“Teach me.”
At first Dante was too stunned to move. Then, slowly, she began.
To open. To surrender. To taste it from the other side.
To speak of it—like that, now here—until you can’t speak anymore, until words melt in the hot crucible of your mind.
To unfurl, to be unfurled. No need for map or compass, the land is new and ancient and we learn it and are lost in it, become it, we break in glittering pieces and need nothing more.
Carmen, you were wrong: forgetting is not joy. Joy is this. A truth with open skies, sweeping all of it up, shadows, music, hunger, beauty, pain.
Afterward they lay together, entwined, breathing air made plush by the day’s heat.
“Rosa?”
“Mmmmmm?”
“Never leave me.”
“Mmmm.”
“I’ll never leave you.”
“No?”
“No.”
“What about her?”
“I’ll free myself.”
“How?”
“I’ll tell her. I’ll just tell her.” In the glow of this moment it seemed that simple.
“And then what?”
“We’ll be together.”
“Where?”
“Here. Or anywhere.”
“And make music.”
“Yes—music.”
“And do this.”
“Lots of this.”
“Forever?”
“Forever.”
“Are you proposing?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Marriage?”
Rosa sat up in the slatted light and her breasts hung close to Dante’s face, manna, heaven. “Yes.”
“I can’t marry you, Rosa.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not a man.” Then, laughing, “Didn’t you notice?”
“You don’t want to be a man?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“Do you want to go back to women’s clothes?”
“I didn’t say that either.”
“But do you want to?”
Dante ran her hand over Rosa’s hip and closed her eyes for a moment. “No.”
“Then don’t. If you want to, you can call yourself a man forever.”
“And be with you?”
“And be with me.”
“But, what you just did to me …”
Rosa’s voice was low, shy. “Did you like it?”
“Yes. Yes.”
“We can still do that and you can still be a man.”
“How can that be?”
“Because we say.”
Dante tried to stretch her mind wide enough to hold these thoughts. She tried to picture her own future, beyond the simple question of will I live or will I die? to which the future had been reduced for so long. Outside her door, the children were bickering over their chores, and La Strega had begun to sing.
“So many of them out there,” Rosa said. “They’ll see me, I’m trapped.”
“You could stay here. All day. I’ll bring you food, we’ll sleep and eat without putting on our clothes.”
Rosa shook her head. “If I don’t go home the shame there will be worse.”
“Then what will you do?”
“I’ll wear my costume.” Rosa gestured toward her briefcase. “If I lower my hat and hide my face, your neighbors won’t guess.”
Dante watched Rosa dress in her men’s trousers, shirt, and vest, seeing the transformation for the first time. A strange mirror. Unthinkable. And yet the simplest action in the world. Rosa was soon dressed, not as a man, but as a woman in male clothing, holding everything inside one skin.
“See you soon, Dante.”
Rosa kissed her on the lips, pulled down her hat, and was gone.
The room hummed with heavy light. Dante lay naked and alone. She thought about her future. She thought about truth. She thought about what it could possibly mean to be true. She thought about madness and kindness and the chance before her. She thought about losses without measure, volcanoes she would never again see on the horizon, a river that would never again enfold her feet, a husband-cousin’s brains spattered on the ground, a broken father, a shut door of a mother, and then suddenly she was running in her mind, running fast, running away, down the hill from the monk’s hut where Cora lived her final days and running also away from a truth that overtook her and forced itself in, she knew, she remembered it all and this time she would not turn away.
She heard it clearly now, the sound that came from Cora’s hut. It was a baby. Crying. Not an evil spirit as the village gossips came to say. The woods are haunted, they would claim, it’s all Cora Matta’s fault, she brought this evil down on us—a twisting of the story, proof that they knew, others knew, they’d heard the same sound in the woods and told a version that was easier to swallow than the truth.
A human baby. That was what she heard the night she stole her way up the hill to the hut, hoping to talk to Cora one last time but running instead as fast as her twelve-year-old legs would take her, away from the untenable sound which was not a scream, not a wail, but an infant’s whimper, as though it had already spent its strength and given up on reprieve. All these years the sound had hidden in a corner beyond memory, furled into itself, waiting for the chance to unleash.
Rumor hid the story and revealed it at the same time. A ghoul haunting the woods. A weeping in the leaves. Evil spirits brought down by the crime of Cora’s madness. One story obliterates the other. The tongues of the village wagged, whipped, cursed Cora’s name, and, strangely, told the secret of what happened to the baby without ever acknowledging its existence.
Bless the nuns, they did their best.
Cleared the woods.
For the good of all.
The nuns did so many good works. They exorcised demons from bad girls, or tried to. They cleaned altars and dishes and the dregs of their own souls. They also owned a stone building in Salerno that, it was said, had been a medieval prison, and then a stable, before becoming an orphanage with barred windows and moldering walls. As for the priests, they had always bent like saplings under her uncle Mateo’s will; all it would take was a gift to the church, and the priest would talk to the nuns, who in turn would make a baby disappear.
