Heart of Tango (10 page)

My father had been a tinsmith. My whole childhood, we'd wandered, town to town, city to city, fixing pots, making just enough to survive. Sometimes, not even that. My mother died giving birth to me, in Landsberg. We'd go back to that town sometimes, because the people there were friendly and they already knew us. The few good memories I have from my early years are from there, from that little city with its colorful houses, its ancient towers, its beautiful river slipping quietly, like a tame animal, past green, treelined banks.

We spent many years in Innsbruck and Landsberg, the only two cities that made any impact on me. I get all the others mixed up, between the muddy roads, the packed snow that I'd slip on, or the icy mud that would seep into my patched and repatched shoes.

I never had time to learn how to read, or how to do anything but survive, use my fists, and handle a blade.

When my father died, I joined up with some Italian comedy actors and headed with them to Genoa. From there I sailed to Argentina, starting off as a cabin boy and working my way up to boatswain, seeing one port after another, much as I had once seen towns and hamlets on foot, until they all started to look like painted scenes to me, stage props made of rags and cardboard, always with the same drunks, stevedores, whores and sailors. Until I met Natalia and decided, for her sake, to make a gentleman of myself.

I
t was a long, wet summer. Once the excitement and bustle of the wedding were past, its preparations and mysteries, we went back to life as usual. I now slept in the big bed, in what used to be Papá's room, but otherwise nothing had changed at home. We continued to eat dinner together, though at times the cutlery now seemed a little heavier, and we might look at each other in an uncomfortable silence we had never known before, as if he suddenly didn't know how to talk to me. At such moments I thought it would almost have been better if Rojo hadn't been a sailor, if he sat down to eat lunch and supper every day with us, until all of us, even me, accepted the fact that we, who had always been two, were now three. But at other times—most of the time—I was happy that Berstein wasn't there, and I fervently hoped that his journey would last weeks and months, until all that remained of him was a blurry memory and the ring I wore on my finger.

The neighborss also treated me differently. The change was subtle, but I felt it, and it amazed me that the one unpleasant night
I had spent with Rojo weeks ago should have worked this change, this glimmer of respect that I had never commanded before, these approving gazes, as if I were a fruit tree or a milk cow that was developing nicely and held some promise for the future.

The Italian girls tried to wheedle me into telling them about my glorious wedding night, but I gave nothing away and only went along with them to the extent of dealing out half-smiles and comments on the importance of keeping it a surprise.

I had heard nothing more about Diego, though I asked about him very discreetly. It seemed that no-one had seen him around. All I was able to find out was that he was a newsman, that he danced every night in theaters and cafés, and that he was having a lot of problems with his dancing partner and was thinking about looking for a replacement. I heard this in Uxío's shop, from the same musicians who had serenaded me the night before the wedding. While I waited for the shopkeeper to refill the bottle with red wine, with my back turned to the table where they were playing cards, I strained to understand what they were saying whenever I heard Diego's name mentioned.

Everything about my life had stayed the same, but still something had changed, something that made me restless and forced me out into the courtyard many nights after Papá had retired to bed. Our home, which had always been my refuge, was now collapsing on top of me, overwhelming me.

On nights like that, pacing back and forth across the flower-filled
courtyard, I would dream of transforming into a falcon and flying over the sleeping city, drunk with freedom, listening to the tango music that flowed from the cafés, the dance halls, the confectionery shops, the theaters … All Buenos Aires had become a tango, while I had to embrace myself, alone, in the shadows of the courtyard.

Ever since I had danced with that man on my wedding day I had found no rest. His memory was like a creeping vine that had set roots in my heart and was coiling around me from the inside, growing stronger and stronger, slowly bringing down the wall that supported my life, until every stone was broken.

Sometimes I thought that perhaps my problem was that I wasn't the decent woman I had always believed. But I felt that the house was growing too small for me, that I had been struck with a harpoon in the center of my chest and someone was hauling in the line, dragging me to places that I could hardly imagine and that would be my perdition.

