Leda hoped that Dante’s soul, wherever it was and may it truly rest as she had said in peace, would forgive her for having used his photograph like a joker at a gambling table. Perhaps, she thought as she closed her eyes, surrendering to the scissors, he would even understand what she’d done, the need to run, the urge to be free at any cost.
“Well then,” the barber finally said, “what do you think?”
She stared at herself in the mirror. A man-woman stared back at her. With hair like Dante’s. Nothing soft about its angles. Nothing pretty at all.
Alarm rushed through her. Her femininity, gone. Without it she felt ugly, worthless—and yet somehow elated, lifted to an unknown and dizzying plane.
She paid the barber and stood.
“Don’t get lost,” he called to her as she left the shop.
The question what am I? looped through her mind as she walked home. Answers roared in from all sides, from the walls of buildings, the slit of sky above her.
You’re a beast.
An aberration.
A mistake of nature.
A woman possessed by demons.
And then another voice rose up inside her, brash and unexpected: that may be true, but if it is, then let the demons have their song!
The women of the conventillo gave her looks of pity. Even Francesca’s scowl softened, a little; she knew, after all, the sorrows of female survival. Look at the young widow, running out of pesos, selling her hair to keep from turning to the streets. This when all they could see was a kerchief around her head; if they could see the cut she’d gotten, then what looks would she get? She didn’t dare think about it.
“You really did it?” Palmira whispered to her at the stove. “You really cut it all off?”
“Yes.”
“Your hair was beautiful. Your best feature.”
Leda said nothing, listening for the unsaid ending of that sentence, and without it you’ll be ugly, no one will want you.
“I can’t imagine.” Palmira washed two green peppers and handed them to Leda. “You’re braver than I.”
Leda took the damp peppers and began to dice them. Her knife moved briskly. Palmira is wrong, she thought; I’m not brave at all. Brave and desperate are not the same thing. As she chopped, she considered how she’d execute the last stage of her plan. Could she test her disguise, sneak out in men’s clothes for an hour or two and see how the world responded? No. Too risky. There was only one sliver of time, at three thirty in the morning, when everyone was either away or asleep, so she’d be trapped out on the streets with no way of coming home unseen. She’d have to do it all at once. Tonight. Put on Dante’s clothes, gather up her most essential things, and walk out once and for all. Walk—where? To the edge of La Boca and beyond it, into a neighborhood where nobody knew who she was, and where she’d be known, from that moment forward, only as a man. Beyond La Boca, the rest of Buenos Aires waited, untouched, as yet unknown, each neighborhood a world unto itself, especially for womenfolk, who never went very far, and it was women who posed the greatest threat to her as they were the most likely to look closely, most likely to wag their tongues. And so when she arrived in the next neighborhood over (what was it called? even this she didn’t know) she would seek out a room, then a job, and then, if she was very lucky, a place to play the violin.
She excused herself from dinner that night and went to the pawnshop down the block, across from the butcher, where she sold her pearled blue hat. She would have liked to bring her dresses, too, for more cash in her pocket—the more cash the better for a leap like this—but could not think of how to do so without raising too much suspicion.
At midnight, alone in her room, she put on Dante’s clothes. This time, she used a bedsheet to bind her breasts down first. Shocking, how much they flattened under pressure. How malleable her body seemed to be.
One in the morning. She combed her hair. Recombed it. Her hair grew slick and shiny with the olive oil she’d taken from the kitchen, as did the comb, which was the only thing of Cora’s she’d been able to steal out of her room after she died. Had she used too much oil? Too little? She’d have to learn the way men did it. And she’d have to buy some grape-seed oil, so she didn’t smell like a salad—the thought made her smile. She thought of her brother Tommaso, grooming in the mornings, his comb’s thin wooden teeth gleaming in the new light. She pictured his face, how he would look if he saw her now. Disbelief. Disgust. No, no, push the thought away, I am sorry Tommaso but I can’t let you into this moment. She wiped her hair with a cloth and reshaped it. Better. It was almost alarming, how much she looked like a man.
