The Gods of Tango: A Novel

by Carolina de Robertis

  She’d landed with good people. But she could not stay. She realized this two days later, when a bathtub appeared in the bachelors’ room and the men began taking turns stripping and stepping calf-deep into water to scrub off the week’s detritus and indignities. It was everybody’s room and men walked in and out during the baths, to fetch something from their small stashes of possessions, or to prepare for their turn.

  “Altar Boy,” said Alfredo, the oldest bachelor, who’d been the first to bathe. “You go next.”

  “No, thanks,” she said. She was sitting in the courtyard, rolling her second cigarette in a row. She pictured herself shrinking and disappearing among the shredded leaves, rising to the sky as smoke.

  “You may as well take it when it’s offered,” said Emilio, a wiry young man who thrashed in his sleep. “Next week you’ll get stuck with the last bath, when you can’t see through the water.”

  The other men laughed. Leda smiled briefly, but her chest constricted as if the sheet around it were a tightening fist. She could not go in there, could not take a turn, and could not tell them why.

  “I’m going out,” she said, and she grasped her violin and fled to the street.

  She wandered for the next few hours, thinking fiercely. She was furious at herself for not having figured out this dilemma before. Each moment demanded so much attention, all her senses on alert, that she was not preparing for the future. She turned a corner. It was Saturday evening and the streets teemed and hummed. She had to prepare for the future. She could never bathe with the bachelors. But she could not live without bathing, or without changing her clothes, which she had not done for three days. She’d tried to rinse her armpits at the washbasin without removing her shirt, but it wasn’t the same, and made her look eccentric, if not outright crazy. Refusing to share the bathtub had made it even worse.

  She had no choice but to look for a private place to live, a small miracle for an immigrant.

  She began her search immediately. She asked women at windows, old men in doorways drinking mate, shopkeepers with dubious smiles. It was such a strange request, a private room, that people looked at her with amazement, no doubt imagining perverse reasons a young man would have to seek such extreme conditions.

  It was a grocer who gave her the clue she was searching for.

  “Go to La Strega,” he said. “She lives around that corner, there, three doors down. The blue door with seven silver nails hammered in beside the doorbell. Don’t ask me what the nails are for. They’ve just always been there, and nobody removes them, even though they have nothing to hold up. La Strega talks to everyone and everyone talks to her. If the place you’re looking for exists, she’s the one who’ll know.”

  Leda thanked him and walked to the corner, thinking, La Strega! The Witch! A name that conjured up a picture of a hunched woman with a withered face and eels slithering through her hair. How did anyone come to live with a name like that?

  But La Strega turned out to be a smiling woman, tall and plump and almost beautiful, old enough to have children her own height but young enough to turn heads on the street. She looked Dante up and down, briskly, then ushered her into the foyer of the conventillo, from which Leda saw a cluster of women and girls taking down linens, men smoking, and small children playing at battle with sticks for swords.

  “So. You’re looking for what?”

  “A private room.”

  “Hmmm!”

  “It can be small. I don’t need much. Just a door and walls.”

  “We don’t have anything.”

  “I’ll pay eighteen pesos a month.”

  La Strega looked shocked. She started to say something, then shut her mouth, gathered herself. “Well. Let’s see. You see those stairs?” She gestured across the courtyard, where a narrow flight of stairs rose over the bathroom to the crumbling balcony above. “That door at the top? That’s a room, a closet, really. We use it to store things, but I suppose we could clear it out for you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes?”

  “I want the room.”

  “Wait a minute. You haven’t even seen it.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “It’s tiny. Just enough space to lie down and sleep.”

  “I don’t need much.”

  “And the roaches. It’s right over the kitchen. Look, young man, I just want to be honest about everything.”

  “That door up there, it closes?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “That’s all I need,” said Leda.

  “Why does it matter so much to you?”

  “Because I’m a musician.” Strange, bold, to clasp that label to herself.

  “I can see that,” La Strega said, gesturing toward the violin case.

  “So I’d like to practice. If I can close a door then I can play without disturbing my good neighbors.”

