The Gods of Tango: A Novel

by Carolina de Robertis

  They played everywhere. They played where they could. There were lush times when El Cuarteto Torres had two or three offers at once and could choose the best venue among them and, more often, leaner times when they had to fill in with the kind of place where they left at dawn sticky and tense and relieved to have made it out alive. There were gleaming dance halls where tips for the musicians slowly filled a crystal bowl; cafés whose candlelight hid the stains on tablecloths and whores’ clothes; bars where old bullet holes riddled a web of cracks in the walls, the work, perhaps, of a violent and furious Arachne. They played through the night, played to push the sun up over rooftops. They played for poor men and for rich men out for adventures among the poor, for women paid to dance and women paid to dance and fuck, and, when they were really hard up, for women paid to fuck so much they never came out to dance. For all her months and months of this work Dante could not get used to the women. They plagued her. Plagued her dreams. She woke up hot, gilded with the sweat of lust and grief and shame because so many of the women had eyes like those of dead fish and the other men seemed not to see this, or not to care, thinking, perhaps, she’s already broken, it doesn’t matter what I do, or simply look at that can’t wait to fuck her. But she herself could not get past the thought of these women’s pain. It seemed a crime to want them. She lay in the dark trying not to think of them, trying not to think of Cora on her back eyes shut against the shadow of her father. Dante could not stand the thought of hurting a woman.

  Oh, you liar. The beast inside you. Waking you in sweats like this, what do you think it wants?

  Not to hurt, no, no—she fought the voices in the fetid darkness. To see yes, to touch yes, to sink inside of the way men do, God, if only—but not ever to hurt.

  You think they’d know the difference, those girls? After all they’ve been through? You’ll just be one more monster to them.

  She fought these voices night after night, could not find resolution. She was guilty. She railed against her own guilt. She tried not to lust, to stop wanting the women, and failed. She came to an uneasy truce with herself: she could look at the women from a distance but not touch them; she’d protect the whores from her touch. The only exception was the sparrow-girl, to whom she returned as though to a secret shrine until the day she arrived at La Moneda to discover that the sparrow-girl had disappeared. Nobody knew what had happened to her, or was willing to say.

  “Find yourself another one,” the bartender told her, shrugging, “and either buy a drink or let me do my job.”

  Dante tried not to think of the sparrow-girl racked by illness, stabbed in an alley, or simply worn to death by long nights. Girls like her got swallowed up and spit out by this city every day. Perhaps that wasn’t what had happened; perhaps she’d run away, escaped on a boat across the river or a train to the pampas, those yawning plains that supposedly arose beyond the city. Dante hoped it was true. She wished she’d known the girl’s name; she hadn’t wanted to give it and Dante had been reluctant to press her for it. Find yourself another one. An easy fix. Already the other whores were looking her way, angling for centavos, but Dante could not face them, so she ducked out and walked quickly home.

  The men in her band all had girlfriends, though these came and went and in any case didn’t stop them from enjoying visits to the brothel on the side. Just the opposite, she learned: serious girlfriends were often virtuous, and the more virtuous a girl was, the more necessary visits to the brothel became. For the first few months she made excuses not to join them, but with each time they grew more incensed and bewildered at her refusal.

  “You can’t say no again,” El Loro said. “What’s your problem?”

  “He’s just a boy,” Pedro said, in a mocking falsetto.

  “I’m not,” Dante protested. “I’m just focused.”

  “On what?”

  “On my music.”

  Santiago was watching intently. She couldn’t read what she saw in his eyes.

  Pedro laughed. “Right. Music. You know what helps a man focus on music?”

  “He’s right, Dante,” El Loro said. “If you’re not careful your nuts might explode.”

  “You’ll join us tonight,” Santiago said, in the same tone he used to demand that they appear at work on time or practice for another hour, and it was this tone above all that was Dante’s defeat. She shrugged her assent and, to avoid looking at the men, picked up her violin to tune it. Her hands shook at the pegs.

  “Oh, look at him blush!” Pedro laughed. “He really needs it.”

  Dante didn’t answer. The words I can’t do it I can’t go were on the tip of her tongue, and she imagined herself opening her mouth and letting them slip out, followed, surely, by more words, confessions, an unmasking. But then it was time to perform, and she followed El Loro up three ramshackle wooden steps to a raised platform that, though worn and tawdry, still placed her in a magic realm, the realm of the stage, her secret refuge. Her hands gradually stopped shaking as music caught her up in its great tides.

  After work that night, they went to Lo de Amalia, a dance hall where they’d played in the past with several back rooms that almost verged on clean. They arrived at six thirty in the morning, when the dancing public had mostly dispersed and left the working girls to focus on the backroom side of business. The hall was crowded, dimly lit, and smelled of beer and kerosene. Dante found it difficult to breathe in the close air, or perhaps because of her own fear. She followed the musicians to a little table and sat down stiffly. A whore soon slung her arm around her neck, and, fortunately, she had plenty of life in her eyes. She was pretty in a moonfaced, thick-bodied kind of way. She was older than most of her fellow prostitutes, thirty or perhaps even older. A seasoned woman who’d seen a thing or two and hadn’t let them break her.

