“No.”
“Two things. First, it is flight. Gliding across the floor with someone, especially if he’s good, there’s no gravity, there’s a lightness you can only get in the tango or by dying.”
“Are we light after we die?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know.” The very subject felt subversive. To conjecture about life after death was to question heaven, not to mention hell and God and soul and darkness. She’d never spoken about such things, except with Cora. “What’s the second thing?”
Carmen stared at Dante, searching. She stepped toward him until there were only centimeters between them, a slim finger of space. “Dance with me.”
Dante reached for Carmen, quaking inside, amazed at the steadiness of her hands. One of them clasped Carmen’s hand as the other landed on the small of her back. There was no music but Dante didn’t need it, the music was always inside her, etched into her bones, where it was impossible to lose. She picked a tune in her mind—“El Llorón,” the one which most made her wish she could step down from the stage and take a woman in her arms—and began.
Carmen danced as though she, too, heard the music. She was lithe; she was strong; she had balance; there was no ripple of tension at the start of a move or at the end of it. Her responses seemed to guide themselves. The illusion of a single body on four legs, following commands that came from neither mind, from no mind at all, from something beyond any realm the mind could touch. Raise and lean and glide and hook and turn and back again to the center, always back to the center, then out again to edges where the soul can ache and stretch and make an arc out of its longing, sweep its secret shape into the air where it will leave no mark, because that is the dance, it leaves no imprint, has no owner, gleams and then is gone without a trace.
She couldn’t stop the song. They kept dancing. They were closer now, in a pressed embrace. Dew on Carmen’s forehead where it grazed Dante’s jaw.
End it. End it. You have to end this dance.
The last move: Carmen leaned into Dante’s body, like falling. Dante held her up, steady, in a slanted line. They stayed there, still, both breathing hard. Time stretched and slowed and revealed a drop of infinity and then Dante gently drew Carmen to her feet. But when she started to pull away, Carmen tightened her hold on Dante’s hand to keep her close. Now they were still, now everything was still. The scent of her hair. Sweat and bread and Parisian cologne. Tightly groomed hair that caught the light of the growing Buenos Aires dawn.
Don’t fall in, Dante thought desperately. Don’t fall in.
Her mouth fell to Carmen’s neck and she fell in.
Kisses rained down on so much supple skin. Carmen’s noises, beautiful noises, not loud exactly, but bold, inhabited, ethereal and growling all at once. The fine black couture unzipped and peeled slowly down to reveal a shape finer than any of the Greek statues in the great hall below. Carmen, naked, standing. Dante on her knees fully clothed. The shock of looking up to find Carmen’s eyes wide open. The shock of gazing back. Into her eyes, at every curve of her. Lean her back against the desk and move her gartered legs apart—they open smoothly—and go inside, inside, inside.
How long was she there? She didn’t know. There was no time. There was no danger. Or there was, but it didn’t matter. Even if she was killed for this it wouldn’t matter. My life for this, my mouth on you, speaking an ancient language it was never meant to learn.
The arch of Carmen’s back. Her screams. She will wake the whole city!
She will wake all of América!
A stab of fear, a pulling back.
“More,” Carmen said.
The sun poured clear and vigilant from the square of sky cut by the window. Carmen finally pulled Dante up and leaned her head against his chest. “Ah,” she said, and then went quiet.
How to leave? Dante pictured the hall and stairs as a gauntlet of possible spies. Was anyone here? Had anyone heard?
Carmen seemed to read her mind. “No one’s here at this hour. Don’t worry. The first employees don’t arrive until two o’clock. My brother comes in at eight in the evening, at the earliest, if he comes in at all. You’re safe to walk out. No one will know.” She kissed Dante’s mouth. “And no one can know. You understand?”
“I understand.”
“I mean it. If you tell anyone I’ll have to kill you.” She laughed, a little wildly, the way a drunk sailor might laugh at a good yarn.
“I won’t tell.”
