The men stared at each other.
Here it is, thought Dante. They were about to cross a border into another world. A world where men like her—or any of the men she knew here—didn’t go, didn’t belong. How quickly life could dwarf you. How vast the world. She felt terror, coupled with a rush of excitement and a sense of possibility.
“Do you understand what this means?” Santiago went on. “We’re rising to the top. We’re going to be a real orchestra, making real money. Tuxedos and everything.”
“Tuxedos!” said El Loro, pushing stray fronds of hair from his face.
“You’d better believe it.”
Dante tried to imagine herself in a tuxedo. A new costume of maleness. Would it be easier or harder than what she now wore?
“Leteo,” Amato said, slowly, as if savoring the sound.
The other men were silent for a moment, as the weight of that word hung between them. They stood close in their curtained backstage corner, close enough to breathe each other’s breaths.
“It’s run by a certain Señor Carrasco and his sister,” Santiago said.
“What?” Joaquín said. “His sister?”
“I know it’s strange. She’s a widow. Rumor has it they used her money to open the place. But he’s the owner, of course.”
This seemed to put Joaquín slightly more at ease.
“They just opened six months ago, and I met with Señor Carrasco himself today. He’s ambitious. He wants to stake out new ground. We’re going to help him do that.” Santiago looked around at each of his musicians, one by one. “There are to be no mistakes. Make a mistake and get your balls cut off.”
Pedro and El Loro laughed.
“And you’ll be fired from the orquesta.”
No more laughter.
“Anyone who doesn’t like it can leave right now. Understood?”
All the men nodded.
“Anyone leaving?”
The men shook their heads.
“We have to be perfect,” Santiago said. “Better than perfect. We have to play so beautifully they forget their own mothers, forget their own names.”
“We can do that,” Amato said.
“Of course we can,” said El Loro, flashing his bright boyish grin.
The men voiced their agreement, and Leda loved them, every single one of them, for their obsession, for the tribe they’d created, a silent pact between the mortal souls of men. For just a moment, standing behind the flimsy curtain at La China’s surrounded by musicians, her body still glowing with sex, she had the most incredible feeling, one she wouldn’t have thought possible: the world felt hers.
SEI
A Cup of the River of Forgetting
Never, in the history of the world, had there been another place like Cabaret Leteo. Dante was sure of it. When she stepped through its doors, the city fell away: all the noise and bluster of Buenos Aires disappeared, not only from her senses, but from her thoughts and, almost, from her memory, replaced by the lavish atmosphere of a contained world. She and her fellow musicians came in through the service entrance, which led to a vast kitchen with enough pans and knives and cooks to set a banquet fit for the gods. And as they quickly wove their way past crates of high-piled vegetables and great boiling pots to reach the white double doors that led to the great hall, Dante thought of them, the gods, the old ones Cora used to tell stories about—one born from her father’s forehead, another from the ocean foam, others on a hidden island shrouded by their mother’s exile—and she imagined them gathering at the front entrance of this tango cabaret, ravenous, itching for a dance. The front entrance seemed designed to entice them. Dante had seen it: the tall ornate double doors opened into a foyer of mirrors and polished brass. Low light from the crystal chandelier played and wept perpetually, a subtle song of flame and shadow. Plush red carpet covered the floors. The coat check was flanked by crystal vases, each the size of a large dog, their long-stemmed flowers watching the room like a many-headed beast.
Whether one entered through the front doors or the back, all roads led to the great hall. It was circular, with ceilings so high they evoked a sense of sky, and a stage raised a full meter from the ground. A wide clear space opened below the stage, reserved for dancing and ringed with round tables sheathed in white linen. White napkins fanned artfully in wineglasses. At the height of business hours, waiters glided unobtrusively from table to table, elegant in their black and white uniforms, discreetly taking orders and disappearing through the double doors to the kitchen.
