Heart of Tango (13 page)

Some nights, when I wasn't able to sleep in whatever place I'd been given a job and a day's wages so I could keep on my journey, I would imagine returning to Necochea at night—I don't know why it was always at night that I was imagining this—and the house would be locked up and dark. I'd make the rounds of the cafés, the grocers, the shops, asking after her, but nobody knew anything, nobody remembered she was my wife. Finally some-body'd tell me her father had died and she'd gone away without leaving a forwarding address.

On nights like that, fear would make me break into a sweat, and I'd end up running wherever to swig a couple of drinks just so I could fall asleep, but lots of times the alcohol and the anguish of having lost her made me imagine worse things: that I'd return and find her with another man—a playboy who had money and a car, or a dagger-and-jaunty-hat
compadrito
like the guy at the wedding—or standing on a corner, street-walking, leaning against a door-jamb, with a cigarette in her hand and her eyes painted.

In Cádiz, our last port before putting in at Tenerife and heading back to America and sinking, I had met a drunken Bavarian soldier who had exactly that happen to him: returning from the war, the
only survivor from his unit, he found his house empty. His wife had left for Munich. She was living with another man and expecting a baby.

“What did you do?” I asked him.

“What would you have done?”

“I don't know,” I told him in all sincerity. “If your wife really thought she was a widow, well, it's better for a woman who's alone if she gets married, has a man to take care of her. But I'd have understood if you had killed them. Rage can blind a person.”

He polished off his wine in one gulp, without replying, and laid his head down on his arm, on top of the bar.

“I'll never go back to Germany again,” he spluttered.

“Come to Argentina. You can start over fresh there.”

He fixed me with a blurry gaze, as if he barely registered who I was, what I was doing there, what I was talking about.

“I should have fallen at Verdun, like all the rest,” he muttered to himself.

“Come with me,” I said. “I'll walk you home. Think it over and tell me tomorrow what you've decided.”

“Don't put yourself out, friend,” he said with great difficulty, as if his own language were as hard for him to speak as a foreign tongue. “I'm already dead.” He raised his head, looked at me with those sky-blue eyes, and smiled.

Ever since then I had carried that smile stuck inside me. Every time I thought about Natalia, all alone in La Boca for months and
months, with no father, no family, no support from anyone, I imagined the worst. And I, who hadn't prayed in years, entered the first church I saw, knelt before the Virgin, and begged her to protect Natalia and to help me return to her and find her decent and good. Or at least to help me be strong enough not to kill her if she wasn't.

A
s I did every night, before the people started to arrive I looked down at my feet, because it always plucked up my courage to see them so pretty, so small, enclosed in the soft old dance shoes that had been worn down by so many hours of music. I had bought them the day after I made up my mind to come to the dance hall, in La Cañita, on Libertad between Sarmiento and Lavalle. When Dolores had seen me wearing my ankle boots, the only decent footwear I owned, she had laughed and led me there, even though it was Sunday, because La Cañita never closes. The poor people who no longer owned anything they could pawn, or who were sure they'd never have enough money to redeem their things, would all go to La Cañita to make a quick sale of anything they still owned. That's why things were so cheap there, if you could find something you needed.

My shoes had once belonged to someone named Grisela, a great tango dancer, according to the seller, who'd left Argentina to find success in Paris. He told me they'd bring me good luck as they
had her, but the truth is, I bought them because the price was right. And they were the only ones my size.

I also bought some remnants of black gauze to make sleeves for the dress, and Beatrice helped me dye it and alter it, because the first day I went to the dance hall I wore my usual clothes—my black skirt and my good blouse, also black—and Doña Práxedes told me that, even if I was a widow, I didn't have to make such a show of it, for it would scare the men and ruin her business.

