The Gods of Tango: A Novel

by Carolina de Robertis

  “You’ve come out of mourning.”

  Carmen smiled. It was a languorous, drunken smile. “Keep your mask on.”

  Her voice was commanding, flush with the night. She took her dress off before Dante could make it across the room and it was better this way, no more talking about the night, to choose instead the present moment as though there were no other, to choose this woman with her whiskey skin, for now, at least, another swig of life. The lust that rose in her was harsh and bright, she grabbed Carmen and carried her to the divan, flung her down and took her with more force than ever before, their masks colliding, Carmen writhing in what could be outrage or thrill, she didn’t say stop, she didn’t say yes, she didn’t say a thing in any language known to man unless you counted the languages of monsters and wolves.

  Explosive pleasure, as if she’d touched herself. As if semen could burst from her hips right through her hand.

  Afterward, she collapsed on top of Carmen, who wrapped her arms around her. “Dante. Dante.”

  “Are you all right?” Dante murmured, but before she could hear an answer, she fell into a pitch-dark sleep.

  She awoke to a hand between her legs, inside her trousers, where it grabbed—she shrank back in panic—and darted back as though it had touched a viper. Dante opened her eyes, all muscles tense. Carmen stumbled off the sofa and across the room, where she stood with her back against the wall.

  Dante stared at her. The fog of sleep unfolded to the fog of horror. It was a dream, it had to be a dream. She stabbed herself with a fingernail. No waking. She scrambled to button up her trousers.

  “What are you?” Carmen said.

  Dante couldn’t stand what she saw in Carmen’s eyes. The sun had risen higher now, and drenched the room in a terrible light. “I told you not to touch me.”

  Carmen reached for her dress from the floor and held it up to her body to cover it. “What. Are. You.”

  “What do you think I am?”

  Long silence. The room spun. The world, crumbling, faster than she’d known was possible.

  “My God,” Carmen said. “My God.”

  Dante wanted to say but did not say you had no right how dare you words stuck in her throat.

  Carmen made a keening sound, at once pure and pained. Then she set her stare on the great window, on the slice of gray sky above the buildings. Here it was, the moment Dante had dreaded these four and a half years, and to her shock the walls were still in place, the sky still vaulting over buildings. She’d thought, somehow, that discovery would break everything around her, the walls, the window glass, her limbs. She couldn’t tell which outcome was worse.

  “Carmen.”

  “Get out.”

  “Let me explain.” An empty promise. What was there to say?

  “Out!”

  Dante ran out of the room, down the stairs, through the kitchen, and out of the service entrance into the wailing city.

  SETTE

  Heartbreak of Mountains, Lust of the Sun

  She could not go back. She had to go back. She had nothing in the world if she did not have Leteo.

  She sat inside all day, in her small room at La Rete, listening to La Strega sing as she washed clothes in the patio. La Strega, smasher of ships, wringer of linens, song always ready to rise from her throat. Dante’s head throbbed with pain. She should sleep, she had to work that night, but she could not lie down, could not take off her shirt, could not move.

  What was this thing pouring through her at a boil?

  Shame.

  Loss.

  Fear.

  The urge to die.

  There was nowhere else to go.

  And she should die. Didn’t deserve to breathe the world’s air into this revolting body.

  She looked around her room for methods. No beams at the ceiling for hanging rope. No poisons. She had her facón, that was all: it would be enough if she slashed the blade across her wrists.

  Carmen’s face. The look on her face.

  Santiago, waiting tonight for a violinist who never appeared.

  The orquesta, all five men, backs turned to her.

  Her secret spilled out to the musicians, would they beat her? rape her? spit on her? these men whom she’d come to see as her brothers.

  Her secret spilled out to a shocked crowd.

  The service entrance guarded by a cook with rough hands.

  Or by dogs. Claws and teeth ripping her apart in the dank alley.

  Her body—traitor body—torn to shreds.

  She couldn’t go. Better to cut herself open before the rest of the world got a chance at her.

