All creatures on earth sleep either through the day or through the night, but Buenos Aires did neither, which made it a beast not of this world. In the night the cafés burst with light, most of them with kerosene lamps and a few with the arrogant new gleam of electricity. Men danced and drank and slipped away with indecent women. (Occasionally they didn’t even slip away; more than once Dante saw a couple in a corner against a wall, the woman’s skirts hitched up and leg raised around the rutting man. So that’s what it looks like. The sight made her burn, whether with shame or thrill or fear or desire she did not know.) When dawn light arrived, men still lined the grimy café walls, hunched around little wooden tables, and took their last swigs at the bar, shoulder to shoulder with strangers. As the night wound down, the brutal grind of the day began: as one man headed home another headed out to brave the factories. Sometimes Dante went to work directly from the cafés. She ground tobacco for infinite cigarettes with her eyelids held open as if by invisible wires. The clang and clatter and stink of the factory saved her, kept her awake, as did memories of the night before, which roused her over and over like shots of coffee. So much to see. So much to absorb. The world under the surface of social acceptance: the underworld. Roaring with life no matter what good girls were told. After work, Leda would go to her room and sleep for a few hours, until La Strega’s daughter knocked to tell her food was ready and she came downstairs for a bite to eat before diving back out into the night.
Her luck turned when, at a café called Il Sasso, at about two thirty in the morning, the violinist was stabbed during his solo.
It was a pimp who attacked him. Lunged for his heart but missed in the scuffle and sank his blade in just below the violinist’s rib cage. The violinist fell to his knees, the music stopped, and dancers turned to face the low stage that was quickly being blanketed with blood.
“You son of a whore,” the pimp said. His words slurred. “You stay away from her.”
The violinist made a terrible sound, somewhere between a groan and a howl.
“Chucho!” a woman wailed. “Chucho, no—”
And then the woman, still wailing, pushed through the crowd, toward the stage, and embraced the violinist for an instant before her pimp pulled her off him, her blue dress now red with blood. She was young, a rail of a girl with a bruised eye, and there was something at once desperate and tender in her gaze toward the violinist as she struggled to escape her pimp’s grip and return to her lover until the pimp punched her in the face and she crumpled and her eyes went flat.
The other two musicians had put down their instruments and rushed to the violinist’s side. The guitarist removed his shirt to bandage the wound and stanch the flow of blood. The pimp punched his girl again, and Dante wanted to help her but she feared that man’s wrath, his muscle, his knife. She could feel both wounds—the blade inside the violinist, the punch on the girl’s face—as though they’d happened to her. She flexed her calf so she could feel the dagger rub against it, hard and ready, though what could she do with it against such a large and savage man? It was nothing, really, a cub’s tooth in a den of lions. The room was packed with men hunched over scarred tables, smoking at the crowded bar, leaning against the back wall cluttered with dry-good drawers, coffee, flour, sugar, each word painted in a hopeful cursive. No one made a move in the girl’s defense. Leda had always thought women were to be defended, that this was a basic law among men, but now she was confronted with another of their laws: that whores were not women and so the same rules did not apply. And if she was ever found out, she could be just like that whore up on the stage in her blood-streaked dress, a woman beyond the laws of decency, abandoned to the brutal cold. She drew her shoulders back and kept her mouth shut.
It was the barman who intervened after the third punch. “Now now,” he called out. “You either calm down or take this outside. I’m not having this in my café.”
The pimp grabbed the woman by the hair and dragged her, now silent, through the crowd and out into the night. The barman went to the stage and helped the guitarist carry the wounded violinist to the storeroom. The bandoneón player was left alone on the stage, arms limp at his sides.
“Is that it, then?” a man called out. “No more music?”
The bandoneonist looked lost, adrift on a suddenly red stage. He was not very old, perhaps twenty-four, a small man whose bulging eyes made him look perpetually mournful. A man cursed with a temperament too delicate for this place. But Dante had heard him play on many nights and knew that, when it came to music, this man was as solid as a mountain. A murmur of complaint began to move through the crowd, spiked with jeers, and when a glass flew to the stage and shattered on the wall behind the bandoneonist, a veil lifted for Dante and she saw her chance.
She didn’t think. She didn’t weigh the risks. She strode to the stage, picked up the violin from the floor, coated with blood, and said quietly to the bandoneonist, “I can play with you.”
The bandoneonist stared at the young man in front of him as though he’d suggested lewd behavior at a funeral. “Play?”
“Just until your friend gets back,” Dante said quickly. “Until he’s better.”
The bandoneonist seemed to weigh this possibility, consider what alternatives he had, and give up on them. He nodded blankly, sat down, and picked up his bandoneón. The instrument was scuffed but elegant, with mother-of-pearl inlay and metal ribbing along the black accordion center. The keys along the sides resembled little stained teeth. “What songs do you know?”
“How about ‘El Choclo’?”
