The Gods of Tango: A Novel

by Carolina de Robertis

  She would rather go back to Italy.

  No. That was not true. She would lose much more if she went home.

  She could not bear the thought of stuffing herself back into the cloister of home, much less as a seventeen-year-old widow, constrained by black clothes and the most stringent expectations. The village gossips were vicious with widows who failed to seem sufficiently mournful, Look at her, it’s only been two years and my neighbor saw her laugh—out loud!—at the village well, can you imagine? She did not want to be that kind of widow. She did not want to be a widow at all. Perhaps this made her despicable, but all she wanted was to be the person she became when she was locked up in her room, in Dante’s clothes, playing soundless music. This strange new music, this tango, which could sing parts of her soul she’d never spoken. In those late-night moments alone in her room, she was freer than she’d ever been, freer than she’d ever thought a woman could become.

  If only, she thought, I could trade music for bread. Then I could survive here without becoming a whore.

  But even here in this América, this place of broken rules, such a thing was not possible. Only men played the tango. And she could not.

  Unless.

  And that is when the thought surged to the surface of her mind. Unless she lived as a man. She could not breathe. Outside, it had begun to rain, though she hadn’t realized it until now. The air rushed and sighed as if releasing a dream. In the courtyard, the women were scrambling to take down their laundry; she should help them, she knew, even though the linens weren’t hers. But she sat frozen by the thought, a dangerous thought, as dangerous as suicide, perhaps more so.

  Water snaked across the threshold of her room, a dark wet guest.

  Cora, my almost-sister, tell me, what would you do?

  The first stage of Cora’s change came on suddenly, and with such quiet that at first the village gossips didn’t notice anything, certainly not enough yet to attach the word Matta—Crazy—to her name. She was thirteen years old then, Leda almost twelve. Cora stopped leaving her home. At first that was all. Leda waited for her, by the river, in the patio outside her back door where they’d always met to shell beans or stir cream into stubborn butter, but Cora didn’t come.

  Where is Cora, Mamma? Leda asked.

  I don’t know.

  Can I take the eggs to her house this afternoon?

  When Leda went on the errand, Cora’s mother stood at the door and reached for the basket of eggs without a word, transferring them brusquely into a wooden bowl. She did not invite Leda in, and though Leda had always entered this house as easily as her own, something in her aunt’s bearing kept her at the threshold. She craned her neck in an effort to spy Cora in the kitchen, but her aunt’s formidable body blocked the light.

  How is Cora?

  She doesn’t feel well, her mother said. Her voice was like the whip of a horse’s tail, batting flies. It was then that Leda realized that Zia Crocifissa had not yet looked her in the face.

  Does she have a fever? Can I bring her anything?

  She’ll be fine. Go home, Leda. She’ll come out when she’s better.

  But Cora did not come out the rest of that week, not even for church or the Sunday family meal that followed. She did not come out for three weeks. When she finally emerged, it was for Sunday mass, where she sat in the front pew, the one with the brass plaque that read LA FAMIGLIA MAZZONI. Leda sat in the pew behind hers, as she was also a Mazzoni but not of the most important branch, and there was not enough room for all of them in the most honored seats. Throughout mass, as they stood and sat and kneeled to the familiar Latin prompts of the priest, Leda stared at the back of Cora’s head, covered in white cloth, and willed her to turn around and meet her eyes, but she did not. Even when the time came to leave the pew and line up for communion, Cora kept her gaze down, a picture of piousness that was nothing like the vibrant girl Leda knew her to be, too bigmouthed for her own good, or so some said of her, full of song and protest and tall tales. After mass, at the family meal, Leda tried and failed to catch Cora’s gaze. Cora kept her eyes on her plate. She did not laugh at any of the jokes that Dante or Tommaso told. She did not rise to help her mother when it came time to gather dishes from the table, retreat to the kitchen, and leave the men and boys to smoke and talk. Leda, hands freighted with dishes, looked over at the table in surprise. Cora was the only girl still there.

  Cora’s father, Mateo, glared at her. Get up and take my plate.

  Cora did not move. She stared at the tablecloth.

  Cora, Mateo said. Take. My. Plate.

  Now all the men and boys were silent. The plates were heavy in Leda’s arms, but she could not move. Even the clang of pots in the kitchen had stopped, and the only sound was the sharp plea of birds in the olive trees.

  I’ll take it, Papà, Dante said and rose to reach for his father’s plate.

  Mateo raised his hand to strike Dante, but his oldest son, Mario, was faster: he leapt from his seat and pushed his younger brother down into his seat. Dante pushed back at him, and the two brothers wrestled for a few moments, but Mario was not only taller and stronger but more ruthless; he cut the fight short with a punch that sounded across the courtyard and made the birds go quiet.

  All this time, Cora had sat so still that she had not even seemed to blink.

  Leda looked over at her own father, hunched at the table with a blank look on his face. He, too, had not moved. He almost gave the impression of being elsewhere, not at this table, transported by his own cowardice. In that moment Leda hated him more than she’d ever thought possible.

  Now, Cora, Mateo said, you have five seconds to take my plate.

