“But sexy, right?” El Loro said cheerfully. “The sexiest!”
What are you, tango, and what on earth am I?
“Now you’ve gone too far,” Amato said. “Music doesn’t have a pussy.”
“Or tits,” said Pedro.
“Tits,” said Joaquín.
And then, just like that, the six men reached a place of unity. The air between them brightened. They all laughed. Santiago refilled their glasses and raised his. “To music.”
“To tits.”
“Music.”
“Tits.”
“Music!”
“Tits, tits!”
They quibbled and laughed and Dante laughed along with them, at first to blend in, although at some indiscernible moment her laugh stopped being false and became something real. They toasted, in the end, to tits, and for an instant as the whiskey poured fast down her throat she felt like part of their tribe, a tribe of men, all of whom, in unison, loved tits and music; she was just like them, and not alone; she wiped her mouth on her sleeve just as the rest of them did, amazed to feel a kind of lightness in her body, in her shoulders, a fleeting liberation from shame.
When shame pressed on her she sometimes heard the old voices as they’d rippled out one afternoon years ago, while she hid behind a tree at the plaza’s edge:
Shameful, shameful.
Pfft, that girl.
Cora Matta.
A disgrace.
Covering herself with mud like that.
Like a rutting animal.
Like a whore.
Drat, I’m out of soap and all these sheets still left to wash.
Here, use mine.
Or mine.
Or mine.
I will, God keep you for it.
Cora.
It’s witchcraft, I tell you.
Devil’s work.
And that last night in the plaza.
Was she chanting? Were you there?
I was there. All I heard were the demons.
What demons?
A flock of them, circling her. The sound of them flying drowned out everything else.
What are you talking about?
Yes, tell us. What do flying demons sound like?
I don’t want to repeat the sound, it’s terrifying.
Come on, we have to know.
It’s like this. Whooooooooosh.
Do it again.
Whooooosh.
Ha ha! Again.
Oh, shut up.
Well, I don’t know about any demons but I certainly heard Cora. She was muttering.
Ah! Muttering what?
I don’t know. It didn’t sound like Italian.
The devil’s tongue.
A curse no doubt, a curse on Alazzano.
I saw her levitate.
No!
Yes. Right there in the plaza.
How high?
Higher than a tall child.
No!
Evil, evil.
She hovered above the stones like a witch.
She’s cursed us.
Our church is marred forever by what she did there.
Shhp! Don’t even mention that. The poor nuns doing their best.
I heard they scrub it down three times a day now.
I heard that too.
But what can scrub out a thing like that, a naked screaming girl?
I don’t know.
Nothing.
They don’t let her out of the house anymore.
They weren’t letting her out before, she still got out.
But now she can’t escape.
Why not?
I heard they’ve got her tied down and someone watching her at all hours of the day or night.
You can’t tie down a demon. They can fly anywhere, right out of the body.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
Thank God they’ve started the exorcisms.
Not a moment too soon.
I’ve seen them going into the house, Father Domenico and the nuns. I’ve heard the chants.
I’ve heard the screams.
Demon-screams.
Of course.
Holy Mary, mother of God, help them with what they must do.
Summer arrived on a brutal heat wave that felled dogs and old men alike. In the peak months of January and February, the Torres Sextet traveled to outlying towns to play the outdoor stages of Argentina’s Carnaval. They took the train together, through the long flat countryside. They slept three to a room at tiny country hotels, some with dirt floors, some with hand-laid tiles, some with rooms where a single small window let right into the chicken coop. The first time they arrived at a hotel, Leda’s heart constricted when she saw the washbasin in the corner with the large pail: everyone to bathe in the same room. She couldn’t bathe in front of them, but if she didn’t bathe, all summer, in this demonic heat, what would they think? Fortunately for her, the musicians slept like the dead all morning. They lay down at about seven or eight a.m., just back from work, and didn’t wake till lunchtime. She willed herself to wake up first, prayed for it, set the tension in her body like the spring of a clock. And her body complied: she always woke first. She crept out of bed and washed herself without removing her underwear or the bandage from her breasts, scrupulously keeping her back to the sleeping men. For the first two weeks she managed this before anybody stirred, and by the time they did she was already dressed, shrugging casually, go ahead compadres, I’ve already bathed. El Loro and Amato stripped easily, baring their bodies: El Loro’s lithe, muscular back, Amato’s hairy chest and paunchy belly.
