“Do you want to go for a drink?” Dante said once, as they passed a bar.
“You know I can’t go in there. I’ll get treated like a whore.”
“Not if you’re with me.”
“Then I’ll get treated like your whore.”
Again she’d forgotten. In her time as a man so much of her had gone to sleep. “Let’s just walk.”
They started walking a little longer, some nights, passing Rosa’s door and Plaza Dorrego and the San Telmo marketplace with its great fortress walls, chained shut for the night, walking on past peeling doors where workers were emerging for their early factory shifts and women nursed babies at windows, squinting at the sky for clues of what the day might bring. The more they walked, the more their silences spoke and hummed, knitting them together, turning their steps into a single percussive song. Because they were walking, they barely looked at each other; because they barely looked at each other, Dante began to feel at risk of saying more, too much, saying almost anything to this woman who was like no one else. Be careful, Dante. Don’t let it spill, not any of it. After two weeks of walking—during which Carmen had not come back and Dante stayed free, the world intact—she asked a question she’d been holding on her tongue.
“How did you do it?”
“Do what?” Rosa said.
“Become this. What you are.”
“I auditioned, you were there.”
“No, before that. How did you become yourself?”
Silence, the low pulse of their steps. They approached a boy, five years old at most, sharpening knives in a doorway. He stared at them as they passed, blade still swinging. “I just did.”
“There’s more than that. I’m sure there’s more.”
“There’s always more. Every person has a story as long as the ocean.”
“Yes! You’re right! I’ve crossed the ocean—”
“I’ve never seen it.”
“It’s beautiful. It’s terrible. It goes on and on. That’s the version of your story I want.”
Rosa laughed. Dante could get addicted to the bite of that laugh. “Well, you can’t have it.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t tell it.”
“Of course you can.”
“Anyway, there’s nothing grand about it.”
“I don’t care.”
“I don’t have the words.”
“Try.”
“It would take hours.”
“I have hours. We’ll walk. The city is big enough for that.”
Rosa seemed shaken for the first time since Dante had met her. She was quiet for so long that Dante thought she’d failed, that she should find something else to talk about. Then, in a circling way, Rosa began.
She’d come to Buenos Aires by herself just two years before, with cash given to her by her mother to soften the blow of exile. Her mother hadn’t used that word, exile, but Rosa called it that in her own mind. When Rosa left Melo, the town of her birth in the rural north of Uruguay, she was eighteen years old and had never traveled further than the fields just across the river that ran a half hour’s walk from her home. Those fields beyond Melo were green and rich and rolled out in all directions to infinity. When she was a little girl, her mother had been mistress to a wealthy estanciero, a landowner, who had kept them both in a pretty blue house on a clean street where Rosa’s mother was spurned by the decent families but always kept her head high and her dresses fresh and elegant, buttoned to the neck. Rosa knew, growing up, that the estanciero was her father, but that she should never call him that, should never call him anything other than Señor, which she rarely had the chance to do because when he visited she stayed quiet in her room as she was told and didn’t come out no matter what she heard, and, on some visits, she heard many things. Her mother always made sure that Rosa had a plate of food and an empty chamber pot when Señor came, unless he came unannounced, at which times Rosa went right to her room and didn’t ask for a thing and held her pee as long as she could (and only sometimes did she fail). Still, it was a good life: she went to school through the third grade; their house had a little garden where she sang for hours to fairies she saw clearly in the specks of light on grass; she got to sleep in her mother’s bed when Señor wasn’t there, which was often, because he lived with his real family in a big white house on his estancia (she had no way to prove the house was white but she knew it was, it had to be). Then, when Rosa was thirteen, Señor stopped coming and stopped paying for their pretty blue house, and Rosa and her mother had to move in with her mother’s brother, a good man of course but there was never enough space, they were always a burden, as his wife never hesitated to let them know no matter how many floors Rosa scrubbed or meals she cooked or bones she had to steal from the dog. Rosa and her mother started washing laundry for the wealthy families of Melo, enormous baskets that they hauled down to the river at the edge of town, which every day received flocks of women wringing linens against the rocks and filling the shallows with the shining, fragile bubbles of their soap. She learned to carry great baskets of laundry on her head as the black women did, even though her mother told her not to, you look like a slave when you do that, hija, you are not a slave, never forget it. The black women weren’t slaves either, though Rosa knew some of them had been before they escaped across the border from Brazil, and in any case they looked powerful to her with their baskets up high like enormous woven crowns. But she didn’t tell her mother this. Her mother was prone to mood changes so quick they made you dizzy. She was still beautiful, only sixteen years older than Rosa, and determined to find a man to care for her again. When she did, Rosa was happy that she and her mother would have a house of their own again. The new house was not blue, nor was it pretty, but it was enough—until, two months after they moved in, Rosa’s mother sat her down and put more cash on the table than Rosa had ever seen at once and said, he doesn’t want you here. I’m sorry. This is for you. Take my advice and get as far away from Melo as you can. Rosa was not a child anymore—she had just turned seventeen—and so she didn’t shed a single tear on the whole train ride south to Montevideo, the great capital, which startled her with its size and its river so wide you couldn’t see the other side and had to wonder how long a boat would have to sail before you’d see land again. Buenos Aires was the city on the distant