into the violin on which her hands brought the music into the impassive world. Her fingers moved more quickly now, and she could hear the notes in her mind’s chapel as if she’d sounded them. The other voice within her, the censoring voice, faded with each time she played. She swayed to remembered melodies, invented melodies, plaintive calls and smooth glissandos and staccato successions that crackled fast as sparks. All this in silence. All this in a silence surrounded by a loud city that was not and yet had to be home.

  The old man Nestore played on the street almost every day, but he played at sporadic times, and she never knew whether she’d catch him on her way to the butcher shop or the peripatetic grocer’s cart or whether his patch of sidewalk would be empty, missing him, bereft of his sound. Every day she made an excuse to be able to leave her sewing station and run an errand, but on the first two occasions he was not there. On the third day, she found him playing and rushed to finish her errand as quickly as she could so as to linger nearby for a few minutes. The boy sat beside him on a wooden crate, sharpening kitchen knives on a flat stone. She watched. Men stared at her as they walked by, a young woman lingering alone on the street for no discerni
ble reason. I have my reason, she thought at them, though she studiously avoided their eyes. Nestore was playing a simple melody, four notes repeated over and over, laden with grace and yearning. He did not look up to greet or even acknowledge her. He was absorbed in his music. The boy saw her but seemed unperturbed. The basket of bread grew heavy on her arm, and she thought of going back. Perhaps, in a pause, he would look up and she could catch his eye, start a conversation, ask the question that lay heavy on her tongue. But when he finished, he stood, and the boy rose without being asked, gathered his knives into the crate he’d been sitting on, and gave Nestore his arm to lead him inside. Because Nestore needed to be led. She saw it with a shock: the man was blind. How had she not realized before?

  She could not wait for him to notice her.

  The next time she saw him on the street, she stepped closer, and waited quietly, again ignoring the looks of passing men, letting the music enfold her—a muscular tune that made her think, strangely, of gullies—listening not just with her ears but with every centimeter of her skin. When the song ended, she put her basket on the ground and clapped.

  Nestore raised his face in her direction.

  “Beautiful,” she said. “I love your music.”

  “Thank you, signorina.” He paused. “Or is it signora?”

  “My name is Leda. I live next door, in the building with the Di Camillos. I’ve seen you play with Carlo on Sundays.”

  “Ah! Yes. You’re that young widow? Dante’s widow?”

  So quickly that name, Dante’s widow, found its way to her and reattached itself. She felt frustrated, though she wasn’t sure why, and angry at herself for the frustration. Nestore was smiling at her. His gaze was focused on a point just to the right of her eyes. She wasn’t sure how to go on. “I enjoy your playing.”

  “I enjoy being heard.”

  “I have a question.”

  “Do you now.”

  “Would you teach me?”

  He drew back. His smile fell.

  “I—I have a violin. It was my husband’s.”

  He turned away from her, down toward the boy, who was shelling peas into a bowl on the ground. The sound of husks breaking open formed a kind of irregular rhythm, tchk, tchhk. “You shouldn’t ask me that,” Nestore said, the way a grandfather admonishes a child.

  “Why not?”

  “This isn’t just any music. It’s tango.”

  “I love the tango.”

  “You don’t know what the tango is,” Nestore snapped. “It’s no place for women.”

  “Women dance it, don’t they?”

  “On the patio of their own conventillo, at Sunday lunch, yes. But the tango gets a lot of other places where, let’s just say ladies don’t.”

  She wanted to ask about these other places but held her tongue. She needed a good reason. She groped for one, tempered her voice into that of a loyal wife, soft words, the shake of sorrow. “My husband would have wanted me to. He would have hated for the violin to go unused.”

  “I’m sorry,” Nestore said. “About your husband.”

  She waited.

  “But there’s nothing I can do about that. Find a man for the violin.”

  He turned his back to her and started playing again.

  Leda stood in place, slightly unbalanced, listening to a light-footed melody that leapt and flashed and that she longed to sink inside of or else break into little pieces before the sound of it broke her. She had exposed something shameful about herself. And there was so much more she had not exposed. If he only knew.

  She turned and vanished into her building before the music could end.

  She gave up on her idea after that. So she was shocked when, the following Sunday, after the dishes from the communal meal had been cleared and the musicians had been playing for an hour, Nestore called out, “Dante’s widow. Is she here?”

  The patio went silent. Leda, perched close enough to watch the old man’s hands and far enough to seem inconspicuous, could not move or breathe.

  “She’s here,” Palmira said. She’d been dancing with Arturo and still stood near him. “Over to your left.”

  “Leda,” said Nestore.

  “Yes.”

  “Get your instrument.”

  She rushed into her room and pulled out the violin before fear could rise up and stop her. When she emerged, murmurs enveloped her, tense, distorted.

  Do you see—

  What is she—

  Was it Dante’s?

