Heart of Tango (15 page)

Nobody made a move to stop me. I looked at the two of them one last time, lying at my feet, in a puddle of dark blood that was spreading across the worn, scratched parquet floor. I knelt down by Natalia and took her wedding ring. There was nothing left to do there. Whatever might happen Afterward had nothing to do with me.

I wiped the dagger clean on the green velvet curtain, taking my time, under the gaze of a hundred pairs of eyes, and walked out into a cool spring morning that smelled of the sea. I was finished, but I was clean. I smiled.

I
am pretty sure, Rodrigo, that you were trembling that night, that something stronger than your will had brought you there, to a place where you had been before but where you hadn't yet found what you were seeking. Habit had dragged you back to the little house on Necochea, which once, in a different century, had been painted blue, though it was now no more than an empty shell of what once might have been the start of a new life.

As you recalled, weeds were growing on the front steps, the windows were coated with dust and boarded up, and there was nothing there to confirm the existence of the mysterious woman you had met in Central Europe months earlier. But it was November now, spring was in the damp port air, in the fog that shrouded everything, and the district was bathed in nostalgia, in the blurry memories of nights on the town, music and drink, even though there was nothing now but solitude and sadness.

You vaguely thought you'd like to have seen that street in earlier days, and you stood there staring in fascination at the rosy, intermittent
light of the street lamp, trying to look through it to imagine the gas lamp that once lit the corner of Olavarría street. Curiously, you felt on that night that you could see the past, as if the reality around you were some tenuous gauze veil, barely covering some other, truer, more intense reality; as if that bygone time still existed there, pooling in the dark doorways, hiding from everyday passers-by, only to reveal itself in all its splendorto those who were worthy.

You heard her steps before you saw her silhouette, diffused by the fog that rose from the river. A few slow footsteps, women's shoes, high heels rapping on the damp asphalt to a beat that matched the rhythm of your blood.

For some seconds all there was were those slow, almost fearful footsteps drawing closer to the place, to the sealed door where you were still waiting, what for you didn't really know. Then a sudden desire to flee, to find a well-lit café where the tango would be playing and women would be sitting at their tables, waiting for a good dancer. You were afraid to stay there in the fog, listening to footsteps that seemed to be drawing nearer and nearer, or perhaps deeper and deeper within you. Your right hand slid to your side, tried to close around the hilt of a dagger you had never owned, then moved away again, leaving you bewildered and frightened at yourself, while inside you a stranger's voice was shouting how dangerous it might be to stay there unarmed. But the idea of leaving scared you more, knowing that you might be about to find what you had so long sought.

Then you saw her: a graceful woman, blond, nearly platinum blond, walking slowly down to the piers. A cigarette's glow lit her mouth. Your fear vanished without a trace, but your gaze was trapped by the figure approaching you on the empty street.

You felt a twinge of disappointment, because she wasn't the woman you had been waiting for, yet something in the way she moved, something in the way she spontaneously held her cigarette by the tips of her fingers, close to her thigh, something in the swish of her footsteps made you suddenly stand up straight and accept her presence in that place, as if she were also a mirage from the past, a shred rent from the fog of time.

I
know, Milena, that you expected to find nothing there; as a sensitive yet sensible woman, accustomed to seeing the world and to fixing all sorts of situations, always on your own, you never expected that time could be smashed to shards this way, like a mirror. Yet an uncontrollable impulse beyond your will had brought you to Necochea on a damp November night, ready to suffer one more defeat, ready to admit to yourself, hours later in your hotel room, that the ghost that had kept you from sleeping was merely an absurd obsession born of exhaustion and solitude.

The taxi had left you further up the street, on the corner of Pinzón, because you wanted to walk a while through the nearly transparent fog that was rising from the port as in an old movie, though boats no longer blew their horns in the harbor and silence now spread everywhere. A few paces later, already regretting your desire, you decided to light a smoke, walk to the house on Necochea that you knew so well, and continue to Caminito, where you might find a squeezebox player and a good tanguero, the two
things that linked those two worlds, those two times, in the vague, ridiculous hope that he might be there with his shockingly black hair and his green eyes, as he had been there in the distant snow-covered city where you had lost him.

You could make out his silhouette from far away, haloed by the dim light of the street lamp that blinked on and off as if in its death throes, standing in for the gas lamp that had witnessed a nighttime serenade in an era that wasn't yours: the silhouette of a man, in coat and hat, black against the light, blurred by the fog that encircled his feet in a diaphanous mist.

Your steps slowed down. The cigarette stub trembled in your hand. It wasn't him—and yet. There was something in the tension of his body, in the angle of his fedora, in his just being there, standing by the door of the little blue house, looking at you.

T
he blond woman approached you with uncertain steps, as if trying to recognize you through the shadows, and you made a tentative motion in her direction, careful not to startle her. Her cigarette flew aside, peppering the street with golden sparks, and then there was a pause, a long silence, a deep gaze through which each of you sought confirmation.

It was as if you had met each other in your dreams, in an urban landscape but a false one, halfway between two existences, between two planes of reality.

T
hat is why it didn't seem strange to you, Milena, to extend your hand to the stranger, who shook it firmly, perhaps to make sure of your existence.

“This isn't the first time you have come here, either,” said the man, and it was not a question.

The statement didn't surprise you, because by then, without even realizing it, you had already crossed over into a borderland where anything could happen.

“Hope springs eternal, you know,” you replied, knowing that he would understand. “I suppose I'll never meet him, but I look for him here because there's nowhere else to look. And you?”

“Same with me. I've seen her portrait in the museum and I know it's impossible. Her name was Natalia. They painted her back around 1920.”

