No, it was something else.
Awake.
Music, arrow to pierce all barriers. Music, the great equalizer. Music, invader of centuries. Nectar of demons, whiskey flask of God.
It rained heavily that winter, the winter of 1913. Children got sick and died of pneumonia in their rooms. Brothers and sisters were forced to sleep in the courtyard to evade contagion, in the cold, in the rain. Each time a child died, the mothers wailed and the bachelors shook their heads sadly and returned to their card games. On nights when the central courtyard filled with water, the men huddled in their room and taught young Dante games from France, Lebanon, Andalucía, Catalonia, as well as how to curse and communicate in Spanish. Without realizing it, they initiated Dante into the secret sect of men. The leaning back and sitting with legs spread apart. The space under the surface of their words, suffused with instinctive understanding. The talk of women, low enough to keep out of female earshot because they were good men after all and wouldn’t want the ladies to hear what they wanted to do to whores. The vivid language they had for lust. Dante would never have guessed the vocabulary for private parts could be so broad. No food or object was exempted from the sexual imagination. Corncob, carrot, pole, post, spear, knife, sausage, broom, cigar, pestle, melons, apples, fig, cake, cup, pot, slit, cut, hole. Her brain raced to absorb this new cosmology of the body. The men didn’t seem to know what to make of this strange young man who was really still a kid, they said, with his face that refused to grow even the smallest semblance of a beard. They called him El Chico, which meant the Kid in Spanish but also the Small One, a nickname she tried and failed to refuse. He was a strange fish in their waters, that Chico, an odd quiet boy with no relatives anywhere in the city, who played the violin behind closed doors and insisted on bathing upstairs in his own room, which required two men to haul the metal tub up the stairs, full of water already gray from a family or two’s ablutions.
“Why do you want to do that?” the men said.
“You got a scar you don’t want us to see?”
“Moles maybe?”
“Or the size of your pole.”
“Like we haven’t seen small ones before.”
“Or big ones. Maybe that’s the secret? Eh, Chico?”
The men laughed. El Chico just smiled and said nothing.
She engaged the assistance of a hale young man, usually Guido, La Strega’s son, who at first refused Dante’s coin of thanks at the end of the chore, though after a month in which it became clear that this strange tenant’s phobia of bathing in front of other men would not abate, he slipped the silver in his pocket with a nod and a mumbled “please don’t tell my mother.”
From the men’s talk, she learned of new places where she could find the tango. Night places. Cafés that stayed lit and loud all night, where decent women never went and where men had better know how to watch their backs.
I can’t go, she thought. I have to go.
She’d start with La Moneda, a little place squeezed between a pawnshop and a bakery, which the bachelors often talked about and which looked innocuous enough, at least by day. It was Valentino’s favorite place. She’d keep her dagger close. She’d go alone.
She arrived at one a.m., just as La Moneda was beginning to fill. It was larger inside than she would have imagined from the street, as the storefront was small but let into a long narrow room crammed with little tables over which men drank and played cards and crouched without speaking to each other. The wall behind the bar screamed with bottles. The air was thick and smelled of onions and unwashed mouths. Men everywhere, claiming chairs, leaning against walls, three deep at the bar. There were also women, though fewer of them, interspersed among the men. Women difficult to look at, harder not to look at. These women bared their throats. Their lips were painted red, and pulled back into smiles. They leaned close to men, touched them, draped themselves over them like human shawls.
Music flowed from the back of the room, though it was too crowded for her to see the musicians. Guitar, flute, and one more instrument she couldn’t place. It sounded like an accordion, only more subtle and intense, a tempered howl. She recognized the song; it was one of the first she’d learned from Nestore. She moved toward the bar.
“Well?” The barman was impatient.
“Yes?”
“What’ll it be?”
She wasn’t prepared, didn’t know how to order at a bar. She scanned the bottles against the wall, tried to think fast, look certain. “Grappa.”
