“What was that!” said Pedro, flinging himself onto the sofa.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Amato.
The men settled themselves on the sofas and chairs, poured whiskey, lit cigarettes.
“Really, Negro,” said Joaquín, “I can’t believe you let her sing.”
“Oh, come on,” said El Loro. “It was entertaining. You have to admit.”
“And the song? ‘El Terrible’?”
“She must have given Don Carrasco a heart attack!”
They all laughed. Dante laughed with them.
“She wasn’t the only one who embarrassed herself.”
“True!”
“Some of those men!”
“Thank God for the good ones.”
“I liked the one who sang ‘Brisas Camperas’—what was his name?”
“He was good. But not as good as the compadre near the beginning, you know, the Russian.”
“He wasn’t Russian.”
“How do you know?”
“His name wasn’t Russian—what was it, Pérez?”
“Well, he looked Russian to me.”
They chain-smoked, refilled their glasses, and kept talking, comparing and contrasting the different candidates, the debate soon locking into the Russian versus the Brisas Man. They were both excellent singers; the Russian had a majestic quality to him, while the Brisas Man was a natural charmer sure to win over the ladies. The Russian had the best voice. Not true. The Brisas Man was agile in his phrasing. The Russian seemed more trustworthy. The Brisas Man seemed like more fun to have around. Dante argued for the Russian, though she could easily see both sides and would be happy either way.
Finally, they noticed, as if of a single mind, that Santiago had not yet said a word. He sat in his armchair, listening, bandoneón on his lap, fingers roving the keys without pressing down as if holding a quiet conversation with his instrument. They turned to him and posed the question without opening their mouths, and you?
Santiago looked at them through the gauze of cigarette smoke. “I want the girl.”
“The girl!” El Loro looked stupefied.
Joaquín leaned forward in his chair and spread his hands open. They were enormous, his hands, long-fingered, muscular, disproportionate on such a lanky man. “You can’t be serious.”
“She’s good,” Santiago said.
“But she doesn’t have balls,” said Joaquín, and the other men laughed.
“Yes,” Santiago said, “she does.”
Silence. Dante was afraid to look at Santiago, afraid her mask might slip.
“We’ll be the laughingstock of the tango world,” said Pedro.
“Maybe we will, maybe we won’t.” Santiago’s fingers still flew across the keys, more quickly now, chasing a tune with an urgent drive. “But we’ll be doing something new. That’s good for tango, and good for the cabaret.”
“Or disastrous,” Joaquín said.
“Maybe.”
“They’ll never allow it.”
“Maybe not. But I’ll tell them I want the girl.”
“With all due respect,” Joaquín said, “it’s a mistake.”
“I say it’s not,” Santiago said.
“And if we vote?” Joaquín pressed.
Santiago’s fingers went still. “There’s no voting here. This is my orquesta. Anyone who doesn’t like it can go.”
No one moved. The air itself seemed to prickle.
“Negro,” said Pedro, “you’d trade us for some girl?”
“I’m asking you to try something different.”
“Different,” Joaquín said, “isn’t always good.”
Santiago lowered his bandoneón into its case and said, in a measured tone, “That’s what people said when I hired you to play bass.”
Joaquín looked both astonished and furious. He opened his mouth as if to protest, but nothing came out.
Santiago shut his instrument case with a crisp click.
“Is this even tango anymore?” Pedro muttered.
“What do you know,” Santiago said, “about what the tango is?” Pedro flinched as though he’d been slapped.
“Anybody else have a grievance?” Santiago said.
Silence.
“I’m with you,” Amato finally said. “She’s one hell of a singer.”
“I’m with you too,” El Loro blurted, looking amazed at himself.
Pedro glared at El Loro, who raised his arms in a gesture of helplessness.
Dante felt her tongue cut in two: half of it wanted to cheer for Santiago and for the arrival of this strange talented girl, but the other half burned to defame her, crush her, push her out of the world to keep it safe.