  She took the facón out of her trouser leg and passed the blade along the inside of her wrist, a practice stroke. And then she heard Carmen’s voice in her head: I tried but I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t bring myself to die.

  For three hours she sat with the blade in hand, looking at it, looking at her wrists. La Strega’s songs continued outside her door, Italian folk songs, a ballad of a fisherman’s wife whose heart is broken, her husband leaves to fish one morning and never comes home, and she sits at the shore and waits, and waits, and waits, and the sea does not change, the sea has no end, the sea swallows everything. Her voice was pebbled with sorrow. She repeated the chorus, over and over, as the water in the laundry bucket sloshed in time. I’ll die, thought Dante, I know I have to die, but first I just want to hear the song, one more time, one more, one more, and then light had fallen and hunger began to rise. A shock that she could still be hungry. That she could still want food, want anything. Rebellious body, determined to lust, determined to live.

  The day’s light faded. Dark enfolded her. And when her throat was dry and her back sore and her stomach growled into the silence, she heard what she didn’t know she’d needed.

  Cora’s voice.

  Wait, Leda. You can kill yourself tomorrow. Go to Leteo tonight.

  I can’t, carissima, my almost-sister.

  Why not?

  They won’t let me in.

  And if they do?

  There was no monster at the service door, no cook to stop her. Backstage, the musicians welcomed her as if nothing had changed, no second looks, no different treatment. They could not possibly know. And in any case, their minds were elsewhere: Joaquín and Santiago sat next to each other, warming up on their instruments, Joaquín’s posture contrite, Santiago’s forgiving. There was no exchange of words. The others watched them with careful optimism.

  Dante played that night with fingers clammy with dread, but Carmen didn’t appear in the great hall. Around her the musicians, above her dead birds, before her the great hall with its vast peacock in which she couldn’t bear to see her own reflection and its statues still wearing masks as if refusing to believe the revelry was done. After work, she followed the other men to the brothel, to drown her sorrows, if her world was about to be destroyed why not wallow in a bit of pleasure? She lay down beside a lovely naked girl and hummed her a slow tango while the girl pretended to sleep. But Dante’s sorrows were not drowned. She went home and slept and woke up still alive, bewildered at the fact.

  She returned to Leteo, prepared for her doom. But again Carmen was not there. A spike of relief, the joy of another set. At intermission, Don Carrasco came to see them.

  “Doña Ruiz,” he told them, “is resting after the great ball.”

  “Of course,” Santiago said politely.

  “She has gone to the baths in Salto, Uruguay.”

  Dante felt something unlock within her.

  “Ah,” Santiago said.

  Ask how long she’ll be away. Ask how long I have.

  “I hope she feels well?”

  “Indeed.” Don Carrasco looked confused, as if his sister’s state of health were a puzzle he was failing to decipher. “She’s left detailed instructions for everything. The decorations are to stay up in the great hall. And you are all to continue as before.”

  “Thank you,” Santiago said.

  Don Carrasco nodde
d and left.

  “Well!” said Amato. “What was that all about?”

  “He seemed to know as little as anyone,” El Loro said.

  “She’s an odd one, all right,” said Joaquín.

  “Probably ran off with some lover.”

  “God help the man!”

  “He’ll be eaten alive!”

  Laughter.

  They returned to the stage. Carmen, far away, across a border. The thought made Dante feel light enough to almost float away. Once Carmen came back she had the power to rip open the ground under Dante’s feet, divest her of everything she’d become. What would she do then? Run away, or fight back with weapons of her own? What were those weapons? She could threaten to expose Carmen as having an illicit affair with a dirty conventillero. Surely that could cause some embarrassment in her world. But the embarrassment of an aristocratic woman, especially one with her own money and cabaret, not to mention a track record of flouting convention, was nothing compared to the ruin Dante faced. It would not be an equal fight. Better to run, she thought as she lifted her violin to her neck and launched into song at Santiago’s cue. But until then, she had this: a stage, these lights, wine, fire, music.

  She became bolder. She played fiercely, night after night. She had nothing to lose and so she held nothing back, spent all of herself while she still had a self to spend.