“How do you do it, Dante?” El Loro said. “Don’t you sleep?”
She shrugged. “I wanted a cigarette.”
“That’s not what it is,” Amato said, and, as always, his voice rang with authority.
El Loro turned to him, expectantly, for the answer. Dante, for the ten thousandth time, went tense with fear of being unmasked.
“It’s that he’s young,” Amato said. And he laughed.
El Loro looked perturbed. “But I’m young too.”
Amato slapped El Loro on the back. “Sorry, my boy. But Dante’s younger.”
One morning, in the third week, in a small town outside Rosario, Dante put on her shirt after bathing and turned to see El Loro, eyes wide open, staring at her intently.
“What’s the bandage for?”
Dante had imagined such a question might come one day, and she’d had a few years to think of an answer. “For the scar on my chest. It never healed right.”
Loro didn’t seem to blink. He was completely awake. He was a sweet-faced boy, really, the kind mothers doted on beyond reason. He’ll make a bride very happy one day, Dante thought. “What’s it from?”
“A knife wound.”
Loro said nothing. He watched Dante thread her belt through her pant loops, buckle the belt, sit down to put on socks. The day was blistering. If only musicians could wear sandals. Even barefoot would be better than this. Finally, El Loro said, “Did it hurt?”
Dante busied herself lighting a cigarette. The tobacco scratched at her lungs. “I’m alive.”
El Loro closed his eyes and slept or seemed to sleep for another half hour. He never mentioned the conversation again.
She also couldn’t urinate the way the men did, on dirt roads or up against the walls of buildings. While their venues in Buenos Aires had always had a private bathroom, however small and filthy, these country bars relied on the fields behind them. She tried to stop drinking, but the men protested: it’s hot, you’re crazy, have a beer. And so she took to pretending to drink, then sneaking outside at intermission to pour beer into the dirt. Her heart pounded with the fear of being caught, but she never was. She grew accustomed to playing the second set with the ache of a full bladder, and holding her pee until they made it back to their hotels, which always had outhouses where a man, it could be agreed, had decent reasons to squat.
“You sure do shit a l
ot,” Pedro teased her.
The other men watched her, curious, as if they’d noticed the same thing.
She smiled, every muscle on alert, and looked Pedro full in the face. “Better than staying full of it.”
The men laughed, Pedro smiled grudgingly, and Dante felt a wash of relief.
It was beautiful to travel with these men. She came to know each of them better, Amato’s snores, El Loro’s sweat, the warm spike of Pedro’s laugh, which came rarely but stayed a long time when it did. Sometimes, on long dull train rides, they told stories about their lives. Amato told them about the many orquestas he’d worked with, and the singers he’d played behind, because, you know, he said, it’s happening more and more, this business of singing along to tangos, and the best of them all is that Carlitos, you know the one, Carlos Gardel? All the men had heard of him, but none of them had heard him sing. He sang in a duo, Gardel-Razzano, and had come up from the same streets and conventillos they all knew. Amato had backed him during a stint at a dance hall, and swore the man had a voice like sweet fire that he knew just how to calibrate and he was a smart bastard, too, courting café owners like they were village girls, though now that he’d hit the fancier circuits he’d become more deferential. Just last year he’d toured Uruguay and then Brazil and been received like a prince, his face on flyers plastered all over the cities, interviews with all the best papers, only to come back to Buenos Aires and get shot last month, in a fight at a party, you know the kind, Amato said, our kind of party. From the highest high to the lowest low. That’s tango for you, said Pedro. Maybe, Amato said. But anyway, I went to see him as he was healing up, just a few weeks after I joined all of you, and I sat beside his hospital bed and told him, in no uncertain terms, you have to heal, Carlitos, you bastard, you can’t take that voice from us, and do you know what he told me? He said that, in Montevideo, at the end of the show, the audience—well dressed and fine—had leapt to its feet and demanded an encore, shouting his name, tocate otra, Carlitos, shouting and clapping and roaring until he returned to the stage and gave them another song he had to come up with quickly because he hadn’t planned for this, he’d never done an encore in his life. And when he went back to his dressing room, do you know what he did? His voice went very quiet when he told me, because, you know, the wound was delicate and it hurt his chest to talk. He said to me, I wept, Amato. I wept like a baby.
