The Gods of Tango: A Novel

by Carolina de Robertis

  And yet here she was. Wanting.

  She touched the girl, lightly, on her belly. The girl didn’t respond. She was either asleep or, more likely, pretending to be so. Dante let her hands move across the girl’s skin, a gentle glide along the perfect slopes of breasts and arms and hips and breasts again, her hands amazed not only at the loveliness beneath them but also at their own joy. There was pleasure in her palms and in the rest of her as well, a hot vortex in the space between her hips. A sensation so strange and powerful she could almost have believed it supernatural. In that moment she knew that she’d rather spurn the laws of God and go to hell when she died than let this be her last time near a beautiful naked girl. And then, as if the girl had a clock inside her ticking off the seconds of her task, she sat up and pushed Dante from the bed.

  “That’s it,” she said, reaching for her clothes. “Time to go.”

  Dante stood, dazed, blood rushing to her head. She didn’t know what to say. Whether to thank the girl or beg forgiveness, or tell her she was beautiful. She felt dizzy, unhinged, hot to the marrow of her bones. She tried to gather her thoughts.

  “Out,” the sparrow-girl said.

  As Dante walked down the hall to the stairs, she prayed—though not to God, who, in his wrath, would not understand her—that she hadn’t hurt the girl. That the girl had somehow felt the worship in her touch.

  But you didn’t only want to worship, did you?

  No. Yes. I don’t know. I don’t know what it’s called, this wanting, no words exist for it.

  She walked home on streets alive with dawn.

  Dante-also-Leda played at Il Sasso throughout the spring, each night its own small miracle. There were no more murders onstage, and only a few stabbings in all those weeks. There was one night when a compadrito pulled a pistol on another man, but the bartender, a seasoned protector of his small domain, got them out onto the street before the shots began. Dante played without sustaining a single wound. With her own violin under her chin she was able to play better than the first night. The two other musicians didn’t talk to her much, didn’t ask her questions, and she was glad of it. She learned new songs from her fellow band members, new moves to strengthen her playing. She learned to play loudly, and to square her shoulders, firm up her stance, and push forward her chest so she could sustain the music for a long time. You couldn’t play in a timid girl-pose without wrecking your back and neck. You had to hold your violin like you were king of somewhere. She reveled in the boldness of it. The more tangos she learned, the more at home she felt inside the form: no two songs were alike but there was overlap in the melodies, in their favored notes, their essential texture, the build and release of verse and chorus. It was a simple form, really, the tango: nothing like those convoluted classical melodies over which her father had labored for weeks; meant not for the plaza in the light of day but for this place, these sticky nights, this lit café where the insomniac soul could meet its match. She played tango after tango, songs that swelled, poured, flowed, strutted, raced, crept, crooned, sparked, howled, mourned, bragged, and battled with the air. She embraced them all, played them all. Her joy grew alongside her skill.

  She didn’t miss being female, though she would have liked relief from the dull soreness of her breasts. Her nipples pressed and crushed beneath the bandages. The pain that Dafne may have felt in her tree-limbs after metamorphosis, when she became a tree to escape Apollo and take refuge in the freedom only an enchanted world would give her. Pain, there had been pain in the version Cora had told her as a child—for the hands now forced into the immobile form of branches, the trunk that had no mouth with which to speak. That’s how Leda thought of the soreness in her nipples. My Dafne pain.

  But the balled cloth in the front of her pants: that she did not find uncomfortable at all. It seemed to graft to her. She experimented with different shapes and textures, with socks and napkins and torn rags, with colors—blue and white-gone-gray and brown—until she finally settled on red. She felt the strongest and most confident when wearing red cloth at her groin. It pumped its presence into her. Its slight pressure reminded her of that place in her body, the place where a male sex would be, so that, when onstage, she played from it. It didn’t feel like an absence. Something coiled there, a source of heat, and she pictured it spreading through her body, pouring through her arms to her violin, where it transformed into whipping strokes of sound.

  They were beautiful, those first months at Il Sasso. But she did not sleep. And one day she arrived at work so tired that she dozed and almost cut her hand off in the tobacco grinder. She jolted awake to the shout of a fellow worker—“¡Dante!”—just in time to pull back from the spinning blade.