  “You can play in the patio, you know. You don’t need a private room to do that.”

  La Strega tightened her lips and took a good look at Leda, who cringed with panic. What a stupid thing to say. How many musicians were there in San Telmo who practiced in the communal patios of their conventillos, surrounded by relatives and strangers? She reached around in her mind for a better lie, but came up dry.

  “You have a secret, don’t you?”

  The panic grew. She had nowhere to run.

  “Well, listen.” La Strega bent closer. She smelled like bread and orange rinds. “I don’t care. God knows that in this city we all do strange things to survive.”

  That night, Leda brought her sack of belongings from the other conventillo—the men’s disappointment at her departure surprised her—and moved into her room. The place was as tiny as La Strega had said it would be—not a room at all, but a closet—and it stank of mold and rot. There was no bed, just a pallet on the floor, and no window either. The only indication of day or night came from a strip of light under the door. But it was hers. His. Was it for Leda or for Dante? For the woman under her clothes or for the man she was now dreaming into being? It didn’t matter. That first night she woke up gasping for air and had to walk out onto the small landing that overlooked the central patio below. The patio was empty and the doors were closed; her neighbors were all asleep. She’d met only a few of them, more tomorrow. She smoked a cigarette, which had quickly become a delectable act, and gazed down at the black and white floor tiles, up at the tentative stars. She thought about stars, about distance, about closed doors and open hands, as her cigarette smoke rose into the night sky and disappeared.

  When she went back inside, she slept deeply, alone with the roaches and her violin.

  Babel. Now she truly lived in Babel. This conventillo had three rooms bursting with Calabrese, relatives of La Strega’s husband; a French family in another room; a quiet childless couple from Spain that piled in with the Calabrese; a network of Lebanese brothers and uncles and wives and children whose exact relationships took weeks for Leda to decipher; and an assortment of single men who spoke to each other in a Spanish inflected with various accents.

  Their home was called La Rete. It was the first conventillo that Leda had known to possess a name, and this gave it a distinctive feeling, as though it were its own miniature city inside of the larger one. The atmosphere at La Rete was as friendly as it was chaotic, the courtyard a realm of constant washing, sewing, folding, peeling, fighting, smoking, whittling, chatting, playing, shouting, laughing, whispering as if a lowered voice could pull a magic curtain of privacy around you, which, thanks to the tacit code of conventillo life, it sometimes did. When she felt lonely, Dante sat with La Strega as she scrubbed linens or pots in the courtyard, listening to her stories about Scylla, the small fishing village on the Calabrian coast where she was born, and that, for all its poverty, had made its mark on history as the place where Odysseus had crashed all but one of his ships. According to La Strega’s version, that great Greek warrior had been navigating through the narrow strait between the crags of Scylla and the isl
and of Sicily when a terrible monster—some said a witch—attacked them and caused the ships to break apart and men to break their skulls against the rocks. “Homer didn’t know this,” La Strega said, “but two of those sailors were skewered underwater on a single spear. Their skeletons remained for a millennium.” And then she smiled as though describing the sweetest blossoms of her homeland. “As for the Sea-Witch, who lived up on the crags and beat Odysseus, I’ve never seen her, but they say she never died. We used to leave out figs with bread and honey to appease her.”

  Dante kept her eyes on La Strega’s washing tub. She worked with great efficiency, her hands as skilled as Mamma’s or her own. It was difficult to sit and watch a woman work without joining in, wringing out blankets, washing shirts. Her hands were unaccustomed to such stillness. She smoked cigarettes to keep them occupied. Even this, the listening to La Strega’s stories, was dangerously un-male of her. But it delighted La Strega to have a new audience. Her mind was bright with bleeding sailors, broken ships, honeyed offerings.

  La Strega’s name had clung to her ever since she first opened her mouth in Buenos Aires and told the founding tale of her village. At first she didn’t like being named for the witch, but then she got used to it, partly because it linked her to Scylla, and partly because she had no other choice: in Argentina, nicknames stuck to people with such strength that their original names often went forgotten. She missed Scylla so much, she told Dante, that the pain of it was physical.

