City of Knives

by William Bayer

  Beth shrugged. "So many things. I wanted to explore the tango subculture, immerse myself totally."

  "And so you have. What were you seeking in return?"

  After some thought, Beth answered: "I was looking for Mr. DreamDance. What some back home call 'Mr. Good-Tango.'"

  Dr. Moreno smiled. "I understand. Not necessarily the guy from San Francisco, but a generic dream dancer, a great partner."

  Beth nodded.

  "You understand that to find him you must dance. Despite what that brother-sister pair seems to think, tango isn't about knife fights or betrayal. It's about getting in tune with yourself and with another. In your heart you know that."

  Beth nodded again; she knew it very well.

  At the end of their first session, Dr. Moreno suggested Beth consult with her twice a week.

  "Psychoanalysis is impractical. You'll be here too short a time. And I'm not going to prescribe an anti-depressant, at least not yet. But in addition to twice weekly sessions, I recommend you work with a new tango teacher, one I studied with myself. His name is Carlos Santos. He doesn't offer classes, just private lessons. And though he specializes in advanced students, essentially what he does is take you back to fundamentals. I think that's what you need now—to go back, rediscover the tango you loved, the tango that drew you here. If there's a teacher in Buenos Aires who can re-instill your joy in tango, Carlos is the one."

  Carlos Santos turned out to be an unassuming-looking, bald, middle-aged man with a trimmed white beard and a protruding stomach. But what a dancer! His studio, the living room of his third floor apartment, had a smooth, well-sprung floor. Two pairs of French doors opened onto small iron-railed balconies overlooking the avenue. Aside from a stereo system and an electric heater in the fireplace, the room was bare.

  In his arms, Beth felt incredibly light and light-of-foot. He didn't lead kicks, hooks or fancy moves. His style was simple, non-theatrical, the opposite of the militant style prevalent at Club Noir. It was pure tango, refreshingly clean, simple moves perfectly executed.

  "You're an excellent dancer," he told her after they danced for several minutes. "But I'd like to see more cobblestone in your dancing. Less fancy stuff, less effort, more of the street."

  And after several more minutes: "It's not enough to simply move to the music. You must feel it deeply. Dance the music, not the steps. Tango is a way to define yourself. To dance well, you must first learn who you are, then become that person in motion. That's what I want us to work on. We can do it by starting with very simple moves. Even though I'm leading, it's up to you to show me who you are. Not just as a dancer, but also as a woman. And without obvious effort."

  Carlos smiled. "So tell me, Beth do you want to showboat? Come off as hip and hot and slick? Or do you want to show me your true self? That involves risk. You'll have to take off your dancer's mask, make yourself vulnerable. That's what all the great dancers do."

  She loved his approach and his way of coaching, so unlike that of other dance teachers she'd worked with. His lessons, she thought, were almost like psychotherapy. Perhaps between Carlos and Ana Moreno she'd be able to make a break-through.

  "Feel the floor. Caress it," he instructed her. "Tango is a formal expression of passion. Create a different story every time you dance. Listen to your partner...then tell him who you are."

  The dance, she began to understand, was really a quest for harmony with a partner, oneness with the music, and, ultimately, a journey of self-discovery.

  "If you reveal, your dancing will reveal," Carlos told her. "If you are true, your dancing will be true. Most dance studios have too many mirrors. I don't believe in mirrors. Don't think about how you look to others. When you're dancing well you'll know it. You won't have to look in mirrors."

  Feel! feel! feel!—that was the core of Carlos' teaching.

  "If you feel the music and bare your soul, then," he assured her, "I promise you, you'll look terrific!"

  She fell into a new routine: Monday and Wednesday afternoon psychotherapy sessions with Ana Moreno; Tuesday and Thursday morning tango lessons with Carlos Santos. A few evenings she joined the two Glasgow girls on forays to the clubs. But the dancing at those places now longer interested her, and, to her surprise, she didn't attract many partners.

  "I think I must give off a negative vibe," she told Dr. Moreno. "A month ago I was approached by too many guys. Now I'm practically a wallflower."

