“How do you know?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Look me in the eyes and tell me you’re not lying.”
Dante held Alma’s gaze. She opened her mouth. But then, she found the words wouldn’t come, because she was in fact lying, though not in the way Alma thought, and not in a way Alma could imagine. She stood for a few moments, mouth agape, hands empty. Finally, she said, “It’s the truth.”
But the silence had been too long and spoke more volubly than her words. They both knew it. Alma shook her head in disgust. “I hope you rot in hell,” she said, and then she went back inside and slammed the door and Dante stood looking at it for a long time before he turned and walked down the street, past clusters of immigrants spilling from their doors, grasping at Sunday, drinking grappa from the bottle, laughing too loud or grimacing as they tightened their shawls against the wind.
“Good riddance,” Pedro said when he found out. “The last thing you need is some knocked-up slut to chain you down.”
Winter shrouded the city in cold thunderstorms. Leteo’s owner, Don Carrasco, had feared the rain would keep the clientele away, but it did not. Santiago composed new music that the sextet played at Leteo for the first time, melodies that rippled with energy and flourish, and that spread across the city that winter, bringing prestige to both the band and the cabaret where they’d had their debut.
The news from Europe became worse each day. All the time there were new battles. Her father’s letters were short and grim. A munitions factory had opened in nearby Salerno. The chickens were laying smaller eggs. Able-bodied men had been taken from the village to go fight in the distant war, among them Tommaso, the baker, and all the blacksmith’s sons. The baker’s wife, her father wrote, won’t leave the church, she has to be dragged from the pews in the evening by the nuns.
Her brother Tommaso. Off at war. The word taken made it sound as though he’d been packed into a burlap sack and carried like so much fresh-ground flour. He’d always been a sensitive boy, her brother, drawn to storytelling and games of the imagination. He fought with the village boys because he had to, coming home scratched up by fists and brambles, but they were amicable fights, no broken bones, no end to friendship, and most of the time he lost. The thought of him in a war zone turned her stomach and made her mouth sour.
She wasn’t the only one at La Rete affected by the war. The German bachelor had two brothers and an uncle on the battlefield, a fact he kept extremely quiet about to stave off the smoldering rage of his neighbors, because their nations were enemies back in the Old World. The French family in the back room on the right lost all their relatives, twenty-four of them, in a battle that destroyed their village. La Strega’s two brothers, three nephews, and eleven male cousins had all been conscripted as soldiers. “Half of Scylla went,” she said quietly, in Italian, out of respect for the French wife who was wringing linens at the other end of the patio (it was the first time she’d left her room in three weeks; the other women had done her laundry and brought her meals without a word for all those days and hidden all the rope and knives and never asked her to stop weeping or be quiet, not at any hour of the night). “And for what! A battle that’s far away from us. What do they want with some poor Southern fishermen? They cast nets. They gut fish. They’ll be no good with a gun.”
In Argentina, another kind of war seemed to be afoot. The anarchists continued to roil and organize. In July, an anarchist attempted to shoot President de la Plaza. The bullet grazed his head during a parade and did not harm him, but panic rippled through the government and the upper class.
“He had it coming to him,” El Loro said. He’d become a fervent anarchist, often arriving at rehearsals directly from meetings. Several of his friends and two of his uncles had been arrested in the past week.
“If you were part of that attack,” Santiago said, “for God’s sake don’t let me ever find out. Much less Don Carrasco.”
Don Carrasco was intensely against anarchists, and had already fired two kitchen boys for their involvement with a collective.
“So that’s all we’re doing here now? Catering to the rich?”
“We’re here for the tango,” Santiago said. “Our music will reach far more people because we’re here.”
“And the workers? The tango came from us, it belongs to us!”
“The tango belongs to everyone.”
