The Gods of Tango: A Novel

by Carolina de Robertis

  That night she went to work, and in the morning, instead of going home to sleep, she went directly to another dance hall, Lo de Amalia. Once inside, she had to wait twenty minutes until Mamita was free. The back room was close and stuffy and smelled of overripe vegetables and a thin veneer of lavender oil.

  Mamita sat down on the bed and smiled at Dante. “Nice to see you, sweetheart.”

  “You too.”

  “What shall we do tonight?”

  “I want to see it.”

  “See what?”

  Dante gestured.

  “Oh, my God. You’ve been here how many times, and you haven’t been in there yet? What am I going to do with you, Dante?” She had her skirts hitched up in fistfuls, and she sat down on the bed and spread her legs. She was not wearing underwear. “Take a good look now.”

  Mamita seemed amused and a little bored in a manner that loosened the ache in Dante’s chest. It had taken her three years to ask a woman to spread her legs, partly from her own shame and partly to protect women from her lust. But this woman, this Mamita, was not fragile: she was strong and vast, the mother of every poor lonely man in Buenos Aires, a role that kept her making a living at an age when other prostitutes had disappeared from brothels and sometimes from the face of the earth. Nothing could break her or, at least, not this, a clumsy lusting boy. It was safe—she hoped it was safe—to look. Dante looked. It was nothing like what she’d imagined. She fell to her knees. Mamita laughed.

  “Go on,” she said, not unkindly. “Touch it.”

  Such warmth, such damp, such utter softness. And the scent of it: bay leaves and copper and fresh bitter dirt. Dante moved her fingers along the folds, exploring, staring, touching, bursting with amazement and desire, possessed by the smell of this woman’s secret place, her central place, this place that was the subject of endless songs and jokes and humiliations and warnings and blood feuds, and look at it, look at this, look at her, here, Mamita full of grace and yes you among women—and then Mamita let out a small moan.

  “You liked that?”

  “Mmmm.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “What else do you like?”

  “Whatever you like, corazón.”

  “No.” Dante sat up. “Don’t lie to me.”

  “Now, now, don’t get upset—”

  “I want you to teach me.”

  “Teach you what?”

  “How to make you feel good.”

  Mamita lifted herself up onto her elbows and studied Dante for a long time in the dim light. “Why?”

  “I’ll pay extra.”

  “Where would we start?”

  “You tell me.”

  “How experienced are you?”

  Dante didn’t answer.

  “Oh, child,” Mamita said.

  “I’ll pay for the whole night.”

  Mamita studied her. No part of her was laughing anymore. “You have that kind of money?”

  “How much?”

  “Seven pesos.”

  “I’ve got four pesos and sixty cents. I can get you the rest on Thursday. Or I’ll give you what I’ve got and stay however long you let me.”

  Mamita was silent for such a long time that Dante began to feel the cold enter her feet. “You’ve got a girl now, haven’t you?”

  She almost nodded, but then shook her head.

  “Not yet. You hope to have her. But right now you wouldn’t know what to do with her.”

  Dante looked at the floor. Wood planks, scuffed and tired, worn down by all the things they’d seen.

  “And you want to make her happy. Yes, you do.” And what Mamita did next shocked her: she reached out and stroked Dante’s face. “You’re a good boy,” she said. “Such a pretty little mouth.” Her hand gripped Dante’s face, thumb on one cheek, fingers on the other, so hard it seemed she might bore a hole right through the flesh. “Now put it to work.”

  Dante surrendered to Mamita like a twig in an ocean storm.

