The Gods of Tango: A Novel

by Carolina de Robertis

  Silence. The men looked too stunned to speak.

  “Good night,” the headwaiter said and was gone.

  The six musicians stared at each other. Dante looked into their eyes, one after the other, feeling her face burn; she had to mimic their reactions to survive; she watched them all make furious calculations as her world fell apart in slow motion. Shock on all their faces, one after the other, until she reached Santiago, who studiously avoided her gaze and that was when she realized that he knew. Santiago knew.

  “Good God,” said Amato, and he crossed himself.

  “Who is it?” said Joaquín.

  “How dare she?” said Pedro, crushing out a cigarette with unnecessary vehemence.

  “She’s crazy,” El Loro said, his voice tight.

  Joaquín said, “So it’s you?”

  “No!”

  “Stop it, both of you,” Santiago said firmly. He stood and opened his hands, as if they held an unseen, combustible sphere. “We’re not firing anybody. We’ll stay together.”

  “And leave Leteo?” said Pedro.

  “There’ll be other places.”

  Joaquín sprang up from his seat on the sofa, tight as a wire. “But someone here is lying, Negro.”

  “We don’t know that—it’s the widow who’s—”

  “It’s not me.” El Loro raised both hands into the air like a man in a police raid.

  “Nor me,” said Pedro. He let out a laugh that came out too sharp.

  “Oh yeah?” Joaquín said, to them both, to all of them, to no one. “Show me your dicks.”

  “You show yours first!”

  Joaquín was already unbuckling his pants.

  “Stop it!” Santiago shouted.

  Joaquín’s sex lay in his hand, a limp flag. “Who’s with me?”

  Pedro laughed at the absurd sight, but no one joined him, and the sound quickly ebbed to nothing.

  “I don’t need to do that shit,” Amato said.

  “You, Amato, are not a suspect,” Joaquín said, glaring at El Loro.

  “I have a wife,” El Loro said weakly.

  “You haven’t knocked her up yet, have you?”

  El Loro went pale and took a step back toward the wall. He began to unbuckle his trousers.

  “Loro,” Santiago said, rushing over to him, “stop—”

  Dante’s mind roared and roared as she said, “It’s me.”

  The men shrank back as if they were one amoebic being. El Loro made a disgusted sound that hurt Dante more than if he’d stabbed her.

  “You,” Joaquín said. “I should have known.”

  Dante met Joaquín’s eyes and felt the world reduced to a single point of hatred. Nothing could have prepared her for it. It aimed to knock her off her feet but she did not fall, did not even sway.

  “Show it to us,” Joaquín said.

  She would die here tonight. She would die before she let him strip or rape her, if she had any say just let me have a say in the matter.

  “Leave him alone,” Santiago said.

  “You still call that thing a him?”

  “Joaquín,” Amato said, “maybe we should all calm down—”

  Joaquín reached into his trouser leg and a knife flashed in his hand. The air in the room shifted, tightened, turned all eyes to the weapon. It was not a facón but a larger blade, a butcher’s blade that flashed with reflected light. “Show us,” he said, in the calm voice of a man ordering a drink.

  Dante reached for the facón in her trouser leg and rallied all her strength just as Joaquín pounced and slammed her against the wall—she prayed for a quick death—another body lunged between them, Santiago, wrestling Joaquín back and gasping, arching, crumpling to the floor. Joaquín sprang back, knife red, and stared in horror at Santiago on the floor in a growing pool of blood, holding his side, struggling for breath.

  Dante fell to Santiago’s side and felt for the wound. Her hands filled with blood at an alarming rate, warm blood, she tried in vain to stanch it. The smell of sickly metal overpowered her, she could not bear it, he could not die, not for her, not for anything, Santiago—a slow red explosion filled her mind.

  Joaquín dropped the knife on the floor, made a low moaning sound, and was gone.