  “What do you miss?” asked Dante.

  Everything, La Strega told her. The high cliffs whipped smooth by the Mediterranean. The briny smell of the wind. The old stone houses on their narrow streets overlooking the water, perched above it as if constantly collapsing into the sea. The baskets of fish the men brought home on good days, sleek, silvery, eyes glazed from the sight of Death. Above all, the nets that hung everywhere—on walls, across doorways, draped over tables to dry in the sun. La Strega had learned to mend nets the same year she learned to walk. All the girls did. Not only that: in Scylla, all the babies were born into a net—the older women spread it on the ground so that the new mother could lie or stand or squat over it until the baby came. Everybody knew, in Scylla, that it was bad luck to give birth without a net under the woman as she opened. La Strega suspected, though she couldn’t prove, that the custom had originated as a kind of protection against the Sea-Witch and her great skill at decimating lives. When she became pregnant in Buenos Aires, she was terrified to give birth without a net, and tried desperately to find or make one, but she and her husband couldn’t afford the rope, so she’d had to give birth onto a naked tile floor, not once but four times. To make up for this tragedy, she’d named their home La Rete. The Net. Her best attempt to battle the bottomless threat of the evil eye.

  “You use what you have,” La Strega said. “To ward off chaos. And chaos is everywhere, it’s work that’s never finished, like this laundry, like feeding hungry mouths. In Scylla the old people used to say, Odysseus’s journey never ends. Well! No one knows that better than immigrants.”

  People did not eat together at La Rete, separated as they were by gulfs of language, food, and culture. La Strega cooked for bachelors for a modest fee. On Sundays, each group adhered to its own traditions, shedding the pressure to translate every word into Spanish, allowing each mind to rest inside its mother tongue. Sunday lunch was a separate affair, taken in individual rooms or at far-flung tables in the central patio on hot days. And, afterward, no tango and no dancing. Leda tried to hide her disappointment.

  She went out searching for the tango. On a Sunday, after lunch, she took a walk in the afternoon light, keeping her ears pricked for music. She found it down the block and around the corner, at a yellow-shuttered window. Violin, guitar, laughter. She stood outside the window for a long time, listening, trying to make herself invisible. The street was empty. April had come, and a cold autumn wind bit at her neck and ears. She turned up her collar and leaned against the wall. They were amateurs, these musicians, with none of Nestore’s control—their rhythm was erratic, the guitar a little out of tune—but their enthusiasm made the song beautiful. Violin as lead voice. Violin soaring. Steps of dancers. Steps of someone approaching the front door. She didn’t want to be found here, a strange lingering man. She walked on quickly and did not turn back to see who opened the door.

  She began taking these walks every Sunday. She learned there was music in many conventillos, after church and food, like the third point in a holy trinity to mark the Lord’s Day. Or so it seemed to her. Perhaps nobody else saw the music as part of any trinity, or as part of anything holy for that matter. Perhaps it was just one brief portal of escape from the grind of long days and suffocating nights in crowded buildings so far away from one’s familiar land. A respite. A halcyon moment between the battles of the week just past and the ones that lay ahead. Whatever the music meant to people, the people clearly longed for it, turned to it, demanded it, made it sing in the dilapidated buildings they called home. Leda walked the streets and listened at each window for tangos, and, when she found them, she leaned against the wall and soaked them up. She never stayed outside any particular home too long, and she never wandered beyond the few blocks that made up the neighborhood of San Telmo, which in her mind had taken on an almost mythological power to shield her from anyone who might recognize her as Leda (although she thought about them often, and couldn’t help wondering whether they thought of her, Palmira, Arturo, Francesca, and, above all, to her surprise, Alfonso Di Bacco, the roaming baker, who stayed with her so vividly that she decided to take his last name).