  “You, pretty boy,” she said, “you’ll be coming with me.”

  She said it with the tone a mother might use to tell a child to wash his face. She sat down in Dante’s lap and pushed her ample breasts against him.

  “There’s a good boy.”

  She smelled of sweat and cinnamon. Dante felt dizzy. This woman, so much of her, so very close. She’d sworn she wouldn’t touch a woman again, no one but the sparrow-girl, but she wasn’t the one touching, now, was she? when this woman had come over of her own accord and didn’t seem fragile, either, just the opposite, she was solid as an oak. Santiago cast Dante a look and raised his eyebrows, as if to say there are other girls here, you don’t have to accept, is that really what you want? Dante strove to answer with her eyes, with the look of a satisfied man. Santiago looked like he was stifling a laugh, and Dante felt herself flush with embarrassment at being mocked. But then Santiago tipped an invisible hat in Dante’s direction and turned back to the girl on his lap, whispering something in her ear that made her smile. Not mocking. Just laughing. Relieved that Dante, the youngest of their tribe, would be taken care of, would have his good time. The gesture seemed paternal, even tender in a way, and maybe that was exactly what it was, maybe this was a known rite for fathers and sons, she didn’t know, she’d never been a son to her own father, but in any case, despite her guilt over the girls, she found herself moved by Santiago’s gesture, his care for her, for all of them, these almost-boys he’d pulled from the gutters of Buenos Aires. The men soon headed to the back rooms. Dante followed them, right behind the moonfaced woman, hoping that the walls weren’t too thin (though they were bound to be) and that her silence wouldn’t raise suspicion. Her whole body felt tight, and she fought back waves of panic with each step. She just wanted to get through the session without being discovered. It was a long hall, she thought, a long way to run if she was found out, and a far longer way to find a corner of this land where she could hope to start again.

  When Dante and the woman arrived in the dim room, Dante whispered, “Lie here with me.”

  “Silly boy. What else would we do?”

  “No, I mean, just lie down. Nothing else.”

  “What’s the ma
tter? Is it sore? Got the clap?”

  Dante shrugged. The woman laughed and lay down. The walls were thin. El Loro was next door, already grunting. Dante lay down on the thin mattress next to the woman. “What’s your name?” she whispered. “Everybody calls me Mamita.”

  She was a lovely woman, even more so now, relaxed against the bed as if about to dream. Leda didn’t mean to touch, but her hands ran along Mamita’s body, lightly. Loosened her bodice. This didn’t count, did it? No touching, no—“You’re warm, Mamita.”

  “That’s just the first of it. Does it hurt?”

  “Does what hurt?”

  “Your tool.”

  “It—uh—no, not much.”

  “You sure? Don’t want me to kiss it and make it better?”

  “No, thanks, really.”

  “I made you shy!”

  “No.” Her hand was inside Mamita’s bodice now, stroking her breasts, returning over and over to the miraculous nipples. She was not allowed. She had to stop. Every fiber in her body blazed with pleasure.

  “I did.” Mamita was laughing. “You’re just a boy, aren’t you?”

  She was looking at Dante with wide brown eyes, half-mocking, half-nurturing. She’s joking around with me, Dante thought with a shock. She even seems like she might—stranger than strange!—be enjoying herself. Imagine that. A whore who was alive inside, who laughed and seemed to mean it. The breasts were freed from their bodice now, right in Dante’s greedy hands. “I’m not hurting you?”

  “Hurting me! With those little paws?”

  “I don’t … I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “Oh, you poor dear. You don’t know a thing. Look, you’ve only got a couple of minutes left—you hear your friend finishing up in there? And you’ve been paddling in the shallows like a baby. So I’ll give you a little something: I’ll tell you a secret. Come here.”

  Dante bent close to Mamita and met her eyes.

  “Are you listening?”

  Dante nodded.

  “Now I’m doing you a big favor telling you this, because most ladies, they won’t ever admit to it, not directly. It’s just something you have to be a man about. Understand?”

  She nodded again.

  “It’s fine to pet them softly like you’re doing. But it’s also boring. A lot of ladies like a little bite. Take the nipple between your thumb and finger, give it a good long pinch.”

  Next door the groaning had given way to silence.

  “Do it.”

  Dante obeyed, gingerly.

  “No, harder.”

  She did it a little harder.

  “Pathetic. You call yourself a man? Harder, hard as you can.”

  Dante did as she was told, and Mamita arched her back and shut her eyes and made a long sharp sound, as pure as it was beautiful. For an instant it even seemed that the artifice between them, the distance made by the roles they were acting, had dropped away, and that they were elsewhere together, on a great sea, Dante a raft, Mamita the bright water itself. Then the room returned. Mamita opened her eyes and stared vacantly for a moment at a point on the wall. Then she turned to Dante with a look of amusement. “Well, look at you. Little devil.”

  Dante didn’t know what to say. Her mind groped for words. Stumbling.

  “Your time’s up.”

