The Gods of Tango: A Novel

by Carolina de Robertis

  Then her husband died, suddenly, in his sleep. Age and a weak heart, the doctor said; his cluster of maladies had finally overwhelmed him. Carmen was free. She put on black clothes and went right to her brother.

  You owe me, she said. I did all of this for you.

  You’re right, he said, I’m sorry. I do owe you.

  She was so surprised that for a moment she didn’t know what to say.

  What can I give you? he went on. I could send you to Paris.

  No. I have money now. I can send myself to Paris.

  Then what?

  I want a cabaret.

  What are you talking about?

  It was the first time she’d said it aloud. There was nothing she wanted more than a place where she could not only dance tango but dance it on her own terms, be in charge.

  Listen, she said. I want a cabaret, but I need you to run it with me, or else no one will take it seriously. I’ll put down my money and make you the owner. It’ll be good business for you. All I ask is that I get to name it, decorate it, spend as much time there as I like, and have the final say on anything concerned.

  The brother agreed, and seven months later Cabaret Leteo was born.

  Dante was listening with her head on Carmen’s naked breasts, fondling the nipples, drunk on their shape. She thought of what they had been through, these breasts, this body. She thought of the multitude of birds hanging from the ceiling in the great hall. “And the name?”

  “What name?”

  “You named the cabaret, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why Leteo?”

  “For the river in the underworld. You know the story?”

  She did. Cora had loved the stories of the ancient underworld. “It’s the river people drink from when they die, to forget their lives.”

  “To forget their suffering.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s what I want this cabaret to be. A river to drink from. Each dance is a cup from the river.”

  “A cup of forgetting?”

  “Forgetting is joy.”

  Forgetting. The elixir of forgetting.

  The thought of it stayed with her for days. She pictured a great chalice at the center of Leteo, presiding over the dance floor, overflowing with mystical waters. To forget. Ever since Cora’s death, she had longed to forget; that longing was part of what had driven her across the ocean. Because, while she still lived in Alazzano, there were things she had tried and failed to cut out of her mind. Like the sounds of Cora’s exorcisms, screams from the grand old house where all the doors and windows were shut tighter than the fist of God. Like the nuns trooping in and out like black-robed armies, faces stern, determined to destroy their enemy at any cost, although they failed in their attempts and finally surrendered to the devil-girl, a hopeless case, nothing for it but to send her to live far up the hill in that dilapidated hut as though she were a mangy dog, or worse than a dog, because strays could roam the village plaza in search of scraps to call their own while Cora was locked in by several bolts and forbidden any company save the monk who brought her meals twice a day and checked to make sure she had no way to hurt herself (and her father, her father visited as well, the only one allowed, but forget, forget, forget). Leda was a coward, a shameful coward, which was why it took her four months to sneak out in the night and make her way to the hut through a forest that even in the light of a three-quarters moon (she didn’t dare go at the full moon, the most wicked time) terrified her, absolutely terrified her, each crackling leaf and whispering branch reminding her of old stories in which girls were eaten by monsters, stolen by witches, swallowed by holes that opened to pits of endless darkness. I’m not afraid, she lied to herself as she walked, over and over, not afraid. She saw the hut at long last in the low defeated light. She looked at it and looked at it and did not approach. She’d knock the next time.

  The second time she came, she heard weeping. It was Cora. Still her voice. The same voice that had told her the most luminous stories the world had ever carried on its back, the same voice that had drawn her to the river, mothered her more than her own mother, urged her to be brave. Now she hesitated at the door. What if Cora didn’t want to see her? What if she bit and scratched her like an animal, as the village gossips claimed she would? In the end, she slunk away. Next time, she would knock.

  But the next time she went, she did not knock; she couldn’t because she heard something, or maybe she didn’t, there was no reason or all the reason in the world for her to run the way she did, racing home so fast the trees blurred as she sped by them. When she woke up the next morning she couldn’t remember what had made her run, she’d forgotten what it was she’d heard, forgotten everything except this: she would never go back to that hill.

