The Gods of Tango: A Novel

by Carolina de Robertis

  After the third song, Don Carrasco came to the stage. The crowd went silent in expectation. Don Carrasco had tucked a red rose in his lapel for this occasion. He was unaccustomed to the stage and his hands shook as he spread them wide in welcome.

  “Ladies and gentlemen! I present to you, the star of our evening, the best kept secret of Buenos Aires, a lady like no other, a legend about to be born: Rosa Vidal!”

  The crowd responded with polite applause.

  She came to the stage.

  The applause stopped abruptly, as if swords had just severed hands from wrists.

  She stood at the center of the quiet, shoulders squared, in her vest and jacket and trousers and hat, smiling into empty hostile space.

  At Santiago’s nod, the band began to play “El Terrible.”

  Rosa opened her mouth and sang. She strutted. She boasted and cajoled and belted out the words, and, when she turned and Dante glimpsed her profile, she gleamed with sweat under the stage lights. Her stance was masculine in its vigor but female in its curves, a glorious sight.

  At first, at the end of the song, no one clapped. Then a smattering of applause began at the back, shot through with murmurs and the sound of chairs pushing back, clusters of people rising to leave, walking out as the next song began and Rosa assured two hundred stricken faces that she’d gladly give everything away for the woman of her dreams, who was the night, who was laughter, who was dangerous.

  “Well,” Rosa said after the second song was done, “it seems that some good people had another place to go.”

  Dante glanced at the other musicians. There was no script or plan for this. They were supposed to launch right into a rendition of “Mi Noche Triste.” Joaquín looked tense and was just starting forward from his bass toward Rosa as if to restrain her, but Santiago, seated in front of him, raised a surreptitious hand to stop him. Rosa reached into her pocket for a cigarette and lit it, unperturbed. She exhaled smoke. Smiled.

  “Listen,” she said in a confiding tone, “I understand.” She gestured widely at the audience. “Not everyone is like you.” She shrugged. “Or like me.”

  Nervous laughter. The room was still. Not a single wineglass or lady’s fan moved. Even the waiters stood frozen in place. Only Carmen, standing in the back near the kitchen doors, turned her head to survey the great hall with the air of a captain at the helm of a deadly voyage.

  “But now that it’s just us”—Rosa took a slow drag on her cigarette—“can I tell you what it’s like to be me?”

  No answer.

  “Good,” Rosa said and nodded at the band.

  She sang “Mi Noche Triste” and every word of it was true, she was a devastated man with a spine in his heart, abandoned by a woman and now his home was an empty shell in which even the mirror was streaked with tears and he could not close the door in case she should return to him, even the lamp refused to shine light on his sad night and every syllable was true, the tragedy was complete, the singer knew the greatest and most delicious pain the human soul could possibly withstand and shared that pain with the full force of lungs that were made to bring this very melody to this very crowd, which sat, rapt, amazed, confounded, awash in Rosa’s song.

  The next day, Leteo was in all the papers.

  A sensation.

  A perversion of nature.

  An embarrassment.

  A miracle. You won’t believe your eyes. This señorita has all the melodiousness—and all the bravado—of Carlos Gardel.

  Such things should not be permitted.

  Such things are not to be missed.

  Leteo should be shut down.

  Leteo is the cabaret of the summer.

  You’ll never see the tango the same way again.

  That week the crowds swelled and spilled over as the gentlemen and ladies of Northern Buenos Aires crushed in to see the new act for themselves. They were outraged, they were curious, they could not turn away. Don Carrasco purchased more chairs and pressed the tables closer together. Even so the shows sold out and they had to turn people away.

  Backstage, in the Lair, Rosa spoke very little. She arrived early to give herself plenty of time to change into her men’s suit, which she brought to work in a leather briefcase. The waiters hung a curtain from the ceiling to create a simple little changing area, though most nights, by the time the other musicians arrived, Rosa was already in her suit, ready and pressed, her face masked with a smile.

