Leda walked toward the center of the circle. “Cora,” she said. “Cora.”
Cora kept on droning and ignored her.
Before Leda could reach her cousin, someone came up close behind her and held her back. “There’s nothing you can do, child,” the person said. It was the baker’s wife. “Come on. Step back.”
Her arms were kind but firm and Leda struggled against them. She called out. “Cora!”
Cora sat up and met Leda’s eyes for the first time since the madness had begun.
And it was what Leda saw in those eyes that took the fight out of her. It was not madness in that gaze, but something else she’d never seen before. In that moment, standing in the moonlit plaza restrained by the baker’s wife, Leda felt something inside her come undone, the fragile hooks that give shape to the mind and keep it from devolving into chaos. She knew nothing, could do nothing, had nothing to hold on to except the melody that Cora had spun and spun without its words, Kyrie eleison, whose meaning now swallowed the night.
Lord. Have mercy.
She might have stayed at Il Sasso forever if not for Santiago.
He arrived one night in December, when the first hot breaths of summer were forcing men’s jackets off and sweat onto every forehead. He was an elegant man. His clothes were not fine, but they were ironed and the trousers creased. He wore his hat at a confident tilt. He seemed to be in his late thirties and had a sensuous face, the black curly hair of a Sicilian or what the Spaniards called a Moor, and eyes so large and liquid that women surely drowned their hearts there of their own free will. He did not dance. Instead, he leaned at the bar and watched the band intently, eyes fixed on Dante. It made Dante nervous to have someone watching her so closely. Who was this man and what was he looking for? Did he suspect her secret? But how could that be? Nobody had suspected her until now, to the point where there were moments she herself forgot that she was not a man. What if he’d been sent by someone who had known her as Leda? Fausta. Arturo. Nestore. Someone who had caught her trail and sent a man to track her down. There was no logic to this fear—none of these people had any reason to bother, except perhaps Arturo, and surely he had moved on by now and found another bride?—but still it caught Dante by the throat and made her stumble through the rest of the set.
When her band took a break, she tried to avoid the stranger, but he followed her to the far end of the bar. “Dante?”
“Yes.”
“Santiago.”
She started to turn away.
“Let me buy you a drink.”
“What do you want?”
“Just to talk to you.”
Dante hesitated. If this man was in fact spying on her for someone who’d known her before, she didn’t want to hear what he had to say. But it might be worse not to. “One drink,” she said.
They stood at the crowded bar, and when their grappas came they shot them down in unison.
“They said you were good,” Santiago said.
Dante wondered who they were.
“And they were right.”
She almost thanked him but didn’t want to seem soft. She nodded briskly.
“I came to hear you.” He leaned closer. There was something electric about his presence; the air around him came alive. “I’m forming an orquesta and I want you to join us.”
Not what she’d expected. For a moment she couldn’t speak. Santiago waited with an unreadable expression on his face. She collected herself. “Where?”
“There’s a dance hall that wants to contract us, where customers know how to pay. Nothing like this place. Well heeled.” He gestured to the bartender to fill their glasses. The bartender, pouring whiskey to a loud fistful of men at the other end of the bar, waved back in exasperated assent. “But there’s more than that. There are cabarets opening up downtown, as fine as anything in Paris, and I’m telling you right now, one day my orquesta will play there.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
“And you need a violinist?”
“I need you.”
Something swelled open inside her. She tried not to show it. “What’s your instrument?”
“The bandoneón. There’ll be three of us, soon four.”
The bartender returned, filled their glasses, and disappeared again, picking his hairy ear as he went. Dante had said one drink, but here she was, another shot, more warmth as it went down.
“When would we start?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow!”
“Or else I lose the contract. Dante. Quit this sad place and come play some real tango.”
Dante fingered her shot glass. Her fellow musicians were starting to head back to the stage. The fistful of men were on their third round of whiskey, their voices rising, banter on the verge of aggressive. There might be blood tonight.
