Heart of Tango (12 page)

Natalia's image kept me company through those cold, dark hours, like a tiny light at an altar, and gave me the strength to resist, to get back to her, not to leave her all alone now that she had found someone who would protect her and support her, because if there was anyone in the world who knew what it meant to be alone it was me, and I didn't ever want the oath I had sworn to be in vain.

“B
ut would it really hurt you so much to try?” Dolores had asked me. She was another girl from Spain, a little older than me, whom I met one Sunday when Beatrice persuaded me to go with her to a creamery.

Beatrice's fiancé was still off at sea. Lonely, unable to go out dancing or strolling with the single girls, she got so bored, and she insisted so much that I should go out with her for coffee and ensaimadas, that I finally agreed, though I could hardly spare the twenty centavos it would cost me. But she was still living with her parents and brother and earning a bit of cash from her sewing, so she told me it would be on her. We went to La Martona, on Avenida de Mayo in the city center, a place I hadn't set foot in since poor María Esther's wedding.

There we met Dolores, from Huelva. She had a touch of the woman of the streets about her, which I didn't like at first, but after we started talking and telling our stories, it eventually dawned on me that not every girl would resign herself to living my kind of life,
and that I didn't have to die of hunger and sadness, all alone in my house, if I could just manage to show some nerve.

“I know it's hard for you to get up your courage,” she said, fixing me with her eyes, as small and black as a pair of ripe olives. “You're a young lady, I can tell from your face.”

“Natalia is a married woman,” Beatrice interrupted. “But she lost her husband.”

Dolores ignored her.

“What I mean is, you're a polite girl, probably one of them as never learned anything but praying and sewing. But you've got to face up to life with a bit of nerve or it'll swallow you whole. Come along and I'll introduce you to Doña Práxedes, and she's bound to hire you, with that virgin face of yours. You dance?”

Beatrice again answered for me, telling her about the tangos I had danced on my wedding day.

“There you go. Not like I'm telling you to go out and start walking the streets—wouldn't do that myself. She keeps a nice dance hall. The men that go there are clean, and they've got the wherewithal. They're honest men, too, working men, don't worry—not a thug or a spoiled brat among them. Doña Práxedes keeps guard like a German Shepherd, and Ignacio and Sebastián too, case anyone tries it on. You'll be with the rest of us girls, dolled up like a queen, nice dress, nice hair. When a man wants to dance with you, he'll give you a red token that he bought from Doña Práxedes. Stick the token in your bag and dance with the guy. One token, one
dance. When the night's over, trade your tokens to the owner for the money you earned, and home you go.”

I lowered my head, dying of shame to think that I'd reached the point where, instead of standing up and running away as any decent woman would have done, I was listening to what Dolores was saying. And it really didn't seem like such a bad idea.

“How long do you have to sew to pay for your coffee and roll?” she challenged me.

“All afternoon,” I answered, barely moving my lips, not looking up.

“That's two tangos at the dance hall. Dance two songs with a man—maybe even a man you like—and you'll pay for your Sunday snack.”

“Just dance?” asked Beatrice, also in a whisper.

“Just dance. If the guy wants anything else, and you want it too, talk it over with Doña Práxedes and she'll arrange it.”

“What if you don't want to?”

“Just say the word, and so long! If he starts bugging you, Ignacio and Sebastián will come over and give him the chuck.”

“They'll what?” asked Beatrice.

“Kick him out,” I translated into Argentine for her.

Dolores licked the milk foam from her upper lip, stood up, smoothing her skirt over her hips, and looked me straight in the eye. “Come on, come with me. Let's go and see the dance hall. No obligation.”

But I didn't go. Not that day, not the next day, not the day after.

Practically without my noticing, every time my gaze met Beatrice's while we sewed in my sitting room, I was thinking about the offer Dolores had made me. Just dance. Dance, which was what I loved most in the world, and earn enough to buy myself some meat now and then, probably even make myself a dress, if only so I could see myself in the mirror looking attractive.

