by Paula Guran
“So you came here,” I said, the café and afternoon far behind us. Cole drank gin straight from a glass and chewed the ice. We sat on the sidewalk that served as my front lawn, resting on warm cement as the multi-colored sidings of La Boca gleamed with deceptive cheer above us. After Maria I had thought to move somewhere festive. Yet the shadows were lengthening now. Mothers called children to supper and the boys with their soccer balls vanished from the streets. I could smell meat and spices, hear the beef sizzling when the traffic lulled. The breeze came in from Canal Sur, stinking of oil. A salsa band began to tune in the distance, the trumpet mewling, lost in amongst the bright and dirty dwellings. Another colored night coming now. Another night.
“I’ve got a jealous nature,” Cole said, blowing smoke from her cigarette. “I won’t let another woman have him. Even if she is a vampire.”
When I winced she quirked the side of her mouth.
“Shall I speak more softly?” she asked.
“Perhaps you should,” I said. “No one speaks that word. Other people would think you were …” Why was it so hard? I had acquired more caution in my old age, instead of less.
“Loco?” Cole asked.
I spread my hands, nodded.
“Vampire,” Cole whispered. “Wampyre. El Vampiro.” She laughed in her low, rough way and blew the names of the demons out in clouds of nicotine. “I’m not afraid, Father,” she said.
I sighed. “Perhaps you should be.”
Cole was the only person I’d ever met who knew about them. My fellow portenos had to have seen things, but even in this city it was hard to acknowledge magic greater than the peace brought you by the Virgin’s effigy, or the hell of too many nights in drink. This was still the modern world. Even Cole and I had only been able to believe after they stole our hearts: Cole’s from a hotel room, mine from a courtyard café.
“Maria,” Cole said. “Your priest friends told me about her. I think they miss you at that little church.”
I laughed. My turn for gin now. We sat sweating in my flat, the bottle nearly empty between us. Passing cars provided the only light. I kept the ceiling fan on but would not touch the lamp. Cole seemed to understand. We sat and smoked, growing drunker. This is what lonely lovers do without their other half. It doesn’t matter if two years have passed or twenty.
“You still wear the collar,” Cole said.
I touched my throat: its white-starch band. She noticed so much, enough even to mark the stir in the air when one of them appeared. Is that how she had traced them, I wondered? To ask in churches until she found rumors and then stories and finally the local legends that brought her to me?
“I was told to retire,” I said. I was drunk enough to sound bitter. “They wouldn’t like it if they knew Father Peña still fancies himself a priest. But I never left them—they left me.”
“You aren’t a priest though, are you? Not anymore?”
“My religion is Maria. Father Adelmo and Father Sanchez—they knew it, even before she vanished. My heart had not been God’s for some time.”
“What happened, Father?” I could hardly see her in the dark. Just the outline of her hair.
“A girl of seventeen won the love of a priest twice her age.” I said it calmly, as if I had told the story before. “On the night they would consummate their love the priest arrived late to a tango and a man in a black suit was standing with the girl. The dance was held outside amongst the garden lamps and torches, but the man cast no shadow. When I … When the priest looked at the suited man, his eyes slid away, as if the place where the man stood was somehow unfit for human sight. The priest no longer believed in God, but he knew enough to recognize His opposite.
“The priest froze, not understanding how the devil could look like a mortal man. Even the girl, who had only begun to understand about God and Satan, seemed to sense the man in black was dangerous. She tried to pull away, but he pulled her close, into a dance.
“Something in their dancing woke the priest. He could sense something terrible had been set in motion.
“He pressed forward, pushing against the bodies of other dancers. It was difficult, because everyone who saw the dance of the girl and the man in black became awed. They crowded in around them, blocking the way. At last, frantic and afraid, the priest bulled through them, calling the girl’s name. But as if God Himself had planned it, a fire pit lay directly in his path. Still calling her, he fell into the flames, scorching his hand. And as he lay writhing in the spilled coals, the man in black began to laugh.