The barman nodded and walked away, returning soon with Leda’s drink. The men around her wasted no time in gulping down the contents of their glasses, so she did the same, thrusting her neck back as she drank. The grappa burned. The music swirled and rose to a peak, then ended with a flourish quickly drowned out by applause. Another song began. No one seemed to be fighting, there were no brawls, no brandished knives, though surely there were many that lurked hidden. She herself had her facón in her trouser leg, at the ready. She ordered another grappa and reveled in the hot trail it made through her body as it went down.
A few paces away, a girl in a green dress stood close to two men, one of whom had his arm around her waist. The second man touched the girl’s breasts. She pushed his hand away and said something into his ear. The man laughed and stroked her breasts again, harder this time, grasping in a way that surely hurt, although the girl showed no reaction and this time didn’t stop him. She stood looking indifferent as though the man weren’t there at all. She was a slight girl, sparrowlike, though her breasts were surprisingly full. Leda was staring. She shouldn’t be staring. She turned away, toward the dancers pressed into the center of the room. Some men danced with women, but many danced with other men. The reason was obvious; there weren’t enough women to go around. Maybe six or seven women altogether, and dozens and dozens of men. And the women: the way they danced. Moving like regal snakes. Backwards in the man’s arms. That one in the red dress that’s been washed too many times (and she thought of the Red Woman she’d seen in Naples, on the street, the urge to leap out of the carriage and lose everything), she was a good dancer, better than her partner, even though he was leading. Her face was a stone mask of concentration as she glided, dipped, rose, slanted against her partner as if melding to him. When the song ended, her dance partner whispered something in her ear and the woman shook her head and turned away. In doing so she caught Dante staring at her. Smiled. Held his gaze for a few seconds, then made her way to the bar and sidled right up to Dante.
“Do you want to dance?” She had a foreign lisp that Leda couldn’t place, flinty eyes, and a great mane of dark brown hair. She barely reached Leda’s chin, and she was younger than Leda had thought, no more than twenty. Bolder than that other girl, the sparrow-girl. Unsettling.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know how.”
The woman shrugged and stepped closer. Her hand landed on Dante’s neck, lightly. “Then perhaps you’d prefer to go right upstairs.”
“Upstairs?”
“Thirty centavos.”
Those fingers. They glided along Dante’s neck, lightly, with casual confidence, as if they’d taken that trajectory many times before, as if it weren’t the first time for those fingertips, that skin. They arrived at the jaw that would surely feel too smooth to them, no stubble or hint of hairs ever to come. Leda pulled away. “No. No, I’m sorry.”
The woman let her hand fall to her side. Her lips pursed with irritation. “Then why did you call me over here?”
“Call you. I … I didn’t realize—”
The woman looked at Leda for a moment longer, with something between exasperation and disbelief. Then she turned away brusquely and moved back into the crowd.
Leda stood, frozen. She didn’t know the rules of this world. She was a fool. She’d tried to prepare herself for the danger that might come from men, but had not prepared for what might come from women. From a woman. The secret language that this kind of woman would speak with her eyes.
&n
bsp; Upstairs.
She should leave. She’d been seen by others, and what would they think of her, of a dimwit young man who didn’t even know how to talk to whores? She glanced around, but no one seemed to care. The men were too busy drinking or dancing, the women too busy with the men. The sparrow-girl and the man who’d stroked her breasts had disappeared, no doubt up those very same stairs. Leda was alone in the crowded room. A new song rose from the band, ardent, sumptuous. The air was so thick with sweat and liquored breaths that it was difficult to breathe.
That woman. The red dress, lifted. Thighs exposed, allowing touch. The place between that woman’s legs, splayed open for thirty cents. The smell of it laid bare.
And then what?
You idiot. You couldn’t have done a thing with her because there’s nothing in the front of your trousers but an old balled-up sock. If you’d gone upstairs you would have been discovered, your whole new life would have come undone.
A counter-voice rose inside her: perhaps I couldn’t have done everything a man could do, but I could have done something.
Oh! Like what?
Look. Touch. Smell.
And why would you want to do that?
…
It’s wrong. There’s something wrong with you.
She thought of Cora, in the hut up the hill, legs open in fear and pain.
You’re an abomination.
