Three blocks from him, a woman woke. Her name was Fausta. Her son was crying for her milk. She pulled him close and opened her nightgown at the collar. As he nursed, he locked eyes with her and reached his small hand to her face. They caressed each other in the moonlight, and then, because he did not seem tired and she, too, felt wide awake, she whispered a story to him, an old story her grandmother had told her, the oldest story she knew. There was a time, she told him, when the gods were many and they destroyed the earth with a great flood to make it new. All the people died in the vast rising sea that covered the land, except for two, a brother and sister, who rode a little raft to a tall mountaintop that kept them safe and dry. They watched the devastation until, finally, the sea receded, and they found themselves in a land they did not recognize, strewn with the corpses of the drowned. At first, they despaired. Then they found their way to the temple of a beautiful goddess, where they kissed the cold stone of the ground. Help us, they said, restore our people, tell us how to make this world ours again. The goddess said: when you leave my temple, throw your mother’s bones behind you. At first the couple balked. Defile our mother’s corpse! How could we do such a thing? But then they realized that they had two mothers, just as everybody does. We have the woman who gave birth to us, as I gave birth to you, but we also have a greater mother, the earth. This mother’s bones are everywhere, in the form of stones. And so, as the brother and sister left the temple, they threw stones over their shoulders and the stones grew and softened into people, until soon the land was full of men and women made from material strong enough to endure this harsh life, and then, my boy, my light, my angel, they filled the air with their song.
PART THREE
OTTO
Bright Jagged Thing
Rosa and Dante lived together in Montevideo for fifty-one years.
They settled in Ciudad Vieja, the city’s historic center, which jutted into the Río de la Plata like the thumb of a stalwart hand. The river was a marvel, a different color every day: blue, brown, silvery gray, sometimes smooth as a mirror, sometimes whipped into waves full of white tongues. The water stretched out to the horizon as though it were the sea itself, and perhaps it was the sea, wide as it was, an estuary, a mixing place, not yet the Atlantic but shot through with its salt. The waterfront reminded Dante of the Bay of Naples, only without the volcano on the skyline. Home and yet not home, known and unknown. In those first ecstatic and uncertain months, they took long walks along the shore, talking or moving in silence, looking out over the water, searching it for secrets of the deep. The day they married, they celebrated with a long stroll from their apartment in the Old City down to the Punta Carretas lighthouse, where they climbed down the rocks and laughed as waves crashed up to them and swallowed their bodies to the thigh.
They soon found that Rosa had been right about the tango: it was thriving in Montevideo, there was more than enough room for two performers fresh from Buenos Aires cabarets. They joined an orquesta that played at hotels and bars and theaters—at Politeama, Artigas, Stella D’Italia, even at the elegant opera house, Teatro Solís. Rosa’s act shook the stages of Montevideo. There would be no lack of work.
In their first summer, Rosa and Dante hung a mosquito net over their marital bed, and when they made love beneath it they were no longer in Uruguay, no longer on earth at all, but weightless, suspended, shimmering like cosmic beasts aloft between stars.
“Never take that thing down,” said Rosa. And they did not.