“Good,” Santiago said.
And he was gone.
Santiago braced himself for battle as he crossed the great hall. If it had been that hard to persuade his musicians—they were good men, but they didn’t risk, they didn’t try to look past the damn patch of ground in front of them to the horizon let alone beyond it—it would surely be near impossible to persuade Don Carrasco. He took the stairs slowly, counting them as a trick to calm his mind.
But Don Carrasco’s office door was closed. The headwaiter stood beside it like a sentinel.
He’s not here, the waiter said. He went home.
But we were supposed to meet.
Yes, he left a message for you.
Ah?
He says to go arrange your business with Doña Ruiz. The waiter gestured across the hall. She’s in her office.
His sister? Santiago thought. He left his sister in charge?
The waiter marched down the stairs, duty fulfilled.
Santiago knocked at the widow’s office door.
Come in, a voice called.
The space was dim and made him think of forbidden steeples, places never meant to be entered. It was larger than Don Carrasco’s, which surprised him, and made him wonder, as he often did, about the mysterious arrangements of this family. There was a blue divan in the corner, and high windows that made stark rectangles of the night. The widow sat behind an ornate desk that had surely cost as much as Santiago’s annual earnings. She looked up at him with an inscrutable expression that did not change as he launched into his argument for the woman-singer, Rosa Vidal, who, though unconventional, had, he felt, a talent that could not be ignored.
When he was finally done, she said, You’re sure that’s what you want?
I’m sure, he said.
People will talk.
And let them, Santiago thought, but all he said aloud was, I can understand, señora, if this worries you—
Oh no, I’m not worried. She fixed an even stare on him, her face a sculpted fortress. And it looks like you’re not either.
No.
You’re a smart man, Señor Torres. She’s the best of the lot.
Santiago nodded, startled.
I’ve already told her to come back tomorrow night.
Unsteady. His legs were unsteady. The floor seemed to be moving, too quickly, beneath his feet.
It’s fortunate, she went on, that we agree.
My band this is my band not yours you don’t—he forced a smile. Yes, señora.
You may go.
He lurched out of the office and down the stairs to the street. He had half an hour before the orquesta’s regular time to gather and prepare for the night’s work; his men were probably still in the Lair, stewing and chafing, waiting to see what came of his request to hire the girl. He would not go back in there. Not yet. The avenue seethed with noise and traffic; he hurled himself into its flow. Walking never failed to clear his mind, and he needed it now, the clearing. That woman. That sleek anaconda of a woman. Lurking behind Don Carrasco as though the man were nothing more than a flimsy paper cutout of authority. Once, incredibly, Santiago had wondered about the widow, about whether she and Dante—but how ridiculous, it couldn’t be, what an absurd suspicion, a single encounter would have broken that quiet lanky kid in
two. He couldn’t stand the thought of anything hurting Dante, the boy he’d scooped up from the gutters, lost, reeling with talent, aching with pain he thought no one could understand. Santiago walked on. The streetlamps poured their light over cars and kiosks, old men and young fops, sleek boutiques and damp gutters. That woman, the widow: who knew what she was capable of, sitting up there in the turret of her castle, acting as if she owned him, Santiago, or, more accurately, as if her grandfather had owned his grandfather as in truth he might have and this meant that anything he, Santiago, did or felt or was belonged to her even now. It rose in him then, the great red rage, bright, familiar, a whipping flame of it that burned to shout out of his mouth or pour down his arms into the world as violence or else through his bandoneón, how many times the bandoneón had saved him, cleansed him, his fingers itched for that now. That smirk on her face, as if she could buy not just a cabaret but his orquesta—his orquesta, which he’d slaved to build up all these years—and, beyond that, as if she could buy the soul of tango itself. These rich bosses treated the tango as if it were a flimsy amusement, nothing more, easy to mold to their whims. And the tango was changing as a result, he couldn’t deny it, the piano would never have been added without the rich, this was the world now, the world of tango, and if he didn’t play the game by its current rules, it would continue without him, and that was a thought he could not stand. And so he would embrace change and keep tango alive. Is this even tango anymore? Pedro’s voice in his head. Pedro, of course, was an idiot: he was good enough with his instrument and a hard worker but he was too sullen and talked before he thought. But the question rattled. Not because of the singer-girl, not because of the widow, but because Pedro had no idea—nor did any of them in the Lair—how much the tango had already changed, how much of its history was unsung, erased, in danger of being lost forever.
