The Gods of Tango: A Novel

by Carolina de Robertis

  She had a rare ear. He’d known as soon as she started playing, and then he’d better understood why she’d asked. Unfair of God to put an ear like that on a woman.

  He’d known only one other person with an ear like that, and that was his father, who was known, in Naples, as Il Magnifico, for his way with the violin. His renown was so great that noble-blooded violinists—the kinds of men who could read not only letters but also notes, who trained at conservatories and played for lavish operas at the Teatro di San Carlo—had been known to brave the Spanish Quarter’s dirty crowded streets just to spy the rapid magic of Il Magnifico’s hands. Six days a week, Il Magnifico worked in a pawnshop, sweeping the floor and dusting the relics of his neighbors’ broken dreams. He played his violin on the street at night, after work, to escape the single room in which he, his wife, and his seven children lived. Nestore, the sixth child, used to sneak down to the street to watch him play. His mother never tried to stop him: it was hot and stuffy in their room, and there wasn’t room for everyone or, on many nights, enough bread for every child. He’d crouch in the street and watch his father’s hands, straining to memorize their motion, dizzied by the beauty of his sound. Il Magnifico played well-known ballads but also invented songs on the spot, melodies that seemed to weave an aural tapestry out of the chaos of men’s banter, women’s shouts, baby’s wails, men’s boasting, women’s pleas, men’s weeping and laughter and drunken fights.

  When Nestore was eight, Garibaldi’s army marched into the city, triumphant, and he went out with his brothers to watch. The soldiers moved in tight formation; they were shaggy from nights in the valleys but walked tall and proud; they were erasing the Kingdom of Naples once and for all to make way for a unified Italy. There would be one flag and one rule of law all the way from Trieste to Calabria. A new era had dawned for the people, or so Il Magnifico told his cousins that night.

  Bah, said his cousins. That may be true for kings. For us it’ll be the same as always.

  A year later, Il Magnifico decided his cousins were right. He was just as poor as ever, and so were his neighbors, and so, it seemed, were the country peasants among whom riots sparked without end. Soldiers marched down from the North to quell them and, before long, invaded Naples. In 1862, Il Magnifico went through a transformation. He became convinced that all soldiers were jettatura and could curse you with a single look of their evil eye. Only the dead, he proclaimed, could be trusted. The dead began to speak to him in his bed and on the street and through the crumbling stone walls of the neighborhood, whispering mystic axioms, ruthless gossip, and winning lotto numbers. Naturally everyone believed him, at first, about the lotto numbers, as common knowledge had it there were few better experts on the swift turns of fortune than the dead, but after a while his losing streak undermined the authority of his sources. He lost money he didn’t have, money he’d borrowed from his boss at the pawnshop. When he couldn’t pay it back three men broke his nose and arm and told him to watch out for his family.

  My arm, Il Magnifico shouted when he got home that night, his face still caked with blood. I’ll never be able to play again.

  Play? Mamma shouted back. What about eating? What are we all supposed to eat?

  My arm, my arm.

  You bastard.

  They’re going to come for you, and the children.

  Oh God.

  My arm. My life is gone.

  You’ll pawn your violin.

  No!

  Will it be enough?

  Il Magnifico shut his eyes and didn’t answer.

  Children, Mamma said, on your knees, now. Pray to San Gennaro.

  All seven children did as they were told. Nestore saw, behind closed eyelids, the decapitated head of his city’s beloved patron saint, as well as a vial of his blood, both of which he had seen before when the priests had brought these sacred relics out into the light to celebrate San Gennaro’s feast day. The crowd had been large, he’d only spied them from a great distance, but he knew they protected Naples so fiercely that, in 1631, they’d saved thousands from certain death when Vesuvius erupted and lava rushed down the mountain and stopped at the city’s border. Still now the head and blood of this powerful saint was all that kept them from being buried alive like the people of old Pompeii, because, as it turned out, the world was always full of burning ash just waiting to destroy you. San Gennaro, save our family. Save my father. Protect us.