  "Maybe you're going to the wrong sort of club. The style of tango Carlos teaches doesn't stand out at places where everyone's trying to be cool."

  "I used to love those places. Now they seem stale."

  "Ask Sabina about some of the neighborhood tango halls. You might like them better."

  "You mean where the dancing's more 'cobblestone'?"

  "Do you understand what Carlos means by that?"

  "He means a little rough, like on the street."

  "What does 'street' mean to you?"

  She shrugged. "I guess the way they used to dance in the early days on the cobblestone streets of La Boca."

  "That's one way of looking at it. But Carlos doesn't dance rough. In fact, his dancing's incredibly smooth."

  Beth found herself growing impatient. "Then what does he mean?"

  "For him cobblestone means real. 'Street-real' if you will."

  "And what's that?"

  "Look around. Buenos Aires is a huge city. There's a lot more going on here than just what takes place at night at the clubs."

  "You think I'm out of touch?"

  "Do you think you are?"

  "I haven't done any of the tourist stuff, if that's what you mean."

  "I'm not talking about the tourist stuff. I'm talking about the reality here, the reality of the streets."

  Beth felt flustered when she left Ana's office. What was the meaning of their last exchange? That she was living in a dream world, a false Buenos Aires as represented by the clubs? Did Ana think she'd come all this way, to "the bottom of the world," just to play and take, rather than participate and learn?

  The next day, at the start of her dance lesson, she asked Carlos what he meant by cobblestone.

  "Come, I'll show you."

  He put a CD of great old Pugliese songs on the stereo, then stood before her, gazed into her eyes and opened up his arms. They went into embrace, slowly as he'd taught her, stood still for several beats, then he signaled with the slightest pressure on her back that after one more beat he would start to move.

  He led her then on a beautiful walk that ended in an elegant ocho. She felt transported. As always she felt incredibly light in his arms and so in tune with the music that she became part of it. But this time there was something else going on, something transcendent she couldn't define.

  What was it? A oneness with the world, a cosmic oneness? That seemed pretentious, grandiose. Maybe it was the city...for she could hear its sounds wafting through the French doors that opened on to Carlos' balconies. Maybe it was the essence of Buenos Aires that Carlos brought to their dancing. Could that be what he meant by cobblestone? This wasn't just Tango Magic; this was Tango/Buenos Aires Magic. When the song was finished she peered at her teacher.

  "That was special," she said. "What made the difference?"

  "The music."

  "At the clubs they play Pugliese all the time."

  "Yes, they play him, people hear him, dance to him, but they don't always feel what he was saying."

  She laughed. "For a minute there I thought it was the sounds of the city blowing in off the avenue."

  "That too."

  "This is getting mystical."

  "Not mystical. Real! Tango can transport you, but it's always reality-based. You're in another world, but still very much in Argentina."

  "You can take me there because you're a fabulous partner."

  "Thanks for the compliment, but no one partner can bring cobblestone to the dance. It takes two, feeling it together. One dancer can make beautiful figures, but only a pair can
bring it in, then make it sublime."

  In the mornings she began to walk the streets, explore this city where she'd been living for so many weeks in what Ana Moreno called "your dancer's trance-state." The streets, she found, were full of life. She remembered her first day alone in the city, after Sandi Barnett departed, how she'd walked and walked and became one with the flow, and how exhilarated that had made her feel. Somewhere along the way, she realized, she'd lost a sense of where she was. Now she strove to regain it.

  She found that the city, grand though it was, was also in despair. She observed whole families in broad daylight digging through garbage, filling stolen shopping carts with scraps. She passed old women hovering with tiny children, begging in whispers from shadowed doorways. She saw men lined up at pawnshops trading in the tools with which they'd made their livings. She passed a woman with terrible open sores on her face, crouched on the sidewalk in front of a luxury leather shop, selling cheap polyester bras arranged on the concrete. Men and women hit boarded up bank windows with hammers. Others beat frying pans together as if they were cymbals, crying out their anger at the lack of jobs and food.