“The priest knew then that he had been right: the man in black was a demon. Even now, his laughter was sucking out the priest’s soul.
“There was nothing the priest could do. Before he could get to his feet, a dark wind rose. When it cleared, the man in black and the girl who carried the priest’s heart were gone.
“Maria…”
I let my voice die and finished my gin. I had never told the story before. I had raved to Father Sanchez of demons. I had given a sermon that frightened the faithful from the pews. But I had never sat as I did now, calmly, with another person, and simply talked.
“At first I thought God was punishing me,” I said, my voice distant to my own ears. “But that thing … God would have been offended by its very existence.”
“I never had much use for God,” Cole said. “What people call God is just love.”
“It has been thirty years, snora,” I said. “I haven’t seen Maria again. Sometimes I don’t know if I want to.”
“You want to,” Cole said. “Even if the worst is true and she and Ash are demons, living in hell, don’t you at least want to save them?”
I laughed. “Me? A faithless priest? If you think to use me as a talisman, I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong man.”
Though no light shone on her, I could sense her smile.
“I didn’t come looking for you because of your religion,” she said. “I came looking for you because the portenos say you can dance.”
Even now, I don’t know how she figured it out: about the vampires and the tango. At times I still wondered if she were one of them, so preternatural were her instincts.
I hardly paid attention to where she led me the next morning, my head aching with gin. Too much for an old man. Too much. My dreams had been of fire and redheaded women.
The courtyard had been closed for years, hidden behind a wooden gate. Yellow and green paint still clung, stubborn and faded, to the insect-eaten boards. Pale weeds bent with a crackle as Cole pushed it open.
I followed her, my head down. Slowly the worn stones of the courtyard came into focus. My heart throbbed a warning even before I recognized the dilapidated remains of the café sagging on my right.
“No,” I said. Brown leaves skittered across the yard, fetching up against the stone wall that circled the property. Mr. Pepe (he’d refused to let us call him “Señor”) had built the barbeque pit into the wall so he could roast an endless supply of suckling pigs. Long before I fell in love with Maria, I came to Pepe’s to eat and watch the dancing. The pit was full of leaves now. They dropped from a withered banyan, rustling as they fell.
Sweat ran wet fingers down my neck. The trees trapped the heat, coaxed the smell of mildew from the café’s swollen walls. A strand of triangular plastic flags still hung above the courtyard where Mr. Pepe had strung them, their beer advertisements melted by thirty years of rain. They pointed down at the stones like fingers at a ghost.
“Why?” I said, rounding on Cole. My body shook.
Cole lit her second cigarette of the morning.
“Your friends like to tango,” she said. “If we dance, they’ll take an interest.”
“Why here?” My voice drove unseen birds from the trees.
Cole pursed her hard, American mouth, redder than any red on God’s earth, around her cigarette. I hated her, I thought. I hated her rigidity.
“It’s reverse psychology, Father,” she said. “If you can dance here, you’ll be
able to dance anywhere—even in front of your friends.”
“Don’t call them that!” I said. I approached her, clenching my fists in front of me. “They are no friends of mine, señora. They took her. Right under those flags. She stood right there—”
Abruptly, the ball of anger melted in my throat. Heat swept through me, wrapping aching coils about my heart. I dashed towards the place where Maria had stood, not knowing if the sickness that surged within me was bile or tears.
Then I was on my knees, the stones hurting even through my clumsy padding of flesh. I placed a hand against the stones, thinking perhaps this would be like touching her, across the years. Only stone met my fingertips. Cupped over my mouth, my other hand felt the watery release of an old man’s tears.
“Well,” Cole said behind me. “That’s one hurdle down.”
“Cabezazo, right?”
We stood across from each other, on either side of the courtyard, my back to the café, hers to the bordering trees.