  She thanked the man. He was a plump Spaniard who scowled through his workdays and rarely spoke.

  “Idiot,” the Spaniard said and went back to his station.

  The blade whirred on. Its sound became aggressive to her ear, wwhhrrrr, I would have taken you; tobacco, hand, it’s all the same to me. Leda, she thought, you’ve got to stop this before you lose a limb and then can’t play at all. The factory and the music, it was hazardous to do both. But she brushed off the thought: she couldn’t quit her factory job, because her musician’s pay was not enough to live on. As for leaving Il Sasso, she couldn’t bear the thought. Playing at home and at the café were not the same. It was at the café that she stretched the edges of her music, learning from the other men, fusing with the guitar’s round chords, the bandoneón’s bittersweet drone. They rarely spoke to her, these fellow musicians, and yet she felt engaged in a long wordless conversation with them, one that struck up when they played and wove through spaces she could not otherwise reach. And then there was the place itself. Il Sasso. A visit to the lip of chaos every time. In playing for strangers—hard men, brash whores, the scattered rich boys—in watching them dance to the sounds she made, she felt an incomparable power, as though it were not the music but she the music-maker moving their bodies, propelling them, unlocking their desire.

  As for her own desire, she gave it all to her violin, and to the sparrow-girl, whom she visited about once a week and thought about on all the days between. The girl had grown accustomed to her strange new client, the young man with broken Spanish who stared at her and never once unbuttoned his trousers. They no longer spoke to each other: a look at the bar was enough to signal the beginning and send them both up the stairs, to the room, where the girl took off her clothes with quick efficiency, lay down, and closed her eyes, leaving the strange client alone with a beauty that reduced him to mute idiocy, that made him, for fifteen minutes, a gaping fool. Dante didn’t dare do more than touch her with feather-soft fingers, not wanting to disturb the girl, burdened by the thought of her just-past hours and those about to come. Touch that wouldn’t disrupt sleep, though potent enough to leave Dante’s fingertips burning as if she’d dragged her hands through fire.

  At home, at La Rete, she took to playing violin in the patio, at first to keep her skills honed and then for the sheer pleasure of it, because now, after a few hours without her violin, her fingers began to itch, craving her instrument the way her lungs craved cigarettes. She’d thought it would annoy people if she played in the patio, in the middle of crowded family life, but it was just the opposite: when she stopped, men and women and especially children asked her for more. Sometimes her neighbors kept on washing and cleaning and smoking, but at other times they took brief breaks to dance: La Strega danced with her son (who towered over her), the Lebanese brothers grasped their wives, the French and Calabrese children tested moves with each other, the childless couple from Spain (the wife now pregnant) glided across the tile floor with silent steps, the air around them crackling with a deeply private exchange. It reminded Leda of when her father used to play the violin when she was much younger, on Sundays after the family meal. Neighbors would come over to listen, or he’d strike up in the plaza and make people smile, sing, dance. A single melodic line can be enough to dance to. One good solid
rope of music is enough to pull your body if it’s ready, if it’s awake. In Alazzano, one lone violin could make people rise and move, clapping the rhythm, kicking their feet: grandmothers, lanky boys, girls dropping their compulsory modesty for a moment, laborers just in from the fields, and in those times Leda had thought her village the most marvelous place on earth. A place you’d never want to leave, not ever, when such magic could be spun out of nothing more than sun and people and a single violin. She tried to bring some of that feeling to her playing in the conventillo, turning the patio into a kind of plaza, despite its crush of bodies and endless damp and stink you could not run from. She tried to play the far green hills into their midst.

  And she had loved them, those green hills, she truly had. They had been beautiful—they had been home—before Cora’s madness. In her new San Telmo life, Leda tried not to think of Cora’s madness, but it was no use: anytime her village entered her memory, the madness spilled in too and flooded everything, drenched her mind.

  Cora’s madness reached the public eye on three occasions. The first time took place three days after the afternoon by the river, the one on which Leda had failed to lift her cousin’s spirits with sun and grass and tales of old Pompeii. Leda had spent those next three days weighed down by shame. She had not healed her cousin. She had failed. She would try harder. They would find a way to run away and make a new life, somewhere, anywhere, she would follow Cora’s heels down the path out of her village and not ask questions or stop even if her soles bled, walking and walking until her soul-cousin said now look! look! we’ve arrived.