  Amato fell to his knees, tearing his shirt to make a tourniquet. El Loro kneeled beside Amato, spread open his hands as if to perform a magic trick, and left them open, helpless, hovering in the air. Pedro stood frozen, his back against the wall, staring at the pool of blood, or perhaps at Dante, she didn’t know, she couldn’t look up, she couldn’t think, her hands were nothing, useless, she cursed her hands as the blood leaked out around them.

  “Loro,” Amato said, “run for a doctor.”

  El Loro did as he was told. Pedro ran out behind him. Now it was just the two of them, Amato and Dante. Together they wound the cloth around Santiago’s body without exchanging a word, and Dante felt a stab of gratitude for this man whose love for Santiago overrode the disgust he must feel at kneeling by her side. She could not feel her fingers as they worked, they were a stranger’s fingers, sticky and agile, immune to the screams inside her. Santiago’s eyes were twisted shut and his breathing rasped and wheezed and for a few moments she actually thought he’d make it, but then, after one last glissando moan, the breathing stopped.

  “No,” Dante said. The room spun and spun and refused to stop.

  “Chico,” Amato said, breathing hard, “we’d better get out of here.”

  “No. No.”

  “You don’t want to be here when the cops come,” Amato added as he vanished through the door.

  Dante stumbled home with her coat drawn tight and her hat pulled low to hide the stains, but still, when La Strega saw her stumble in, she shrieked in alarm.

  “What’s happened to you?”

  Dante fell into her arms and wept for the first time since arriving in Argentina. She streaked La Strega’s chest with blood and snot and tears, and it enfolded her, that ample chest, it smelled of sweat and onions and animal warmth. La Strega asked for no explanations and, once she’d established that Dante was not wounded, held and rocked her like a baby until the tears subsided. Then she demanded to know what had happened. Dante told her about Santiago’s death, leaving out the original reasons for the fight.

  “He saved my life.”

  “It’s still in danger.” La Strega wiped Dante’s face with her skirt. “You have to hide.”

  She installed Dante in the little closet upstairs, her first room at La Rete, now a storeroom again. La Strega brought her a chamber pot and a plate of bread and cheese, and insisted that Dante stay inside and not make a sound and not come out for anything, not for water, a cigarette, or a breath of air. Then she left Dante in the dark. Dante fumbled for space to lay her body down. She felt sacks of grain, broken crates in a pile, empty washtubs stacked one inside the other. Something rotted in a forgotten corner, she couldn’t tell what. Voices wafted up from the courtyard through the closed door, the ordinary lives of the living, continuing on. She crawled into a washtub and curled up inside it, still caked with blood, clutching her violin as though it were the flotsam of a shipwreck, her only hope for staying afloat.

  She woke at dawn to the sound of men stomping through the courtyard, opening and closing doors. Official men. Police.

  “Where’s Dante Di Bacco?”

  “I don’t know, sir. He’s not here.” La Strega, her voice innocent, ignorant, verging on stupid. The perfect act.

  “When did you last see him?”

  “Before work last night.”

  The slam of doors.

  “Why? Did something happen to him?”

  “Show us his room.”

  They marched to Dante’s room and she gave thanks for the good people of La Rete, who formed a shroud of protection around her, not one of them giving her away. The police spent half an hour in her room and then left. Two hours later, La Strega knocked on the door and entered, bearing coffee, gossip, and the morning papers.


  “It’s not good,” she said as she lit a candle.

  Dante looked at the papers.

  BLOOD AT LETEO, the headlines read.

  THE DEADLY CABARET

  TANGO AND MURDER! POLICE ON THE TRAIL

  The articles featured photos of Santiago’s bloody body and the incriminating knife on the ground. They bemoaned the lurid violence of the tango world and described the corpse in greedy detail. La Strega had more to add, having trawled the street with the great prodigious net of her connections, catching one slippery fact here, another there. The police were beside themselves, desperate for a suspect. They obviously didn’t care about El Negro Torres from the conventillos of San Telmo, but they were under pressure to arrest someone for the sake of the cabaret. They’d spoken, so far, to a bandoneonist and a Russian violinist—Pedro and El Loro, Dante thought—because they’d returned with a doctor and found the dead body. No one was sure what they’d said to the police, but rumor had it that the Russian claimed the bassist was the murderer, while the bandoneonist had accused Dante. Meanwhile, the bassist and the pianist were nowhere to be found.