Where was that baby now? Was it safe? Happy? She longed to know the child’s name, its face, the shape of its soul. If the child lived it would be nine years old now, but Leda, who was also Dante, lying naked in her bed on a hot Buenos Aires day, could not think of it as anything but a baby, still crying in that hut, calling out for help that she had failed to give. Because I couldn’t. A knot of shame tore open. She would have saved them if she could have, but she was twelve years old then and, she now saw, so much smaller than her world. The knot unraveled further, acutely painful, stabbing. Cora querida, carissima, my almost-sister, forgive me, I would have liked to save you both but I did not have the power, not then, not yet, I long to see your face as you bent over your child in the moonlight, the face of a mother however young or mad or broken. Did you love your baby even though it was your father’s child? Can such a love be? I am glimpsing love now, Cora, it’s a vaster force than I ever thought and more mysterious, don’t despair, I’m coming for you, can you see me rising from this conventillo in the New World and flying back over the ocean, back in time? I am bringing all the strength I wish I’d had that night when I approached your hut and that I had to cross the wide ocean to gather, this strength to see you clearly, to come up to the door, to break the lock with my bare hands and find you both inside, holding each other by the light of a fire, both of you pure, and beautiful, and you won’t be surprised that I’m wearing men’s trousers because you’ll know my face, you’ll know it’s me, arriving with the King of Naples’s violin in one hand and reaching out the other; you’ll brighten when you see me and the baby will sense the change and stop crying, a miracle, and when I say Cora, are you ready to go? you�
��ll stand up tall and your smile will be a star to guide us all.
Dante dressed and went out for a walk without thinking of where she was going or why she’d stuffed her pocket full of pesos before she left. She had not slept, she was not tired, the streets seemed to murmur to her in a stony tongue. She wandered for a long time without purpose or direction, or so she thought before her feet arrived at a gray door.
It was slightly ajar. She entered without knocking.
The courtyard was crowded with children and a few women washing linens and hanging them on the line. The children thronged around her quickly, examining her with bright eyes and grimy hands that roved her trousers for pockets from which to steal. She held her pockets down tight—no coins, not one, or there would be no end to it. For an instant she thought of her first day in Buenos Aires, when she’d entered the conventillo that became her first home, with Arturo, a thousand years ago, or so it seemed.
“What do you want?” a thick-bodied woman said.
“I’m looking for Alma.”
The woman snorted. “She doesn’t live here anymore.”
“Where can I find her?”
“We don’t know.”
“She didn’t leave an address?”
“No,” the woman said coldly and turned her back to Dante. The other women tightened their faces and kept to their work.
Dante gave up and was almost all the way down the hall when a voice said, “Pssst, mister.”
She turned.
It was a girl, tall and skinny, somewhere in the hazardous space between child and woman. She glanced behind her to make sure no one saw them together. “Alma left because they threw her out.” She mimed a large, pregnant belly and widened her eyes.
“I see.” Dante kept her voice to a whisper, following the girl’s lead. So it was true, then; she’d been pregnant. At least that much was certain. “Do you know where she is?”
The girl nodded. She pursed her mouth closed.
Dante pulled out three coins and handed them to the girl, who stared at them in wonderment.
“Well?”
“It’s a place called Lo de Julia.”
Dante felt punched. She knew the place. The women lived there and worked all night in their own beds. She thanked the girl and walked over there immediately.
At Lo de Julia, she persuaded the madam—a woman reminiscent, in her size and force, of a city tram—to let her in even though it was off-hours and, for a few more coins, to call Alma out to the courtyard. Alma emerged from a back room on the right. She looked much older than when Dante had last seen her. Her skin was drawn and pale, her jaw set like that of a boxer between fights. She’d lost weight from her already thin frame, and her bare arms hung like brittle twigs. She balked when she saw Dante.
“Alma,” she said.
“What do you want?”
“I have something for you.”
Alma put her hands on her hips, waited.
Dante wanted to ask how this could have happened, what the downward slide had been. The madam had returned to her end of the patio and was pretending to attend to her embroidery, as if madams cared about such things. “What happened to the baby?”
“Born.”
“Boy or girl?”
“Girl.”
“She doesn’t live here, does she?”
“What does it matter? I thought you were impotent.” She spat the word, loudly, and the madam turned to stare, all pretense gone.
“Not impotent, Alma. Sterile.”
“Fine. Sterile. Anyway, if you can’t be the father, why do you care?”
Dante lowered her voice. “You can’t raise a child in a place like this.”
“Then you fucking raise her.”
“Please, calm down.”
“Fuck you, Dante.”
The thought pushed in with brute force: this could have been me. If I hadn’t put on trousers, I might have fallen off this same edge and the face I’m looking into would resemble my own. She was not so very different from Alma, though Alma would never know. There was no use trying to explain herself, so she said nothing as she handed Alma a chaotic wad of pesos, making sure it stayed hidden from the madam’s line of sight. Alma looked shocked but quickly tucked the bills into her corset. The madam, eyeing them from behind, seemed not to have noticed.
Alma leaned in and lowered her voice. “So you admit you’re the father?”