  What was it Sandi had told her that first afternoon: that most milongueros weren't aware that Argentina was in a pre-revolutionary state? Beth wasn't sure if that was the right word; the despair struck her as too deep to inspire a rebellion. According to the newspapers, which she now read closely while sitting in cafés, there was no painless solution to the crisis. Each day the country defaulted on foreign bank loans. Each day its credit was reduced. People were starting to say that only a strong man, "a man on a white horse," could change things for the better. Hearing this, Beth thought back to the party on the island she'd attended with Charles and Lucinda, the conversations she overheard there about a "time for cleansing" and "a time for the sword." Perhaps the situation wasn't pre-revolutionary, she thought; perhaps it was pre-fascist.

  How could she have missed all this? What kind of dream-world had she been living in? Buenos Aires wasn't a stage-set for a fantasy life led at night by foreign visitors. It was a real place filled with real people...and, she observed, many of them were suffering.

  There was an old man, a Gardel impersonator, one of several who stood on street corners, whom she passed each time she walked to Ana's apartment for a session. This one looked particularly ravaged, his sun-burnt face deeply creased, his back bent with age. Gardel, the greatest of all tango singers, had been forty-five when he was killed in an airplane accident in 1935. This impersonator looked to be at least seventy. Up close Beth could see the heavy make-up applied to his face, and the white roots of his dyed slicked-down hair. Yet he mouthed the words to his Gardel recordings with an energy that stirred her. She always paused when she encountered him, listened a while, smiled at him, then left whatever coins she had in his upturned hat.

  He too, she understood, was "of the street," evoking a sense of tragedy she could incorporate into her dancing. Maybe this was what Carlos meant when he used the word "cobblestone"...though she refused to ask him again. Cobblestone, it seemed, was something you had to discover for yourself.

  And then one day, she thought, she grasped it. It was yearning, a yearning to live and to connect.

  Yes, that's what tango's about; it's a dance of yearning.

  Within days of this revelation she felt less depressed. Dr. Moreno commented upon it, and so did Sabina.

  "You're looking great, Beth," Sabina told her over one of their private mid-morning breakfasts. "Ana wants me to take you to one of the neighborhood tango halls where I dance."

  "Do you think I'd fit in?" Beth asked.

  "There're very few foreigners...but I don't see why not. These are mostly family places which a couple might go to on a Saturday night. Singles too, of course—young people looking to meet someone new."

  "And the dancing?"

  "It's always good, sometimes superb. You'll see people you'd never see at the downtown clubs. They don't go out dancing every night, but when they get on the floor, they dance beautifully."

  They agreed to go out together soon to a club in one of the northern districts, an experience, Sabina promised her, that would be a revelation.

  "Not smart or chic or decadent like Club Noir. I'm talking about the real thing, the heart of tango. The source."

  Both Ana and Carlos had much to teach her. Ana fastened on her obsession with Mr. DD.

  "That you call him DreamDance," she said one day, "makes me wonder whether you've endowed him with a dreamlike aspect."

  "You don't think he's real?"

  "Oh, I don't doubt you've described a real person," Ana said. "But you've romanticized him, elevated him to mythic stature. You came down here in pursuit of an undefined dream. Your Mr. DD was part of that."

  Carlos spent a session engaging her with a unique exercise, playing a song then asking her to dance its various musical threads: "Dance the piano;" "Dance the bandoneón;" "Now dance the lyrics."

  He spent another session describing different styles of tango, demonstrating each one in turn:

  "There's silly tango, comedic tango—when you dance it you feel like laughing aloud."

  His demonstration did make her laugh.

  "Then there's eccentric tango filled with daring attacks and unexpected counter-attacks."

  That demonstration caused her to stumble.

  "There's gymnastic tango."

  He whirled her though a breath-taking series of athletic maneuvers.

  "Intricate tango."

  He held her close, then moved with her in a very tight frame.

  "For me the best," he told her, "is psychological tango, in which the relationship deepens the longer the partners dance."