  “The bandoneonist. What’s his name?” La Strega said.

  “Pedro.”

  “Why would he accuse you?”

  It was easy to imagine why. Pedro was surely disgusted by Dante’s secret, and he no doubt blamed her for everything that had happened in the Lair. But it seemed that none of this had leaked out, not yet, not if La Strega knew nothing. Relief whipped her on the inside. “It’s a long story.”

  La Strega squinted at Dante in the candlelight. “It must have been quite a fight.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well. Dear boy, you’re in trouble. Those policemen this morning, they wanted your hide. And if the one who did it disappears, as it seems he has, they’ll pin it on you faster than a fly can blink.”

  Dante thought of the Buenos Aires police, the same ones who’d killed her cousin-husband at the strike years before, who cared nothing for lowly conventilleros, and everything for clearing Leteo’s name. “You’re right.”

  “You can’t stay in this city.”

  “No.” Buenos Aires seethed around her, garish, unforgiving. “I’ll leave tonight.”

  “Where will you go?”

  She could find only one answer in the great swirl of her mind. “Uruguay.”

  La Strega nodded, satisfied, and reached for the chamber pot. “I’ll miss you terribly. You’re like a son to me.”

  She’d said it hundreds of times before, but today Dante heard it with all of her being and stashed the words where they’d never be lost.

  “Can you help me escape?”

  “Dante, carissimo, I already am.”

  She tried not to think of her losses, the life she’d made, this beautiful hazardous city, Santiago vibrant onstage, the orquesta, its tribe of men, shining Leteo, moonlight in gutters, dawn over rooftops, Santiago crumpled in a red pool, Rosa, Rosa, Rosa. Don’t think. If she started to count her losses she’d get tangled in their numbers and might not survive the bridge to exile. Rosa. To live without her, a punishment. And yet, to subject her to danger was even worse; there was no choice; she had to escape without saying goodbye.

  But that afternoon, when La Strega brought Dante a clean chamber pot and a bowl of soup, she said, “Someone’s come twice now to see you.”

  Dante’s heart pounded.

  “A woman.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Rosa.”

  The room glowed in the light of La Strega’s candle, not decrepit anymore, a dim chapel where any prayer was possible. “What did you tell her?”

  “What I tell everyone. That you’re not here.”

  “Please. If she comes back, I have to see her.”

  La Strega pursed her lips and studied her.

  “She can be trusted.”

  “My God,” La Strega said. “You’re finally in love.”

  Dante looked up. There was so much she could have said in that moment, so much left to be said, but there was no time, there could never be enough time, and, she now realized as she took in La Strega’s face, there was no need.

  “Oh, my boy,” La Strega said. She reached out and stroked Dante’s hair, then was gone.

  Rosa came an hour later. La Strega brought her to the door, then closed it, shutting them into a shared dark. Rosa groped for Dante and, when she found her, fell into her arms. They held each other for a long time without speaking. Rosa’s body sparked a riot in her, joy and grief and pure bright lust.

  “You’re all right?”

  “Yes,” Dante said, though she wasn’t sure.

  “I can’t see you.”

  “I can light a candle—”

  “No, it’s all right.”

  “Rosa.”

  “What happened?”

  Dante told her about the note from Carmen and everything that rippled out from it, until Santiago’s death.

  “My God. I will kill that Joaquín.”

  “There’s been enough killing.”

  “I can’t believe Santiago’s gone.” Rosa’s voice rasped with pain. “He was good to me.”

  “He was good to all of us.”

  “And now they’re after you.”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Leave.”

  “Where to?”

  “Uruguay.”

  Rosa filled the dark with silence.

  “I’ll cross the river. Make a new life.” Dante tried her best to sound hopeful. “Maybe even play some tango.”