unseen shore, even larger, it was said, than this one. City of tango. Montevideo was a city of tango too, as Rosa soon learned from the washerwomen at the shore of the Río de la Plata. One of the women took pity on her and shared her workload in exchange for a few centavos. A girl like you, she said, should never be alone in a city like this one, where is your mother? Dead, said Rosa, because it was easier than the truth. The women clucked and shook their heads. Rosa rented a tiny room in a run-down building where several families shared a long hall and a single bathroom, and it was there that she first heard tangos played and fell in rapture with the music. She danced with a vivid joy she paid dearly for when, a few nights later, one of the men, a guitarist, a factory worker, father of five, broke into her room and gave her reason to sleep with a knife on her nightstand for the rest of her days. She left that building and found another, and in her first night in her new room she lay on her hard bed and thought of her mother, of the estanciero, and of the father of five, all asleep right this moment in different beds. She made a vow not to rely on any man. She would survive alone, or die. There were good people in the new building, and tango. The knife stayed close, she did not dance, but she did sing. And in the singing she found an even greater joy than in the dance; when she sang, she led rather than followed, pushed open the walls of sound and made room for her voice in the raw world. She earned a reputation as the songstress of her street. In Buenos Aires, people said, you’d be famous, on fancy stages, can you imagine? She began to imagine. She began to dream an absurd dream.
“And now I’m here,” she said, and stopped. During the telling they had reached the port at La Boca. It was a shock to see it again, the great wareho
uses, the slapdash houses built from salvaged wood and corrugated iron, painted in a bright patchwork of colors that announced their hope and chaos. Dante and Rosa stood at the rail, the water below them a dark mirror under the growing dawn. There was no moon. Dante had broken her own rule of never coming to this neighborhood, dangerous as it was to her disguise, but Rosa had set the pace and she hadn’t dared do anything that might interrupt the story. Words like water to a parched man. It was her own story and not hers at all.
“I’ve never told that,” said Rosa.
Dante thought of the man, the father of five, his hands stained from the factory. She struggled not to think of Rosa, under those hands, alone with him in the dark. She didn’t know what to say, but Rosa seemed to be waiting, so she said the first stupid thing that came to mind. “Do you miss Uruguay?”
“I don’t know. Do you miss Italy?”
“Yes, but I can’t bear the thought of going back.”
“Why not?”
“A lot of reasons.”
“You’ll have to tell me.”
“I can’t.”
“You didn’t let me get away with that. Tomorrow it’s your turn for the long story.”
She’d made a mistake. She was an idiot. There was so much of her story that she couldn’t tell, it wasn’t possible. “I’d rather listen.”
“Dante.” Rosa was looking out over the water, keenly focused away. “I love the orquesta. I love that stage. I don’t care what the other musicians think of me.”
“They respect you,” Dante said quickly.
“I’m not stupid.”
“They’re afraid of you.”
“Maybe.” Rosa seemed to consider this. “They’ll always see me as a woman first, then as a singer or a person.”
“They think you’re beautiful.”
“I’m not beautiful. You’re not talking about beauty, you’re talking about conquest.”
Startling, such directness. Dante felt a prick of shame, though she couldn’t have said why.
“Look, Dante, what I’m saying is that the stage is everything. It’s life to me.”
Dante nodded, though Rosa kept her gaze on the water and did not see.
“And I won’t do anything that jeopardizes that life. Not even with you.” And then Rosa did something incredible: she reached for Dante’s hand, where it perched on the rail, and held it for a moment before moving away.
Dante stood frozen. Her whole body hummed from the touch of that hand. She didn’t know what to say, and it seemed that there was no room to speak, that a portal between them had closed, and so she stayed in place beside Rosa, looking down at smooth black water that revealed nothing.
She thought about this conversation for days. She could not stop. Rosa’s words, not even with you, rang over and over through her mind. Rosa thought that she, Dante, was pursuing her. She was wrong, of course. But Dante could not shake the warmth of Rosa’s hand on hers, its stinging power. Maybe Rosa had not been wrong. Maybe Dante had followed her all this time with hopes more complicated than she’d realized. Lust, after all, was a prismatic thing, refracting differently with different women. Alma, Carmen, Mamita, the dance hall girls, the sparrow-girl. Rosa was unlike any of them. She was honest in a rare, unsettling way. She was a universe, glittering with the stars of her own thoughts. Dante wanted to swim in the space between those stars, to swim in Rosa’s laugh, in her voice, in her silence. Friendship, that was called, wasn’t it; Rosa had no reason to fear. But then there was that hand finding hers on the rail, the duet of their touch, brief, searing. Now, as she rolled cigarettes and oiled violin strings and unbuttoned her shirt for bed, Dante could not stop thinking of that hand. The arm it led to, the body. What she could do with that body. She started touching herself in bed at the thought. She’d touched her sex hundreds of times before, thinking of this or that woman, but when thinking of Rosa she touched more of herself: the length of her waist, her pelvic bone, the breasts that sprang out of captivity every night, stubbornly resuming their shape. The delicate inner thighs that no one else had ever felt. She wondered at it all, this secret body, warm, insistent. The pleasure was as strong as it was frightening. She should not pursue Rosa. Rosa did not want to be pursued. That radiant moment between them had been a warning. And in any case, it would be an enormous mistake for reasons Rosa could not yet know. She, Dante, was a liar, an impostor, poised to run away at any moment (to where? to Uruguay, perhaps, this nearby land that Rosa spoke of with a prickly kind of longing?) and an entwining would be hazardous to them both.