  But she had missed her chance.

  She was at the washing tubs on the plaza with the other women, scrubbing her brothers’ clothes, when the screams began. They were coming from the church, and all the women left their dirty linens and crossed the flagstones, hands dripping with soap.

  “Stop it!” a woman’s voice shouted inside the church, into the screams. “Stop, you devil-girl!”

  The women crowded the church door, so that Leda had to crane her neck to see over them into the chapel. Cora stood in the aisle between the pews, a few paces from the altar. On the altar lay her crumpled dress. She was naked except for a white cloth that Sister Teresa of the local order was struggling to keep around her shoulders, but Cora was younger and stronger and kept writhing to push it off, keening in protest.

  “Sister Teresa!” the women said.

  “I’m—trying—to cover—her up—”

  Cora bent down and bit Sister Teresa on the wrist.

  Sister Teresa screamed, and the cloth came loose and fell to the floor. At that moment, Leda saw that it was an altar cloth, adorned with an image of the chalice and the host. A collective sigh of horror rose from the women in the doorway at the sight of the holy embroidery on the floor, and of Cora’s nakedness, her bared teeth, the unnatural twist of Sister Teresa’s arm.

  Within seconds the baker’s wife was beside them. She was a burly woman who lifted great pans of loaves from dawn to dusk, and she pulled Cora from the nun with one swift gesture. Cora screamed and Leda felt the women of the village tense in anticipation of more fighting—and there was surely pleasure in the anticipation, Leda felt it though she knew none of them would ever dare admit it—but then, to all of their surprise, the scream ended abruptly as Cora fell limp against the baker’s wife, her head against the woman’s ample breasts.

  “Get her clothes,” the baker’s wife instructed Sister Teresa, who obeyed.

  When the dress arrived Cora shook her head wildly against the baker’s wife’s chest and made a sound, Eeeeeeeeeee.

  “Get dressed!” said the women at the door, swarming toward her.

  “The nerve.”

  “How dare she?”

  “Sacrilege!”

  “Someone get that girl into clothes before—”

  “I’ll see to it—”

  “Oh just wait, let me past, I’ll slap her so hard she won’t recall her name!”

  “Not if I get to her first, you won’t—”

  There were several women around her now, struggling with the dress and with Cora’s limbs, trapping her in a human cage that grabbed and slapped at her while she kept droning Eeeeeeeeeee. Leda stood frozen at the door. This was not her soul-cousin Cora, the bright one, the brave one. This could not be.

  “Get her out of here,” said a man’s voice. The priest’s voice. He had entered through the door from the sacristy.

  “You heard him,” the baker’s wife called out. “Let us through!”

  The women made way and Cora and the baker’s wife came to the door, the girl still naked and still in the matron’s arms. They walked in unison like a strange four-legged beast, crossing the sun-drenched plaza, slouching their way toward Cora’s house, Palazzo Mazzoni, with a crowd of women in their wake that grew as more women abandoned their washing and their hearth fires to murmur aspersions and shake their heads and stare and clutch their hearts and hold up evil eyes and crucifixes with a pageantry that made Leda think of a saint’s day procession, turned inside out.

  When they arrived at Palazzo Mazzoni, Cora’s mother took her by the wrist, slapped her for all to see, pulled her inside, and slammed the door. The crowd waited at the steps, hoping for shouts to leak through the regal windows or for more heinous sounds from the girl. But there was only silence. The crowd dispersed and Leda stayed alone for a long time, watching the windows of the upstairs rooms for hints of what had happened next. She even knocked on the front door but got no answer. By the time she returned to the washing tubs the light had left the village and it was too dark to finish. Mamma would scold her for coming home without the laundry done, but at that point she didn’t care. She could think only of Cora. Her bony wrist in the nun’s clasp. Her wilt against the baker’s wife. Cora, carissima, what has happened to you?