And El Rojo, who might have stopped it, wasn't coming back. Rojo wasn't coming back. Papá had started coughing and spitting blood once more. And I had never seen Diego again.

“A crush,” Doña Melina had said, “a passing infatuation.” Passing? Something that had already gone on for three months? Something that was consuming me like an sickness, like a fire, roasting me slowly from within so that no-one could see it, leaving me weak and ashamed?

“It's because she misses her husband,” said the Italian girls
whenever anyone at the marketplace remarked that I looked pale and haggard. Or they'd joke about a possible pregnancy. But I knew that neither guess was true. I just lowered my head and let the older women think whatever they wished.

S
ummer seemed as if it would never end. Each night I danced like mad, holding tight to Grisela's body, which weighed less and less, became fragile, transparent, like the body of a sparrow. I immersed myself in the tango with all the mad desperation of the bitterness that gnawed at me from within. Closing my eyes, I dreamt it was Natalia dancing with me. Better than opening them wide to see the reality that surrounded me in that café on Maipú street: Grisela's blurred gaze, the bruises over her body, the false cheer of gangs of rich kids from the best families spending more in a night than she or I could make in a lifetime, cocaine-filled salt cellars on marble café tables, waiters dressed as women . . . Buenos Aires, the great cosmopolitan metropolis, the most European city in the Americas, had become an image of hell, and I traveled through it, my hat at a jaunty angle and a dagger in my hand, knowing that paradise was on Necochea street but not for me. That's why I went by La Boca as little as possible, and always late, very late at night, so I'd never run into Natalia by accident.

I had heard from Yuyo that her father was sick in the lungs, so they'd had to take him to the Spanish Hospital, the one with the nuns, and she'd been left alone, barely earning enough to live on from the sewing piecework that Yuyo brought her. Her husband's salary all went to pay for the medicine. Not that it did any good, except maybe to put off the old man's death a while so he could suffer longer and she could slip further into poverty.

One autumn afternoon I lost Grisela. They told me at the newspaper office. By the time I got to her tenement room, they'd already cut the poor girl down from the beam where she'd hanged herself. There weren't even half a dozen of us at her funeral. I bought some flowers at a street stall and left them there in her grave, because I thought she would have liked it. I felt ashamed that it had never occurred to me to buy her flowers while she was alive.

After I lost my dance partner I started making the rounds of the local cafés and cabarets, just another tanguero. My dreams of glory, of dancing in the theaters of Europe some day, were fading. My memories of a world where something like happiness might exist slipped further and further away.

But so long as Buenos Aires was full of noise and trams, and they talked about building a second underground tube line, like in Paris, and women cut their hair short and their skirts shorter, I went on wallowing in the cafés, from brothels to billiard halls, back to my origins as a
compadrito
, already old before my time at the age of twenty-five.

“M
y father is dead. Papá is dead.” In my head I repeated these words over and over, like a prayer, trying to convince myself that it was true, as if it weren't enough that the coffin sat in the middle of the drawing room surrounded by four fat yellow candles, as if it weren't enough that I could see him in it, his face growing thinner by the hour, his skin turning colder, paler, more transparent, telling me at every moment that he was drifting further away and leaving me alone, forsaken, with an absent husband whom I scarcely knew, with an empty home.

From the hall I could hear the hum of conversations among the neighborss who smoked in front of the door. The women neighborss sitting around me on low stools they had brought from their houses, were reciting whispered prayers. From time to time someone would approach me with murmured words of condolence that I could barely understand.

The damp air, hot from the candles that had been lit throughout
the room, was making me dizzy. Everything smelled of sadness, of poverty, of having reached the end of a dark, narrow tunnel from which I would never emerge.