Dyeing my wedding dress was the worst thing I had ever done, even worse than what I did with Rojo, because, after all, what I did with Rojo was what a woman has to do with her husband. But lowering that lovely fabric into the pot of dye and watching what had been orange-blossom white grow greenish and filthy until turning finally black as coal, that was sorrow of a sort I could never explain. It was as if I myself were growing dirty, as if the little girl whose mother had rubbed brilliantine into her hair, the youngster whose grandfather had given her toys, the woman whose father had led her to the altar, were being dyed black along with the dress. forever. Because once something turns black, it can never become white again.

When, alone at home, I looked into the mirror and saw myself in the fitted dress, with its gauze sleeves and high hem, black with a greenish sheen like a poor person's moiré, I felt a kind of dizziness. Because I saw a handsome woman. But it was no longer me.

And tonight, like every other night, I was looking at my shoes
and the silk shimmering on my legs and the reflection of my carmine lipstick like a red stain on the dull dance-hall mirror, and wondering who that stranger was, that woman who earned in an evening what I couldn't have made in a week before, and how she had got to that point, and especially, how she would keep going, because this couldn't last; in spite of the money I was making and the fact that most men came only to dance and I had never been put into a dangerous situation, this couldn't, shouldn't last.

I was thinking about what my grandfather or my father would say if they saw me like this, about the shame they would feel, as decent men, to see how low I had fallen, and I felt an urge to run away from that hall and go back to being what I had always been. But that would mean dying of hunger, burying my youth and my life within the walls of the house on Necochea, my only hope that one day, after I had been officially declared a widow, some honest man would show concern for me and want to lead me for a second time to the altar. And I didn't want that. Because that was even worse than what I was doing now, even if everybody else thought it more decent.

I was also recalling poor María Esther, the afternoons we used to spend at her house before we each got married, how she had asked me whether I didn't sometimes dream of dancing the tango in a theater where men would watch me and bring me flowers. And bitter bile rose from the pit of my stomach when I looked around the dance hall and saw the dusty lampshade trim, the green velvet
curtains blocking out the windows, the buffed marble café tables where men with tired eyes patiently awaited their turns, drinking cane liquor and rapping their tokens in time to the music. Then I lit a cigarette in memory of María Esther, wishing with all my heart that time could go in reverse, that we could be back in her house, smoking behind the curtains and imagining a future that was still ahead of us and that wasn't this.

Now my life was this dance hall and Urías'
atelier
, where I always went with Dolores. After he had persuaded me to let him paint me, he also proposed to make a double portrait, me and a partner, a portrait that would represent the tango, in which I would appear dancing with a friend of his. But I had said no, because I didn't want to embrace yet another stranger after the ones in the dance hall where I earned my living. If I had agreed to pose for him, it was because, deep down inside, I was still dreaming of the portrait that had never been—though my father wasn't around now to enjoy it, and I had no children to see it some day in a museum. And the painter was respectful and agreeable, though his skin was dark and mysterious things were said about him. But as soon as he finished the painting it would all be over, because I didn't want to insult the memory of Papá and because I didn't like to stand still there for hours while Urías stared fixedly at me, as if I were a jug or a fruit plate, as if he were extracting from me the last bit of life I had left, now that I was an orphan and a widow.

I was saving what I earned from those sessions in an old jam
tin that I kept hidden in the courtyard, under the tree with yellow flowers. I didn't even know why, but it comforted me to know that I could do something with that money one day, whether or not I had any idea how to use it for the time being. If I ever truly tired of this life, I could sell the house on Necochea, take my savings and return to Spain, go to Vitoria or Valencia and perhaps open a haberdasher's, or a flower shop. I had never made any plans for after the wedding, and now that all of a sudden and for the first time my life was in my own hands, I didn't know what to do with it.

I tried never to think of Rojo, of his white body at the bottom of the ocean, eaten by fish, of his empty eyes that had once been so blue and would now be nothing at all, of his big, strong hands that would now be two handfuls of dark seaweed.

But most of all, I tried not to think of Diego, of his voice, which I had scarcely ever heard, of his body, which was still scorched on to mine, of that burning gaze that had spoken so many things to me. I spent each night fearing that Yuyo might have told him where I was dancing and that he would come and see what I had turned into, and give me a red token and embrace me again. No, not like that. No. Anyone but him.