She needed a drink. She ordered another grappa and gulped it in one quick shot. The music swelled, pushing at the thick unventilated air of La Moneda, making objects swim in her vision.
Later that night, as she walked home on unsteady feet, she could not stop thinking about those stairs.
A letter arrived for Leda Mazzoni, addressed in her mother’s hand. La Strega handed it to Dante with a look of deep sympathy, having thoroughly believed the story he’d told her, I’ve sent my relatives this address for my cousin Leda, she died last summer in La Boca, and you understand, of course, I haven’t had the heart to tell her parents. As though this new tenant Dante were some kind of hero, striving to protect his relatives back home, rather than the opposite. A liar. A fraud. Perhaps even a kind of killer.
She waited until she could be alone with the letter. Even then, she sat on her pallet for a long time in the dim light of her kerosene lamp, staring at the worn unopened envelope. The letters of the address seemed written at an aggressive slant, the g’s and z’s and capital L brandishing loops of accusation. Her mother. Enraged and potent. Shaping words strong enough to cut the flesh of a daughter thousands of kilometers away. This daughter who had kept the money meant for a boat back home and run off with it, refused to obey, stayed where she was despite the danger and the shame she could bring down on her whole family, because everyone knew that a young widowed girl alone in a city was bound to fall prey to sin. Probably the village gossips had already begun to wag their vicious tongues, spinning tales of vice and disgrace, that Leda alone in América, and she could not fight them back on her mother’s behalf, nor could she reasonably deny that they were right: she had fallen, she was beyond redemption. Though from what kind of sin, of course, the village gossips would not have guessed.
She put the letter under her pallet, against the cold stone floor. She would open it later, when she could face it, when she had more courage.
The next time she went to La Moneda, she found her neighbor Valentino at the bar, and they had a couple of drinks together. Valentino was astonished to learn that Dante did not know how to tango.
“You’ve never danced it, not once?”
“No,” she said. She didn’t dare acknowledge the truth of her dances with Arturo. They had occurred in a past that she avoided discussing at all costs.
“But you must start immediately! Dance with me, I’ll teach you.”
“I don’t know,” Leda said. If they came close to each other, he might detect her secret in her scent or motion or in the slight bulge at her chest. “I’m a bad dancer.”
“That’s all the more reason to learn. This is Buenos Aires, Chico. Every sidewalk crack is stuffed with men. You can’t afford to be a bad dancer forever.”
He grasped Dante’s wrist and placed one hand on her back while his other hand clasped hers. To her relief there was a slice of space between their bodies, they did not touch. He was shorter than she, but this did not seem to faze him; he smiled up at her with an almost paternal reassurance. Valentino began to step in time to the music, forcing her feet backward, to the side, bumping into other pairs around them. He smelled of cigarettes and sweat and cologne. He was more skilled than Arturo; a gentle press to the small of her back was enough to guide her, suggest a step, with gestures so subtle yet assured that her body responded before her mind was aware of them. She was dancing backward into unknown space, and the thought made her tense.
“Let me lead,” he whispered into her ear. “Let go.”
She didn’t want to let go. She fought surrender. But, as with Arturo before, once she let herself relax, the moves began to flow from her or, rather, from both of them, as though a secret tide had caught them both and bore them in gentle circles circumscribed by the legs and arms of other pairs aloft on secret tides of their own. As soon as she began to think again, she stumbled. Stop thinking. The steps come out of nothing, out of touch, hand on back, body speaking, there, there, there. At the end of the second song, Valentino dropped his hands, stepped back, and grinned. She had survived. He suspected nothing.
“Not bad.”
“Thanks for the lesson.”
“When you start leading, remember that it’s you who moves the woman. You have to make her feel like she has no choice but to go where your mind sends her.”
Leda nodded, and Valentino kept studying her, as if waiting for something. But what? Had she missed a joke?
“What?” she said.
“You’re an odd fellow, you are.”
She tensed. “You think so?” She braced herself for questions that she’d have to find a way to dodge.
But Valentino only laughed his wide booming laugh, such a large sound for a small man. “Let’s get a drink.”
When Valentino went upstairs with a sallow woman with a drooping paper flower in her hair, Leda shot back another grappa and pressed through the crowd toward the band.