  You don’t know, when they start to call you Mamita, that the name will come to subsume all other names, that the name you were born with will drown in the great noise of your life, but that’s how it is in this city, Buenos Aires, it renames you, rebaptizes you for better or for worse. You don’t know any of this at first. You work because you have to, because your human body keeps insisting on a crust of bread and a place to sleep and another place to shit and some way to stay alive, even when your mind rails against it all and fantasizes about death as though it were one of those sweet desserts that flaunt themselves in the windows of fancy pastry shops like exuberant clouds you’ll never be able to touch. Just as your mouth craves those pastries, your mind craves death. But not the body. No matter what happens, the stupid body wants to live. It insists on breath and food and so you live. And to live means to fuck, and to fuck means to open up your body to whoever shows up at the door and there is always someone at the door, always another hungry man in this city in which night has no beginning and no end. The men keep coming and coming and they—not you—are the ones who find Mamita inside you and start to call you that, present you with her name. They give it to you because they need it, because Mamita is what they want of you whether they know it or not: they are all boys inside still desperate for their mothers’ skirts—and so many of them are thousands of kilometers from their mothers and cannot abide this, can’t stand the thought that their mammas or muttis or ommis or mères are aging on a faraway continent and will die without ever seeing their sons again, that they, the sons, will never again touch their mothers’ hands or eat their stews or wear clothes their mothers mended with needles sharp enough to draw blood, these grown men lie awake and weep over this loss of their mothers, even the rough ones, especially the rough ones—so when they find a spark of their own mothers inside you they come groveling for it and can’t see or even call you anything else. You play along and let them have their games. You don’t realize that the games they play are changing you. The years pile up and one day you wake up and realize two things: first, that you have become Mamita and barely remember being anyone else; second, that, with the passing years, your odds of survival have slimmed and being Mamita just might save you, might allow you the miracle of a long career as a whore, continuing to work when all of your contemporaries have starved or disappeared or run off with evil men because there’s nowhere else to go. And so you stay. You last. You work. There is nothing left of your original self, the whore-self looms larger and there’s power inside her as long as you can stomach the cost. And you do stomach it. Your body is an empty cup they fill with whatever they want to. On your best days you are able to erase sensation, to curl away from your own body while it is doing its job. Sometimes there is pain. More often there’s only irritation, like the feel of harmless cockroaches walking across your skin. Every once in a while, it’s true, there is pleasure here or there, but it is always an accident, a stray flash that ends as quickly as it began. Except for now, on this night, with the boy. Dante, he calls himself, though you suspect he, too, has other names he’s hiding behind the one on everybody’s lips. The tension with which he holds himself tells you he’s afraid, the way a thief on the run is afraid, though it’s hard to imagine this boy committing any serious crime. It doesn’t matter. He’s a child and he reminds you of your own boy, your gone boy, the one whose age you count as the seasons pass and whose face you try to imagine on sweltering days of restive sleep. You were fourteen when you conceived him, fifteen when he was born, and the men you worked for let the other whores stand around you in a circle as you labored, then gave you a few days to hold your little boy and give him milk—you gave him your milk and in the hardest times you say that to yourself over and over, there’s that at least, he had my milk—before the men who owned you took him away. After that you used the herbs the other girls did, every time you needed to, so you’d never have to say goodbye like that again. And every day you think of him and God may punish you for thinking of tha
t boy of yours when young ones come to you but to hell with God, he’s the one who invented hell in the first place so how about he just go live there like the rest of us? The young boys tear at your heart because any one of them could be him, could be your own. Your child is a man now, eighteen and a half, more than old enough to visit whores and you hope that, wherever he is, he’s one of the gentler ones. This Dante, this boy now with you, he’s a gentle one all right, he wants to please you so he can please other girls and nobody’s paid for a whole night with you in eleven years and even then they certainly didn’t pay seven pesos, what an outrageous lie, poor naïve boy, you just want to crush his face between your thighs, you want to swallow him whole into your cunt all in one piece just the way your little boy came out of you, all at once slipping whole through your cunt slow slow slow at first and then with shocking speed, out into the world, out into the light, he shot out of you and it’s the most radiant memory of your life, and now with this boy you want to do just the opposite, namely, swallow him out of the world and out of the light and right into the core of you, stealing him inside to where you can possess him forever—but you can’t. You don’t. Instead, you teach him. You are not patient. If he wants to learn he’d better flex his muscles. If he wants to learn he’d better get over any fear of his skull getting crushed between two thighs. If he wants to learn you can just put him to work for you, and let him pay you for it, because why not—? That’s right, little boy, do as you’re told, I’ll slap you if you get it wrong or if you miss the spot or use your teeth or stop paying attention. Get the rhythm right, the pressure. You pretty little boy. You say you want to make me feel good, you want to know how. How about you find my baby boy for me? no, you can’t? you young pretty boys don’t all have some secret telepathic bond to help me reach him through you? then you’d better work that tongue until all the words it’s ever spoken are wrung out of it, you’d better follow my instructions to the letter, you’d better stick fingers to make me feel good yes but also for your own sake, so you can have some kind of anchor when I burst, a yoke to this world so you don’t get flung into the next.