I
t took me months to make it back to Buenos Aires, but I did make it. And when, after all that suffering, I finally managed to reach Necochea one November night, a spring chill still in the air, I found the house closed up.

At first I felt nothing. One of my worst nightmares was coming true and I felt nothing. At most, an emptiness in my gut, a contraction in my right hand that made me seek relief in the hilt of my dagger, a throbbing in my temple.

I walked slowly toward the Gallego's shop, searching for an explanation of Natalia's absence. If Don Joaquín had died, maybe she had returned to Spain to ask for help from her family in Valencia. Or maybe she'd gone to spend the night at a girlfriend's house, if she was afraid of staying there alone. Or most likely she had gone out for a while with the Italian girls, to get some fresh air, and I would meet her on their stroll.

But it was already after ten. Even the shop was closed. La Boca was starting to fill with people coming to enjoy the night, tangos
could be heard in every direction, women lurked in doorways and on street corners, men calmly strolled by jangling in their pockets the coins that they planned to spend. On Pedro de Mendoza the shops were still open and there was more of a family atmosphere, but I had a hunch I wasn't going to find Natalia there. And she couldn't be at church.

I decided to head up toward Progreso and Alegría. There were cafés around there where I might run into an acquaintance and ask about her, but I was ashamed to be seen so desperate, so lost—a poor man returning from a shipwreck, having to make the rounds of the cafés to ask after his wife in the middle of the night.

On the way, in amongst the other men who were on the hunt, I drank a glass or two of cane liquor to screw up my courage, and I slowly started to notice that people were keeping their distance from me, so the beast must have been baring its fangs and showing its face through mine, heating my heart along the way.

T
hree days went by before I made up my mind to go and look for her. When a doll like Natalia starts dancing in Doña Práxedes's dance hall, it means she's desperate, and nobody wants to be seen like that. But I had to go and see her. Had to go and take her away from all that, no matter how. Had to tell her I loved her, tell her I'd spent nearly a year waiting for the right moment to let her know, to tell her she could trust me.

The dance hall was on Alegría, and from what I'd been told it was in even worse shape than it had been years before. I had always known it crowded with single men who never allowed the girls a minute's rest, snatching them from one another without even giving them time to wipe the sweat that drenched their clothes. It frightened me to imagine Natalia there, innocent as she was, all alone, no-one to help her but Doña Práxedes' pair of bruisers, those two old broad-assed Gallegos who couldn't stand up to anyone remotely experienced at handling a dagger.

The streets were packed, as always on a Saturday night, more
so tonight, what with the All Saints' Day just over and people wanting to have a spree.

I was getting closer and closer to Alegría, feeling my feet grow heavier with every step, trying to grit my teeth so nobody'd notice what I had going on inside, coming apart at the seams with desire for her and at the same time with sorrow and shame that it had to be in that place, in this way.

In spite of what I thought I felt when we embraced at the wedding, I knew she didn't love me. She had never asked Yuyo about me, it hadn't occurred to her to seek me out when she was left alone, and she had found the dance hall a better solution than turning to me, though I would have given my life for her gladly if she'd asked me.

What would I do now if I entered El Divino and she snubbed me?

But there I was. I smoothed my jacket, set my fedora on the sill for a minute while I brushed my hair back with both hands, straightened my kerchief, and entered the hall.

N
earing Progreso, minutes before midnight, I saw two men leave a building and start walking slowly past me. I recognized one of them. A fellow named Quinquela, a painter, one of the regulars who met at the Bar Unión. I remembered his name because my father-in-law told me once, a long time ago, that he wanted to commission a portrait of Natalia if his carpenter's shop did well, so our children could see what their mother looked like when she was twenty. Quinquela knew her through Don Joaquín, but I wasn't sure if it was a good idea for me to ask him, because most likely he didn't know anything, and he'd find out that I was out looking for her and that my wife had got away from me, taking advantage of me being off at sea.