They sat huddled in a corner, faces grave. The guitarist and the flautist were no older than thirty, two wiry, lanky men. The bandoneón player was burly, with hair growing from his nostrils and ears. He looked like an overgrown gnome, hunched over the beautiful square instrument on his lap as though hoarding stolen treasure. The three of them played with skill, though not much vigor. There were so many things she longed to ask them. Whether music filled and lifted them—it didn’t seem to—or whether perhaps it had once, at an earlier time in their lives. Whether it was true, this dream of hers, that music could keep the soul from shattering. How they’d started making music in public, for pay. How she could find a way to do the same.
It wasn’t until the next time she came that she finally dared approach them. She caught them during a break, and offered to buy them a round of drinks.
The musicians looked suspicious, but they accepted. They were quick with their shots. As they were wiping their mouths with the backs of their hands, Leda said, “How long have you been playing?”
“Long,” the bandoneonist said and began to turn away.
“I play too,” Leda blurted quickly. “The violin. Do you know anyone who needs a violinist?”
The bandoneonist looked him up and down, slowly. “How old are you, kid? Fifteen?”
“Twenty,” she said, then regretted the lie when she saw the doubt on the man’s face.
“How many songs do you know?”
“Many. And I learn fast.”
“Look, muchacho, I don’t know of anything. You’ll have to ask around. Now leave me alone, I’ve got to get back to work.”
Ask around. He made it sound so easy. She burned with embarrassment. She went back to
the bar, where she saw the girl from the first night, the sparrowlike one with the full breasts. She was wearing the same green dress, which Leda now saw had a tear along the left seam, near her waist. The girl caught Leda staring and raised her eyebrows in a tired invitation. Leda looked away, having quickly learned the danger and power of eye contact.
Just as the band’s next song came to its last, drawn-out note, Leda ventured out into the lamplit night.
But she didn’t give up. In fact, just the opposite: the next day, throughout her long shift at the cigarette factory, as the tobacco rolled endlessly into its little white paper prisons, she thought and thought about the music she longed to make. Over the next month, she prowled the San Telmo nights. She opened door after door, following the music that bled through walls onto the streets. Not all of the places from which music poured were open to her. Toward downtown, she found dance halls so exclusive that they had guest lists, where the well-coiffed women in the foyers didn’t even deign to address Dante with words, but simply turned their backs and let the menace of their hulking guards do the rest. And there were brothels set up in worn-down conventillos, where patrons could hear music after paying, as they waited for their turn. Patrons who, like Dante, slaved all day at a factory or warehouse or construction site, and brought their worn bodies to this place, she thought, to taste the things for which God had made them sentient. The lust of men fascinated Leda, in its sheer focus, the simple arrow of its aim. I want a woman and when I have her I’ll know just what to do and then feel better. In her hunt for tango, Dante went into one single brothel, on a single night, and leaned against the wall in the corner, clutching her zinc token, listening to the mediocre trio and the moans from the closed rooms until the madam gestured toward her and then toward a door—your turn, in there—at which point she ducked out in a panic but kept the zinc chip in her pocket and fingered it as she walked until it grew warm from her touch. The best places for an odd fellow like her (too poor for the dance halls, scared of the whores) were the cafés, where she could buy a drink and lurk in peace. There was an astonishing number of such cafés in San Telmo—even more in La Boca, rumor had it, but of course she wouldn’t venture there—and all of them burst with tango and with men. Men who came for drinks, men who came for women, men who came to hawk the women whose bodies they sold (and these would arrive in their pristine suits and tilted hats with two or three women in tow, gaze fixed on them all night as they plied their trade), men from the rich neighborhoods in the north (often young men, no more than boys, cocky, bawdy, bright with rebellion, itching for a dance, a fuck, a lawless night on the wrong side of town), men who came for the company of other wakeful bodies staving off loneliness and pain. She, Leda, Dante, was there for the music, and she drank and drank it, still reveling in the freedom to be out at night in a public place without fearing rape or disrepute.
The Gods of Tango: A Novel Page 16