  She’d lost hope and that losing made her free. How hard we all work to hold ourselves up, she thought, to play the role we’ve chosen or that’s been chosen for us and we fall asleep right in the middle of our days with our eyes open, we talk and laugh and shit and fight and walk around fast asleep, caught in a dream in which the part we’re acting threatens to devour the hidden self. And maybe after a while it succeeds. Maybe the parts of us that never come to light get eaten over time and disappear. The parts of me I no longer am—village-Leda, skirts-Leda, never-ever-touch-a-naked-woman-Leda—I don’t know where they are, they’re gone, and now parts of the Dante I’ve been are also threatening to go, careful Dante, fearful Dante, El Chico, the Kid. Always vigilant like a thief who knows he’s done for if he’s caught out in the night. But now I’m done for anyway so why not wake up from the dream and take a good look at the world around me before it falls apart?

  Colors were keener. Lamps were brighter. At times she wanted to kill something, anything, whatever lay close, a rage that blurred into the urge to kill herself. At other times she burned with love for everyone, even the arrogant customers who looked at her with scorn or condescension, they just didn’t know better, didn’t know how to see, but every single one of them had once been a small child who needed help to wipe his face, and the tango sang for them, too, didn’t it? It sang for everyone, no matter how closed or broken. It sang for her, Dante, for her bruised soul. It sang for Santiago, keeper of music, stoker of its flames. It sang for Rosa, sang through Rosa, who onstage was neither man nor woman, or perhaps was both at once, a hybrid creature privy to the heartbreak of mountains and the lust of the sun, or so it seemed when you stood inside her voice.

  She was a powerful singer. A brilliant singer. Nobody could deny it anymore, though the musicians still didn’t treat her as one of them, not even Santiago, not even Dante herself. Santiago may have taken this way out of politeness, afraid to intrude, but still the effect remained: Rosa slunk out as soon as her women’s clothes were on, as if she didn’t belong to their tribe, as though she had no place with them offstage. But wasn’t she a part of their sound, just as much as any other? Didn’t they have her to thank for the new reaches of their fame? All this time Dante had accepted the dynamic, acted the same as the other men, but their behavior had come to disgust her. She disgusted herself. In her new clear sight, she looked like a coward.

  One night, she gathered her courage and, just as Rosa came out from behind the curtain, called out, “Rosa! Have a whiskey with us.”

  The room went quiet with surprise.

  Rosa looked like a hunted deer. “No, thank you. I should get home.”

  Dante had already reached for the bottle and poured a glass. “Come on, have a seat.”

  Rosa sat. The musicians stopped talking, their irritation palpable; they’d planned to head to a brothel after the bottle was done, and this would have been their time to argue over where to go as they all had favorite girls in different places. The air grew tense. Rosa didn’t say a word as they finished their drinks quickly and got up to leave: first Joaquín, then Pedro and El Loro and Amato, who turned at the door and glanced at Santiago: “Coming?”

  Santiago looked angry. “No.”

  Amato shrugged and was gone.

  The room seemed empty, just the three of them, Santiago and Dante and Rosa.

  “You did the right thing,” Santiago said to Dante. And then, to Rosa, “I’m sorry.”

  Rosa knocked back the rest of her whiskey. Santiago refilled her glass.

  “Why did you do that?” She said it with eyes on her drink, so that it took Dante a moment to realize she wasn’t talking to Santiago.

  “You deserved it,” Dante said. “You’re part of this band.”

  “I’m not,” said Rosa.

  “You are,” Santiago said.

  Rosa leveled her gaze at Dante. “I don’t need your help.”

  That gaze, it punctured her, she was defenseless against it. “All right.”

  They sat for a long time in a silence that started out taut and eased with each passing moment, each sip of whiskey, the three of them pulled together and apart and together again by the room’s breath.

  When the bottle was empty, Rosa stood. “Thanks for the drink,” she said and walked out without looking back.

  Santiago crossed the room for a new bottle, then sat down and refilled Dante’s glass. They knocked the shots back quickly.