“Listen,” Santiago said, and his eyes glittered with the reflected flame of a lamp, “you’re a young man and you seem new to the city. Am I right?”
Dante raised her eyebrows and didn’t answer.
“Right. So you may not realize that the tango is changing. Transforming. This winter, all those months we were huddled in the rain, it was summer over in France, and guess what those Parisians were doing?”
“Sitting in the sunshine?” Dante asked, imagining white parasols, a sculpted green park, cuff links that glinted with light.
“Dancing the tango.”
“Our tango?” Dante said, amazed, both at this news and at the our that had just escaped her mouth.
“Of course, yes, our tango. What else? You ever seen the rich boys who come down here for a drink and an easy girl?”
“Of course.”
“Well, seems some of them took the dance on their Paris vacations. Showed off to the French girls. It sparked a fire. Now all the fancy ladies in Paris want to dance the way these whores are doing it here at old Il Sasso. Can you imagine?”
Dante shook her head. She couldn’t. The Old World, Europe, ignited by songs from the grim conventillos of New Babel. To think she’d crossed the ocean to find this Argentinean music, only to find it sailing back to Europe, closing a vast loop around the world.
Santiago went on. “We still have no idea what the tango can become. It wasn’t long ago that there was nowhere you could dance it in public. There’s a whole high-class side of this city where, a few years back, they’d sooner have swum in piss than danced the tango. You probably haven’t seen that side of Buenos Aires yet.”
Dante shook her head.
“I didn’t think so. Well, it’s there, and let me tell you something about the rich: they follow Paris. And with Paris dancing tangos, everything will change. It’s not just about making money. This music of ours is going to rise up into something.”
The guitarist was starting to glare at Dante. Time to get back to the stage.
“What kind of something?”
“A mark on history. Even if nobody knows about us, even if no one remembers our names. Music that sings after we die.”
The way he was speaking. The thrill of it. “I have to get back to work.”
“Don’t go back up there. Forget this place. Walk out with me tonight, right now. I’ll pay your night’s wages, we’ll practice until dawn.”
He was staring at Dante now with a look that flustered the woman in her, a look that would have seemed seductive if she weren’t disguised as a man. Behind him, the whiskey men were arguing now but there were no knives out, she couldn’t make out their words. A whore came over and draped herself between the two ringleaders, smiled like her mouth was a weapon all its own. Distraction. God bless the whores.
“Where do you work, other than here, Dante? At a cigarette factory?”
Her spine went tight. Had he been spying on her after all? What else did he know? “Who told you?”
“Nobody. I can smell the tobacco.”
She went hot with embarrassment.
“Don’t worry. We all smell like our jobs
around here, whether it’s metal, tannin, bread, or shit. If you come work for me, one day, I swear to you, you can quit the factory and then you’ll just smell like music.”
Dante laughed. “Really? What does music smell like?”
“You tell me.”
Dante met Santiago’s gaze. He was serious. She had never met a man who talked this way. He loved music as recklessly as she did. It seemed madness to trust a stranger in this city. He could be tricking her, luring her into some sort of trap. Naïve new immigrant, easy to stab for a few coins. And yet his vision pulled at her. It made her want to follow him anywhere, out into the night, like the children in the story of the pied piper, blinded by an irresistible song.
“Che, Dante.” It was the guitarist, come up behind her. He grabbed Dante’s shoulder. “You coming or what?”
Santiago waited, watching them.
Dante rose. She meant to walk to the stage. She meant to ask Santiago for more time, to come back tomorrow, in a week, when she’d had a chance to think. But the guitarist’s grip was too tight on her shoulder and what if this stranger didn’t come back and found another violinist for his scheme and together they played music that sang after they died? She would never forgive herself. This man had opened a portal in the chaos of this city, and if she didn’t step through it now she’d never know what lay on the other side.
“I’m coming,” Dante said.
The guitarist let go of her arm. “About time.”
She strode up to the stage and grasped her violin and bow. She felt Santiago watching her from the bar. Her instrument case was backstage, but there was no time for that; no matter, she’d get another one, a new skin. “I’m leaving,” she said and headed down to the bar.