Paintings of nymphs and satyrs hung along the walls, and naked statues of them stood watch as well, scattered across the room, towering between tables, so that patrons could enjoy their wine or bœuf au vin almost within reach of bare breasts. Flocks of multicolored birds—toucans, starlings, ravens, thrushes, jacamars—hovered close to the high ceiling, frozen in mid-flight, the strings that suspended them invisible to the mere mortals below. But the decoration that most stole Dante’s gaze was a mirror right across from the stage. It was four meters long and painted with a giant peacock, its blue and livid green feathers fanned in a great half circle that gleamed, majestic, flecked and rimmed with gold. Whenever Dante glanced in the mirror’s direction, she glimpsed shards of herself caught between the long bright feathers.
She learned to walk quickly through the slice of the great hall that led from the kitchen to the door backstage. The hall scared her; it was too sumptuous; it was made for old gods and rich men, not for her. She held her breath as she walked, exhaling only when she’d arrived in the musicians’ dressing room and closed the door behind her. The air was more familiar there: cigarette smoke and sweat and the sticky thickness of men in an unventilated space. It had none of the polish of the great hall or the foyer, but to the musicians, after the curtained corner they’d crammed into at La China’s, it seemed the height of luxury. There were two velour sofas, only marginally stained. The parquet flooring was not missing a single piece. The wallpaper bore a red, yellow, and orange fleur-de-lis pattern, which, along with the fact that there were no windows, gave the room a dim and cave-like feeling, as though they were not so much musicians as lions gathered in their lair, as Pedro said one night, joking, and that’s what they called it from then on, the Lair. They met there six nights a week, just before midnight, and opened their instrument cases as though undressing beautiful ladies. They tuned their instruments and discussed the lineup of songs or simply spoke to each other without speaking, as men do, as musicians do, itching with silent excitement and the stiff fit of their borrowed tuxedos. They were not gentlemen but they would be as elegant as if they were; they’d put the real gentlemen in the audience to shame. Look at us as we step out onto the stage, as we bow to your polite applause; see how immaculate our suits are, how painstakingly polished our shoes; you may laugh at us, we see the condescending smiles, but we are not down there with you in the hall where you mock us, we are here in a separate realm entirely, a realm we call the stage, and which is neither palace nor tenement, neither your space nor that of the poor; it is our space, the space of music, and music is a thing which we will make for you out of thin air and send pouring out to your fine tables where your ears and minds and blood will be invaded by our sound.
It was not that the rich men who came to Leteo were so different from those at La China’s. In fact, Dante recognized a few faces from the dance hall. Here, though, those same men acted proper, and brought women on their arms. The women wore fine gowns and pearls and drank champagne and, when they danced, kept their paces modest, did not press into the embrace. This was a civilized tango, after all, and these were civilized ladies. They were chaperoned and danced only with men from their own tables. They came in groups, or with their husbands, but they never came alone.
Except for one.
Every night, an exquisite woman occupied a small table at the hall’s edge. She wore daring evening gowns, lower-cut at the collar in that Parisian style just coming into fashion to the alarm of the Buenos Aires e
lite; only, unlike the bright colors imported from Paris, her gowns were always black. Her black hats were extravagantly decorated with black velvet bows or tall black plumes. Even sitting down, she seemed tall. Ageless. Impenetrable. Back straight with the posture of an arrogant dancer. She sipped her oporto and watched the crowd.
“Who’s that woman in the back, alone?” El Loro asked, in the Lair, at intermission.
“That,” Santiago said, “is La Viuda Ruiz. Don Carrasco’s sister.”
“Viuda?” El Loro looked up from his violin in amazement. “She’s a widow?”
Dante, too, was surprised, even though she herself was a widow and hardly looked the part. But all the widows she’d known in Alazzano were stout, veiled, resigned down to the slouch of their spines. This woman was the opposite of resigned. She exuded power. She seemed to know that she turned men’s heads. Her very dresses made a mockery of the widow’s duties; they drew the eye right to her bare flesh and whispered stay.
Pedro whistled and played a long, languorous chord on his bandoneón.