A music born among the children of slaves is like an orphan: it will never know its real parents, will never hear the full visceral story of its birth. That’s what his uncle Palo had told him. Palo used to drum when Santiago was a boy, every night after dinner and for hours on Sundays, on drawers turned upside down, on barrels salvaged from the port, drumming as if the slap of palms on hard things could fill his children’s bellies for the night (though it could not), as if the dead gathered in a circle around him listening and reveling and stepping in time. And there were so many dead. Palo’s three older brothers had died in the Paraguayan War, conscripted by the Argentinean government, taken off by force along with all the black men of their generation, because, Palo told young Santiago, they needed a way to not only win their war but also rid this country of us in the process, two birds with one stone. Buenos Aires was too black for them, one third of the population, that’s enough blackness to swallow you up! to get strong on you! and so they sent our fathers off to war and opened floodgates to European steamships so that white men would pour into the city to replace us, and their plan worked, the bastards, look at our city now. Look at San Telmo. It’s like an outpost of Italy around here. Not that I’m complaining: your father was a good man and if he hadn’t come here from Florence, he wouldn’t have met my sister and you wouldn’t have been born. History is dirty but you’re a good thing to come out of it, one of the best.
When Santiago was six, his father died in a construction accident, and after that Palo always kept him close. Uncle Palo lived in the room next door, and played candombe—three drums of different sizes locking rhythms to form a complex throbbing whole—as well as tango, in those earliest days when the music was just beginning to assume the name. He played with other men in the neighborhood, in the patio of the conventillo as the women washed plates and pots and clothes and as boys sharpened knives and made rope to sell in the plazas and girls shelled beans or wrung out linens in tubs the size of coffins. In the 1880s, when Santiago was small, Palo had played with El Negro Casimiro and El Mulato Sinforoso, who were among the first to take the tango out of tenements into bars and cafés, playing a couple of songs and passing the hat, happy to gain a coin or two and warm men’s spirits in the process. They became famous in San Telmo and La Boca for the exuberance of their violin and clarinet, back in those days when the tango was still joyful and unkempt, still riddled with the old dances of Africa and rhythms that sped your blood. Palo’s wife didn’t like it when he went out with Casimiro and Sinforoso—all those sailors and whores, she said—so, after a few years, Palo stopped going. Santiago started on the drums with his uncle Palo, but, when he was twenty, he heard an old German neighbor’s bandoneón and immediately fell in love with its velvet voice, its sweet piercing melancholy sound. He began helping the old neighbor with errands in exchange for lessons, and soon came to love everything about the bandoneón: its steady weight on his lap, its elegant inlay, the complex navigation of all those tiny keys, the strength it took to press the air out, compressing, expanding, pushing music out of hidden darkness.
But you’re not German, a neighbor said. What are you doing with that thing?
I like it, he said, lacking words for the whole truth.
His uncle Palo rose to his defense. Leave him alone. It’s an odd box, sure, but he sounds good playing it, and anyway, new instruments aren’t to be feared if they help keep music alive.
He has a point, the old German neighbor interjected, lighting a cigarette.
And in any case, Palo pressed on, look at Sebastián Ramos Mejía!
He said the name with sunlight in his voice. Santiago had never met Sebastián, but he knew that he was an old man, the son of slaves, who performed in cafés and, rumor had it, had brought the bandoneón to the tango as never before. That his uncle Palo would place him in a category with this man made Santiago feel hot and large inside.