  Valentino, one of the bachelors—a short man with a beak nose and a surprisingly loud laugh—helped her find a job at the cigarette factory where he worked. Twelve-hour days of crushing tobacco in a great machine, so much of it that when she closed her eyes to sleep at night she saw levers pressing over and over into shredded leaves. She stank of raw tobacco and her feet ached from standing all day. But it was work, and, though at four days a week it wasn’t enough to pay for her room and La Strega’s food, she still had the money her parents had sent her (and how were they? waiting for word? no, don’t think about that, don’t think about them) to supplement, and, for now, that was enough to buy her time.

  This new life brought many freedoms. She could smoke, she could walk the streets at night, she could curse and spit into gutters. She could hold down a job that paid twice as much as anything a woman could do with her clothes on. But there were also new demands. She had to be extremely careful with her posture (head up, shoulders squared) and her gait (long sure strides, no swaying hips). She had to exude confidence, if not outright bravado, at all times. She had to keep her voice carefully calibrated, using only the lower half of its natural register. She could use the chamber pot in her own room now, but as she couldn’t wash her menstrual rags and hang them on the public line, she had to smuggle them out in burlap sacks, mixed with basil to hide the metallic smell, and take them to the streets, where she left them, guiltily, in a different alley each month, like a murderer’s bloody refuse or some twisted heathen offering. (It was thanks to Fausta’s advice that she used the basil, and every time she smuggled out these incriminating sacks she could hear her old bunkmate’s voice, use basil, cover bad things with it, so the evil eye will go away. But what if Fausta could see her now, creeping into alleys, dressed as a man? Would she see Leda as protecting herself from the evil eye, or as the evil eye itself, a demon to be warded off? And what about Fausta herself—how was she faring with her husband in the wilds of this city? Had she found what she wanted: thyme, coriander, motherhood, pesos for daily bread? Leda longed to know, and yet the thought of running into Fausta filled her with dread.) She could never drop her guard, not even for a moment, because, as it turned out, men sized up other men, not just sometimes but constantly. She’d never realized the full extent of these invisible transactions until she was involved in them. Sometimes they were blatant, sometimes subtle, delivered
with pursed lips or darting glances, sometimes behind a smile or coupled with a kiss on the cheek, all the while calculating your odds in case it came down to a fight. Because being a man meant facing possible violence at any turn. If you were helpless, it did not serve, as it could for a woman, to make you seem more innocent, more pure. It would not inspire a gentleman to come to your aid when you were in distress. And she lacked the muscle of the men around her; not only did she know this but the men around her knew as well. There was no way to conceal the narrowness of her shoulders, her lanky build. To make up for this, her persona had to be even tougher. She bought a dagger in a pawnshop—a facón, the shopkeeper explained: the kind of knife the gauchos used in the Argentinean countryside—and she wore it tucked into her trouser leg at all times. As she walked, the blade moved against her calf, and she drew comfort from its hard presence. Forward, back. Forward, back. Her small yet potent companion, scissoring a silent rhythm against her skin. Its slim pressure fortified her. In the big city, you had to hold your own if you didn’t want to die.

  Sometimes, deep in the night, she unbound her aching breasts and sat alone in front of a cracked mirror, staring at herself in the light of a single candle, amazed at what she saw. A not-man. Not-woman. A fallen-woman-risen-man. She couldn’t tell what was stranger: that a man existed inside her, or that the world accepted his existence. She wondered why no one saw through her disguise. Perhaps people could see only what they expected, what fit inside their vision, as if human vision came in precut shapes more narrow than the world itself, and this allowed her to hide in plain sight.

  Hidden but not silent. Now she practiced out loud, in her little room. Nobody seemed to mind or even notice in the din of La Rete’s days. A wild freedom to let her hands sing tangos, to refine her sound, which grew a little clearer and brighter each day as she practiced in that cramped rectangle where sunlight shone only through the slit beneath the door, that humble stinking space that she could love because it was her own, and where music possessed her, her first lover, her only lover, perhaps forever, since even if by some miracle she managed to keep living on this knife’s edge, undiscovered, surviving, besting death at its own game, she obviously could never have a man. She didn’t mind the sacrifice. It seemed enough for a life, to give yourself to music the way nuns give themselves to God. To vow. To surrender. Only music, after all, made life bearable. Only with music did she feel—what was it? Free? Happy?