  The next day the story was all over the village. Cora had walked into the church in the middle of the day, when not even old widow Fiora was in the pews. She was so quiet, at first, that nobody had known she was there until Sister Teresa came into the sacristy to mend the father’s alb and heard humming in the chapel. When she went to look, she found Cora on her knees behind the altar, completely naked, humming with her eyes on the tall crucifix on the back wall. Her clothes were on the altar. The melody she hummed was so familiar that the words sprang right into the nun’s mind. Kyrie eleison. Kyrie eleison. In her shock, Sister Teresa reached for the closest thing at hand that could dispel the sacrilege, a folded altar cloth, and tried to wrap it around the girl and drag her out of the church at the same time. That was when the girl began to scream.

  The following Sunday, Cora missed church again. Leda felt the disappointment of the gossips as surely as if they’d given it voice. There would be no spectacle, no blasphemy, no chance to tear down the girl. Still they savored the delicious horror of the story. Madness alone would have been enough of a crime to delight them. But to have it come from the daughter of Mateo Mazzoni, landowner, exploiter of poor men, cause of so much suffering that Christ himself would have flinched to meet him—to see him shamed by his own daughter seemed too good to be true. A revenge sent down from heaven for all the denizens of Alazzano.

  Cora Matta, they called her. Crazy Cora. Over the washing tubs, at the outdoor market, the bakery, in the apothecary’s shop. Days and weeks of Cora Matta this, Cora Matta that. She carried the brunt of the sins of her father. Two months passed before the second public sighting of her madness. It took place on a Thursday, when Leda was at home making dinner with her mother. She saw nothing of the incident and only heard about it later. This time Cora was found in the woods east of the village, naked again, her dress nowhere to be seen. She had covered her body in dirt and caked her hair with it, so that she looked like some sort of swamp creature risen from a realm beneath the earth. She had dug a hole in the soil with her bare hands, a low shallow bowl in which she knelt, eating dirt by the fistful. It was the blacksmith’s son who found her this time, a boy of elev
en who ran screaming all the way back to his house and dragged his father out to see the earth-witch, or so he called the apparition he’d seen. The blacksmith tried to talk to Cora but was met with nothing more than a silent gaze that he later said would haunt him to his dying day.

  That’s no earth-witch, he told his son. That’s Cora Matta.

  He sent his boy for help. It took four grown men to restrain Cora and bring her home.

  The third and final occasion took place a month after that, two and a half hours after midnight. Cora was found in the central plaza of Alazzano, under a full moon. The whole incident might have passed unnoticed if the blacksmith’s wife had not woken from a nightmare and stepped out for a breath of air, only to hear a melody borne on the dark breeze. She’d followed the sound out to the plaza, then rushed back home for her crucifix, the best protection against the kind of devil-work she’d seen, and in the process she woke half the village and drew them out of their beds to wallow in the spectacle. Leda woke to the sound of footsteps on the street below her window and voices muttering their alarm.

  Cora Matta, Cora Matta.

  Dirt in her—

  The devil—

  Shhhp! The horror.

  Leda’s gut clenched at the sound of her cousin’s name. She snuck out of her house despite the absolute certainty that Mamma would beat her if she heard of it. To her surprise, the rest of her family seemed to sleep through the noise. She walked the two blocks to the plaza in her nightgown. The night air chilled her skin, an exhilarating, unfamiliar feeling that might have caused her pleasure if she hadn’t been so scared for Cora.

  She expected to find a tight knot of women and men around her cousin, beating and attacking as they had inside the church, but instead she saw a wide circle of figures around the plaza. In the light of the full moon, the townspeople looked like silhouettes of Death, their crucifixes held out before them, their Our Fathers and Hail Marys a low blanket of sound. At the center of the human ring, many paces away as though no one dared get too close, lay Cora. She was fully clothed this time, splayed out on the ground with her limbs extended in the shape of a five-pointed star. She must have gone to the woods first, because her hair and dress and exposed skin were matted with dirt. She was droning the same tune she had the first time, Kyrie eleison, Kyrie eleison, Kyrie eleison. It was not a hum but an openmouthed sound, a wordless aaaahhh somewhere between a song and a moan. Her voice skulked under the surface of the town’s muttered prayers, almost but not quite drowned out.