Amato’s stories opened room for others. Dante was amazed to learn that she was not the only one who’d broken with expectations to become a musician. El Loro had, in his own words, broken his parents’ hearts; they were grateful for the money he brought home, but had hoped that he’d become a doctor and support his family, marry a good Russian Jewish girl, not spend his nights out in dens of sin—on Shabbat, no less, making his forebears in the Old Country turn in their graves—and his summers playing a fiddle on dirt roads. What decent Russian girl would take him in this state? He laughed as he told the story, but Dante heard the catch in his throat. And then Joaquín spoke up: I think I know what you mean. Joaquín had never talked about his life outside music, and all the men looked at him in surprise. Joaquín told them, as wheat fields sped by outside their window, that he was a lawyer’s son, groomed from a young age for a life of classical music. His father loved music more than anything, and had grown up playing piano as if galaxies depended on its sound to keep on spinning, but he had studied law at the insistence of his parents, who were immigrants from Spain. His greatest dream was to send a son to the conservatory, and he did, never expecting that the son would drop out of school to play a wholly different kind of music that, for all its popularity, would always be the music of the lower classes, of those who had no culture, who didn’t know Handel from Bach. Dante, listening to this story, bristled at the worlds no culture, and wondered for a fleeting moment how Joaquín saw her, and the rest of the members of the band. But then she brushed the thought away. Joaquín had come to the tango for the same reason they all had: out of passion. The other men weren’t bothered by this part of the story, or else they didn’t let on. El Loro nodded as though grateful for another tale of parental pressure. Pedro listened intently, not saying, not needing to say, that he had no parents to pressure him into anything, orphan that he was. Amato roved invisible piano keys across his lap as he listened, always practicing, halfway out of the conversation; Santiago rolled a cigarette and lit it, seeming unperturbed—this was nothing, after all, that he hadn’t heard before. He’d surely heard much worse things said about the tango, his tango, their tango. His hair had grown out a little, and curled black and wild against the rapid sky outside.
These talks, these moments, made Dante feel like part of something larger, a long tradition of wandering musicians who gave a little joy in exchange for a coin or bit of straw on which to sleep. She had heard, back in Alazzano, of minstrels through the ages who lived simply, close to the ground, eating on some days and starving on others, existing at the world’s edges and bringing music to the center with relentless hands. She felt part of their ancient nameless ranks, and this moved her. It also moved her to play outside, in the quieter lands outside the city. Green. For the first time since she’d come to the New World, Dante’s eyes could feast on boundless green again, in the low hills around them, the long flat fields, the groves of great old trees whose sumptuous branches dripped with tiny lights like wayward stars that shone all night as wealthy couples, on vacation at their families’ estates, danced and forgot themselves—and the stubborn mosquitoes, and the dark of the surrounding land—in the arms of tango. The women wore heavy ruffled dresses that buttoned primly all the way up to their necks, and elaborate hats that looked, to Dante, heavy enough to cause perpetual headaches. Their dancing was just as prim: their feet dutifully stepped back or to the side in response to the man’s moves, but rarely attempted a gancho, rarely slid a calf between a man’s legs—an unseemly act—and even when they did it was a quick and timid motion, obscured by floor-length skirts. Even so, the women looked thrilled to be dancing. It seemed to Dante that the dance floor gave them permission they didn’t otherwise have: permission to move, permission to touch a man in public, permission to breathe a slightly looser breath.