“But you’ll be back?”
“Yes.”
“Or else I’m not letting you go.”
“I’ll be back.”
“Promise.”
“I promise.”
It was true: the hall was empty, the stairs deserted. Dante’s legs had not yet returned to her, they seemed made of a hot liquid and she did not walk but poured down to the ground floor and out into the brash light of day.
The following night, she came to work terrified. If Santiago found out what she’d done, she could be expelled from the band. They would know. They would smell it on her despite the several times she’d rinsed her face at the washbasin at home, despite the cologne. If they didn’t smell it on her body, they’d smell it in her thoughts.
But nothing was different. The musicians gathered backstage, in a jovial mood. During their first set, they played another new song of Santiago’s—he’d been composing feverishly for weeks, with shocking ease because, he told Dante in a rare moment alone, between you and me, the melodies wake me in the night and make me grab my bandoneón and teach my fingers to sing them—and it was a lovely piece, luxurious, seductive, couples crushed onto the dance floor eager to glide to its beat. Carmen came to her regular table and sat with the same alert severity as always. Her eyes grazed across the stage, across all the men including Dante, with such impersonal attention that Dante for an instant wondered whether the night before had been a dream, a fevered one, as fevered as the visions of those bathing maidens in Pompeii.
At intermission, and after the second set, Dante waited for a note from a waiter on a silver tray. But none came. And so she went home to her conventillo room and lay in the early morning light and touched herself furiously, thinking of Carmen, naked, pushed back against the desk, making sounds that could rip the world in two.
Five nights later, the summons came. Dante went upstairs after work and found Carmen in the same place, in front of her desk, no cigarettes this time. They didn’t speak. All the words Dante had gathered, all the why did you make me wait so longs and what is this we should stops dissolved in the face of seeing—in the widow’s posture, in her face—a raw open lust. They kissed, roughly, and when Carmen’s hands began to roam toward Dante’s crotch, Dante pinned her wrists behind her back with one hand and touched her everywhere with the other. Mark the rhythm. You mark it. Don’t let her do it, you’ll be lost. Devour her, lift her, see how light she is and carry her to the divan where to your surprise she does not fight but lies back with a feline sigh. Push her dress up her thighs, to the tops of her garters and beyond them, uncover her sex which is bare beneath her gown and which you have been craving since the last time.
Afterward, they lay on the divan, both breathing hard, Dante’s head on Carmen’s belly, the wrinkled pillow of her raised skirts.
“Fuck me,” Carmen said quietly.
Dante tensed.
Carmen must have felt it. “Don’t worry. I want you to.”
She didn’t know what to do. She had to obey. She wanted to obey. But it was past dawn, the sun was high, the room was full of light and this was not the sort of woman to keep her eyes closed. Dante pulled out her handkerchief and moved to blindfold Carmen.
Carmen made a sound of surprise and pulled back.
“If you want it”—Dante stroked her face—“you will have to”—cloth bound over her eyes—“trust me”—a tightened knot.
Then she was between Carmen’s thighs and inside her and the sun was a river that swept the
m both.
There were no more notes after that; none were needed; Carmen would wear a particular ruby necklace when she wanted a visit to follow the evening’s work. The rubies sparkled with light borrowed from the chandeliers. From across the room, they formed a bright red slash at Carmen’s throat. These secret invitations came three or four nights a week—or rather, mornings, since the dawn’s first rosy fingers always beat her upstairs—and Dante always complied, always slunk right from work to that office, whose air they soon thickened with the scent of sex. Sometimes they spoke; often, they said nothing until Dante had collapsed on Carmen, head on her damp breasts, and they’d had a few minutes to catch their breath. Then they’d murmur or laugh or do both at the same time, understanding everything and nothing.