The Argentinean police never came to their door. They were free. And they were happy, almost obscenely so, aware of the enormity of their luck, as if the gown of reality had torn and they had managed to worm their way out through the hole. But there were also sorrows. For a long time, Rosa was haunted by the father of five, who lived, as far as she knew, in this same city, and whom she sometimes glimpsed in crowds until the stranger would turn and reveal himself to be another man, and who invaded her dreams until she found, by word of mouth, a healer in the dusty neighborhood of Punta Carretas, a tiny woman who sat in the back of a butcher shop and listened with the stillness of an owl, then dispensed remedies that gradually expunged the nightmares from Rosa’s sleep. In 1919, news from Argentina told of a Tragic Week, so it was called, in which the police shot down anarchists and tens of thousands took to the streets to protest, resulting in riots and massacres, hundreds dead, thousands wounded, tens of thousands imprisoned. For weeks, Dante could not sleep, thinking of her cousin-husband’s exploded skull, thinking of El Loro and Arturo, two anarchists who might have been at those very riots, though really any of the others from the conventillos—Francesca, Carlo, Valentino, Fausta, La Strega, Palmira, any of their uncles or daughters or children—could have been on those same streets, and so she pictured all of them, one by one, vivid against her dark ceiling as she wished them safe from harm. (Years later, she would meet El Loro again on a tango tour through Montevideo and be thrilled to find him alive; he came to their apartment for dinner and they reminisced warmly over Rosa’s gnocchi and a long slow bottle of whiskey; it was marvelous to see him, he seemed genuinely happy for their marriage and never brought up Dante’s secret, never even seemed to flicker, as if there had been no secret at all, as if that moment in the Lair had never happened. They drank and talked until dawn, swapping stories about Amato’s life in Paris with the same wife and a new mistress, it seemed, and Pedro’s successes in New York, both men riding the waves of the tango’s stratospheric rise across the globe to make new lives on distant shores, like tango exporters, El Loro said, or tango missionaries, Rosa said, and they all laughed, and then they mused over what the hell had happened to Joaquín, who had never been seen again, and toasted to the old days and above all to Santiago’s memory, his immeasurable imprint on their lives). The letters from her father trickled down to once a year after her mother died. Even when they came, they told her almost nothing. It was to be expected, but still, it shredded her inside to think of her mamma buried in a tomb she’d never see, to be left wondering about Tommaso’s life after he lost one of his legs in the war, to never meet her many nieces and nephews. To never again see or hear or breathe the air of Italy. On some days, this seemed an impossible sacrifice. On other days, it seemed no sacrifice at all, a mere illusion, as Italy was not far away but deep inside her, in the pulse of her veins, the shape of words in her mouth, the volcano dreams that still greeted her in sleep.
A few times a year, Dante sent Alma money for her daughter, whose name, it turned out, was Miriam. In return she received occasional brief notes, not of thanks but of acknowledgment: your envelope arrived, Miriam is well, growing quickly. No photographs, no anecdotes or details on how the money was spent.
“Why do you do it?” Rosa asked her, gently.
Dante could never fully answer the question. It was too tangled in the briars of lost Italian hills and the sticky labyrinth of the past. “Because I want to” was the best she could manage, and Rosa accepted this as answer enough.
As the 1920s unfolded, they watched the tango rise into an unimagined glory under Carlos Gardel’s explosive fame, and with the advent of the radio and its power to amplify a single human voice across invisible waves into thousands of homes. Gardel’s voice spilled from windows and invaded every sidewalk, as did the voices of other singers, even women, because now women could not only sing tango but do so in evening gowns fit for queens. Tango singers were no longer purveyors of vice; they had become the height of glamour.
“Well look at that,” said Rosa. “Who would have believed it?”
“Santiago,” Dante answered. “He always knew.”
Santiago surged in her mind then, as he did every time she said his name and also when she didn’t; he hovered in the room, mocking her grief, demanding life, demanding music, urging on her fingers as she played.
They were among the first in their neighborhood to buy a gramophone. With it, they could dance tangos in their living room, Dante leading, Rosa supple in her dress, their bodies
fused in motion, moving, not just to the music, but inside of it.
Now Rosa could sing whatever she wanted, however she wanted. New songs came out every day, scripted with female singers in mind. The freedom was dizzying. She experimented with singing in a feminine dress, but she never abandoned her suit and trousers. Together, Rosa and Dante wrote their own tangos, coded with their passion in secret, slanted verse, and recorded them, as sung by the one and only Rosa Vidal. Soon her voice had enthralled not only the radio listeners of Uruguay but audiences in Brazil, Argentina, the United States, and a Europe just returning to its shaky feet after the war. She began to tour. Dante occasionally went with her (though not to Argentina, where she was wanted by the law), but most of the time she stayed home. She didn’t mind; she had no need for crowds. Her favorite way to play, now, was standing at the window of her second-floor apartment in the center of Ciudad Vieja, on Calle Ituzaingó, just her and the violin and the strip of sky above the buildings, pouring music down to the bustling street for anyone who cared enough to catch it, and, often, many did. Men slowed their walks, craned their necks up, peered out through the polished windows of Café Brasilero. Women hanging laundry on the flat rooftops swayed their hips. Children appeared on balconies, jostling for the best view, forgetting their fervent little battles for a moment. She gave them songs, played for all of them, for no one.