El Loro smiled and opened his mouth.
“Shut up,” Santiago said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Don’t start. Not a word about Doña Ruiz. Don’t even think of her, you hear? Doña Ruiz is not a woman. She’s your boss’s sister. Understand?”
They complied. But even so, the next time Dante went onstage, she snuck a glance at Doña Ruiz. The widow was watching them with the calm alert gaze of a general just before battle.
The money was good, damn good. Amato gave his wife a Singer sewing machine and his mistress a Parisian coat. El Loro rented another room for his family in their conventillo and, in a flush of optimism, got engaged to a sweet Russian girl who lived across the hall. Pedro appeared wearing gold rings that flashed as he pressed music from his bandoneón. No one knew exactly what Joaquín did with his money; he said nothing about it, and seemed unchanged. So did Santiago. All of them, at Santiago’s insistence, bought new tuxedo suits from a tailor on Corrientes, a gentlemen’s tailor, who received them with a kind of shock but served them nonetheless. Dante held her breath when the tape measure approached her groin, but there was no close touch, she was not discovered, she was safe. If the tailor noted anything suspicious about her proportions, he didn’t say a thing about it, the picture of discretion. When the suit was done, it was as supple as a second skin. She hadn’t worn such well-fitting clothes since La Boca. They made her feel powerful, potent, the world in her reach.
The money had a similar effect. Money opens many kinds of doors in a city. You can go into a restaurant and dine right next to respectable couples, never mind their stares. You can buy five kilos of meat at a time if you want to, or a strand of pearls, or perfume bottled on the other side of the world. Dante bought all of these things: the meat for La Strega, the pearls and perfume for Alma. She saw Alma once a week, on Sunday afternoons. The biting winds of autumn cut short their walks on the promenade. No matter. Dante took her to a fine salon that served high tea, complete with scones in the British style, fresh jam, delicate cakes, and whipped cream that glistened in a polished silver bowl. Alma fingered each pastry as though on the brink of some incomparable communion, and her eyelids fluttered closed with pleasure as she ate. Dante watched her raptly, her whole body on fire. After tea, they crossed town to San Telmo, to that dingy room with the bowl of water and its single wilted rose (sometimes it was red, sometimes white or pink or yellow, but it was always wilted). There they stole hours of visceral wonder. Alma was always naked, Dante fully clothed. She always put her mouth on Alma first, to make her delirious, to make her surrender, to make her believe, as she seemed to believe, that the thing Dante did next was what any man would do. As an added safety measure, she sometimes blindfolded Alma with a handkerchief and tied her hands together behind her back. Why? Alma asked the first time, and Dante, reaching for a reason, said, Because you look beautiful this way. Which was also true. In any case, it was an unneeded precaution. Alma took what came and gave no sign of wanting to reach down or undress her lover or do anything other than ride the waves. All week Dante thought about seeing her again. She even dared to dream into the future, about days with Alma, hundreds of them, strung forward into the great fog of time. Since becoming a man, she’d thought about the future only in immediate terms—Tomorrow, Next Week, Next Month If I’m Still Here—so deeply did she believe that she’d die young, if not at some knifepoint, then struck by the lightning of God’s vengeance for her sins. But none of that had happened. God was bored or distracted or rationing his bolts, and, as for knives, at Leteo there were fewer of them in trouser legs, more of them on linen cloths, it was a different life now, almost civilized. If she could live into the future, how many nights of music, how many days with Alma, months and years of tango and sex, enough to live for.
Then, one gray June afternoon, as Alma lay naked in the crook of Dante’s arm, she said, “I’m pregnant.”
She hadn’t heard right. She couldn’t have heard right. “What?”
“I’m pregnant,” Alma said again, more quietly this time.
The walls weren’t solid anymore. Nothing was solid.
“Maybe your … time, is simply late.”
“I’m never late.”
“This could be the first time.”
“It’s not.”
“How do you know?”