“Yes,” I said, no longer resisting her. Whether through age or expenditure of grief, I felt oddly detached from this. She wanted me to teach her the tango so she could impress the vampires. What else was there to do on a Wednesday afternoon?
“The cabezazo,” I said, continuing the lesson “is the moment when the man and woman first make eye contact.”
“Across a smoky room.” She hoisted her cigarette. “Then what?”
“We approach one another. Only professionals really trouble with this part anymore. The laymen go right to the embrace.”
“Let’s do it right,” she said. She sauntered towards me, holding her cigarette in her right hand, her wrist at a ninety-degree angle.
“No,” I said. “No, no, no.”
“What?” She smiled insolently. “Do we need to hire an accordion?”
A wave of anger disrupted my apathy. I hadn’t felt angry in a long time and now I realized I had missed it: missed feeling anything, whatever the cause. When my blood stirred I did not shy away from it. The señora wanted a dance, did she? Father Peña could oblige her.
I stepped into anger.
“First,” I said, drawing close enough to hiss the word in her face, “only whores carry this.” I knocked the cigarette away with the back of my hand. Señora Cole began to protest but I drew her into the starting position: my offending hand in the small of her back, my other hand joined to hers above our waists.
“Hold on to me,” I ordered. “No. Only our upper bodies touch. You lean into me and I guide you, like so.” Her chest was flat and hard, but her back felt good beneath my hand. I showed her the basic step. In tango, the man leads, the woman must always be on the point of resistance. My left foot went forward while her right went back: el paseo.
“Keep your upper body erect and pressed to mine,” I said. “Our hearts always touch but never our feet. This is the Argentine Tango, señora.”
She learned quickly, incorporating her desire to pull away into the dance. We progressed to la cuinta, the rocking step, and la chasse: the chase.
“Now,” I told her, “backwards eights!” and she complied. Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow. Slow, slow, quick, quick. After an hour I could smell my own musk and her clean, soapy perfume. She wanted to keep going, her face flushed, two honest points of red pricking her cheek.
“And, salida,” I said, at last. I needed a drink of water. More gin. A beer.
Abruptly she fell into me, the tension in her neck relaxing, her strong, thin arms coming about my stoutness.
“Thank you, Father,” she said. Her fingernails caught the short hairs at the back of my neck. “I knew you’d help me. You still dance like a young man.”
“A young man is what they will want,” I said. My anger had faded. My heart beat now with a strange peacefulness. “I don’t know why you think I can bring you closer to them. They thrive on youth and beauty—you must know this if you’ve been close enough to see them dance.”
“I’ve seen them,” she said. “It isn’t the youth they want, though.”
“You mean they take old women with blue hair?”
“No,” she said. “But you don’t have to be young. They feed off emotion. They got you when you were going to bed Maria, right? And me on my wedding night, with Ash …” She trailed off a moment, raised her hand to her mouth as if anticipating the cigarette that wasn’t there. “They’ll get us,” she said, quietly. “We have too much circling us—all that bad history. They’d be nuts not to go for it, don’t you think?”
“Your guess is as good as mine, señora.”
She released me and stepped away. I thought she would go for the purse she had left near the gate—for her smoking. But she hugged herself, rubbing her arms as though she were cold.
“The tango is like life,” she said. “Struggle, struggle, struggle and then—what did you call it?”
“Salida,” I said. “The end.”
She nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “Salida.”
That afternoon we went to La Recoleta and walked among the tombs. Cole ate a dolce de leche cone in ravenous little bites that made me question her age. I had placed her at thirty, yet now she seemed younger. Her step even bounced a little as she walked past the marble sarcophagi, immune to the flocks of tourists. She had more energy since we’d danced.
“You’re younger than I think you are, aren’t you?” I asked.
Her eyes narrowed above the rims of her sunglasses.
“I thought you were part of the generation who thinks those sorts of questions are rude,” she said.
I waited, but she said no more. We walked in silence, enjoying the sun, staying clear of Evita’s mausoleum. She was happy to be doing something, I decided. It explained her sudden lightness.