They played. The violin was red and sticky with another man’s blood and also lighter-weight and more worn in the neck than Dante’s own instrument, not to mention that a raw-copper smell rose from its bridge to fill her senses and her fingers were surely getting stained, but it was still a violin and Dante could still could play it, clumsily at first, with a tone more rasping than she wanted it though at least her notes were accurate, her rhythm true, the bandoneonist glanced at her as if in reassurance and added a little flourish to his melodic line, she played through her embarrassment, played through the blood, and when her sound grew cleaner the bandoneonist smiled and that was when they truly merged, the song robust, men dancing again, with each other or with whores and by the third song the guitarist had emerged from the back room and joined back in and it was magic to blend sound with them like this, with strangers, and the sound they made was red red red and stripped of all the lies they told all day and night to survive these Américas, a naked sound that pulsed with everything they longed to be and never would become except like this, alone in a crowd, playing tango.
They played for two more hours, during which the wounded violinist bled to death in the back room and thereby made his position available to the new young man if he would have it, the guitarist said, and what was your name again?
His name was Dante and he would have it. Oh yes he most certainly would.
Before Dante left Il Sasso that night, the barman put a sweaty wad of small bills in his hand. “See you tomorrow, kid.”
Dante walked out, exalted, wide awake. It was five a.m. and the street rang with each step as if it craved the impact of her feet. As if the streets themselves were a musical instrument, a vast drum of asphalt and stone. She would play better tomorrow, better still after that, even if it meant she had to practice until her fingers bled. She felt hungry for something: for improvement, for the stage, for life itself. She meant to go home but there were damp bills in her pocket and they insisted on another plan, they sent her around a corner to the left and down a narrow street to La Moneda, where, by the great serendipity of this night, Dante found what she didn’t realize she was looking for.
The sparrow-girl. In her fraying green dress. She was just coming back downstairs when Dante’s drink arrived at the bar. Dante shot the grappa back and caught the girl’s eye. This time she held the girl’s gaze and it was thrilling, the way the girl came toward her as though a mere look could ho
ld the power of a magnet over iron.
An easy boy, this one, the girl thought as she approached the bar. He didn’t seem violent, not yet, and might even be a little scared. The scared ones were easier, except when fear turned mean, which made for the worst customers of all. It had been a decent night so far. There were no new bruises and the man she’d just left had been quick, rote, muttering in a language she didn’t recognize and so easily ignored. In her three years in Argentina, she’d spread her legs for every language on earth or, at least, many more languages than she’d known existed as a little girl. She spoke Spanish now but not the other tongues; she didn’t want to know them, wanted the men’s voices to wash over her like water over rocks, rushing, senseless, soon gone. She never spoke Polish anymore. Polish was a secret language locked up in a box deep in her mind. She refused to open it—her one rebellion. The worst men were not the ones who beat her, or the ones who tore her that-place and made it hurt for days; the worst men were the Poles who tried to speak to her. She pretended they were wrong, shook her head as if she didn’t understand. What are you? they asked. A mute? A Russian? Some gave up, they weren’t there to talk after all, but others got angry and tried to punch her into answering but they always lost the fight, she always won, she would not do it.
The box would stay locked up until she died. She dreamed of death the way other girls her age dreamed of marriage. When she died, she’d have to go to Hell—she didn’t fear it anymore, she’d seen it already—but first she’d march up to the gates of Heaven and open her Polish, open her mouth, pour words between the golden bars so Yahweh and all the archangels could tremble at what she had to say, because she’d say everything then, she wouldn’t hold back, she’d dare to call God by His name and spit through the gates and shout Where were you? Have you seen your cursed América? and if they listened, those archangels, Michat, Gabriel, Rafat, she’d send them down to tear the faces off the men who’d carried her across the ocean.
She’ll see the world, the stranger said to her father, and his gold rings glinted in the firelight. Her father stared at his visitor’s black suit, tailored in a modern fashion never before seen in the village, no doubt the finest clothing Warsaw had to offer. He seemed proud of the visit and dwarfed by it, a peasant called on by a king. She was at the edge of the room, crushing dried marjoram with a pestle beside her mother. Matka was separating dough into strands, to braid into challah for Shabbat. She looked tired, Matka. She was always tired. She’d borne eleven children. And you, she always said, are the most difficult, you’re a colt who needs breaking, your poor husband will have a hard job. But she said none of this to the stranger when he spoke of taking her pretty girl, and so he said it, your pretty girl, to the New World, where a husband would be waiting. The stranger paid her father a dowry fit for a princess, or so it seemed, and also promised to pay for her bridal gown, travel, food, and shelter until her wedding day.
Since then she’d seen the ocean from the deck of a great ship and seen, also, many small dim rooms that filled too fast with men. There was no wedding. The first weeks were the worst because the colt still rose in her and forced the men to teach her a lesson and another and another. Lessons that broke the skin and filled every orifice she had, she was a field full of holes, she was a poisoned field where nothing would ever grow again.