“There are children who don’t have enough to eat! And these rich patrons—”
“—are helping you put bread on the table,” Santiago said. “Or hadn’t you noticed? You can do a lot more good with a stage to play on and cash in your pocket. Look, Loro, I’m not saying you can’t go. Just be careful. You could get us all fired, and that doesn’t help anyone.”
El Loro brooded the rest of that night, but he didn’t leave the orquesta and continued to abide by Santiago’s rules. Dante wasn’t sure what to believe. The anarchists always made her think of her husband-cousin, shot dead on the street, brains on the pavement. She recoiled from the movement that had brought this about. At the same time, the anarchists seemed brave to her, and their dream seemed noble, at least the way her neighbors at La Rete and El Loro—ever passionate, ever ignited, outraged—spoke of that dream: good pay for all, a decent life for anyone who worked. She had good pay now and she knew how incredible it felt, the lightness of knowing how you’ll eat tomorrow and the next day, the thrill of a new suit, the happiness in helping someone else with needed pesos. She could afford to leave the conventillo now, if she wanted to. But La Rete sustained her, with its bursting noise, its chaotic smells, La Strega’s affection; it had become the closest thing to home she could hope to have. Rather than leave, she moved into a larger room that stank less, with a window where she could sit and practice on her violin for all the street to hear.
This left her with money for other things. Like her parents, to whom she sent short vague letters with guilty clutches of bills. And women, too, because there was always a dance hall girl happy to go out with you if you fed her a nice hot meal. She took them out to ease her heartbreak about Alma, to help her forget, although she doubted, in those first weeks, that she’d ever love again. She didn’t want to love. She wanted to gaze at these women, sit close to them, watch them eat steak and knock back whiskey and arch their bare otherworldly necks. She didn’t push them to come back with her to the room of wilted roses. What a gentleman you are, they’d say, surprised, relieved, bemused, and then she’d go home alone and think of them as she touched her own body in the dark, rubbing her sex, rippling with lust. Every once in a while, a dance hall girl would herself suggest they go somewhere private, and Dante would try to resist, but instead she’d find herself in the room, often drunk, the girl naked—what was her name again, what was her own name, what did it matter—she let her hands and tongue dissolve along the plains and curves of the girl’s body, marvelous body, mortal, perfect, vast enough to hold the world, she roved it until there was no Dante, no Leda, only lightning pleasure and a voice begging for mercy or for more. Sometimes the pleasure shot through all of her, all the way to her own sex, a crest that matched theirs; at other times it was enough to watch their ecstasy, revel in making them burn. She didn’t put her hips close to theirs when she fucked them, so they’d know it was her hands, so they couldn’t trick her later. Afterward some girls sprang into their clothes and others gazed at her (at him, they thought) with curiosity shot through with hope, but no matter what they did, Dante knew she’d never bring the same girl to the room again. That way they’d never ask too many questions or invade the hidden cellars of her heart.
Perhaps it was a monstrous thing to do.
But she was already a monster. There was no escape from that.
The months turned, sloped into spring. Leteo gleamed and hummed to bring down the mortal sky. Dante forgot herself there, forgot sadness, war, the dangers of the city. At Leteo she was large; she was invincible; her instrument was restored to its true place, a royal place, fit t
o charm the ears of kings.
Or queens.
There was one uncontested queen at Leteo. The widow. It was difficult not to look at her, even more difficult to tear her eyes away. She was always the most elegant woman in the hall and, to Dante, the most beautiful. Not that there weren’t other women with fine features and delicate necks and a pristine glow to them, the glow of modesty and innocence and of never having washed a rag or hauled a bucket of water in their lives. You could tell from the way these women danced that their legs had been trained to stay shut. They had the careful beauty of porcelain dolls. But La Viuda Ruiz had the beauty of smoke rising from a wood fire: roiling, unpredictable, strong. Bursting at the seams of her own body. Desperate to escape all constraints.