  They knew almost nothing about her. She was nineteen years old, one year younger than Dante. She was from Uruguay. They didn’t know where she lived, how long she’d been in Buenos Aires, how she’d gotten here or with whom. Nobody asked her. The first few nights were painful. The men could not talk as freely as before, about women, about whores, about anything, without fear of offending the gentler sex. And it was more than that: a woman, a stranger, had invaded the Lair, their very brotherhood, the mesh of their souls when they played. A silent pact ran beneath the surface of their music, and that pact felt shaken if not shattered. Everyone felt it though no one spoke of it aloud. El Loro fidgeted and lowered his usually exuberant voice to a mumble. Pedro sulked and kept his distance from Rosa, eyeing her occasionally with a mixture of lust and condescension. Amato made a few too many jokes that landed flat at the center of the room. Joaquín brooded in a vague rage that was difficult to interpret. Santiago became more formal, careful to pay equal attention to everyone, focused on the work, torn between trying to ease the tension and sticking to his guns, straining, Dante thought, to keep a cool appearance and not let his frustration show. As for Dante, she didn’t know how to react or what to do with herself. Part of her wanted to offer Rosa something: friendship, admiration, sympathy for the constant exhausting battle to be here, to occupy space. But she could not afford to arouse suspicion, and, beyond that, it would have been a false camaraderie, stained with rage and envy at Rosa’s ease, the way she toyed with the trappings of manhood as if they were so many game pieces and not the hazardous tools of survival.

  Rosa did not let the silence buckle her. She sat quietly on the sofa during intermission, waiting for the next set to begin, as though saving all her noise and fire for the stage, where she unleashed enough power to light up all the city’s new electric lamps. When the night’s work was done, she disappeared almost immediately behind the curtain at the far edge of the Lair, which came to feel like the border of a separate and hostile nation. The men poured out drinks and busied themselves with their instruments while Rosa changed (Dante tried not to think of the stripping, unhooking, the slide of fabric, the writhe of limbs, but she couldn’t help it and from the way the men glanced over she guessed she wasn’t the only one), and though they sometimes spoke to each other, they never addressed the veiled side of the room. When Rosa emerged, skirted, fully female, the men didn’t look at her, didn’t speak to her, didn’t pour her a whiskey, acted as though she were not there. At first she’d stand, still as a hungry bird, and watch them before picking up her briefcase and heading out with a quick goodbye. After a few weeks, she simply left, as though acting out her part in an unwritten but unrevisable script.

  Carmen, for her part, was delirious with triumph. Upstairs, she raved to Dante about their success—“we’ve shown them, that’s what, now everybody wants to come here, even the prudes, especially them, I don’t care what they say, we beat them.” She laughed more than before. She became bolder; spread her legs wider; unfurled a larger appetite than Dante had ever seen in a woman (and she suddenly thought of Alma, lying still with her eyes closed, weeping afterward; the baby must be born by now, if there had really been one, was it a girl? a boy? how were they doing? stop, don’t think about that, come back to this sweat-thickened room, these salted thighs), Carmen wanted everything now, to see Dante naked, to put her hand down her lover’s trousers.

  “Why won’t you let me?”

  “Because—no.”

  “Come on, I want to see you. All of you. It’s not fair that I’m always naked and you�
��re not.”

  “You don’t like what happens when you’re naked?”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  Smiling, coy. Hands traveling to buttons. Dante pushed them away, sharply.

  “No. No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t want you to.”

  “You are one strange man, Dante.”

  Dante sat up and lit a cigarette. Its smoke coiled in the air, made a gauzy veil for Carmen’s nakedness. If only she weren’t so beautiful.

  Carmen resumed with a gentler voice. “What do you have to hide—some kind of scar?”

  She might almost have gone with that lie—it seemed a good one—but Carmen added, “Because then I really want to see.”

  And then she pounced like a puma at its prey and Dante fought back, Carmen laughing, Dante wrestling at her until Carmen leapt back with a howl of pain.

  “You burned me!”