  I never saw him with—

  Oh yes it was Dante’s—

  Stolen.

  No.

  Yes.

  How did Nestore know?

  She must have—

  Shot you know between the eyes—

  Francesca was standing close to the musicians now, a stalwart guard. Her disapproval was palpable, a dark glow around her, because, of course, if tango was a netherworld where women should not go, Francesca would be the first to guard the gate. Don’t let her stop you, Leda thought, pretend she isn’t there. She stood in front of Nestore and plucked a string to tell him where she was. The open note echoed from the walls.

  “Copy me,” Nestore said.

  He played a simple strain, three repeating notes. She tried to copy him, sweeping a bow across strings for the first time in years. The notes rasped and shrieked. Behind her, someone laughed, a woman, flushing Leda with embarrassment. She was glad, at least, that she’d rubbed resin on the bow over the past few weeks, just for the pleasure of it.

  “You’re out of tune,” Nestore said.

  “Yes.”

  “Fix it.”

  He plucked his strings, one after another, for her to tune her violin to. It took a few tries, and each moment felt infinite. When they were done tuning, Nestore played the same melodic pattern as before. Leda copied it. A little smoother. Not much.

  “You’ve played before?”

  Leda shrugged, then remembered he couldn’t see her. “No,” she said, to avoid a more complicated answer.

  Nestore looked skeptical, which gave her a flicker of confidence.

  “You put too much pressure at the end of your stroke. Listen.”

  They kept on, sounding out a couple of tangos on their two violins. Leda had been practicing these very tunes at night, in silence, and now she could bring them to light, adjust her left hand—she’d been too far up the neck on some notes, not far enough on others—and stroke with a real bow, real horsehair, which sang out with a raspy voice flecked with glints of beauty. Around them people shuffled, coughed, whispered sharply to each other. Ignore them. Ignore them. There is only this, all the world condensed into four strings.

  “All right, now go,” Nestore said. “Back to you, Carlo.”

  The two men struck up together, and Leda hovered for a moment, glancing at Nestore’s skillful hands and then at Carlo’s hands on his battered guitar, their aggression on the strings, or was she just imagining it? She didn’t dare look into Carlo’s face. Behind her, nobody danced. Everyone was staring at Leda. Her whole body went hot from their gazes on her, it was too much. Beneath their stares the violin felt impossibly heavy in her grip. She went to her room and listened through the closed door as the dancing slowly resumed, more subdued than before. She stayed inside until the musicians were gone and she could hear the women cleaning pots in the kitchen. If she didn’t come out now, the gossip would surely revolve all the more intensely around her name. She went to the kitchen to help clean.

  “Where did you get that thing?” Palmira said. She was drying beside Leda, whose arms were elbow-deep in a tub full of plates and suds.

  “I brought it from my village.” She thought of adding for Dante, but did not. “It was my grandfather’s.”

  “Well, you know,” Palmira whispered, leaning so close that Leda felt the girl’s breath stroke her ear, “I think you play beautifully.”

  “Thank you,” Leda murmured into the dirty water.

  “You should keep playing,” Palmira
said, “no matter what anyone says.”

  Leda placed a rinsed plate on the counter between them and let her hand linger on it until Palmira picked it up. For an instant they were touching the same wet object, fused by it. Then the plate left Leda’s grip and dove into the folds of Palmira’s rag. Leda’s ear still stung from the heat of Palmira’s breath, those lips so close to her. She would keep playing. No matter what anyone said. She would go to her room tonight and practice those two tunes until their motions were tattooed into her hands. And if Nestore ever let her play with him again, she’d jump at the chance, even if it meant all the murmurs against her in the world. Because she’d had a first taste now of playing aloud in a space full of people and the thrill was enough to live for. Sound is pure power. It floods a room. It can even flood the world beyond a room. You might be locked behind a shut door, unable to get out, but the sound of you can pour right through locks and walls into the great air that lies beyond, where anything that breathes—a dog, a queen, a girl like Palmira—can be penetrated by your sound.

  I’ve made a mistake, Nestore thought that night as he rinsed his face at the washbasin before work—Sunday night at the brothel was almost as busy as the night before, and he expected to come home at dawn with his fingers sore and satisfied from hours on the strings—I will come to regret teaching that girl, that widow-child, that Leda next door. And in front of all those people. Well. How else was he supposed to find her? He’d called her name out at the gathering because he knew she’d be there. But no. That was not the whole truth. He’d enjoyed what happened to the air when he brought her forward, the hush and horror of women and men. He’d especially enjoyed the women’s horror. And anyway, it served her right for trying to enter a world that wasn’t hers. This way he’d managed to give her what she wanted and punish her at the same time. He’d done it on purpose, because he didn’t know how he felt about the girl, or rather, he felt a lot of things toward her: irritation, curiosity, disgust, and something else, what was it? Recognition.