“What!” the guitarist shouted behind her. “You can’t just leave, you—”
“Quickly,” Santiago spat when she reached him. He grasped Leda’s wrist and pulled her through the crowded café. The guitarist was close on their heels, pursuing them through the thick crowd of men, and when Leda turned she saw the glint of his dagger and the red rage of his face. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected but she hadn’t expected a knife.
“Don’t look back, you idiot,” Santiago said. “Come on, come on—”
This is madness, Leda thought as she ran to the door with him, spilling across its threshold, heart pounding as they made their escape into the night.
CINQUE
Ladies and Gentlemen!
She wanted it always, every bit of it, the blistered fingers and sore feet and arms aching from holding up that damn blessed violin, the long endless chain of nights performing until the sun came up as if only their music could make the light return. Her new orquesta’s sound tightened over the months, fusing into a shape that could curl and soar and sting. They played and played for arrogant and easy crowds alike. Then she’d walk home on streets dipped in the liquid gold of morning, looking around, dazed, amazed at the city that had taken her in and given her a way to survive. At least so far. Because no day was promised, nights even less so; it was not a soft city, it was full of edges on which you could cut yourself or trip and fall quick and lost right down to hell. Which made each breath of Buenos Aires air an act of grace. There were mornings when Dante came home to her matchbox of a room and lay her head down in wonder, one more night, one more stony dawn, a gift so large it almost seemed untenable. She earned her bread with her violin, a miracle that seemed as large as loaves and fishes. She was able to quit the factory, as Santiago had said, and live in a manner she hadn’t known was possible: from music. And for music. For what happened when bodies filled the dance halls and the tango gripped them like a beautiful curse, propelled them around the room in pairs, bodies caught in the fierce language of dance, the room disappears, the world disappears, all things give way to a single bright circuit of light between two dancers. She knew how it felt, she’d danced it too. She also knew that the feeling of the world reduced to two, and two alone, was an illusion. Because no couple generated the dance on its own. There was no tango without music, and the music came from her, from them, the music makers: she pressed her strings and fifty women’s shapely ankles moved in time, fifty lovely backs arched, fifty thighs lifted along trousered legs, oh, blessed kick, hook, sliding. Oh, bodies pressing as she pressed the sweet neck of her instrument and watched from the stage. Hold her close, compadre, Dante would think, flick your leg between hers, press her so gently to the left that she believes the turn is born from her own will, hold the small of her back like it’s the core of every pleasure on this earth, and I will give you my sound, over and over, night after night, my sound will move you, my sound will guide you, my sound, through you, makes love to her.
The orquesta was called El Cuarteto Torres, after their leader, El Negro Torres, whom Dante still called Santiago because this was how he introduced himself, always as Santiago, a given name that quickly disappeared behind the Negro that stuck to him and called from every mouth and every crowd, nothing to be done about it, a man does not name himself in a city like this one, the city names the man. In this city you didn’t even have to be a black man to be called El Negro, but if you were indeed black, even the way Santiago was, with the wide curls and olive skin Dante had at first mistaken for Mediterranean, then you were El Negro this or El Pardo that and there was no escaping, just as short men became El Petiso, fat men El Gordo, bald men El Pelado, on and on. The nickname becomes ravenous and swallows your first name whole. At first, Dante occasionally forgot and called him Negro, like everyone else, but she noticed that, although he didn’t seem to mind his nickname, when she remembered to call him Santiago there was something else in his reaction, a flicker of glad surprise. She knew what it felt like to want to define yourself. It was a slippery goal, never fully secured. She gave him what she could by using the name he chose.