  The next day, Il Magnifico pawned his violin, walked out of the shop, and immediately took his clothes off on the street corner where he’d always played. He marched, naked, his formidable sex erect and his broken arm hanging at an awkward angle, right out of the Spanish Quarter, toward the Piazza del Plebiscito, where he paraded in front of the Royal Palace until a group of nervous young soldiers shot him thirty-seven times. This was in 1863. Nestore was eleven years old. He never found out what his mamma did to clear their debts with the local mafia, but soon thereafter she gave up completely. She sat all day and stared at the stove as if any moment it might start cooking of its own accord. She didn’t flinch when her two older daughters came home with cash they’d earned on their knees in alleys, didn’t say a word when her second son disappeared into the dank mazes of the Spanish Quarter and never returned. She stopped listening, stopped eating, and stopped breathing soon enough as if by force of her own will. After Mamma’s death, Nestore’s older brother became the head of the household; there was often no bread, no water, no kindness. Nestore roamed the city barefoot, a street rat, picking pockets in the plaza, stealing bones from dogs in alleys, eating garbage, eating nothing. He wandered constantly, propelled by hunger and a wordless, formless rage. He took to going down to the port to watch the droves of country folk arriving to take steamships away to the New World. They had almost nothing to take with them, and looked dazed by the city. Vedi Napoli e poi muori. See Naples and die. That was the saying, though whether it meant the city was supposedly so grand you could die happy once you’d been there, or whether it meant the place would kill you, Nestore was never sure. All these people, all these Italians, huddled on the dock, tottering up the gangplank, was this a death for them? Was leaving a kind of death, and, if so, was it any worse than staying put in misery? He thought of his mother’s vacant gaze, of the unnatural angle of his father’s arm. He thought of food, obscene piles of it, meat and fruit and bread slathered in butter. He wondered where were they going, these ragged masses, what was waiting for them across the water, how they would live, what they would eat, what he might eat if he should join them.

  He was nineteen years old when he left. In Buenos Aires he found more grime and poverty, though, back then, in 1871, the waves of immigration were just beginning to rise, and the city did not seem crowded, not to him, not compared to Naples. After a few weeks of sleeping on the street, he found a room in San Telmo—a whole room to himself, a luxury of space made possible by the yellow fever that had gripped the southern neighborhoods of the city: San Telmo, San Cristóbal, Montserrat. The rich families that had lived there for generations were frantically abandoning their homes to build new ones in the north. Their empty mansions were quickly becoming conventillos occupied by new immigrants. Nestore was the first poor person to inhabit his room. When he arrived, there were still two rich families on the block, stragglers caught up in planning their escape. They seemed disoriented and offended by their new neighbors, and never greeted them on the street, never even looked at them, as if they did not exist. You don’t know how bad it got during the sickness, his Italian neighbors told him. They blamed us for the outbreak, fired us from our jobs, our people wandered the streets without work, sometimes without a home, men died in the street of cold or of the sickness and it took hours for anyone to come for the bodies. Nestore’s room gleamed with gold-leaf wallpaper that had not yet begun to fade. An elaborately carved chest of drawers stood in one corner, wrought with details that must have taken days of sweat and thought and patience to create, all so someone could have a place to store her stockin
gs. In the bottom drawer he found a single bottle of expensive women’s perfume. It shook him. Every night, he sprayed a little of the perfume in the air before going to sleep, and lay down on his pallet under the sweet bite of its scent. He imagined the woman to whom it had belonged. She was a young virgin of noble blood, an innocent whose heart had been broken by the rapid deaths of all her sisters. She was the only one who had miraculously survived the plague. On her last night in this house, she had lain in bed in a translucent white nightgown that she’d soon removed so she could feel the night air of La Boca on her skin for the last time, because she would miss La Boca, she would miss her childhood, she was not a little girl anymore. She had lifted her thighs to the moonlight and prayed for health. She was hungry for life. She was hungry for a man. And then in a swift act of magic he closed the gap of space and time between them and appeared beside her, in this very room, and whispered You’re so beautiful, let me show you, and he made love to her for hours, this noble daughter of Argentina, this girl who saw beyond the terrible things she’d heard about Italians, and she shook with pleasure and amazement as he did all the things he could think of doing to a maiden like that, or so he imagined as he lay alone on his hard pallet, sex in hand.