  Dante spent three nights with Mamita—nights that whipped and lit her, dismantled what she thought she knew—before taking Alma out again. It was the following Sunday. They returned to the park. Just as the deep gold of afternoon light was starting to fade into dusk, Dante whispered in Alma’s ear, “I want to be alone with you.”

  Alma leaned against Dante for a delicious instant, then lifted away, her profile calm as a queen’s. “Where?”

  Dante had thought about this. Home was a minefield: thin walls, screaming children, La Strega’s all-seeing eyes, families bickering in many languages and surely casting stares of disapproval at a young woman who disappeared behind a closed door with a man. A single glare from the conventillo women could make this delicate thread between her and Alma shrivel away to nothing. Not to mention the unromantic stench. And so, the night before, she’d done her research with El Loro, who was happy to instruct her in how to find a private place for, in his words, a fuck you earned with something other than pesos. “I know a place in San Telmo where we can get a room.”

  Alma looked away, kept walking. To keep up appearances, she couldn’t say yes. But she hadn’t said no.

  Dante grasped her arm and steered her in the direction of the tram. “Let’s go.”

  The room was dingy and smelled of mold and vinegar. The sheets on the bed had been hastily arranged. But, on a slender end table, there stood a hopeful bowl of water with a single red rose floating on the surface. The rose’s petals were wilted and brown at the edges, but with luck Alma wouldn’t notice. She didn’t look at the bowl when she walked in. She stood in the center of the room, her back to Dante. A graceful creature from another plane, wings folded in wait.

  The street murmured at them through the window. Dante closed it, trapping the twilight heat inside. Then she leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette.

  “Strip,” she said.

  At first, Alma did nothing. She didn’t move, didn’t look at Dante, didn’t say a word. The room crackled with silence. Dante blew slow, controlled smoke toward the ceiling. If the game could not be played according to her rules, then she couldn’t play at all. Perhaps this had been a mistake. There was still time to put an end to it, turn around, leave this place and walk this woman safely home.

  And then Alma reached around her back and unzipped her dress.

  The body, exposed, arms and thighs and waist a unified song.

  Fabric pooled on the scuffed parquet, around high-heeled feet. Spine straight, gaze steady on the wall, a dancer’s focus.

  Dante couldn’t breathe. Power and fear of her own power. Thrill. A shivering.

  Where was her voice? She summoned it. “The bra too. Panties. Everything but the shoes.”

  Is this my voice? Mine?

  Alma complied.

  The song of her, perfect.

  Her body the song that commands the dance.

  Dante, who was also Leda, put her cigarette out on the windowsill and came to Alma from behind. She pressed her fully clothed body against Alma’s naked one, careful to keep her groin at a distance to hide the lack of a hard sex (and she remembered how her cousin Dante had felt, back in Italy, under the fig tree, against her thigh, the press of someone else’s lust) and let her hands and mouth lead the way, to the nape of Alma’s neck, the arms, breasts, waist, and neither of them made a sound just as two tango dancers move without a word, shut up and let your body do the speaking, like this, this, this. Alma stood still, arms at her sides, encircled. Her stance relaxed slowly, butter lifted toward the sun.