  Dante stared at the angry red mark on Carmen’s wrist. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “You’re an animal.”

  “You don’t attack a man holding a cigarette.”

  “So it’s all right to hurt a woman if you’re smoking?”

  “Shhhh, Carmen, don’t shout. I told you, it was an accident.”

  “You’re nothing but a dirty conventillero.”

  Dante stared at Carmen in the stark morning light. She shouldn’t be here. She should never have been here. But when she rose to leave, Carmen grasped her arm.

  “Don’t go.”

  Dante froze, at war with herself.

  “Look at me.”

  Dante turned. To her shock, she saw tears in Carmen’s eyes.

  “You can’t leave me.”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m sorry about your arm.”

  “I know.”

  “You can’t—you can’t break my rules, Carmen. You have to accept them if you want me to stay.”

  Carmen stared at Dante for a long time as though there were some cosmic puzzle trapped beneath her skin. “I will. Now stay.”

  Dante softened and fell to her knees to kiss the tender wounded skin at Carmen’s wrist, as if kisses could keep wounds safe from harm.

  Months passed and they kept making love, almost always with rope, not only for protection but also for the thrill because Carmen’s joy was more brutal with a blindfold, her body more ferocious when lashed down, and for all the danger of their time together, for all the sense that This Is a Mistake and We Must Stop and for all the galaxies of space between their worlds, Dante couldn’t stop coming back for the wild arch of Carmen’s back as she raised her breasts to heaven, straining against the cords that held her down.

  Carmen decided to hold a masked ball. The notion came to her in a gauzy dream that, she told Dante, woke her from her siesta in a delicious sweat. It would take place on the spring equinox, to welcome the fresh September sun, and would rival the best costume parties of Carnaval.

  She was lit up by her idea, and orchestrated every detail. She ordered Venetian masks of every color for the Grecian statues in the hall. For the musicians, she bought matching black masks in the Neapolitan style, with long black noses that made El Loro joke about having grown a new appendage for the ladies (and it was good to hear him try to lift the men’s mood, though they didn’t all laugh, the atmosphere was tense between them still). Everyone was to wear a mask at the party, from waiters to statues to clientele—except for Rosa, who would sing with a naked face.

  On the night of the party, they were all to arrive at ten o’clock, to rehearse.

  At ten thirty, Joaquín still wasn’t there. They began without him, running through a few of their newer songs onstage. Their sound reached out to the carved nymphs of the decorated hall, whose glittering green and silver and purple masks drew attention to their nudity. After rehearsal, they retreated to the Lair, still without Joaquín. No one spoke. No one dared ask what would happen if he didn’t come. They put on their masks, and sat, paced, stood, sat back down again. Rosa sat quietly, in her vest and trousers, studying the parquet flooring with great focus. Santiago seemed to smolder, though Dante found it difficult to read his masked face. She felt unsteady. Joaquín had been angry ever since Rosa joined the group, and though she’d thought he’d calm back down after a while, as the others had, he showed no signs of doing so and, if anything, seemed only to grow more bitter with time. It suddenly occurred to her that the orquesta was more fragile than she’d thought. She’d come to think of it as solid, permanent, the way a family or a village is permanent—or seems to be. Because, in truth, even families could be scattered to the winds: look at all the immigrants in this city, blown about by fate, far from their roots. This band itself was made, in part, of such men, brought together by music to form a new family, the only one she had. Now fighting. If she lost them, she didn’t know what she’d do. She looked up and, to her shock, found Rosa staring at her with a curious open gaze. It seared her, that gaze, she had to break it. When she glanced back, Rosa was looking away, at the fire-colored pattern on the wall.

  The headwaiter poked his head into the doorway, wearing the green face of a grinning satyr. “Ready?”

  “We’re ready,” Santiago said.

  “You’re not all here, though?”

  “We are.” Santiago looked grim. “This is all of us now.”

  “We promised El Sexteto Torres.”

  “It’s still us.”

  The waiter sighed. His mask grinned on. “All right. Five minutes.”