Pedro was their second bandoneonist, not as agile on the keys as Santiago but always solid, a keen rope of sound. He often played with his eyes shut, wisps of his overgrown hair sticking to his sweaty skin, giving him the appearance of a strange amphibian creature, neither animal nor human, wet, transformed. Then he’d open his eyes and step offstage and the toughness would return to his face, the clenched jaw, the defiant chin, like a seasoned gangster or a boy who’s been roughed up one too many times. He was young, twenty-three at most, a drifter from the rural cattle lands outside the city. No one knew how he’d gotten himself to Buenos Aires, or why (though that was easy to imagine, as of course everybody did: the noise; the music; the work; the broader selection of whores; who wouldn’t come if they could?).
El Loro was the fourth member of the group, and played the violin alongside Dante. He became El Loro when he was three years old because, as translator for his parents—Jews arrived from Russia—he was forced to chatter and repeat himself incessantly in both languages. Just like a parrot, un loro, his conventillo neighbors said. El Loro was younger than Pedro, at twenty-one. He was born on a ship halfway across the Atlantic, which, according to a busybody matron who’d insisted on attending the birth, doomed him to roam without anchor for the rest of his life. What the hell, he said, laughing as he told the story over whiskey and stew after work at six a.m., what’s an anchor anyway? Just a chunk of metal to drag around. El Loro lived with his parents and sisters and brother in a small room, and shared all his earnings with them. He was friendlier than Pedro. When he talked, he swept the air with arcs so wide they seemed to enlarge the room. As a violinist, he was undisciplined, exuberant, bringing an energy that drove the group and was well tempered by the steadiness of Dante’s sound.
“You lose the tempo when you get excited,” Santiago told El Loro. “Control yourself. Come back to the bones. Follow Dante.”
“Of course. He’s like a rock, that Dante,” El Loro said, a little sulkily.
“He is.”
“How does he do it?” El Loro said. “A kid like him?”
El Loro and Pedro glanced at Dante for an answer. She shrugged and turned aw
ay to busy herself with her instrument case.
“Don’t worry about how he does it,” Santiago said. “Just be glad he does.”
She didn’t know how she did it, where the steadiness came from. Everything in her life was unsteady: pesos, bread, work, her hole of a room, the intense proximity of neighbors who must not under any circumstances discover what she was. Her life could be upended in an instant, and this truth often made her feel fragile, brittle-boned. And yet, when she stood on a stage (or in a corner when there was none) and played, something else awoke in her, a sureness so vast it seemed to belong not to her but to some mountain, some monster, some ancient thing. Not a sureness of survival—never that. A sureness of motion. A sureness of rhythm. A sureness of sounds bound together by desire.
Santiago was a mystery; he seemed driven by forces beyond the human world. There was no other way to explain the singular intensity with which he worked. He talked little about himself, and yet Dante felt as though she’d known him for a long time, as though she could tell him anything and he’d at least listen, if not understand. Thanks to him, she was no longer alone, but part of a group, a foursome floating through the world on a shared raft, and she trusted it, trusted where their leader was taking them even if he himself had no rudder and no map. She couldn’t say exactly why she trusted him. His assurance, perhaps, or the pure vigor of his vision. Santiago didn’t want to just play tango: he wanted to vault it into rarefied realms where its existence still went unacknowledged. His orquesta couldn’t just be good; it had to become a legend. This made him a harsh leader sometimes, demanding, though not ever cruel as she had heard other orquesta leaders could be. He never insulted or lied to his musicians, never attempted to cheat them of their pay. But he rode them like a ghoul. There were no breaks in rehearsals; mistakes onstage were crimes. Sometimes Pedro and El Loro grumbled and threatened to leave, but the truth was that they knew they could be replaced, that there were many men who’d taken up instruments recently with dreams of conquering the tango world. Yes, granted, Pedro and El Loro had a unique combination of rough talent and the kind of dedication that suggests insanity, which gave them good chances, but even so, they wouldn’t risk it. Dante never thought of leaving, never questioned the bright conviction in Santiago’s voice when he said, We’re going somewhere, I’m telling you, keep with me and keep the faith. In any case, she didn’t care too much where they were going. The luminous present moment was enough.
The Gods of Tango: A Novel Page 19