Real hope in her face. Perhaps it had never been a lie, not a complete one. Perhaps Alma truly believed Dante was the father, or wanted to believe it so much that she was making it true in her mind. Maybe she had no idea who the father was. Maybe she was groping in the dark, not lying exactly, but searching for a story to hold on to, as so many people do.
“I just don’t want your girl to suffer.”
Alma said nothing, her face a granite wall.
“I have to go,” Dante said and kissed Alma on the cheek, pretending not to notice the way Alma flinched at her touch.
That night, when she arrived at Leteo, instead of reporting directly to the Lair, she went upstairs to Carmen’s office, uninvited, full of resolve. She knocked on the pale door. No answer. Perhaps Carmen hadn’t yet arrived. Dante wasn’t sure; she’d never come so early in the night and didn’t know the routines of this hour. She was an interloper. She should leave. But first, she tried the door handle, which turned and gave way.
Carmen sat at her desk, drinking whiskey from the bottle. She was wearing red again—it seemed that, in coming out of mourning, she’d traded one color for another—and stood up quickly when she saw Dante. “You,” she spat.
“Carmen.”
“You can’t come here at this hour. My brother could have seen.”
“I’ll be quick.”
“Where were you last night?”
“I came to say it’s over.”
Carmen swayed a little, and her mouth tightened. “It’s not over, Dante, until I say it is.”
“You don’t own me.”
“How dare you?”
“I’m not your dog, Carmen, to come whenever you call.”
“Is there someone else?”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Who is she?”
“There’s no one.”
“Rosa Vidal?”
Dante startled; she couldn’t help it. How had she known? “No,” she said, too late.
“That whore! She exists thanks to me.”
Dante couldn’t begin to imagine what Carmen meant by that. She didn’t dare ask. “Carmen, please, calm down.”
Carmen stared at her with wild, vulnerable eyes, and Dante longed to enfold her in her arms, strip her naked one last time. This beast of lust, she thought, how it refuses taming. She still wanted Carmen. But she wanted Rosa—and the new life opening for her, for them both—even more. She reached for Carmen’s hand and kissed it gently. Carmen watched and waited with an indecipherable expression. They’d done so much together. There had been, if not love, at least passion between them. There still was. Of all the things she could say, an appeal to that passion seemed her best chance at getting out unscathed. “Set me free, Carmen. Like one of your caged birds.”
Carmen sneered. “Or like my husband?”
Dante didn’t understand at first. Hadn’t Carmen’s husband died? How had she put it? Suddenly, in his sleep. The doctors said. Weak heart. And then Dante recalled the poison Carmen had fingered before that, contemplating death. Her own death. Unless. She shook her head. It couldn’t be that Carmen had—No. This woman whose face in pleasure would melt Eros himself.
The danger she was in came into sharper relief.
She thought fast: don’t ask, don’t take the bait, try a different course. “Carmen. You’re so beautiful. There are thousands of men who’d give anything to be with you.”
“Then stay. Don’t go.”
She was pleading now, her face naked, about to break. Dante could see the scared girl in her, the forced bride, the hurt wife, the woman sc
ratching her way out of an abyss. And, also, the rich child who always got the doll she wanted. She took Carmen in her arms and felt her collapse against her chest. Her smell was so familiar, tart, refined.
“You’ll be all right,” she whispered into Carmen’s hair.
Then she pulled away and found she had to pry Carmen’s arms from her and block out her sobs in order to escape the room and descend the stairs without looking back.
I’m free, she thought as she flew downstairs to the Lair, where the musicians were tuning their instruments and warming up with stray arpeggios. We’re free, we can start over. Rosa emerged from behind the curtain, resplendent in her men’s clothing, and Dante beamed news of her victory in a glance they both quickly broke away from. They took the stage and played a glorious set, with Carmen nowhere to be seen in the great hall. Rosa sang with fresh abandon, made the audience laugh harder than ever between songs, strutted as if the world belonged to her, and maybe, tonight, it did. Dante’s violin sang into the band’s collective sound, more keenly than ever, an extension of her body and her soul.
But then, at intermission, when they were all gathered in the Lair, the headwaiter arrived and announced that the rest of the night was canceled.
The men stared at each other.
“What do you mean?” said Santiago.
“Leteo is closed,” the headwaiter said.
Dante felt her limbs grow cold.
“Furthermore,” the headwaiter said, “I have a message from Doña Ruiz. For men only.”
Silence spread across the Lair as all the men looked at Rosa, who stood as still as a statue, hat in hand.
“You don’t have to go,” Santiago said.
Don’t go, Dante thought at Rosa. It’s a trap, we’re not her pawns, don’t do it.
“It’s fine,” Rosa said, placing her hat on her head. “I’ll see you all tomorrow.”
She picked up her briefcase and left in her men’s clothes.
The headwaiter pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. “The message,” he said, and read. “I consented to one woman on my stage, but only one. Fire them both or don’t come back. Doña Ruiz.” He cleared his throat and gazed intently at a point on the far wall. “Any questions?”
The Gods of Tango: A Novel Page 34