I wished I could have run into the streets screaming, tearing off my clothes, until I jumped naked into the river, wished the ocean that had brought me to this strange city would take me in and cleanse me of all my grief and humiliation and finally return me to the distant land I should never have left. But no, I could do nothing but stay there, where I was, feeling the tears drip down my cheeks, making an effort to keep anyone from hearing me weep.

At some time during that endless night Doña Melina came up to me. She was now but a poor, faded woman, beaten down by the sorrow of losing her only daughter, my poor María Esther, who had died in childbirth along with her baby. She hugged me so tight that the rosary around her neck bored an impression into my chest. I remember feeling ashamed, even through my fog of grief and helplessness, that María Esther had died while I remained alive. Doña Melina parted from me, with a light touch on my cheek. A moment later she vanished, a ghost. We had no time to speak.

By three in the morning almost all the neighborss had left, promising to come back after sunrise to pick up the coffin and carry it to the church. Two old women, strangers to me, had nodded off in their rush chairs. The candles had burned down until their flames had gone out, drowning in their own wax, dying with a sputter,
as in the cathedral of Valencia at the end of a novena, when the sacristan went around dousing the last candles, kicking out the last church ladies, locking all the doors.

I stood up, feeling light, unlike myself, as if I were the one who had died, and walked around the dark hall, searching for a bit of fresh air by the door that was still ajar. Rain fell meekly, rhythmically, monotonously, as if it had all the time in the universe to finish flooding the earth.

At that moment, watching it rain, I thought—and it seemed I wasn't the one doing the thinking—that there was now no-one left who cared that I was alive, and for an instant, in addition to my sorrow and loneliness, I felt something for which I had no name: something like relief, because no-one had a right any longer to expect anything from me. I didn't think about Rojo.

Then I heard the sound of a throat clearing in the street, and Yuyo showed up, the skinny squeezebox player who had become a sort of friend, the one who had brought me the piecework that I had hoped would earn me enough to save Papá—the boy from that serenade, which seemed to have happened in some other life, to some other girl. Behind him, unexpectedly, like an apparition, I saw the face of another man, pale, serious. My stomach leapt.

Both men removed their hats. Yuyo repeated the same words I had been hearing for so many hours: “My condolences, madam. Don Joaquín was a good man. At least his suffering is over.”

The other man, who was not Diego, said nothing. He lowered his head and followed Yuyo into the drawing room.

I had to sit down, right there in the hall, because my legs would not support me.

W
hen the squeezebox player told me Natalia's father had died, for an instant I thought I might go down and pay my respects. I'd never have a better occasion to see her. The thought even passed through my head that I could ask her to be my dance partner, because I knew that she'd need the money and that her husband was off at sea. But it would have been an insult. She was a married lady, not one of the desperate girls I hung around with. A real lady couldn't dance in public with a man who wasn't her husband, even if she wanted to.

So I got together with Malena, a lively brunette who drew stares from every man in the room. Thanks to her, half a dozen elegant cafés hired us. But it was only my body dancing. My soul, or the bit of soul still left to me after I lost Natalia, would take to the air whenever the tango started, flying me far, far away, to a dark, fragrant, velvety place, where she was waiting for me, holding out her hand for me, her eyes half closed and a hint of a smile on her lips.

That's how I always imagined her, I don't know why: wearing black dancing clothes, hair done up in a chignon with a tortoise-shell comb, leaning against the jamb of a door that opened one way on to the milonga and the other on to a nighttime garden, waiting for me. The image was so clear, so intense, it seemed like a childhood memory. An impossible memory from a past that had never taken place. That's why, sometimes, when I was trying to motivate myself, I'd pretend it was maybe a memory of the future, of what life had in store for me, even if things were going against me for now.

One night at Salón Peracca, during the break, a guy came up to me. I'd seen him all evening, leaning against a column with a notebook in his hands, and I'd noticed him a few nights earlier at La Puñalada. At first I thought he might be a fellow newspaperman, but soon I realized, from the way he was watching us dance, that he had to be in some other line of work.