  November unfurled its brazen spring throughout the streets of Buenos Aires. By December, the air was a thick hot brew you could get drunk on. Dante lived for the moment, in the moment, as though there were nothing but the cabaret, the upstairs room, nights with tango and mornings with Carmen. At home at La Rete, she was El Tanguero, the one who played in front of gilded crowds, envied and revered. La Strega’s daughter married and Dante paid for her crisp white dress, never worn by anyone else, as fresh as a wordless page, and for the feast that took place in the central patio. La Strega thanked him with tears and copious blessings on his future progeny, should he ever have them, and he should have them, good boy that he was, you, Dante, like a son to me. She embraced him so heartily that Dante had to close her eyes against the hallucinatory power of her breasts.

  El Sexteto Torres did not travel that summer, deciding instead to stay on at Leteo, where the crowds continued at a steady pace. They’d been a sextet now for a year and a half, and Dante could no longer imagine their sound without Amato or Joaquín, the chords and ornaments of piano, the bedrock of long deep strings. Their sound had grown lavish, as well as tight: they meshed with each other, knew each other’s sonic shapes, nested together without thinking.

  For the New Year, 1917, Carmen planned a lavish party, complete with rare wines, towers of French pastries, several piglets choking on the polished apples in their mouths, and trapeze artists to slice the air between acts.

  The musicians toasted with champagne in the Lair, half an hour before midnight.

  “Here,” Santiago said, raising his glass, “is to the best year of our lives!”

  “Which one?” Amato said, grinning. He’d grown portlier that year, and had a fourth child with his wife, and one with a mistress, all of whom he talked about with pride. “The one that’s ending or the one to come?”

  The men laughed.

  “The one to come,” Santiago said, his expression serious.

  “I don’t know, Negro.” El Loro raised his violin into the air with a triumphant flourish. His wedding was just a couple of weeks away; the entire band had the day off work to attend the ceremony at a synagogue in San Telmo. “This year’s been pretty good!”

  “Hear, hear!”

  “At least on this side of the Atlantic.”

  “At least for us.”

  “I mean look at us!”

  “Look at this!”

  “Can things really get better from here?”

  “Just you wait,” said Santiago. “You won’t believe your eyes.”

  They played beautifully that night, and the trapeze artists flew and sparkled and did not fall (the blond one, Pedro later told them, made pretty little sounds in bed and bent the way you dreamed she would), but much of the pork and pastries went uneaten, as crowds did not appear in the droves that had been hoped for.

  “Where was everyone?” Carmen moped, upstairs. “Why didn’t it work?”

  “It worked just fine,” Dante said, tying her blindfold.

  “It could have been better.”

  “Shhhh—”

  “Why didn’t—”

  She trailed off into incoherent sounds.

  Three days later, a new sensation hit the tango world. That young
singer Carlos Gardel, of whom Amato had spoken with such warmth and admiration, had presented, as part of his appearance at the Esmeralda Theater, a new phenomenon called a tango canción: a tango that revolved around vocals rather than instruments, in which the lyrics not only accompanied the tune but told a story; in this case, in the song “Mi Noche Triste,” the story was of a man whose woman has broken his heart and left him to face the sadness of night. The audience had roared with applause at the end, enraptured, transported, sold. One reviewer called it the start of a musical revolution: the soul of the tango can be sung!

  “As if we didn’t know that in the conventillos,” El Loro grumbled when Santiago read the article aloud in the Lair.

  “It’s not the same,” Joaquín said, with a haughtiness that sent a prickle down Dante’s back. “They’re talking about art.”

  “Art does happen in the conventillos, you know,” El Loro said, an edge to his voice.

  Joaquín squinted at El Loro and opened his mouth, then hesitated.

  “One thing’s for sure,” Amato said. “If Carlitos keeps going with this, and he will, the world won’t be able to turn away.”