Two in the morning. Nothing left to prepare. No one stirred anymore, and Carlo had left for work, but she was afraid to leave quite yet; she had heard people across the hall shuffle to the spigot for water around this hour. Not that they couldn’t get up at three or five or any moment in between. No hour was completely safe. She crossed her hands. Uncrossed them. Should she play? She felt too nervous. Instead, she took out the violin and held it, traced its curves, took a little comfort in its beauty.
She wondered what had gone through Cora’s mind in those last moments as her lungs and vision filled with water. Cora, she thought into the stark night air, I owe you this, a true escape, a break in the walls, come with me, I’m reaching for you, we’ll do it this time, finally run away.
Three in the morning. Leda rose. She left a note for her neighbors on the table in her room—you’ve been kind to me, I’ll always be thankful—and slipped out in the middle of the night, taking nothing but the suit on her back, her pesos, a few of Dante’s clothes in a potato sack, Cora’s comb, and the King of Naples’s violin. She left behind the trunk she’d brought from Italy, with its empty folded dresses, vestiges of a woman who no longer walked the earth.
PART TWO
QUATTRO
Noise and Blades and Death and Also This
She walked to the west, out of La Boca, and wandered foreign streets as they slowly lost their grasp on the night. Men hovered in doorways and on crumbling balconies. She willed herself to look them in the eyes. They did not stare at her in horror or surprise; a quick assessment and the gaze moved on. Whatever they were looking for in her face, they seemed satisfied. Nobody knew who she was, nor did anybody want to know. Was she walking too much like a woman? Or exaggerating the bravado of men? She couldn’t tell. She felt larger than her own body, almost floating. The night air wrapped its warmth around her. She didn’t dare stop walking. The potato sack hung over her shoulder; her violin swung gently at her side, an anchor, the only thing yoking her to the earth.
Light spread gently over Buenos Aires. A new neighborhood unfolded around her, worn old mansions pressed together on cobbled streets. She felt drawn to it; the men she saw leaving for work in the early dawn seemed like workers, immigrants, like those in La Boca. Children stirred behind shuttered windows, bickering in Italian. She crossed the plaza more than once, doubling back, returning, tracing a wide lasso through the streets. Her eyes stung from lack of sleep and her body felt taut. More men began to fill the sidewalks, walking quickly, some in pairs or groups, others silent and alone. Two workers in factory uniform approached her on the sidewalk. The shorter man was speaking in Spanish, too quickly for her to understand. The taller man was shaking his head with mournful appreciation, as though the tale were at once terrible and engaging. The short man stopped and spit in the street. Just like that. Gathered and spit a fast bullet of saliva onto the cobblestones. Then he wiped his face with his sleeve and kept talking, the tall man listening as if nothing had happened.
She’d seen men spit on the street before, but this time it dizzied her, the freedom of vulgarity. The man’s ease with it. He had made it look so natural. As though the whole world were his spittoon.
It took her two more blocks to gather up the courage to try it herself. She looked around. The sidewalk had become crowded with men on their way to work. She was almost invisible among them. Draw the shoulders ba
ck. Cheeks taut. Spit.
Nobody saw, or seemed to care. The saliva made a dark mark on the cobbles. How unladylike, she could hear her mother say. And if her mother were here she’d surely grasp her by the ear and drag her off the street in shame. But she was not here. Only I am here, Leda thought. Alone with this city and I will spit in its streets when I choose.
She walked until the morning sun was high enough to break up the shadows of tall buildings and she could no longer deny her need for sleep. She listened for Italian-speaking voices, and approached a grave matron, a boulder of a woman, who was dumping a bucket of dirty water in the street.
“Buongiorno, signora,” she said, in a low voice, reveling in the sound—her own male voice!—and at the same time scared that it didn’t sound right, that it would give her away. “I’m looking for a place to rent.”