Over the years, Palo drummed to Santiago’s bandoneón, and the sounds they made together were more beautiful than anything they could have made on their own.
Uncle Palo lived to the age of sixty-two, when pneumonia tore through the conventillo and took many small children and old men. Santiago was thirty-three then. At the burial, as the men of his family shoveled redolent dirt over the coffin, he thought of Palo Torres and the world that would soon forget him, forget his name, the sound of his voice, his drumming, his steps on cold flagstone. Palo, a giant of a man, condemned to erasure from the books of time. Santiago pledged, then, spade in hand, to take Torres as his stage name, and to make music with such ferocity that his name would force itself into the world of tango, or, if not his name, at least his sound, which carried Palo’s sound under the surface.
This was the commitment that fueled him still, kept him striving even when the odds seemed insurmountable. He never married and now, at thirty-nine years old, he still couldn’t think of marriage, for fear a wife might split his heart away from music, blunt his hunger. Sometimes, when he was tired and the other members of his band had gone back home, he wondered why he was doing all of this and whether he should give up the fight, maybe find a wife and settle down into a life of nights by the hearth with a full belly and feet up, children other than the scattered bastards he suspected might be his but had never seen, children who could climb all over him and accost him with shouts of delight—and in those moments of doubt, he called up his uncle’s voice, saying, the tango is ours, remember that, remember where it came from. For every person who knows the roots of tango there will be one hundred people who do not and maybe one day those who do know will all disappear. But the secret lives on, it beats in the drum, and in these syncopations even when the drum is gone, in the steps of dancers who’ll never know they’re mimicking the steps of an old religion that arrived here in the festering bellies of slave ships like the only bright thing left in hell: a god and goddess dancing side by side the way they used to do before the tango made them face each other and embrace. Then those white people wonder why the dance makes them feel so alive. Don’t worry about that. Don’t ever try to tell them. Just give them the music and let music take care of the rest.
It was
time to go back to Leteo. To face his musicians with their countless fears. The new girl, this Rosa, she had a new way of keeping tango alive, and he welcomed it, even though he had no idea what it would bring. You can’t cage the tango, he thought, and as he approached the service entrance he suddenly was not thirty-nine anymore, but six years old, scrubbing rat shit off crates in the conventillo, hearing Palo argue with Casimiro and Sinforoso in the warm way of good friends.
Tango, Casimiro said, is the sound of Africa.
No, said Palo. It was born here. Tango is the sound of América.
But it has the sounds of Africa inside it.
Look at us: we have the blood of Africa in our veins, but we were born here. Are we African?
Of course.
And our children? Are they African?
Why not? Argentina will never accept them as her own.
Sinforoso shook his head. Listen, he said. You’re both wrong.
What!
What!
But they leaned in close to listen.
The tango began with drums, and drums are prayer, they’re still underneath the rest of it.
Yes.
All right.
And so?
And so, my friends. Tango is the sound of the gods.
A NEW ACT! the posters shouted. LIKE NOTHING YOU’VE SEEN!
ONLY AT:
CABARET LETEO.
No names. No more description. Even “Orquesta Torres” was left off the leaflets, the posters, the marquee. The strategy worked: on the designated night, the crowd was so thick the waiters rushed to nearby restaurants and rented their chairs to line the walls.
Because what on earth, for a Buenos Aires gentleman, is like nothing else he’s seen?
The musicians came out first, at half past midnight, and played an instrumental song. Dante, in her stance at the center of the string players, between Joaquín and El Loro, felt the crowd hum with disappointment. A few couples got up to dance, but their movements were halfhearted, rote, was this all there was, El Negro Torres’s band, solid and predictable? By the second song, a few more couples were on the dance floor. By the third, the crowd fidgeted, whispered, smirked with disappointment.
The Gods of Tango: A Novel Page 29