  Leda could feel every mind in that courtyard counting in silence.

  One. Two. Three.

  Four.

  Cora rose and took her father’s plate, along with her own and Dante’s, and carried them to the kitchen.

  Mateo sat back and dabbed the edges of his mouth with his napkin.

  As if she’d been waiting for this moment to make her entrance, Cora’s mother emerged with a tray bearing a bottle of grappa and an army of small glasses for the men.

  Leda found Cora in the kitchen. She was washing already. Leda picked up a towel and began to dry. They were silent for a long time.

  Are you all right? Leda finally said.

  Cora shrugged.

  You’re feeling better? You’re not sick anymore?

  It seemed that she had said the wrong thing. Cora turned away from her, toward her tub of dirty water.

  Do you want to go to the river when we’re done?

  Cora shook her head. I’m tired.

  After that, Leda stopped trying, and the two of them worked in silence. When the dishes were all clean and put away, Cora disappeared into her room.

  It took three more weeks for Leda to persuade Cora to spend some time alone with her. It was a Sunday, after the family meal. They went to their favorite place by the river.

  Leda took off her shoes. Come wade with me!

  Cora shook her head.

  Leda stood, unsure, then walked in anyway. The water was cold and tightened the skin of her feet. She tried to think of something that would cheer her cousin. Tell me a story.

  I don’t want to.

  Please? We can do any one you want. The Inferno. Diana and Actaeon. Old Pompeii.

  You already know them, so what’s the point?

  She said it harshly, and Leda could not help but recoil. Cora looked at her, and for the first time in two months she let Leda meet her gaze and did not look away. Leda searched Cora’s eyes for traces of the girl she’d been before, for clues to what had changed in her, was it the woman’s blood? already? more painful than they’d thought?

  When Cora spoke again, her voice was gentle. You know what, since you know the stories so well by now, you should pick one and tell it to me.

  Leda hesitated. This was a steep reversal to the roles they’d always had. She’d always been the listener, never t
he teller. But she stepped out of the river, back onto the grass, and began.

  She decided against the Inferno, and told instead about old Pompeii, where before the eruption people had lived full-blooded lives: men built houses and painted frescoes in the courtyards of the rich, portraying Athena on her throne, Actaeon ripped to shreds by dogs, Poseidon dreaming up an earthquake while sea nymphs wove spells into his hair; women married, gave birth, and chased down the neighbor boys who climbed the garden walls to steal fruit, cuffing their ears without mercy; girls pined for suitors their fathers would never accept; boys wrote maudlin lyrics in the moonlight and cursed their fate as hopeless suitors; children ran through the narrow streets, careful not to drop the eggs in their baskets; children dropped the eggs in their baskets and wept as though the world had ended; men, women, and children alike crushed grapes for wine with enthusiastic feet, certain they would still be alive later to drink it, innocent of the cataclysm that awaited them—except for one young maiden who dreamed of Vesuvius, over and over, shaking and beginning to roar, warning of fire to come. All night in her dreams the mountain roared, but when she woke there was nobody to whom she could tell the dream. Because in ancient Pompeii, Vesuvius was thought to be a mountain like any other. Nobody knew it was a volcano, with a hollow belly and a hidden, deadly power. So who would believe the maiden’s dream? Who ever heard of a roaring mountain?

  As Leda talked, Cora lay in the grass on her belly, her face hidden in green blades. When she finally lifted her head, her face was caked with dirt. Leda liked her face that way, painted with the brown symbols of an incomprehensible language.

  Keep going.

  I’m not sure what comes next.

  It can be anything.

  Leda thought as hard as she could, but before something occurred to her, Cora said, Let’s run away.

  What?

  Let’s run off together. Just you and me.

  Where to?

  I don’t know. To Naples. To the sea. Or maybe all the way to Rome.

  And do what?

  Live, what else?

  But how would we live?

  Freely.

  That wasn’t what Leda had meant. She had never heard of two young girls surviving away from their families, without a husband or father to care for them, alone in a large city or on the slope of a volcano. It was not possible. Maybe Cora meant this as the seed of another story, one that she should follow into imaginative flights—but it was too late. Cora had sat up and begun to wipe the dirt from her cheeks.

  Forget it, you’re right, it’s stupid.

  They never talked about it again. It was the last day they talked at all. With everything that happened next, the words let’s run away would come to haunt Leda’s nights and shake her awake in bed to demand she open her eyes and meet their stare.

  The quick summer rain subsided soon after nightfall, but Leda could not sleep. She played her violin in silence until her fingers throbbed, then lay in bed and stared into the dark, cradling her instrument against her chest. The dangerous thought had sunk its teeth into her mind and would not let her go. The next day, she drank it with her breakfast coffee, stitched it into every sleeve and collar, stepped to its rhythm on her walk to buy bread.

  She thought about how she would do it. Make a new life as a man. An unnatural act, unheard of, a magician’s sleight of hand—or even more than hand: a sleight, if such a thing existed, of the whole body.

  To disappear from your own life. To reappear into another one.

  An impossible thought.