She danced with many different men. She danced with all the men she could. She was the only woman in Leteo who did so, the only one who could turn such scandalous behavior into a business strength. Male patrons had come to anticipate a dance—no more than one—with the mistress of the hall. They took it as a ritual of welcome, though it could just as well have been a test. Leteo, Dante gathered from the rumors among the waiters, was quickly gaining a reputation among the Buenos Aires elite as, if not the best cabaret, certainly the most eccentric, featuring not only excellent food and music and decorations as lavish as they were strange but also the possibility of dancing with a beautiful widow, all in black, so graceful on the floor that she made even the clumsiest men seem like they knew a thing or two. Dante tried not to stare but sometimes couldn’t help it. Watching her dance was like glimpsing a shred of the tango’s soul, unbound. And yet, for all her flagrancy, Doña Ruiz was untouchable. She never spoke to the men afterward, never smiled or thanked them. She retreated to her small back table and sipped her drink, alone, surveying her domain.
One October night, Doña Ruiz caught Dante staring at her.
The widow’s face opened in surprise, who is this boy, who does he think he is? Dante looked away quickly, ashamed, alarmed, she’d crossed a line, she’d get them all fired. She glanced at the peacock mirror at the far end of the hall, but the sight of her own face between the bright blue feathers unnerved her, so she focused, instead, on the back of Santiago’s head, where he sat right in front of her, moving slightly in time with the music. Perhaps Doña Ruiz would think she’d misread the look. When the song ended, Dante looked for the widow. She was staring back. The surprise had given way to something else, controlled, focused, intense, either intrigued or furious beyond reason. They held each other’s gaze in the gap between songs. Let no one notice. Let no one see. Soon they were playing again and Dante kept her eyes on her instrument, as though she were some crude beginner who couldn’t find the notes without looking. If the violin was like a woman’s body, the place where it rested at a musician’s throat would be its sex. How had she never thought of this before? Her instrument seemed warm now. Steady, steady with the bow. She’d been reckless. She broke into a sweat, her skin felt damp and hot and achingly alive.
There was no retribution, not that night or the next. She began to think she was safe, that she may even have invented the exchange in her mind, which was a relief, of course; there was no reason for the prick of disappointment.
A week later, a waiter came backstage with a sealed note for her on a silver tray.
“Who’s it from?” Amato asked.
Dante opened it.
I wish to speak with you. After your work. Upstairs, in my office, second door on the left. If anyone asks, you were called upstairs by Doña Ruiz.
“From no one,” Dante said. “It’s nothing.”
But her heart thumped loudly in her chest.
What could it mean?
The punishment she feared?
Or—
The second set sped by in a haze. When she finally dared look over at Doña Ruiz’s table, she was not in her chair but on the dance floor, with a regular patron, a portly man whose wife watched helplessly from her table, fidgeting with the cuff of her prim blue gown.
That night, Dante began leaving with the musicians, and when they were halfway through the kitchen, she said, “I forgot my scarf backstage. You all go ahead, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“What! No drinks?”
“No girl?”
“We’ll wait for you.”
“No, I’m tired tonight. I’ll just get my scarf and go home.”
They protested amiably, then let her go.
She meant to go backstage, to get the scarf she’d left behind on purpose. But all she could think of was the office upstairs. She’d never seen it, never scaled the curving, regal staircase that led to the upper floor. Its rich red carpet made no noise beneath her feet. She was ready to tell anyone she saw—a maid, a waiter, the boss—that she’d been sent for by Doña Ruiz, but no one stopped her, no one was there.
Second door on the left. She knocked on its pale, grooved surface.
“Come in.”
The room was more spacious than she’d imagined, and surprisingly bare compared to the opulence downstairs. No paintings graced the ivory walls. A fine Persian rug covered the parquet flooring. To the left stood a divan and an armchair, both upholstered in a sapphire-colored velvet. At the center of the room, a wooden desk gleamed, dominating the space, larger and more elaborately ornamented than Dante had known desks could be.