  Don Carrasco was beside himself. He wanted a singer. Now he understood why their New Year’s party hadn’t worked; they’d failed to keep abreast of a rising trend. All the most important cabarets would now have a singer; he could see the wave, and they’d join it. He pulled Santiago aside just before intermission to tell him his new vision. There would still be dancing but there would also be a show. People could sit and sip their wine and watch the spectacle; it was clearly what they wanted, so it was what they’d get.

  “If we find the right man,” Santiago told his musicians, back in the Lair, “we can make this work. Who knows, it might even be a great way for us to expand.”

  “These rich people,” El Loro said as he rubbed resin along the length of his bow. He always treated his instrument with tenderness. He must be a good lover, Dante thought, though perhaps a little tentative. “They don’t have the guts to dance, and now they want to change our music to suit them.”

  “I don’t think it’s just them,” said Pedro. His hair had grown even shaggier and gave him a wild look. “There have always been lyrics.”

  “That Carlitos.” Amato shook his head. “He deserves the good luck. Smart bastard.”

  Joaquín lit his cigarette. It hung from his mouth like a dead bird. “The real question is, how do we find the right man?”

  “Don Carrasco will help us,” Santiago said. “He’s arranging auditions. We can take our pick.”

  Four days later, at seven in the evening, long before the first set of the night, the musicians gathered at Leteo to hold auditions. They sat in the front row of tables by the stage.

  A waiter brought them a full bottle of grappa and six glasses, poured for them, and stood by as they raised their glasses in a toast.

  “Here’s to the right man,” said Santiago.

  “The right man,” the men echoed.

  The grappa burned Dante’s throat as it went down. A delicious burn, how had she ever lived without it? She felt an undercurrent of nervous excitement between the men, about who this Right Man was, how he might change the band. Every member of the group deeply affected the whole. Their leap from quartet to sextet had transformed them, thickened the delicate webbing of their bonds, put pressure on their tribe and ultimately strengthened it. This new change, a singer, could enrich them or pull them apart.

  The waiter cleared his throat. “Don Carrasco wishes to know whether you’re ready to receive the candidates.”

  “Send them in.”

  Amato went up to the stage and sat at the piano, ready to accompany songs. The singers entered. There were more of them than Dante had imagined; they kept coming and coming; twenty of them, thirty, forty, in a muted stampede. The band members exchanged glances of surprise, so many!

  “Line up against the wall, please,” Santiago said.

  They did so, jostling for proximity to the stage, each out for himself, young men with jet-black hair slicked back in tidy place, old men whose bellies strained at their tuxedos, poor men torturing their smiles to hide their missing teeth, men with money or at least enough of it to polish up their shoes and add a flash of gold to their cuffs, men lit up with ambition, men struggling to hide their desperation, men fidgeting with nervousness, men who moved as if they did the air a favor. They stared in amazement or hunger at the hall, its opulence, its marble, its brass, its birds hanging from the ceiling, frozen in a travesty of flight.

  Dante’s fellow musicians, she realized, were looking at the back of the line, where an applicant had been pushed by the throng of singers.

  It was a woman.

  She wore a man’s suit and a dark bowler hat. She held a briefcase at her side. Her breasts and hips were obvious under her clothes; she was much too curvy to ever convince the world she was a man. And she was making no attempt to do so. The suit seemed tailored to her round hips. She wore bold red lipstick and black kohl around her eyes. A woman’s face under the arrogant slant of a man’s hat. A woman’s shoulders squared like a man’s, legs farther apart than a woman should ever stand. Dante stared at the apparition, her human echo, her worst nightmare—her face was pretty in a frank, pragmatic way, and she knew that face, didn’t she, think, think, Dante, search your mind—and then she knew: it was Rosa. The woman who’d approached them at La China’s and asked to sing. What was she doing here? How dare she? She had no right to do this, a young upstart from the dance halls, toying with the border that Dante had risked everything to cross, flaunting it for all to see, anyone could look at her and get to thinking about men and women and the lines between them and drop the blinders from their eyes and then how long would it be before they looked at Dante and saw what she really was?