A week went by, and when Beatrice was about to leave at supper time, I threw a glance her way so the other girls wouldn't see it. She understood, left with the others, gave them the excuse that she had forgotten her bag and came back to see what I wanted.

“Do you know how the girls dress when they go to Dolores' dance hall?” I asked, not daring to look straight at her.

“I went by there last Sunday,” she said, and rapidly added, “Just for a minute, out of curiosity. They go nice. I mean, you can't see anything.” She realized she was sticking her foot in it and tried to extricate herself. “Elegant. They wear satin or gauze dresses, short sleeves, skirts to the knee, a bit tight in an old-fashioned kind of way, you follow? Not like a really modern cut, low waist and off the shoulder.”

“And their hair?”

“All sorts. Some of them are wearing it short now, cut
à la garçon
, like in the magazines, but most wear it long, in buns. And they wear a little bit of makeup—liner for their eyes, and red lipstick for cupid's-bow lips.”

Almost a minute passed before either of us spoke. Then she asked me a question, and I instantly felt such warmth and such gratitude for her that I almost cried.

“What are you going to wear?” she asked, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if we had already discussed and decided everything. “If it has to be taken in or dyed or anything, you know you can count on me, as long as the others don't see us.”

She hugged me and went home, where they were expecting her for supper. I went up to my bedroom, opened the wardrobe and, almost shocked at myself, took out my white satin wedding dress, the only nice dress I owned.

I
'd been posing for five sessions already and he still hadn't let me see the painting. As soon as we finished a session, he'd throw a cloth over it, offer me a drink, and tell me that things were going well and I'd see it when it was finished.

I asked him several times whether he'd found the kind of doll he'd been looking for, and he finally told me, yeah, he'd found the perfect woman, the one who represented exactly what he was trying to get across, but it had cost him a ton of trouble to convince her, even though it was obvious she could use the cash. She was proud, he told me, and innocent, naïve, at the same time. Like an angel without wings who had to drag herself around on the ground like the rest of us. A flower in the mud, he called her, begging my pardon for being “a bit of a poet”.

I felt all my muscles tense up. The only woman that description could fit was Natalia.

“Know what,
compadre
?” Nicanor said, wiping off his hands with a dirty rag that stank of paint thinner. “The two of you would
make the perfect couple for a painting I've a mind to do. But she doesn't want to have anything to do with men. It cost me plenty to get her to come here, and she only does it when a girlfriend of hers comes along. Of course, we painters have a bad reputation, and half-witch painters like me, so much the worse.”

“What do you mean, half-witch?” I asked.

“Just talk, as you might well imagine. My mother was a slave from Brazil, a mulatta, and she knew how to talk to the spirits. That's what she said, anyway. When I decided I wanted to be a painter—I was still just a kid—she made a spell for me, like the ones the
babalaos
or whatever do, so I could make the spirit of the people I paint enter the painting. I've never noticed anything. But people gossip, and lots of them are afraid to let me paint them, afraid I might steal their souls, I suppose.” He laughed. A forced laugh, it seemed to me. “Lucky thing, rich people don't pay any attention to that rubbish, and thanks to my portraits of Buenos Aires high society I'm living a pretty good life. If I make it here, I'd like to move to Paris, or maybe New York.”

“I used to want that, too,” I said, quickly polishing off my drink.

“Not any more?”

“No.”

“Dancing as well as you do, I think you'd have a good shot at it. A squeezebox player, friend of mine, is looking for a pair of dancers to go to Finland with him, to try their luck, because that's
a country where people haven't grown tired of the tango, the way they have in France or Spain.”

“Where's that?”

“It's in Europe, too, but all the way north. Nothing but ice and lakes and woods and so on. They say it's beautiful. Think about it, and if you like, I'll introduce you.”

I stepped away from Nicanor and started pacing around the covered easel while he lit a cigarette. I didn't want my foolish hopes to be reborn: it had been hard enough for me to let go of my dreams, and I refused to believe in anything so absurd.