Doña Ruiz stood in front of the desk, half-leaned against it. Behind her a great window framed the Buenos Aires sky, the inky blue of early dawn.
“Close the door.”
Dante complied. Doña Ruiz did not offer her a seat, so she stayed standing at the center of the room.
The widow took a cigarette case out of her small purse and opened it. She did this slowly, methodically, with keen focus. She put a cigarette between her lips and lit it. She inhaled, let the smoke out slowly, and extended the case to Dante.
Dante took a cigarette and bent forward for the light of the widow’s match. She’d never seen a woman light a cigarette for a man before. Nor had she ever seen an upper-class lady smoke.
“You can put your violin down.”
She’d forgotten she was holding it, as she often did, so familiar was its weight. She put the instrument case down, and inhaled. The cigarette had an unfamiliar flavor, smooth and flecked with something other than tobacco.
“You’re Dante.”
It wasn’t a question. “Yes.”
“Italian.”
“Yes.”
“From which part?”
“Campania. South of Naples.”
“You’re a village boy?”
She was not a village boy. She’d never been a village boy. She’d been a village girl and now she was a man or a not-man of the city. “Some might call me that.”
“I see.”
Doña Ruiz said nothing for a while. They smoked their cigarettes until there was nothing left but ash. Dante was just starting to think that she should leave, that she had no idea why she’d been called here and little hope of finding out, when Doña Ruiz said, “You play beautifully.” She looked right at him. It was not a coy look. Nor was it the look of a woman lost in perfumed dreams of romance. She did not slant her head or smile. The gaze was direct and as limpid as crystal. There was desire in that gaze, matter-of-fact, unveiled. And there was a question. A searching. Dante gazed back and felt her sexual edifice crumble, all those walls and rules of no touching and no second nights and never the widow, never that had no possible bearing on a force like the one inside this room, inside this woman’s open stare.
She was defeated and willing to be so. She would melt, fall on her knees, do this woman’s bidding.
But before she could summon any movement, Doña Ruiz broke the spell.
“You may go.”
Dante hovered for a second, disoriented. The floor unsteady beneath her feet. Then she picked up her violin. “Good night, Doña Ruiz.”
“Call me Carmen.”
Dante blinked. The widow seemed amused. It was the first t
ime she’d seen her smile. “Carmen. Good night.”
“Good night, Dante.”
Six days later, Dante received another sealed note.
The office tonight. C.
She could decide not to go. It was not too late, she told herself, to escape the danger.
But she didn’t want to escape. She’d spent the last six days in a fever, unable to stop thinking about her encounter with Carmen, and by the time she took the stairs again she found herself rushing up them, two at a time.
Carmen was in the same place, standing in front of the desk. The band had finished a little later tonight, and the sky behind her was pale, the buildings visible in sharper relief. Two long black plumes sprang boldly from her hat. Feathered hats were the height of fashion in the upper class, but Dante had never seen any as large as Carmen’s; they had the effect of transforming a compact woman into a giant presence.
Carmen took out the cigarette case, unclasped it, and offered it to Dante as a greeting.
They smoked. Their smoke entwined in the space between them. It was not such a large space after all.
“What do they say about me?” said Carmen.
“Who?”
“The musicians.”
“They don’t say anything.”
Carmen raised an eyebrow in rebuke. “You don’t want to tell me. I know what people call me. But you know what? I’m done with the rules. No one knows what I’ve endured.”
“No one ever knows that about anybody else.”
She hadn’t expected to say it, and, apparently, Carmen hadn’t expected to hear it. She didn’t mask her surprise. “True.” She studied him. “I suppose you’ve been through a thing or two yourself.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”
Coming here on a boat alone, losing Cora, losing my husband, having nothing to my name, losing my name, living with the terror of being discovered. “Why did you call me here?”
“You think you’re going to ask questions?”
“Why not?”
Carmen looked amused. She put her cigarette out. “Do you know what I love about the tango?”
The Gods of Tango: A Novel Page 26