“We’re full,” the woman said, without looking up, irritated, as though she’d answered the question so many times that she was sick of the routine. “There’s nothing, not even a corner.”
“I see,” Leda said. “Sorry for the bother.”
She had already begun to walk away when the woman called out, “Young man.”
It took an instant for Leda to register that she was the young man in question. She turned.
“Where are you from?”
“Campania.”
“There’s a group of Neapolitan men down the block, next to the grocer.”
Leda thanked the woman and walked on, elated at having survived her first conversation. She tried the entrance beside the grocer—tall ornate double doors that suggested a grandeur lost in time—where a young mother with one child on her hip and another burying its face in her skirts told her that there was in fact a bachelor room that likely had space, but all the men were away at work right now and they’d have to make the decision, could he come back that night at nine o’clock?
She didn’t trust herself out in the city, without sleep, until nightfall. Nor would she be safe closing her eyes anywhere in the streets. She thought fast. “I’ve been working all night, signora. I’m very tired. Is there any corner where I could rest my head for a peso?”
The woman eyed her more steadily. “A whole peso?”
Leda hoped her offer made her sound more generous than desperate. “A whole peso.”
“You’d have to pay up front.”
“Of course.”
The woman stared at Leda as though she were a beast with two heads, and Leda braced herself to bolt if needed. But then the infant, indifferent to these proceedings, began clawing at the woman’s shirt, trying to uncover her breast. The woman slapped the infant’s hand back and shrugged. “You can have my room for a few hours. Come with me.”
Leda followed the woman down a hall and through the courtyard to a small room where an old man sat in the corner, drinking grappa. He was missing his right leg. His right pant leg flopped emptily below the knee. He glared at Leda and the young mother as they came in.
“He’s just going to sleep here for the day, Nonno,” the young mother said in a scolding voice. “And he’s paying, a peso no less, so don’t you give him any trouble.” She nodded at Leda. “Don’t worry. He’s harmless.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. The peso.”
Leda paid the woman, who fingered the coin.
“What did you say your name was?”
“Dante.” The only name she could imagine herself answering to.
“Well then, sleep well, Dante,” the woman said and left.
Leda lay down on the bed, not daring to get under the rumpled covers with the old man’s hostile eyes on her. Was he examining the shape of Leda’s body? Could he possibly suspect? A false move and she could die. The room smelled of stale garlic and urine, and every muscle in her body felt tense. The old man’s eyes ran over her again, and she realized that it wasn’t her body he was staring at but the violin case. She wrapped her arms around it and took a deep breath. Old man, she thought, just try to steal my instrument, you’ll see how fast I wring your wrinkled neck with my bare hands. What a thought to have about a cripple. She was ashamed of it, of who she was becoming, but she still kept her arms wrapped tightly around the violin. She closed her eyes and lay awake for a long time, peering at the old man every once in a while, until she saw that he’d dozed off and she finally descended into sleep.
When she woke, it was almost dark, and the laborers were home. They sat on wooden crates in the courtyard, smoking, talking, twenty or so men in their undershirts or no shirts at all, taking relief from the day’s heat. I will never be able to strip like that, Dante thought, acutely aware of the sweat soaking her armpits and the torn sheet wrapped tight around her chest. She wished she’d wiped her forehead before coming out, so she could appear more comfortable in her shirt and vest.
The men eyed her, neither smiling nor hostile. “So you’re the new kid.”
She nodded, bracing herself for questions.
A tall man with a scraggly beard offered her a cigarette. She put it in her mouth and accepted his light. The smoke scratched at her lungs with unexpected strength. She tried to suppress her cough but failed.
“What, don’t tell me you’ve never smoked before!”
“What are you, an altar boy?”
A laugh rippled across the courtyard. Dante felt herself flush. She took another drag of her cigarette and willed her lungs to cooperate, this time with more success.