Sometime in those years, the Shift occurred, though Dante would never be sure of the exact moment, just as one can’t know precisely where the river ends and the great Atlantic begins: but one day he simply knew it, simply found himself a he, at home in the pronoun the world gave him each day, not because his body had changed, not because his story had changed, not even because he didn’t see himself as a woman, but simply because the gap between inside and outside, self and disguise, truth and pretense, had narrowed and thinned until it became invisible to the human eye.
When Rosa turned forty—in 1936, the year after Gardel’s plane crash wrapped all of tango in a shroud of tragedy—she asked for a special gift. “I want to dance with you, and play the part of the man.”
Dante balked. “I haven’t worn a dress in over twenty years.”
“You don’t have to wear a dress. You can still be you, still be Dante. I just want to lead you.”
Dante closed the shutters, checked them over and over.
Then he let Rosa lead.
It was still, at the root, the same dance: the same two bodies, connecting, gliding together, two aching souls reaching for each other and finding more than could be told. And then, in the fourth song, or maybe it was the fifth, they switched roles, without speaking, their bodies deciding, hands moving from waist to shoulder or shoulder to waist and pouring the dance in the opposite direction, which was, they discovered, not an opposite at all but a continuation of the very same dance, the same essential language of the body, of two bodies wishing to be one, forming a kinetic poem out of longing. They switched again, again, until their bodies knew before their minds did which way the dance would flow. This malleable secret tango became their truest. They danced it in private for the rest of their lives.
Later that same year, when Rosa was away for an engagement in New York City, where her voice would join an enormous orquesta and fill a hall normally reserved for the solemn symphonies of old Europe, Dante received an unexpected visit. He almost didn’t answer the knock on the door. When he did, he came face-to-face with a girl with a round face, a prim bonnet, and a frank gaze.
“Good morning. I’m looking for Dante Di Bacco.”
“Yes, that’s me.”
The girl stared even harder. “Can I come in?”
Inside, the girl looked around at the tidy living room, the potted geraniums in the windowsill, the warm little kitchen down the hall as if she’d just arrived from another planet. Then she blinked and gathered herself. “My name is Miriam.”
Dante felt the air stop in his lungs. He stared at the girl, tried to drink her in, as though she might dissolve any moment.
“Miriam Di Bacco.” She said the last three syllables with the extra emphasis of a challenge.
Had Alma given her the last name? Or had the girl claimed it? Questions galloped into his mind, hundreds of them at once. “Would you like to sit down?” he said.
They spent the afternoon drinking mate, and talking. Miriam told him that, when she was nine, she’d intercepted an envelope from Uruguay and opened it to find a wad of cash and a brief note: “for Miriam, as always. D.” Until then, she’d always been told that her father was dead, though the two other children in the brothel told her that her father must have been a customer, just like their own. She confronted her mother and, after a fight that lasted several days, was able to learn that the D. in question was a certain Dante Di Bacco, who lived in Montevideo. And is he my father? Miriam had asked her. Is he? Is he? Alma had stared at her for a long time before finally saying, yes, Miriam, he is. From then on, the money had gone directly to Miriam’s upkeep (before then only God knew how it had been spent) and helped her to go to school, as well as, ultimately, to escape her mother’s profession when she ran away at fourteen, a wad of Dante’s cash in her pocket, intercepted from the mail. She found her first job across town, in Palermo, with a Lebanese rug merchant who let her sleep on the storeroom floor because he believed in giving the wretched a chance in this world. The storeroom floor was better than her mother’s room, she said, though she stopped short of saying why, and Dante didn’t ask. She worked hard and dreamed of meeting her father one day. She saved money for years before setting out to look for him. The name change had been her own idea, not yet legal but, she said, real in her mind.
“How long will you stay?” Dante asked, his heart in his throat.
Miriam eyed him, equal parts defiance and hope. “How long can I?”