“I know,” Alma said, her irritation palpable. What did men know of these female matters, after all?
“Whose is it?”
“Whose else would it be?”
“I don’t know, Alma, you tell me.”
“How dare you?”
A stain snaked down the wall by the window, brown, menacing. Dante had never looked at it before.
“Why would you doubt me?”
She couldn’t say why. Her tongue silenced. Alma had believed it, all of it, Dante’s plan had worked, better than she’d dared to hope. Perhaps too well.
Alma was pouting. Waiting.
“What are you going to do?”
“What are you going to do?”
Dante opened her mouth to say something but nothing came out.
“I thought you were different from other men.” Alma sprang up from the bed and reached for her clothes. “How wrong I was.”
Dante watched her dress, paralyzed. If Alma was really pregnant, she wanted to help her. But then, she was lying about there being another man—or other men. Deceit either way. Deceit at every turn. It hurt her head.
Alma was dressed now, hair unkempt but elegant already. Her belly gave no hint of what it contained. “Well? Is that all you have to say?”
What if she wasn’t pregnant at all? What if she just wanted money? What if this was what she’d gone to bed with her for—with him for—in the first place? How could she have been so stupid, so trusting?
“Bastard. Faggot. Coward.”
Dante rose to her feet. Alma flinched but didn’t step back.
“Alma,” she said.
Alma looked into Dante’s eyes and ran out of the room without closing the door.
For the next seven days, Dante thought—in the depths of night, on the gleaming stage, on walks through the early winter rains—about what to do.
Only one thing was clear: she could not be the father. She could not make a woman pregnant, could not even lie naked with her; she knew how those things worked, what it took, and she knew she didn’t have it; she was a farce, an aberration masquerading as a man. Even so, Alma must be suffering. She didn’t want to be cruel. She didn’t want to be one of those men who turned their backs on women when they were vulnerable. The thought of it pushed at the pit of her stomach, an aching fist. She should offer her money, or marriage. Marriage! She tried to imagine it, the rest of her life hitched to a lie. It seemed a nightmare, a false life, an interminable cage. Of course, she, too, was lying; but her lie freed her to live her truth more fully than she otherwise could. Perhaps, for Alma, this lie felt simil
ar, a key to her best authentic life. Dante strained to imagine this. She didn’t know, couldn’t know. It shocked her to realize that, for all the raw hours they’d spent together, for all the intimacy she had with Alma’s body, she knew very little about her mind.
On some nights, she woke suddenly in the darkness, enraged at Alma for trying to trap her. On other nights she lay awake consumed with thoughts of Alma’s lovely belly, swelling with new life, miraculous, vulnerable. Emotions tore at her from all directions. There was no precedent, no example she could turn to for guidance. She had never known or even heard of anyone in a similar predicament. Joan of Arc’s ghost haunted her nights, standing in the corner of her dark room like a prison guard, wearing dull armor and a crown of flames. You’re disgusting, the ghost whispered, unspeakable, like nobody else in the history of the world. I am not with you. No one is with you, you’re alone.
She saw Alma one more time, the following Sunday, at the usual hour, at the door of her home. Alma came out dressed for the park, wearing a sleek blue hat that Dante had bought her a few weeks before. She looked equal parts wary and hopeful.
“You came back,” she said. “I didn’t know whether you would.”
“Listen to me, Alma.”
Alma waited, somewhat sulkily.
“I want to help you.”
Alma didn’t blink.
“I just need you to tell me the truth.”
“I already have.”
“The whole truth. About the other man. Or other men.”
Alma said nothing. She stared out at the street, where a carriage laden with coal was making its noisy way toward the boulevard.
“I know I’m not the father. I can’t be the father. Just be honest with me, and I’ll help you.”
“Why don’t you believe me?” She said it in a child’s plaintive voice. Dante lowered his voice and glanced away in a gesture of shame. “Because I’m sterile.”
Alma flinched. “You’re lying.”
“It’s the truth.”
The Gods of Tango: A Novel Page 25