“Would you look at that.” Pedro whistled. “Ladies dancing tango. I never thought I’d see it with my own eyes.”
The rich were infinitely fascinating to Dante. They were good to play for in many ways. They gave money freely, tossed their bills into the musicians’ bowl without a second glance, as though it were not money but old rags they were casting to the side. She’d never seen this kind of wealth before; in her village, her family, the Mazzoni family, had always been the richest, and her uncle Mateo had accepted his aristocratic status like a debt owed to him. But these people made Mateo Mazzoni look like a pompous country fool. Their clothing dazzled. Their posture spoke of majesty, or at least of a kind of virtuosic arrogance. They had books, they had paintings of themselves in cavernous houses, they had educations that grasped the heights of human thought, at least the men. Their gaze flicked across musicians on a stage as it might across a cadre of servants. Everything in order, yes, nothing more to care about or see. And yet, Dante would think: you don’t see us but you need us. You need this tango. That is why you came here, to this summer theater, in your gleaming carriage and polished shoes. You need the tango and we’re the ones who have it, so take this, bastards (line of melody spools out under her fingers) and take this too (staccato notes that mesh with the piano’s snarl) and this and this and if you think for an instant I don’t own you then it’s you who are the fool.
The men never looked twice at the musicians, but some of the ladies did. Young wives, solid matrons, virgin girls. When their husbands or fathers were distracted, they stared at the musicians with expressions of curiosity or longing or discomfort, as if the coarse men onstage were wolves on the loose, rarely seen in their own confined lives, keen to maul them if they weren’t careful, and as if they, the ladies in question, weren’t
at all certain that careful was what they wanted to be.
The musicians of El Sexteto Torres were entirely proper with these ladies, except for a few long intermissions when Joaquín or Pedro or Amato disappeared at the same time as a lady who returned with a ribbon of mud at the hem, a single unclasped button at the throat. These moments were discussed among the musicians with the silent language of looks: amusement, envy, admiration, and, from Santiago, disapproval—one feminine complaint and they’d be out on their ears—mixed with an almost paternal resignation, boys will be boys. Most of the time, however, the musicians saved their lust for the town brothels or, sometimes, an easy chambermaid, kitchen girl, or innkeeper’s daughter. Pedro, in particular, seemed to make a new girlfriend in every place without trying. Girls would follow him from room to room with young-fawn eyes. He neither encouraged them (as Joaquín did, for himself, with mixed success) nor turned them down. Sometimes they fell away, chastened by their fathers or Pedro’s tepid response or their own goal of chastity. At other times Pedro took them to a barn, a yard, a rooftop, and left town with a lock of hair, a tear-filled goodbye, a promise to wait for his return. He put these promises in his pocket like small change, quickly accepted and forgotten. Dante pretended to share the other men’s admiration. She kept her own ventures to the brothels, ramshackle sheds nailed to the backs of town bars where she cashed in her chips like all the others, so as not to draw attention to herself, but, once alone with a girl, did nothing more than stare at her sublime body—sometimes fully naked, sometimes breasts, bared thighs, a rump bent over with the skirt thrown up—as she raged inside with a thirst she could not slake.
Except with the tango. The music itself. It seemed to carry something of this land in it. It seemed a strange thought, absurd, that music could somehow contain the pulse or imprint of the earth where it began. It seemed like the kind of thought that got people carted to insane asylums. And yet, some nights, as she played on those torchlit summer stages, she felt the continent beneath her feet—the bedrock buried far under the wooden planks—moan in grief. Or perhaps it was pleasure. She didn’t know. But the moan was there; it wrapped itself around the backbone of Joaquín’s bass, those solid notes that formed a skeleton around which the melody could flex and breathe. The moan sailed along the underside of the bandoneón’s warm howl and echoed between the piano’s restless notes. It rose and fell around them, a ghost-sound in their midst, a disembodied echo, a throb of untold wounds and glimmers and urges and colors; the throb of América; the continental heartbeat, unleashed.
The Gods of Tango: A Novel Page 22