“That’s the ticket.”
“More like it.”
“Men don’t smoke where you’re from?”
Dante shrugged, at a loss for an answer.
“Don’t talk much, do you?”
She shrugged again. The attention hollowed her with fear.
“You must be a country boy.”
There, she nodded.
“Where from?”
“Campania.”
The men brightened; almost all of them were from Naples and the surrounding province of Campania, which, here in América, was enough for them to claim her—or him, as they thought—as one of their own. Once they’d established where her village was, and that no one there was from the same place, the focus shifted away from her, to good-natured banter about whose home neighborhood or town was best. When dinner came, it was harder than she’d thought it would be to let the women serve her along with the other men. She ate her spaghetti and stale bread in the courtyard, with the other single men and a few married ones who hadn’t left to accompany their families in their respective rooms. The young mother who’d given her a bed that day brought her a glass of wine, and she tried to refuse it, as she already had to pee and had not yet figured out where and how to do it with more privacy than chamber pots afforded.
“What!” one man said, exposing a mouth full of masticated pasta. “No wine for the altar boy?”
“No blood of Christ?”
“Come on, have a little.”
She complied. The wine was sharp, with a hint of vinegar. The men toasted with her, and that was when she realized that she’d been welcomed into their room.
When the time came for sleep, she found a space in the middle of the floor and laid her potato sack out as a pillow. The men—there were eight bachelors in all—took turns pissing into a chamber pot and rinsing their faces at the washstand. They undressed in front of each other, keeping their gazes to themselves, but still, she could not join them, nothing for it, she’d have to sleep in her clothes. Dante slipped out and stood in line at the single toilet with a closed door. At least there was this, a lucky step up in the world, a private place to shit. Her bladder ached so much she had to will herself not to shift from one foot to the other. She was afraid the other people in line might hear her and wonder why she hadn’t used the chamber pot like all the other men, but fortunately the clatter and voices from the nearby kitchen drowned out the sound. Then, finally, she lay down to sleep on the strip of floor for which she’d pay sixteen pesos a month, and found herself wide awake
. She’d slept all day, she was off-kilter; and also, the air rippled with breaths and snores and her own terror that one of them might suspect her lie and come over to feel and test the shape of her body, or simply try to steal the violin out of her arms or the pesos from her pockets, in which case she could lose everything, cash, instrument, her false manhood. It took her hours to fall asleep, and, in the meantime, to stave off thoughts of the future, she ran through all the tangos she knew, letting their rhythms swell and ebb through her body.
The next day, when the men went to work and the women set about chores she didn’t dare to offer help with, Dante embarked on a long walk around the neighborhood. San Telmo, it was called. It was different from La Boca in some ways. It was further from the port, and it had none of the clapboard and sheet metal buildings painted in many different colors. All the buildings were tall old mansions that the rich had abandoned to the foreign hordes decades ago, during a legendary bout of yellow fever. Stately houses now crowded with the families of the poor. Bakers and grocers with their wares in wood crates on the sidewalk, and cafés shut down to sleep for the day. And there was a large plaza called Dorrego at the center of the neighborhood, where men came to drink and play dice in the evenings. And yet, for all the differences, the neighborhood was also similar to La Boca in many ways. There was the confluence of languages, overlapping with each other like streams collapsing into the ocean. Vendors trolled the street with their carts, selling bread fresh from their conventillo kitchens or old boots gathered from God knows where. So many ways of scraping out survival in the New World. So much long hard scraping to be done. She walked broad streets and damp alleys. The buildings cast full-bodied shadows across the cobbles, one after another, street after stony street. The green foliage and brown earth of Alazzano were so far away it almost seemed like a dream. Or maybe that had been the waking time and this was the dream, this walking in Dante’s clothes, answering to Dante’s name, in a city so large and crowded it could almost encapsulate a world.
The Gods of Tango: A Novel Page 14