She vowed to stop thinking of Rosa. But it was too late. At work, at Leteo, she could hardly look at Rosa for thinking about the body beneath that men’s suit, the breasts that pushed the shirt out, the hips defiant in their trousers. Her singing voice had become the most lambent sound in the world. When she changed behind the curtain, after the show, the thought of every move back there consumed Dante.
Sixteen days since Carmen left. Seventeen. The baths at Salto must be wonderful; stay away, Carmen, stay a long time. Dante didn’t leave. How could she go? She didn’t know how much more time she had, or how her story would end, and it was bound to end badly but it wasn’t over yet. The nights at Leteo were beautiful. Rosa’s act had staying power, the crowds continued, and she’d begun to receive offers from other orquestas and cabarets, each of which she’d turned down.
“She’ll leave us one day,” Santiago said.
“Oh yeah?” Joaquín said. “For where?”
“For the stars.”
“You owe me,” Rosa said on a walk home together.
“What do you mean?”
“I told you my story of becoming, or whatever you called it.”
“Yes.”
“And you still haven’t told me yours.”
“I can’t, I really can’t.”
“Why not?”
“A man has his secrets.” She tried to make it sound witty.
“And a woman doesn’t?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“They can’t be bigger secrets than what I told you.”
She longed to tell herself to Rosa. To have a person, a single person in the world, who knew who she was. She longed for it so much it made her bones ache.
“I know what your problem is.”
“Oh really? What?”
“You think you’ll shock me. But I can’t be shocked.”
Dante laughed.
Rosa stopped and took out a cigarette. She was not laughing. She handed a cigarette to Dante and accepted a light. “Why don’t you start with your big secret.”
Dante took a long, slow drag of her cigarette. Across the street, a grocer was setting up crates of his wares with the help of a small boy. The man looked haggard, the boy half-caught in dreams. “I’m going to run away.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
“Where to?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why?”
“I’m in trouble.”
“What did you do? Kill somebody?”
“Worse.”
Rosa met her gaze, completely calm. “I’m listening.”
“It’s La Viuda Ruiz. She left because of me.”
“What did you do to her?”
“What do you think?”
Rosa flicked ash from her cigarette. A light rain had begun, and tiny drops caught in her hair. Across the street, the grocer grimaced at the sky. “And she didn’t like it?”
“No, that’s not the problem.”
Rosa flashed a smile at Dante so direct that she blushed and looked away.
“I’m sorry,” Rosa said. “I know this is serious. You want to run. But maybe you can work it out—apologize, send her flowers, lick the mud off her shoes, she’d like that.”
“It’s too late.”
“Why?”
“She holds power over me.”
“She holds power over all of us. So what?”
“She holds more powe
r over me.”
“Do you love her?”
The question unsettled Dante. This damn rain, wetting her forehead, darkening her sleeves. “I don’t know.”
“Then you don’t.”
“I don’t know what love is.”
“Well, whatever it is, you can’t have it with her.”
“Why not?”
“Because she’ll never see you.”
Dante thought of Carmen, wearing nothing but a blindfold, crying for more dirty conventillero, shrinking back from a cigarette burn. She thought of Rosa as a girl, locked in her room, listening to her mother with the man she called Señor. “Nobody will ever really see me.”
Rosa focused on lighting another cigarette, cupping her match against the rain. “That’s up to you.”
“No, it’s not.”
“I’m waiting.”
Dante looked into Rosa’s face. The hiding of the past four almost five years crashed over her, and she felt she’d trade all the careful safety of her life for just one moment of being fully seen. By Rosa. By this clear-faced peerless woman standing in front of her. She almost spilled her secret, but then Rosa shrugged in resignation. “It’s getting late,” she said and resumed their walk.
Another week passed. The urge grew, to reveal herself, to tell Rosa everything: the whole of her, the ocean-story, all of it rushing to the surface whenever she saw Rosa, demanding air and light. Maybe Carmen would never return. Maybe she could live forever inside this space, a life that swung between the two poles of the stage and these walks home, requiring nothing more.
They did not touch again, but, sometimes, when silence swelled languorously between them, Dante thought she felt the hum rise up between their bodies as it had in La Boca. Surely Rosa felt it too. At times she seemed to reach the verge of saying something and then change her mind, close her mouth, close her face, rein herself in.
The Gods of Tango: A Novel Page 32