She was still there when Rosa arrived the following week, still there a year later, part of their family for three precious years in which they came to know her coppery laugh and her quick temper and her wildly generous soul—and in which Dante came to know the dizzying joy of being called Papá, never saying anything to the contrary, allowing Miriam’s truth to define their world—until, in 1940, she completed her studies in nursing and returned to Buenos Aires to minister to the poor of her old neighborhood, San Telmo. The day she left, Dante and Rosa stood in the Montevideo port and waved and waved until the boat disappeared at the horizon, and even then they held hands for a long time, saying nothing, staring out at the great river in amazement.
The tango reached a Golden Age. Orchestras grew to dizzying size, and traveled all over the world to grace the best of stages. Musicians with classical training or years playing jazz, or both, pushed the tango’s edges into new terrain, to the outrage of some and the thrill of others. Rosa and Dante were now considered part of the Old Guard, a term that amused and bewildered them, as they remembered so vividly a time when their sound and everything they did was radical and new. Some of their peers, over drinks in Montevideo, bemoaned the changes, claiming that what people now called tango was not tango at all, and sometimes Dante, too, worried that the soul of tango as it used to be would be lost in the cacophony. And perhaps it would. But then his mind always returned to Santiago, his embrace of changes—the loss of drums, a woman’s voice, the advent of piano and bass—because, in his words, change keeps the tango alive. And alive it was, throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s, riding the tide of Juan and Evita Perón’s nationalistic fervor until the generals took Argentina into their iron hands in 1955 and clamped the tango down as though it were the very soundtrack of rebellion. As if music could be crushed like a condemned building or a stubborn anarchist. But it could not. It always rose and returned, vital, immense, fortified by new instruments, new shapes, new musicians crazy enough to give their lives to it like underground, unsanctioned priests. Dante played on and Rosa sang on as the tango rose and fell and flowed and ebbed with the decades, with the times, with those who grasped the songs and carried the
m into rebirth.
As Dante grew old, he looked around him, at the life he’d built, the friends he’d made, the city he’d come to love, the man he’d become. It was a good life, one he often wished he could wrap in a blanket and carry back in time to the girl he’d been, to show her what was possible, to watch her mind break open in shock. In his sixties, he took to talking to his cousin Cora, on walks along the waterfront, in the shower, in his sleep. He started thinking about the grave, the things you couldn’t take with you, and the things you could. That was when he bought the coffin, a simple construction of solid Uruguayan oak, and kept it in his living room, shut and empty, a bench for piles of sheet music or for guests. Word spread among their friends, and throughout the city, of the eccentric old tanguero in Ciudad Vieja obsessed with death. Only Rosa understood the real reason for the coffin, an obsession not with death but with narrating your own life, because if you don’t script your own way once and for all, your story will be written by someone else, and your actions will be guided by other people’s dreams of who you should be rather than by the bright jagged thing you really are.
Dante died when he was seventy-two years old. Rosa found him in the kitchen, facedown on the morning paper, which featured photographs of a huge funeral procession in the United States for Martin Luther King, Jr. Dante’s morning mate had been knocked to the floor, and the shredded leaves had spilled out of the gourd onto the tiles. Below the article about Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral was another about the Tupamaros, a guerrilla revolutionary movement in Uruguay. Dante would not be there to watch that movement expand and then be crushed by the government as it hurtled toward dictatorship. It would be Rosa who would see those changes; she would hide revolutionaries in her basement and as she did she’d think of Dante’s cousin, the first Dante, the way he’d died as an anarchist martyr—and she’d think of El Loro’s youthful passion years ago—the eternal march of outsize dreams. She would harbor these young Tupamaros, not because she was one of them or because she believed them for a second when they said the revolution was right around the corner, but because she was moved by their fresh faces and the fever in their eyes. It’s unstoppable, this fever, she would think, and not so different from other fevers I’ve known. Rosa would survive until democracy returned to Uruguay as well as to her other nation, Argentina, the giant across the river, and when it did she’d write a tango celebrating freedom, but she wouldn’t join the public marches, wouldn’t let her song reach other human ears. She would sing it quietly to the houseplants, and they, the plants, would absorb her old-woman crooning with glad hunger.
The Gods of Tango: A Novel Page 36