  This style felt right to her.

  "The suspense is in the pauses," Carlos told her as they moved. "I pause and ask myself: 'What will she do? How will she adorn?' Then, when you do what you're doing now...yes! like that! I learn more about you. And then I show you that I've seen you and that I like what I've seen. Then, perhaps, you might tempt me further by showing me a little bit more...but not too much. See, it's just as important to know what not to do, how not to move, as it is to give of yourself. When I pause, I give you space to shine, but it's you who must decide how brightly. I call this style 'psychological' because it's totally between the two of us. We don't care what others see. We dance only for each other. To do that we must always be aware, feel one another, listen to one another, revel in one another as our relationship deepens."

  Two days later, on a balmy afternoon, after an invigorating two hour walk following her psychotherapy session, Beth returned to the apartment to find Sabina, looking grave, waiting for her in the apartment living room.

  "Something bad's happened," Sabina told her.

  "What?"

  "Sit down. I'll turn on the TV. It's been on the news all afternoon."

  Beth sat still waiting for whatever-it-was, hoping there hadn't been a military take-over of the government, or, worse, another big terrorist attack back home.

  It turned out to be a local crime-story. A young couple had been murdered. It took Beth a few seconds to realize she knew the victims.

  Laura Gonzáles from Channel 6, an attractive young reporter with an urgent expression, was addressing her anchor, Roberto Morales, from the street in front of the Céspedes' white cubic house. As Laura spoke cops could be seen moving back and forth through police barricades behind.

  "The naked bodies of Charles and Lucinda Céspedes, son and daughter of the late renowned polo player, Juan Céspedes, were found this morning by their housekeeper in the ground floor spa of their Belgrano home. The bath, lined with white tiles, was reportedly smeared with blood, and a bloody switchblade knife lay between the bodies on the floor. According to police sources, the brother and sister were cut to ribbons. According to these same sources, the young Céspedes had fought ferociously for their lives...."

  As Beth brought her hand to her mouth, Sabina placed an arm about her sho
ulders.

  Laura Gonzáles turned to a stout middle-aged man with a shaven skull, identified on the screen as Hector Ricardi, Chief of Homicide for the Federal Police.

  "What's it like in there, Chief?"

  Ricardi shook his head. "Not pretty."

  "We understand the victims' hands show defensive wounds."

  "There's blood all over the place. Even on the walls." He spoke in a gruff whisper.

  "Any idea who might have done this?"

  "We know who did it," Ricardi said.

  Laura Gonzáles appeared stunned. "This is breaking news! Please, Chief, fill us in."

  Ricardi smiled. He seemed to enjoy catching the young reporter off guard.

  "Late this morning a twelve year old kid tried to sell the victims' watches at the flea market in Plaza Dorrego. The watches were extremely valuable, so one of the dealers gave us a call. We arrested the kid. He in turn led us to his older brother, a hustler known to our vice squad, who hangs around the better hotels. The older boy confessed, said the Céspedes couple picked him up late last night behind the Mariott Plaza in some kind of restored vintage car. They brought him here to Belgrano where, he says, they asked him to perform 'unspeakable acts.' When he refused, they got mad and attempted to throw him out. There was a fight. He says they attacked him with fencing sabers. We found a couple of discarded foils upstairs. He says he went back down to the spa to retrieve his clothes and that while he was dressing they attacked him again. This time he drew his knife and fought back. After he killed them, he took their watches and fled."

  "We understand the brother and sister were naked."

  "Correct."

  "What do you suppose was going on?"

  Ricardi shrugged. "I suppose 'unspeakable acts'."

  Summoned by a detective, Ricardi excused himself and moved off screen. As soon as he was gone, Laura addressed her anchor.

  "There you have it, Roberto. 'Unspeakable acts!' We have an inkling too of what that could mean. There're rumors, circulating among neighbors, concerning this attractive brother and sister—rumors they were living together as husband and wife. Though unconfirmed, these rumors suggest a decadent life-style consistent with the killer's story. Roberto."