  He left, and Santiago reached for his instrument. The others followed suit.

  They were all on their feet, on their way to the door, when Joaquín appeared at the threshold, his giant instrument case slung over his shoulder.

  “Where were you?” Santiago said through his black mask.

  “Around.”

  “What happened?”

  Joaquín shrugged. He seemed drunk.

  “We were about to go on without you.”

  “You can’t play without me.”

  “We can. In fact, I shouldn’t let you on the stage.”

  Joaquín pushed past Santiago to the side table where his black mask lay waiting, put it on methodically, and turned back to Santiago. “It’s not your stage,” he said and then, slowly, deliberately, “Negro.”

  The men froze. They all heard the underside of that tone; Dante heard it too, the slithering attack, though she didn’t want to believe it. Santiago stood unmoving, alert as a soldier. The two men stared at each other through their masks, with their ridiculous long noses, an unspoken transaction taking place between them. Dante realized, as she watched them, that she did not know Joaquín, for all the long nights they’d spent together making beautiful and intricate sounds. Staring now at his masked face, she glimpsed a deeper seething place that rarely surfaced, that swirled below the haughty sadness he usually displayed to the world. She strained to see. She did not want to see. And then Santiago picked up his bandoneón and walked right past Joaquín, to the stage.

  The other men followed him, not looking at Joaquín, who came to the stage a minute later and took his place at Dante’s right. No one stopped him. They launched into their first song and the doors burst open, crowds burst in, the masked and costumed gentry ready for their Spring Equinox ball. The band played but couldn’t mesh. Their rhythm was right, their pitch was right, the untrained ear would suspect nothing, but Dante could feel, under the surface, the aural web that bound them fray and strain. They played for a delighted, oblivious crowd. The party grew wild, as wild, at least, as the upper crust got: champagne poured; couples danced more brazenly than ever before, as if the cramped quarters left them no choice but to press together and tangle legs; voices spiked and fell, laughed and howled, sang and sobbed; whiskey poured; gin poured; men licked Chantilly cream from the fingers of masked ladies; a male figure in a full boar’s head tore through the room grasping women’s behinds; a drunk woman
vomited on her fine silk gown. Rosa charmed the audience, shone as always, received whistles, hoots, roses thrown from lapels, a few slurred proposals of marriage shouted at the stage. Where was Carmen? Wasn’t this her party and, even more, her dream? Dante looked but couldn’t find her. At intermission, the men retreated to the Lair and drank shots to ease the tension, barely speaking to each other. They did not take off their masks. Santiago was silent throughout the intermission, except to say Easy there, Dante, at the sight of her downing another quick glass. It did not make her stop. The liquor flushed her with warmth and calmed her nerves. In the next set the stage spun a little, but she played the first song with perfect steadiness.

  And then Carmen appeared.

  She was not wearing black. Her dress was red, blood red, to match the ruby necklace at her throat. Her mask was golden and left her mouth exposed, that red mouth, smiling, triumphant. Soon she was dancing with a tall young man and Dante itched with jealousy: it should be her down there, on the floor, holding Carmen in her arms, not that man, not anyone else. But how could that be when no one knew what was between them? And what was this thing between them, anyway? Carmen a flame in the crowd, gliding, dancing, living the tango, and Dante forgot the troubles in the orquesta, the rift in their sound, Joaquín, Santiago, what was said and what was not, as she pictured herself falling into Carmen’s redness, against her breasts, and disappearing into this new woman who could wear any color and do anything she wished, what a woman, that Carmen, blinding like the sun. Dante played like a demon, horsehairs broke out of her bow and swept the air as her violin sang the way it had long ago for a soon-to-be-exiled king in a voice that had now become her own, exquisite, resonant, blanketing the crowd.

  By the time the ball was over and Dante could escape upstairs, dawn already glowed in the windows.

  Carmen was waiting for her, standing in front of her desk, still wearing her glittering golden mask. “Well? Did you like it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Everyone did.”