“Mine was Diego. The same date is on his portrait.” You lit another smoke and stared at the boarded-up windows. “I don't sleep well, you know? Something makes me keep coming back here. For nothing.”

“Yes. Me too.”

“Shall we enter?”

Your question made the man turn to look at you, amazed and disquieted.

“How? Do you have the key?”

Ignoring his question, your fingers felt under a loose tile on the bottom step and found a rusted iron key. You had stood many times in front of this house, on every trip you took to Buenos Aires, but you had never felt such certainty, it had never even occurred to you that you could try to open the door with the key that, you now knew, had always been hiding under the step.

Without a word you fitted key to lock, and after a struggle the door gave way, opening on to the dark interior of the house.

A smell of dust and old house assailed you both, like an almost tangible presence that must have been waiting years for the chance to escape its prison.

“There can't be anybody in here.” Your soprano voice sounded muffled, as if you had suddenly lost the determination that had led you to open the door.

“No. I suppose not. But perhaps it will help us to sleep better. To understand. Don't you think?”

The man lit a match and preceded you into a long hallway that smelled like a musty crypt. To your right, a staircase rose into the darkness of the upper floor. To your left, the kitchen was barely discernible beneath the ancient grime and the pots and pans abandoned
to their fate. The two of you saw an old-fashioned sitting room with a gutted divan, a cobweb-laced dining room with an almost fossilized layer of dust over every surface, a sideboard mirror smashed to scintillating bits that reflected the match's wavering light, empty bottles.

You walked out into the overgrown courtyard. In contrast to the darkness and the fetid smell of the interior, this seemed like paradise. You both breathed deep, looking around at the tall weeds that had begun to bud. A tall tree, studded with yellow flowers, covered half the sky. From one of its branches dangled a stiff, thick rope with a hangman's noose.

You were hardly surprised, though shivers went up your spines.

“What was that, shining for a second on the ground?” Your white hand, lined with bluish veins, rested on the sleeve of his black coat.

Another match. Picking your way with difficulty through the bushes that caught on his trouser legs, on your fine stockings.

“Careful. The plants are very dry.”

At the end of the rope, on the ground: a rusted tin that had once contained quince jam, surrounded by the scattered bones of a human skeleton. You opened the tin with trembling hands by the light of a mobile phone. Inside, a few Argentinian bills, brittle with age, two stained black-and-white postcards, and a gold wedding ring.

The postcards showed views of the Golden Roof of Innsbruck
and the Old Town Hall of Landsberg on market day. Among the people in the image, to the left, enclosed in a circle drawn in ink, were a diminutive man pushing a tinsmith's or knife-grinder's cart and a little boy with long, fair hair who stared unblinking into the camera.

By the ghostly light of the mobile phone you looked one another in the face, slowly understanding in the other's eyes the story behind this house, and at the same time your own stories from the moment when, far from here, you had each discovered the passion of the tango in a being who couldn't be. But that was not enough. You both knew that a piece was missing, the essential piece for bringing to a close a story that had been cut short eighty years before.

Slowly, without making up your minds to do it, you drew closer to one another. A pale hand caressed an unshaven cheek; lips lightly brushed blond, nearly platinum locks.

You looked at each other for a long time, in the thickening fog, by the tree with yellow flowers,

… in Natalia's house, which I never got to enter, except on the night of the serenade …

… in my house, in the very courtyard where I bathed on the morning of my wedding day …

… in the house on Necochea, where so often, on so many trips, you had each waited for the miracle to occur.

Leaving behind the bones and the tin and the courtyard and the weeds, you left the house, at a leisurely pace, hand in hand, looking at one another from the corner of your eyes from time to time as if to find in the other a presence that you were beginning to guess was there.

You wandered through the dark and empty fog-lined streets, letting yourselves be led by vague memories that were not yet your own, while time folded around you, gas lamps appeared and disappeared with every step, and somewhere a distant squeezebox played a melody that you both sensed could not really be.

You paused when you got to the street named W. Villafañe, formerly known as Alegría, in front of a modern shipping company that, at that late hour, was closed and had the lights off. Nevertheless the music rose in all its power from behind the doors, and you both knew that, at this instant, anything was possible and that the front door would swing open if you touched it, showing you a world that you could scarcely imagine. Perhaps Diego and Natalia would be waiting for you right there, in the ineluctable spot to which you had been called by so many dreams in so many hotels.

After looking at each other for a few seconds, you pushed the door and it swung in.

For a moment you believed you saw the crystal chandeliers, the dusty lampshade trim, the long green velvet curtains, the marble
café tables, the musicians in black suits and bow ties—and you even felt the rush of hot air and the smell of drink and sweat-drenched couples dancing the tango in the middle of the hall.

A second later you were in a dusty warehouse, surrounded by the debris of days gone by, in the company of ghosts.

And something inside each of you let out a scream as it was ripped from your body, while your hands and lips recognized other hands and other lips, the ones they had lost in that very place, while the tango played.

W
e felt so sorry for you, Rodrigo, Milena, so very sorry. You couldn't have known we had been waiting nearly a century for this reunion, that we had been floating, alone and lost, in the shadows while the world changed, trusting that some day, some night, some milonga, the sound of the tango would come back and allow us to return to the place where it had all begun. And now we were back, though nothing was the same, in other bodies, with other names, but we had done it thanks to you two, who were now but a cry lost in the limbo that we had already started to forget.

“Diego?” I whispered, in a voice that wasn't mine.

“Natalia?” he said, looking at me as if for the first time, with his fiery eyes, no longer green.

W
e kissed for a long, long time, while the fog outside grew thicker in the dance hall of red tokens, in the streets that once were ours, that bore witness to our beginning and our end.

“What shall we do now?” Natalia whispered in my ear, not stirring from my embrace, still trembling.