After I left my church, I had only felt alive when I followed one of them to an assignation. I took a pathetic thrill knowing I could recognize one, shadow it while it prowled, unaware. Such delights, however, faded when I began to notice them everywhere. After dark they haunted the restaurants, lurking, never eating. I’d seen one in a barber’s shop once, reading a newspaper. Some had passed the little hall where, for a few months, I had taught the tango to old folks and tourists. They’d never liked my clientele. Their paths always ended with the abduction of another young beauty. Another Maria.
I thought of Cole’s theory: were they drawn to emotion, somehow? To love? It could be. But why here, in this city? The vast streets and close-knit barrios were a beating heart upon which they preyed.
“The lights start about midnight,” Cole said around the last bite of her cone.
I nodded. “You can see them from the street.” “We should come back after dinner,” she said. “Hide until the guards leave.”
“What? You mean watch from inside?”
She pushed the sunglasses down her nose. “You’ve never done that?”
I shook my head. I’d always seen the lights from a distance, circling the cemetery on foot. It had never occurred to me to get closer.
“Well,” Cole said. “We can fix that. Come with me tonight. I’ll take the first watch—Jesus!”
If she had still had her cone she would have dropped it, bowled over by a pair of speckled cats who came charging from between the tombs. They vanished into the shadow of a large mausoleum, hissing and spitting as they fought.
“Tonight,” Cole said, firmly, straightening her skirt.
When her back was turned, I crossed myself.
Nothing happened that night, save that she grew even younger to me. We took turns sleeping, crammed into a nook of broken stone where the backside of an enormous tomb had crumbled. No watchmen came near. My only company as I fell asleep, too tired to care if my cheek pressed into her hard young shoulder, was the distant howling of cats.
In the middle of the night I jolted awake. Cole put her hand on my shoulder and together we watched the silver-blue light bloom over La Recoleta. Beyond the boundaries of the cemetery the nightlife would carry on, the neon glare maski
ng the glow to the casual eye, but I heard no motorcycles rev, no horns or voices, not a single strain of music. The light hummed, casting moon colored shadows on the cemetery paths.
“God,” I said.
Cole nodded. I could smell the new-washed sweetness of the sweatshirt she had used as a pillow and wanted suddenly to burrow into it. Her grip tightened on my shoulder.
“I want to go to them,” she whispered. “But we aren’t ready. Have you ever thought that they might be different when they’re at home?”
I shook my head. They were terrible enough when they roamed the streets, pretending to be human.
“Not ready,” Cole said again. “Not yet. But we will be.”
I remember her at our first dance: tight mouthed, determined not to falter. Her dress was scarlet, a color far different from simple red. How deeply the vanished Ash must have loved her.
Nervously, we waited for the evening to begin. My burned hand tingled, my dreams the night before all of fire. Cole crossed her arms under her small, apple-like breasts, watching as the unholy materialized among the tables.
It had been years since I’d paid attention to the individual aspects of a vampire. At first I had scanned their ranks, looking for Maria. When she never appeared the rest of them took on a kind of uniformity. Male or female all were slender, all beautiful, all surrounded by subtle darkness. You would mistake them for portenos if your eyes didn’t slip across them when you tried to stare.
Five sat in the crowd that night: three women, two men. I recognized a cruel faced boy who had only appeared in the last decade. The others were strangers. Their ranks kept growing, new faces every year. They were making their own portenos now: a whole city, perhaps, lying beneath our feet. Did Maria live there too—hidden away all these years? She would no longer be the girl in the modest white dress, but something unholy and refined.
The music began. In the clubs, couples are expected to dance with strangers. After the first dance, Cole and I would be expected to switch partners. We had one chance. We waited for our song.
It came at last with accordion and bass: an Argentine Tango. No one bothered with the slow seduction of the cabezazo anymore, so we took to the floor, beginning our routine with the entrada.