  She glanced furtively at her fellow musicians. Their eyes were on Rosa. They spoke to each other in whispers.

  “My God.”

  “Is that really a woman?”

  “You can’t call that a woman.”

  “What, then?”

  “I don’t know. A thing.”

  “Who is she?”

  “What does she think she’s doing?”

  “She looks familiar …”

  “Never seen her before.”

  “She must be crazy.”

  “It’s disgusting.”

  “It’s a joke.”

  “Kick her out, Negro.”

  “Oh, come on. Let her embarrass herself.”

  “It’ll be distracting.”

  “It’ll be fun.”

  “She can’t be here. She’s got to go.”

  “No, wait.” Santiago raised his hand, a gesture which never failed to part the seas of chatter and open space for him to speak. “I want to hear her.”

  The other musicians’ looks ranged from surprised to amused to annoyed, but no one argued. Dante wished that someone had. She couldn’t relax in that woman’s presence, couldn’t let the knot at the pit of her stomach untie.

  It took three hours to get through all the applicants. Santiago gave them all a chance to sing, no matter how scuffed their shoes or gray their skin. A lesser man, Dante thought, would have sent the most pathetic ones away on sight, as they’d clearly never be presentable to the audience at Leteo, but under Santiago’s direction everybody had their few minutes onstage. Some were mediocre; many were good; a few were excellent. After a while they bled together in her memory. Halfway through, as one exited, shoulders hunched in the sense of his defeat, Dante saw that Don Carrasco and Carmen were sitting at the very back of the hall, watching. How long had they been there? Carmen did not meet her eyes, but still, when Dante turned back to the stage she felt Carmen’s presence as a prickle at the nape of her neck.

  Finally it was Rosa’s turn, the last one. She rose to the stage in absolute silence. The musicians did not clink their glasses or shuffle their feet or twitch an eyelid.

  “Name?” called Santiago.

&
nbsp; “Rosa Vidal.”

  “Song?”

  “ ‘El Terrible.’ ”

  Next to Dante, Pedro let out a sharp sound of disbelief. And Dante herself was shocked at the chosen song, a bold celebration of male bravado—how could a woman ever sing it?

  Amato, onstage at the piano to accompany the singers, froze with his fingers over the keys. He looked at Santiago for explanation or reprieve. Santiago only nodded, slowly, go on, play.

  Rosa opened her mouth, and her voice made the world fall away. It was full-bodied and potent, large enough to fill the stage, the cabaret, the entire city. She seemed to grow twice as tall as she sang, and your ears were made to hear her, your eyes were made to watch her strut and flash, hands hooked loosely in her pockets, chest puffed out because she was, she told us, a man who knew what he liked, a man who went where he pleased, a lover of women, all women, criolla women, the best dancer and best knife man at any party, lover of guitars and food and may the noble audience listening now forgive him, he must be frank, he must be true, he must tell them who he really was, El Terrible. Rosa caressed every word on its way out. She was pure vitality. She was the compadrito from the brothels, from the cafés, rebellious, good-natured in his obscenity, unabashed. She swaggered like a man and sounded like a woman and the combination caused a clash inside that could wake the depths of a person, monstrous depths. She leaned into the suggestiveness of each line, eyeing her audience from below the slanted rim of her hat, winking at her audience as if to encourage them to dirty up the meaning of her words, as if to rope them right into her story. El Loro laughed despite himself, turned it into a cough. Dante could not breathe. She wanted this woman to evaporate. She wanted her to become the world. She clutched the table in front of her, groping for stability.

  Finally, Rosa finished. Silence returned to the hall. She stood, expectantly, small again, dwarfed by the heavy velvet curtains.

  “Thank you,” Santiago said. “That’s all.”

  Rosa walked off the stage, picked up her briefcase, and left. Santiago motioned for the musicians to follow him to the backstage Lair.