There was less time for sleep. Dante didn’t care. She lived off sex and music, drank them in the way she imagined that the old gods had sucked their nectar: greedily. She was constantly half-drunk, wakeful, taut as a wire. When she was not with Carmen, she craved her, thought of her, itched to feel her under her hands, around them. The musicians knew Dante had something going on, as he rarely went out with them after work anymore for “a drink and a poke,” as they put it, and they teased him for this—“oho, our Don Juan! At last! So you’ve found yourself some high-class lady, have you?”—but the tone was admiring, approving, exaggerated: he couldn’t really have found a lover among the linen tables of Leteo.
Could he?
Santiago seemed to wonder. He studied Dante quietly, as he surveyed all his men, only, it seemed, with even more intensity, a focused stare that made Dante want to tell him everything, to confess the way you might to a gentle father whose arms were strong enough to embrace you no matter what you’d done. But she feared that if she started telling, she wouldn’t be able to stop: that she’d start with the trysts with the rich widow and end up spilling out the secrets of her aching bound breasts, the sock in her pants, the unspeakable shape of her lust, the ways she’d found of giving women joy (did men do the same things? some of them?), the radiant cramp in her hand when Carmen finally begged for mercy, the tense fear in her gut that never went away, the loneliness of banishment from heaven. If there was anyone she could tell these things to, it was Santiago. But this very fact made talking to him dangerous, and so she didn’t dare.
Leteo, home of luxury and ecstasy and danger.
“I had no idea,” Carmen said one morning, naked, blindfolded, sated and glistening with sweat, “that this was possible.”
“This?”
“So much pleasure in one moment. In one life.”
Dante felt a rush of happiness. “A woman like you? How could you not know?”
“What does that mean, ‘a woman like you’?”
“I mean—you seem—”
“Careful, now.” Teasing.
“No, not that. It’s that you can have anything you want. And you’re confident. Able to say what you want. I’ve never seen that in a woman before.”
“Well, I’ve never seen this in a man before.”
“What do you mean, ‘this’?”
“This.”
“The blindfold?”
“Much more than that.”
“I’m sure your husband—”
Carmen laughed, a sharp bark. “You’re not serious.”
They were silent for a while.
“Release me.”
Dante untied Carmen’s hands and removed her blindfold. Carmen gazed at her.
“I can’t have anything I want,” she finally said. “If only I were so free.”
“But you are free,” Dante said, and in her mind the sentence continued, freer than any of my neighbors, freer than any poor San Telmo soul. “You have money. You built this cabaret.”
“It doesn’t matter. Money doesn’t free a woman. You don’t understand because you’re a man.”
Dante bit her lip shut up shut up don’t answer that.
“You’re right about one thing, though. I built this cabaret.”
“How?”
“How did I build it?”
“Yes.”
“You really want to know?”
“Yes.”
The story came out in fits and starts, beginning with Carmen’s marriage, which was, in her words, its own private circle of hell. Don Ruiz had been a mean old man who stank of stale soup and never smiled. It was her brother who’d forced her to marry him. Her brother became her guardian when she was seventeen years old, and he was twenty-five. Their father had just died of a heart attack; their mother had already been gone for years. At their father’s death, they discovered he’d squandered the family fortune, which had taken four generations to amass in the cattle ranches of Entre Ríos, and left a trail of unpaid debts. They were destitute; they let go of all the staff except the old housekeeper who had been Carmen’s nanny when she was small. When old Don Ruiz started to call on Carmen, his footman bearing rose bouquets large enough to lose a child in, her brother, Felipe, saw an opportunity.
You’ll marry him, he said, and we’ll get our standing back.
Carmen tried to fight it, but her brother was firm. One night she tried to escape through a bedroom window. The old housekeeper, suspecting a burglar, cried out and woke her brother, who dashed out into the little garden before she could make it over the fence.
You stupid child, he said, grabbing her by the arm, where were you going?
Away.
To become a whore.
No—that’s what you’re trying to make me.
He raised his hand to slap her but she glared him down.
Carmen, he said in a steadier tone, you’re being ridiculous.
Am I?