  “Oh. Yes.” She rose, shakily, and reached for her hat. “Thanks for the secret.”

  “Don’t forget it.”

  How could I? Dante thought, and would have said, but Mamita was already closing up her bodice with businesslike gestures that made Dante feel thrown out like a dog. She walked out on unsteady legs. The hall shimmered strangely. Pedro and El Loro were leaning against the wall, waiting. Santiago had not yet returned.

  “What did you do to her, Dante?”

  The question she’d dreaded. El Loro staring, waiting for an answer, and if they knew that she hadn’t—that she couldn’t—the world would crumble all around her.

  “To make her scream like that? Come on, tell us how you did it!”

  It was not suspicion on El Loro’s face but admiration. His girl had been silent the whole time. Even Pedro was looking at her with an expression of grudging curiosity.

  A new Dante smiled now, cocked his hat on his head, and drew himself up tall. “Boys, you know what they say. I’m a gentleman, I’ll never tell.”

  On some mornings Dante fell into sleep like a dead weight, but on others she lay awake, restive, aching. Loneliness wrapped tightly around her throat, a thin wire, fatal. There was nobody who saw her as she truly was. There was no end to the disguise, to the invented story. It was not that she did not want to live as this new Dante. But in hiding half of her story, she became unseen, or half-seen, like the moon when it veils one side of its face in darkness. And there were times when she wanted to be seen. Even touched. But these things were not possible; she brushed them off. She was glad no one could see her, that she was invisible in full view. It was her salvation. People cannot see what they can’t imagine, and she was unimaginable, even to herself, a kind of rip in the fabric of reality. Women had never done such things before. Had they?

  One rainy morning, as she lay down on the dank floor to sleep, arms sore from a long night’s work, she thought of Joan of Arc. Fat drops roared in the hall outside her door. Water leaked in through the threshold of the closed door and soaked her pallet. Downstairs she heard La Strega calling to her daughter to move faster with the peas or she’d still be shelling when the archangels announced the end of the world. What about Joan of Arc? In the dank unbreathable air of her little room, she recalled Cora’s stories of the saint’s life. A girl in armor. A fight for justice. Well, she thought, I’m not fighting for justice or to free a whole people; my fight is unseen, I’ll be buried by the clamor of a million untold lives, a speck in the avalanche of history. No one will ever know that I was.

  Joan of Arc, unlike her, was remembered. Even held up as a hero.

  But she was also burned at the stake.

  Better not to look too deeply into old stories.

  Only the violin accepted her fully, without question. She sometimes imagined that she was making love to it. She gave it all her force and longing, and the violin received it all in its fine curves, its secret hollows, utterly sensuous, neither male nor female, complete. I can live without romance, she thought, as I clearly must (although a crack of doubt had appeared in this thought, Mamita’s arched back, her flashing pleasure, what if she could make that happen in other women?—no, don’t think about that), I can live without being seen, I can even live knowing that heaven will close its gates to me when I die and force me down to hell, but I cannot live without my violin.

  At times she would imagine that, when she played the violin, someone or something else was playing her with the same fierce care, using her to fulfill its inscrutable vision. She, nothing more than an instrument, of the divine perhaps, though not the god of priests and the Bible from whose embrace she was surely excommunicated by her sins; there had to be some other force that also was divine or at least felt so, perhaps originating among lax angels or bold demons or some creature that fused them both within itself, an angeldemon, a spiritual hermaphrodite, exiled from heaven just like her, entirely awake. Only that kind of god would deign to fill a vessel like Leda-who-was-Dante, pour in through the crown of her head while she played and rush down her arms through her fingers to strings that moaned beautifully not for her alone but for all the secret exiles here on earth.

  Home stilled pulled at her ankles. A riptide strong enough to drown in. She tried not to think of it, tried not to miss Alazzano, tried to ignore its imprint behind her eyelids when she blinked, but it was there, always throbbing beneath the surface, always beckoning to her, threatening the ground on which she stood. The letters continued to arrive, and now she read them and even, occasionally, answered. In an effort to soften the blow of her absence, she wrote of a happy false life in which she lived from her needle in a bustling and charming city whe
re chaste and honest immigrant women came together to sew and protect each other in a tenement whose walls kept the world’s dangers at bay. She didn’t know whether her parents believed her or not. They kept writing. They finished every letter with the same request, And please, Leda, come home, come home, but even this seemed like an incantation spoken out of duty, robbed of power through bland repetition. It was her father who wrote the letters now. They were doing fine, he said. The little ones were growing at a startling pace. Tommaso had a son now, another on the way. The harvests had been good. The war in other European countries had them worried that Italy might join in, but war, her father pointed out, was like the weather: it comes upon you and seeps in everywhere and can’t be stopped, there’s nothing that an ordinary man can do. Leda strained to read between the lines. Was Tommaso happy? And Mamma? Would her father ever forgive her for staying in Argentina without his blessing? To disobey your parents was to commit the worst treason. She was a bad daughter, worse than they would ever know. Staying was a betrayal, but it protected them from ever learning of the larger one.