  She became his secret bride. He kept the perfume bottle and summoned her to his side at night long after the scent itself was gone. Over the decades she remained the same, a startled virgin, grateful, voluptuous, perennially pure. He fucked hundreds of whores over the years, thinking of her. She was the only person in the world who truly loved him, who received him with open arms no matter what, the only person he could trust in a city full of people straining to survive.

  There was no going back to Naples; nothing waited for him there. He worked at whatever jobs he could. He hauled stones and tanned leather and slashed cows’ throats in the slaughterhouses at the edges of the city. He spent what little money he had on liquor and women, to hell with bread. Even when there was no money for drinks or sex, there was music, and sometimes music was enough, especially in Buenos Aires, where music rapped and hummed and pulsed on every corner—you didn’t need to go to a bar, in those days: men appeared in alleys, spilled onto sidewalks, and played. Music on the night streets to terrorize the cobblestones. You had to be alert, you had to have your knife and wits about you, but what music: payadas, sung by pairs of country men who knew the life of gauchos and horses and lassos and dirt, who battled each other through song, caught up in a duel of wits, brandishing guitars and verses spit from their mouths as drunken crowds cheered them on; habaneras, sparked by sailors freshly arrived from Cuba who swarmed the whorehouses and drummed their blood-quickening beats with their knuckles on every surface they could find; milongas, those fast joyful songs that could fill a filthy alley with dancers more quickly than honey could draw flies; and candombe, the music of black people whose ancestors had come in ships from Africa, shackled, enslaved, and who now lived among the immigrants, as poor as they were, often poorer, with the most incredible music, unlike anything Nestore had ever heard, music played on drums built with cast-off barrels, whose rhythms interlocked to form a tight vast sound. There was no melody. In Europe it would have been called noise. But candombe had a potency that hit him in his belly, and in depths he hadn’t known about. And to dance to it. It woke you up. It made you want to be awake again, made you want to live, if not another day, at least another hour, here, like this, right now, inside the drums’ collective voice.

  The first time he took up a violin and joined the music—some neighbors had gathered in a conventillo courtyard, it was four in the morning, and, drunk, he saw these men as, if not friends, the closest things to friends he’d found—he thought he saw a ghostly decapitated head in the shadows and felt that it was not San Gennaro but Il Magnifico, watching his son with wild bright eyes.

  How much had changed since then, since those days when the tango was fresh and young and had a percussive drive and vibrancy, before it passed through the hands of hordes of immigrants, before it got slowed down by the bandoneón and the spirit of lament. The bandoneón, that boxy German instrument, accordion-like, made for voluptuous mourning. But the percussive bones of the tango were not entirely gone. They hovered under the surface, stepping, pulsing, tak-tak-takking in this music that was, along with a perfume vial, the only thing that had stayed with him all these years in which he’d lost so many things, even his sight, but not his life. Somehow, to his own surprise, he’d lived and lived, even as the men and music of yesterday kept disappearing in the grind of time. The cataracts had likely helped him live more years; people pitied a blind old man. Without sight, the realm of sound became vivid to the point of piercing. He was one of the few musicians left who recalled the old days of tango, and he shut them up inside himself, shared his memories with no one except through the sound of his violin.

  Now, getting ready for work, he called out for the boy, his lazarillo, his guide, his surrogate eyes. The boy arrived without delay, touching Nestore’s arm lightly to let him know. Reliable, the boy, and he never complained; no doubt he loved his job of escorting an old man to a brothel, and not only for the coin he got to palm for it. That widow-child, she’d never be able to play in the places where he, Nestore, had played. What did she think she was doing? She was a puzzle he couldn’t decipher. He wondered whether she was beautiful. Whether she would let him bed her if he was very nice and very helpful. It had been at least thirty years since he’d been with a woman whom he hadn’t paid. Nobody wanted a blind old man, not even María, the kindest of all whores, who stroked his brow afterward in a way that made him think of his mamma and almost weep with a blend of gratitude and relief. But even María wanted her pesos just like everybody else.