I’m sorry. This isn’t what you want. But it’s not—what you called it. It’s a respectable marriage. And you’ll see, you’ll grow to love him.
There was real hope and real tenderness in his face. He wanted to believe his own words.
And if I don’t? Carmen said.
He took her into his arms and she felt the low thrum of his heart. You will, I promise.
She tried to believe him.
After Carmen married, Don Ruiz arranged a plum job for Felipe Carrasco at a railroad company where he owned shares. Felipe lined his pockets and attracted an aristocratic bride. Carmen tried her best to squeeze happiness from the dry fruit of her marriage. The first six months were tolerable. Don Ruiz was not kind, exactly, but he kept to himself much of the time and seemed to enjoy Carmen’s beauty or, at least, the way others responded to her beauty when she stood beside him. But after six months, Don Ruiz became ill—the doctors found no malady to speak of, except that he was old, until finally the fifth doctor to replace his predecessor supplied a list of diagnoses and useless pills—and angry. The more she tried to soothe him with words or caresses, the more briskly he slapped her away. Everything became her fault: his aches and pains, the maids’ laziness, the rainy weather. By their first anniversary, he’d stopped speaking to her except to spit insults or commands. In bed, he treated her like a mule to be slapped into acquiescence if necessary. He liked to urinate on her. He liked to see her cry during the act. There was no pleasure. She became obsessed with obtaining caged birds and watching them throw their bodies at the bars for a few days before releasing them into the Buenos Aires sky. She strained to memorize the exact slant of their wings as they soared off so she could call it back to mind in times of despair. She bought and released thousands of birds, and it was never enough, would never be enough until the sky became so crowded with finches and parrots and jays that she could grasp their feathers like ladder rungs and rise up to the clouds.
After three years she went to her brother and said, I’m unhappy, I’m horribly unhappy.
I’m sorry, Carmencita.
He is cruel to me.
I’m very sorry. He looked sincerely pained.
Then help me.
Marriage can’t be undone. What can I do?
Help me escape.
Wh
at?
Across the border. I’ll go to France, Morocco, anywhere.
Morocco. You’re crazy, Carmen. What would people say?
I don’t care.
It would ruin us.
Ruin you. I’m already ruined.
You’re not. You’re a lady, a respectable wife.
I am nothing. I’m a stain on the bottom of his shoe.
Things will get better with time, querida.
You’re wrong.
More firmly, he said, You have to go back home.
I’ll kill myself.
No, you won’t. You wouldn’t shame us that way.
What do you know?
But he was right—she couldn’t kill herself. She tried: she kept poison close at hand and put her lips to it several times over the years. But some phantom force always brought the vial back down. She wanted to leave, yes, but not by dying. She wanted to live. But, she sometimes asked herself as she lay beside her husband, for what?
Bird after bird lashed at its cage with frenetic wings.
Ten years into her marriage, her husband took her, only once, to see tango at Club Armenonville. It was the first luxury cabaret for tango in Buenos Aires, and that year, 1913, all the people of their class went at least once between trips to the opera to see what the commotion was about. Carmen both loved and hated the opera: loved the soaring grief and passion of the characters, which spoke directly to her soul, but loathed the crowd at Teatro Colón, which clapped primly after each act as if they gave a damn about heroic love or tragic loss but then spent the intermission hissing petty gossip. Still, the opera had been a comfort, before she found tango. At Armenonville, Don Ruiz looked on at the spectacle, impassive. They did not dance. But even so, Carmen was amazed: the dance was like nothing else she’d ever seen, a couple’s dance that was not a series of predetermined steps but, rather, improvised. The bodies of the dancers had to talk to each other. A secret communication flowed between them—how did they do it? how did they know what they knew? The dance and its music shot through her skin and right into her blood, where it woke a part of her that had been in a stupor, a kernel full of rage and joy and claws and dreams, livid with life, biding its time.
The Gods of Tango: A Novel Page 27