  Santiago said, “You did the right thing.”

  “It didn’t do any good.”

  “Don’t give up.” He filled her glass again. “You’re important to this group, Dante. Don’t forget it.”

  She didn’t know what to say. His words took shape inside her, formed a tenuous glow, fluttered. They drained their glasses more slowly this time, not looking at each other. In that moment, she felt strangely close to Santiago, as though the air between them could hold anything, even her secrets. For the first time she was aware of his body, planes and angles in the dark space beneath his clothes. It wasn’t possible for her to love a man, not anymore, not with everything she’d become and all the things she’d cast aside that men needed from women—but if she could ever love a man again she could see it would be a man just like Santiago. The whiskey had gone to her head. Her hands itched for naked skin. She wondered what Santiago was thinking. He was gazing intently at the wall.

  “Sometimes,” Dante said suddenly, “I want to swallow the world.”

  “All of it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then what?”

  “I don’t know. Swallow it again. Or let it swallow me.”

  “I know exactly what you mean.”

  “That happens to you too?”

  “Of course. That’s why I’m here.” He gestured broadly at the room, the bandoneón case at his feet.

  “It’s too much sometimes.”

  “It gets easier with age.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “Unless, of course, it kills you first.”

  Dante laughed.

  Santiago laughed with him. Their laughter rose and glowed and rippled, reaching every corner of the Lair.

  The next night, after the show, when Rosa changed and left quickly as usual, Dante got up to follow her without thinking, without saying goodbye to anyone. The musicians called out to her, but she ignored them. She followed Rosa at a distance, through the kitchen and out into the dark back alley. Rosa walked quickly, to the wide street and then a sharp right toward San Telmo, where she lived only four blocks from Dante, why had they never walked together? Why was she speeding up? And then Dante reali
zed that Rosa didn’t know who she was, and that a strange man tailing a woman on the street was a threat. What an idiot, she’d forgotten. She ran to catch up with Rosa, who herself began to run.

  “Rosa, it’s me!”

  Rosa slowed. “You scared me.”

  “I’m sorry. Can I walk with you?”

  “I don’t own the streets.”

  They walked side by side. It had rained earlier that night, and rivulets poured quietly in the gutters, flecked with cigarette butts, a few dead rats, shards of light from the iron lamps. The sky hummed with clouds.

  “Whatever you want, the answer is no.”

  “I don’t want anything from you, Rosa.”

  “Then what are you doing?”

  Step, step, step against the cobbles. What a question. She had no idea of the answer. “You just seem so alone.”

  “I like being alone.”

  “I understand. I like being alone too.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why did you follow me?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t.”

  Rosa said nothing. They walked in silence, listening to the creaks and horse clops of Buenos Aires on the brink of dawn.

  “Maybe,” Dante ventured, “there are different ways to be alone.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Some are nourishing and some are poison.”

  “There’s poison in being with others too.”

  “That depends on what the others are doing, no?”

  “It depends on who they are.”

  At her door—a conventillo whose façade was chipped, stained, exquisitely wrought—Dante said, “Thanks for letting me walk with you.”

  Rosa nodded, still wary.

  “I don’t want anything from you. But I’d like to walk together again.”

  “We’ll see,” Rosa said and slipped inside.

  The next night, Dante followed Rosa again; she felt pulled toward her like a magnet, she didn’t ask herself why, her body sprang up from the sofa and she followed the urge without thought. Rosa didn’t stop her, not that night, or the one after that. They began to walk home together regularly. They spoke in ellipses; they spoke of God and grappa, stars and horseshit, odd thoughts that floated in from nowhere to puncture each other’s consciousness. They never spoke of their work together, the stage, their music. Long silences stretched over the rhythm of their steps. Dante found herself looking forward to their walks almost as much as to the hours onstage. She didn’t know why, except that, as she counted the disappearing days of her freedom, she craved the company of people who woke her. And Rosa woke her. She was a mystery, a puzzle with no solving, frank and labyrinthine, distant and honest all at once.