  But he sensed this girl was not as easily swayed. There was something desperate about her, and desperation, he knew, always went one of two ways. It could either make you pliable as water or make you a living weapon. This girl was not pliable. Already the city was honing her into a blade.

  And just as well, he thought as he left his conventillo on his lazarillo’s arm—because if that widow-child kept going the way she was, pushing edges in a city that contained more edges than anything else, a blade was exactly what she’d need to be.

  Six weeks after arriving in Buenos Aires, Leda received her first letter from her parents. It was written in her father’s hand.

  Cara Leda,

  What a tragedy. We are all wearing black and Dante’s mother has not stopped weeping. We are glad that you, at least, are safe and that there have been people to help you.

  You must come home as soon as you can. A strange nation is no place for a young unmarried woman. Leda, anything could happen to you. We are gathering money and will send it dispatched on a boat as soon as possible. Use it for your ticket back to Naples. We are waiting for you here.

  Embracing you,

  Papà and Mamma

  She held the letter in her hands for a very long time, staring at her father’s tight and tidy script. It was dusk, and the day’s heat still oppressed the air, though outside her half-open door the women were starting to murmur about taking laundry down from the lines, because look at the clouds, just look. Leda still couldn’t fathom how a day this hot could end in showers, but she’d seen them happen now, quick hot summer rains, and, in fact, one of them had caught her on the day Arturo took her to visit Dante’s burial site, a humble workers’ tomb on which her carnations lay damp and sad and fragile, like soiled girls. She felt torn. Part of her was tempted to obey her parents, go home, be wrapped in their embrace. But another, stronger part of her searched for a way out of the letter’s confines, as though the sentences formed the bars of a cage and she were a trapped animal stalking for a loose chink through which she might flee.

  If she went back, she’d have to be the same girl as before.

  It was too late for that. She had tasted small scraps of freedom. She had lived with strangers and carved herself a home. She had worked all day and kept the pay for hers
elf, not handed it to her father, and the money, however paltry, was hers. She had heard the great cacophony of a South American city, walked its streets, felt its infinite anonymity and muscle. She had even worn men’s trousers and survived.

  She had played the violin.

  For four Sundays now, Nestore had called her over and walked her through a few tangos. Not many. Just two or three. His manner was harsh but she didn’t care. Her attention was absorbed by those hands. The demonstrations, broken down line by line, would always be of different melodies than the week before. After that, perhaps as a test, he would strike up one he’d already taught her and she played along, Carlo joining in on the guitar. That was when she felt his skill, the bright confidence of his notes, their rich timbre. She made sure to play softly, so that her sound could hover underneath his, shaping itself to it. It was more than just technique that he was giving her. There was something larger, a kind of inheritance, and though she didn’t fully know what it was, she felt it ripple out from him to her and absorbed it greedily. There was a gap between what her ear heard and what her fingers could manage, and she found this maddening, but each week that gap seemed to narrow just a little. The sounds she made were on their way to beautiful. Her hands were learning to make a wooden body sing.

  Her neighbors had taken to dancing again, despite the unusual sight of a teenage widow playing with men. There was still disapproval, especially from Francesca. And Leda understood: she had broken the delicate equilibrium of good behavior, an equilibrium without which daughters were in danger of receiving the wrong impression and being led astray, perhaps into those worlds where music played all night and girls were torn beyond repair. Francesca had stopped speaking to her, except to discuss errands or plans for dinner, which made their long sewing days feel tense and even more interminable. The Di Camillo daughters did not follow their mother’s lead. Palmira seemed to admire her all the more for breaking unspoken rules. She glowed at Leda as they stitched, continued with their banter and stories. Diana wavered between admiration and a kind of caution, which must, Leda thought, be born from a reluctance to receive her mother’s wrath. Silvana was as gentle and ethereal with her as ever. Of course, once money ran out, she might be forced to move into the Di Camillos’ room, if the invitation still stood (and it might not). Would she then have to capitulate to Francesca, obey her rules, stop bringing out her instrument?