That was three years ago. Now it was better. There were nights like this when she felt almost nothing at all. She rarely went outside, but she didn’t miss the sun. She didn’t want heat, didn’t want to be exposed. She missed the cold of home, deep winter, hot red broth, fire crackling in the oven, skins and wool and furs to enfold you, soft layers between you and the world.
When she dared to dream, she dreamed of snow.
Snow casting itself across the fields to hide the broken earth.
Snow alighting on each branch in fragile benediction.
Snow to force the bears into their caves.
Snow on roofs as if to wash them.
Snow before the footprints, before the mud and ice, as far as the eye can see a hush of white.
And when her room became unbearable, she didn’t bear it at all: she dissolved from her body and the city and América itself, and reappeared in the most perfect moment of her life. She was eight years old, out to fetch water in the first snow of winter, stealing a glance at the field. It was so entrancing, crisp and pure and quiet, that it took her a minute to see the miracle: a kropiatka bird, perched in the whiteness, so light he left no footprint. Nobody would believe her if she told. The kropiatka migrated in the fall, and were never seen in winter. Surely his brethren were all gone by now. But he was here, and did not act lost; he trilled with shocking joy; she couldn’t take her eyes off this brazen little bird, the most beautiful creature she’d ever seen, so full of spring that he sang in the face of everything, the loss of his flock, a buried field, the dark about to come.
The sparrow-girl arrived at Dante’s side, looked up into his face, and waited. Dante wondered what to say. Good evening? You’ve been on my mind? My name is Dante? She wasn’t at all sure that she wanted to tell the girl her name, or that the girl would have any use for it.
She settled for the most direct route. “How much to go upstairs?”
“Thirty centavos.”
Dante nodded, and the girl turned and walked away. Dante followed her, to the stairs and up them (sway of green skirts, faded and stained but what shaped them no less wondrous) and down a narrow dim hall lined with closed doors through which Dante could hear business being conducted and the last door on the left was theirs. It was a tiny space, just large enough for a single cot with a mattress bearing a stained sheet and no pillow. A kerosene lamp on the sill held a dim flame. The girl turned to Dante, expressionless, and moved to open her customer’s trousers, but Dante was ready and caught her wrist.
“No,” she said. “I don’t want that.”
The girl looked bewildered, then angry, the face of a cheated child. She was Dante’s age, perhaps a bit younger, sixteen or seventeen. Here we are, Dante thought, two teenage girls in a room, nothing more, though one of us will never know it. She put money in the girl’s hand, a whole peso she’d just earned at Il Sasso, the bill still damp with sweat or rum or God knew what.
“Don’t worry, I’m paying.”
The girl looked at the full peso in surprise. “So what do you want, then?”
Her accent was unfamiliar to Dante, nothing liquid about her Spanish, all firm bones and raw angles. “To look at you.”
“Just to look?”
“And touch?”
The girl’s stare became mocking.
Dante felt like a fool. She shouldn’t have phrased it as a question. She’d thought the girl would be glad to have a customer who asked permission, but instead it seemed to expose something pathetic about him, something laughable.
“I suppose you’d rather have the dress off.”
A lump rose in Dante’s throat. She nodded.
“Fifteen minutes, just like everybody else,” the girl said as she unlaced her bodice and let her dress fall to the floor. She stepped out of it, wearing a brassiere and panties. “What about these?”
Dante nodded again.
“What’s the matter?” she said disdainfully as she took off the rest of her clothes. “Don’t tell me you haven’t seen this before.”
Dante couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe. The girl was naked now, and Dante filled her eyes with the sparrow-girl, whose breasts and skin and hips and thatch of hair where her legs met were more glorious than she could have imagined. The sight stirred something in Dante that was fierce enough to break her. This brutal city was full of noise and blades and death and dirt and hunger and also this, a naked girl so beautiful she put the stars to shame. Dante might have fallen to her knees before the sight and reached toward the girl, but suddenly the girl, now clear about her power and her customer’s submission, took matters in her own hands: she lay down on the cot and closed her eyes.
Dante, who was also Leda, sat gingerly on the edge of the bed. The girl must be tired. She’d been working for hours. And working, what that meant for her was another thing entirely from factory shifts or hours with needle and thread. How had the girl come to this dismal life? She couldn’t bear to disturb her. Part of her longed to enfold the girl the way she’d wanted to enfold Cora years ago when the nightmare began, wrap her in a blanket and protect her from the harsh side of lust. But this time she, Leda, was the enemy—sitting here beside the girl she could not deny it: she lusted. That was why she’d come here, what she hadn’t been able to admit even in the depths of her own mind. But how could she want such a thing? How could a woman—? She’d never heard of such a thing. It had to be impossible or else demonic, the worst kind of sin, beyond hope of penance.
The Gods of Tango: A Novel Page 17