  And yet, if there was any place in the world where it could be possible, that place had to be América. Land of self-creation. Of rootlessness. Of New Babel. Not that Buenos Aires didn’t have its walls and rules. But still, perhaps, in a city that held so much noise and anonymity, so many émigrés with so many cultures and tongues, surely mad things could make their way into reality.

  As she sat in the patio and numbed her fingers with stitch and needle, she considered what life as a man could afford her. Other jobs. There was much more work out there for men. And the ability to walk down the street, at any time of day or night. What sort of work might she do? She didn’t have the strength to work at the docks, like Dante and the men she’d seen the other day, straining under the hot sun, chests bare and muscled. She could never be that. But there were factories. Shops. Even places where men were paid to play music, as Carlo and Nestore did. How could she find out where they went?

  Then there was the problem of convincing the world she was a man. Not an easy challenge. If she failed she’d be in a danger so severe that she didn’t dare to think about it—though the images arose, a knot of men, outraged, drunk, stronger than she, prepared to beat the transgression out of her, or worse. She had no reason to think it would be otherwise. Just last month one of the bachelors in her conventillo had been beaten to a pulp in a bar brawl, and though the women nursed him to health without a second thought, their judgment was clear: he’d failed to protect himself, he was too gentle and should expect nothing less. As for women themselves, they deserved protection in this city, but not when they crossed lines: look at that girl Francesca mentioned, who used to live here, who was turned out for becoming a prostitute, and to hell with what happened to her next. No. She couldn’t fail. She took stock of what she had. A low voice. Small breasts. Narrow hips. Height. Long limbs, long torso. Who would ever have thought that her physique could prove an asset, this same shape that her mother had bemoaned, how will you ever carry a baby in that body, you’re like a tube, things will move in and out of you but never stay and grow the way they should. And then there was her face: lean, angular, not soft as a woman’s ought to be (look at Palmira, bent over her sewing, the lovely curves of her cheeks). Leda’s own face was dominated by a nose that jutted out with undeniable vigor, a beak of a nose, with a stubborn knot in the middle of its slope. The nose of a man, some would say. Not delicate at all. Fearsome.

  The light had grown heavy and golden with the passing of the day. It settled on the white cloth in her hands like honey. Her fingers hurt. She wanted to stick her needle into something—anything—her own flesh if necessary—so she could be rid of sewing, so her fingers could spring free.

  Could she do it?

  If she set out as a man, alone and hidden, nothing but herself and Buenos Aires and the violin, what would she find? What would she become?

  She burned to find out.

  Three weeks later, the money arrived from Italy. She did not buy a ticket with the cash, as the accompanying letter instructed. Instead, she folded it up and hid it in the case of her violin.

  The next step: cut off her hair.

  The wig shop was not difficult to find. Alfonso Di Bacco had told her about it, though it pained him—truly pained him, he insisted, to his heart—that she should feel the need to resort to such extremes.

  “Keep your hair and I’ll give you free bread.”

  “Thank you, Don Alfonso, but I have to do this.”

  “You have no other choice?”

  She shook her head, and his face was so mournful, so swept up in her tragedy, that guilt stabbed her. Surely it was a sin to hide the truth from a good man.

  The wig shop was run by a Genovese man with doleful eyes who put her hair into two braids and sliced them off so quickly that tears of shock stung her eyes. All those years—all seventeen years of her life—of growth, all cut away in an instant, dumped on a heap of amputated braids behind the counter like a common unmarked grave. Ashes to ashes, braid to dust.

  “If you want to get some shape to that,” the Genovese man said, not unkindly, “my brother-in-law has a barbershop down the block.”

  I am dead, she thought as she held her hand out for the money and walked directly to the barbershop. I am dead, she thought as she gazed at the image in the mirror when she sat down in the barber’s chair. The barber was portlier than his brother-in-law, with receding gray hair and the red nose of a hard drinker; he was missing the smallest
finger of his left hand. To her relief, they were alone in the shop, which smelled of lavender, camphor, and sweat. Leda asked him to cut her hair like a man’s.

  “Are you sure?” the barber asked, astonished.

  She nodded.

  “Because I could—”

  “Like a man’s,” she said, more firmly this time, meeting his eyes in the mirror.

  The barber squared his jaw and folded his arms over his chest. This was going to be harder than she thought.

  She pulled out her photograph of Dante. “This,” she said, “is my husband, may he rest in peace. All I ask is that you give me hair like his.”

  The barber stared at the picture. “Dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long?”

  “Three months.” And then, seeing her advantage, she added, “He was nineteen years old.”

  “So young! How did he die?”

  “The police shot him. At a workers’ strike.”

  The barber sucked his teeth mournfully. He held the photograph to the light. “Handsome.”

  “Yes.”

  “I had an aunt who was widowed young. She never wore a cheerful color or face again. She was almost thirty when it happened—while you, you look almost like a child.” He shook his head. “You shouldn’t marry your grief.”

  “That’s not what I’m doing.”

  The barber eyed her, and for a grim instant she thought he might ask her what, in fact, she was doing. But then he handed back the photograph and reached for his scissors. “Migration is a cruel whore,” he said and set to cutting.