  Alma beneath her hands. Alma at her lips. Alma everywhere, inescapable, the scent of her, the warm flesh offering itself to her tongue, teeth, hunger. The crescendo of her breath. Staccato pain—or was it pleasure?—making her tense and soften in alternating waves. Dante led her to the bed and pushed her onto it. Kissed her hard. She was ready to fight if Alma tried to undress her, but Alma didn’t try: she lay with her eyes closed, willing to be taken, willing to ride the river on a current not her own.

  Her legs opened without resistance. But when she felt Dante’s face at her sex, she let out a sharp sound and her body went tense. “What are you doing?”

  “What I want to do.”

  Alma opened her eyes and lifted her head to stare at Dante as though she’d suddenly grown two heads.

  It’s not what you want? Dante wanted to ask, but couldn’t, as it seemed out of keeping with what a man would do. Instead, she said, “Shhh, lie back, don’t be afraid.”

  Alma stared at her a little longer, then lay back. She tasted brighter than Mamita, a hint of bitter orange mixed with copper and fresh-turned earth. She had a different shape, elongated, taut. Unlike Mamita, she gave no instructions or advice; there were no words to guide Dante, nothing but the raw and blinding moment.

  She stayed there a long time. She could have stayed forever.

  Twice, Alma tried to get up, but Dante pushed her back down. Finally Alma’s hips began to shake. She made sounds as though she were fighting something back—a jaguar, a shark, a sword of joy. Then she lost the fight, and as sensation stabbed her Dante held fast to Alma’s hips to keep her own mouth fused in place, as she’d learned to do with Mamita, accompanying the storm, swallowed by it, lit up in every centimeter of her body.

  Once Alma had fallen back again, gilded with sweat, Dante lay down between her open legs, as men do; their heads were together, their hips were together, her hand was at Alma’s sex, two fingers now inside her and Alma’s eyes were closed, she was lost at sea, she was in no state to look down and discover—and even if she did, Dante miraculously had no fear because there was no room for fear in this moment, only a shocked sense of rightness, of being vital and alive and completely in her skin as she did to Alma what men do.

  The pleasure of it, immense, enfolding. Woman all around her. Heat in the marrow of her bones. Washing her skin. Pouring
through her arm into her hand where it rocked right in front of her own sex like an extension of it, rocked into Alma, over and over, a ragged rhythm, primal, unrehearsed.

  Afterward, Alma turned to the wall and lay still for a long time.

  Now the fear poured in. If she suspected. Then she would—it couldn’t be.

  “Alma. Are you all right?”

  Alma finally turned to face Dante. She was crying.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Did I hurt you?”

  “No.”

  “Did I—”

  “Shut up, Dante.” Alma reached out and stroked Dante’s cheek. “Just promise me we can do that again.”

  “I promise.”

  “Your skin. It’s so soft, it seems impossible.”

  Dante said nothing.

  “So much about you seems impossible.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have to go.” Alma rose and reached for her clothes on the floor. “I’ll be late for work. And so will you.”

  Dante walked to work that night on feet that seemed to levitate, stepping on pure air. Was this love? Was this what it felt like? A sweet hollowness deep inside you, desperate to be filled. A joy that bites and slashes. The urge to be with her again, right now, immediately, doing it and doing it and to hell with the rest of the world.

  Backstage at La China’s, she found the musicians clustered expectantly around Santiago, who surveyed them like a captain assessing his crew. He nodded at Dante. “There you are.”

  “Sorry I’m l——”

  “Never mind that,” Santiago said. “I wanted us all to be here for the news. This is our last night here at La China’s.”

  Dante was flanked by El Loro and Pedro, and felt them tense.

  “We’ve broken through. We’ve got an engagement at Leteo.”

  “Leteo?” El Loro asked.

  “It’s a cabaret, you idiot,” Amato said congenially.

  “One of the finest,” Santiago said.

  “Where is it?” asked Joaquín.

  “Downtown. Right on Calle Corrientes.”