“My partner isn't up to it,” I muttered, my back to him, looking at the unfinished portrait of a young lady from a nice home, dressed for a game of tennis. Nicanor's mother hadn't lied to him: he was capable of capturing someone's soul in a painting. That girl, silly as she was, looked about ready to come alive.

“Find yourself another one. Buenos Aires is full of women who are dying to dance.”

I shook my head with a stubbornness that he couldn't have understood, that I couldn't even fully understand myself.

“If only you could see Natalia dance, you'd change your mind,” the painter insisted.

“Natalia?” I wheeled to face him, and he must have noticed something in my eyes that left him confused for a few seconds. “You've seen Natalia dance? Where?”

He walked over to me, surprise still showing on his face, put
his hand on my shoulder and led me to the back of his
atelier
, where another easel was covered with a cloth. He tore off the cloth with a flourish and turned the painting to face me.

“Are we talking about the same woman? Her?”

From the obscure depths of the canvas, Natalia's dark eyes stabbed at me like daggers.

“Where is she?”

He smiled a little condescendingly at me, as if he were disappointed that it had been so easy for him to convince me. He crushed the stub with his boot and took his time answering.

“If you let me paint the two of you together, I'll tell you.”

“As you wish.”

“You don't even have to pose. I have your features up here,” he said, cupping his forehead. “All I want is your permission.”

“For my part, you have it.”

“She dances in El Divino, in La Boca.”

“Doña Práxedes's nightclub?” My throat had gone dry and my voice sounded like a crow's.

“She's still a good girl.”

“I know she is,” I said. “Thanks,
compadre
.”

That was the last time I ever saw Nicanor.

I
spent my entire journey back to Buenos Aires doing sums, because I was stuck on the idea of figuring out exactly how long I had been gone and where it had happened to me, but the dates got all tangled up inside me and the only thing I knew for sure was that we had set sail from La Boca on the 29th of January, that autumn and winter were past, and that it must be spring now. Even though I'd first dropped anchor in Argentina years ago, it still seemed strange to me that October should be the start of good weather, that January should be summer, and May an autumn month.

Whenever I got tired of calculating dates and trying to remember the exact day we were shipwrecked, I would think about Natalia, and wonder whether Don Joaquín had died in the meantime and whether the company was paying her the salary that was hers by rights, even if it were only the puny widow's pension, because I was certain that after so much time they would have given us all up for dead.

I could have tried to send her word of my return through some other shipping company's offices after I finally reached Rio de Janeiro, but in some way that even I couldn't quite understand, I wanted to give her a surprise and at the same time get a chance to see her myself before she found out that I was still alive.

Sometimes I pictured myself arriving at the house on Necochea after dark: I'd be standing on the pavement across the street, away from the lamp, looking at the light in the bedroom, and maybe her shadow moving behind the blinds, too. Then I'd clack the knocker, and Natalia, upstairs, already in her nightdress and with her hair down, would put her hand to her chest, startled, and finally she'd come out on to the balcony to see who could be calling at that hour of the night. Then I'd take off my cap and stand under the street lamp, and she'd recognize me, shout with happiness, come running down the stairs, open the door to me, and we'd hug for the longest time. After that, I'd take her in my arms, and we'd go upstairs to the room, and while she was looking for something to give me to eat and drink, saying, “You're so skinny, Rojo, you'll have to put on some weight—how happy I am you're back!”, I'd be looking around, overcome with joy to be in my house, in my bed, with my wife.

Other times, I'd find her in the morning, at the market, picking up her basket filled with freshly bought vegetables, wearing black for my sake, her face pale and haggard, her eyes lowered. Hearing my voice, she'd lift her eyes, startled, and slowly her gaze would fill
with light, while her lips smiled. She'd drop the basket, and we'd hug right there, in front of everybody, who'd all suddenly start clapping and shouting, “It's Rojo! He's back! Nobody can beat Berstein!” Ever since I reached Argentina, nobody, not even I, had ever called me Bernstein. Too many letters, too hard to pronounce.