  “Of course you’ll play tango.”

  “Don’t forget me,” Dante said, trying to keep her voice from breaking.

  “You’re an idiot, Dante.”

  “What?”

  “Light the candle.”

  Dante did as she was told. Rosa’s face appeared, determined, sublime, how had she ever thought this woman was less than beautiful?

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “You can’t do that,” Dante said, too quickly, belying the hope that pierced her chest.

  “Why not?”

  “You’re not on the run.”

  “But you are.”

  “Your career. You’re on your way to the stars.” She could still hear those words in Santiago’s voice.

  “I can sing in Uruguay.”

  “You shouldn’t have to give that up.”

  “Do you want to give me up?”

  “No. No.” She was weeping now. “This is all my fault.”

  “It’s not. You didn’t wield the knife.”

  “But Santiago—”

  “—defended you. As he was right to do.”

  “The orquesta, it’s destroyed now.”

  “To hell with the orquesta.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Why not?”

  “The orquesta is life.”

  “No, mi amor. Life is life. The orquesta was only people playing music.”

  “I don’t know the difference between the two.”

  “There is a difference.”

  “The stage is life for you too. You said so yourself. And if you leave with me, that life will end.”

  Rosa leaned forward. “We don’t have the least idea what life can be.”

  “We don’t?”

  “No.”

  “Then how do we find out?”

  Rosa wiped tears from Dante’s face with her fingers. The gesture was as firm as it was tender. “We plunge.”

  That night, three hours before dawn, two figures slipped through the shadows of San Telmo and onto a boat that waited for them at the La Boca port. One carried a briefcase, the other an instrument case just the right size for a violin. A fishing boat stood at the docks; its wooden body welcomed them without question, as did the fisherman who palmed more bills at once, that night, than he ever had in his life. The two figures went belowdecks and huddled together on a net whose ropes were still wet from yesterday’
s catch. As the boat launched onto the Río de la Plata, they held each other close, humming tangos to mesh with the slosh of waves and, finally, falling into a gauzy, dreamless sleep.

  Meanwhile, Buenos Aires continued, awake in the night. In a public morgue, the body of a bandoneón player was prepared for burial by two men who remarked to each other on the corpse’s hands, which were stronger than any they’d seen before, fingers muscular from years of music, now clasping each other stiffly across a chest cleansed of blood. They gave up on taming the cadaver’s curls and let them spring in a lush black crown around his face. While they worked, in the cemetery, a tired old gravedigger prepared the hole for the bandoneón player’s final rest. A few meters away, in an unmarked grave, a Polish girl lay buried, her flesh blending slowly with the earth, becoming food for worms that would one day be food for birds.

  At that moment, in San Telmo, a woman known only as Mamita sat on her bed, a gray-haired man suckling at her large breasts like a baby. The top of his head was bald and shiny, and there was nothing hard about his touch. She pitied the old sod and gave him five extra minutes, rocking gently back and forth, humming an old tune in her boredom. Nine blocks from Mamita, a young man from the Cilento Coast woke with an ache in his arm, which had broken in his youth and never set right. He’d just dreamed about his dead friend again, first the moment when the bullet blasted open his head, then the two of them together, whole, laughing on a great red ship. His wife felt him stirring and turned to massage the limb, groggily, gently, preparing it for the day’s labor to come.

  Two houses down from them, a blind old man who sensed his time to die was close, but not yet here, dreamed an intoxicating dream. He was walking barefoot on a road that led to Naples, or that he hoped would lead to Naples, thinking to his dream-self that, the world being round, all roads could lead to Naples if you walked them long enough. He walked and walked. His feet throbbed with pain. And then he realized that he was not walking on a road at all but on the neck of a violin, long enough to stretch out before him to infinity. The land on either side had fallen away, leaving only blackness. If he fell, he knew, there would be no return. The violin strings cut the soles of his feet but made soft sounds beneath his steps, odd sounds, ghost sounds, sounds to carry a man beyond this world.