The Gods of Tango

ALSO BY CAROLINA DE ROBERTIS

FICTION

The Invisible Mountain
Perla

TRANSLATION

Bonsai
, by Alejandro Zambra
The Neruda Case
, by Roberto Ampuero

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2015 by Carolina De Robertis

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
De Robertis, Carolina.
The gods of tango / Carolina De Robertis. —First edition.
pages; cm
“This is a Borzoi book.”
ISBN 978-1-101-87449-3 (hardcover) —ISBN 978-1-101-87450-9 (eBook)
1. Violinists—Fiction. 2. Gender identity—Fiction. 3. Buenos Aires (Argentina)—History—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3604.E129G63 2015   813’.6—dc23   2014023450

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Jacket image: Mary Evans Picture Library
Jacket design by Stephanie Ross

v3.1_r1

For Luciana

And all things conspire to keep silent about us, half out of shame perhaps, half as unutterable hope.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

Convert the outrage of the years into music.

—Jorge Luis Borges

Since the house is on fire, let us warm ourselves.

—Italian proverb

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

PART ONE

Uno · Think of Nothing, Think of Home

Due · A Corner of the Possible

Tre · The Good People of New Babel

PART TWO

Quattro · Noise and Blades and Death and Also This

Cinque · Ladies and Gentlemen!

Sei · A Cup of the River of Forgetting

Sette · Heartbreak of Mountains, Lust of the Sun

PART THREE

Otto · Bright Jagged Thing

Acknowledgments

A Note About the Author

Reading Group Guide

Dante died a happy man, although a strange one, known for living with a coffin in his house. The gossips of Montevideo had spent years speculating about the reason for the coffin. He’s a vampire. He’s mad. He’s terrified of death. He keeps his violin in there, under a witch’s spell, that’s why your soul breaks open every time he plays, the old bastard. But as for the true reason, they could never begin to guess.

His last moment came in the kitchen, a sudden blurring of his heart, as if a giant paintbrush had pierced his chest and smeared its inner walls with white. He couldn’t breathe; he reached for the table’s edge and grasped only air. Something clattered far away. It was not pain, exactly, just a pressure that urged him to collapse into himself, almost sweetly, plunging all his secrets into rubble. His last thought was not of secrets, or of music, or of God, or even of the woman who had flooded his life with joy. It was of Cora. Cora, my darling,
carissima
, come closer. Are you here? Take my hand. If there is light then steer me to it. If there is not, I’m not afraid, not if there is you. You. There you are. Radiant. As you were before it all began.

He reached for Cora’s hand and Cora smiled and opened her mouth and out poured an explosion of light.

PART ONE

UNO

Think of Nothing, Think of Home

Leda arrived in Argentina on February 4, 1913, on a steamship that only twenty days before had made Italy disappear, swallowed by that ravenous monster called the horizon. On her last morning on board, she dressed with care and latched her trunk tightly so that nothing, no sleeve, no village dust, no errant memory could spill out when the porter came to carry it to the deck. Then she sat in silence for a while. Her bunkmate, Fausta, had left her bedclothes tousled and unkempt. No doubt she was already on deck, craning for a glimpse of Buenos Aires. If Leda didn’t find her in the crowds, she might never see her again, a strange thought after twenty nights of sharing quarters with a woman who wasn’t kin, whom she’d never met before the voyage. Strangers. Strangeness. These two things filled the crossing to América. She wondered what her mother would say if she were here, in this stuffy little room with her. Here you are, then, or It smells like a sty in here, or For God’s sake, Leda, straighten your hat. She told herself that she would see her mother again one day, as well as her father and cousins and uncles and aunts and her great-grandmother’s ceaseless dragonfly hands—though none of it was true: in the years and continent to come, Leda would see many things that would astound her, break her into pieces, and reassemble her in shapes she hadn’t known a human soul could inhabit, but she would never see her family again.

She was sitting on the trunk that had accompanied her from home. So few things stowed away inside it. Folded dresses. A cluster of books. A
jar of olives cured by the baker’s wife. Hazelnuts wrapped in burlap. Her father’s violin, passed down for generations, gone from Italy for the first time, a gift for her new husband.

It was her grandfather who’d told her the tale of this particular violin, over and over, as if the telling could stave off loss, as if the weight and scope of human history were not found in books or in those mythic universities in Rome and Naples that no one in their village had ever actually seen but, rather, were encoded in objects like this one, a violin touched by hundreds of hands, loved, used, stroked, pressed, made to outlive its owners, storing their secrets and lies. Imagine, said her grandfather: this very violin belonged to the King of Naples until 1501. Oh, it’s true, don’t you doubt it. How long it was in the royal family, nobody knows. But there is no question that, whoever it belonged to before, it did belong to Federico d’Aragona, the last King of Naples of the Trastámara line. He was a quiet, kindly man never meant to face the kinds of forces that he did—two nations, Spain and France, vying for his throne; a lineage still shaking from the too-brief reigns of his father, brother, and nephew before him. Are you following, Leda? He tried to rule but
all it takes is for your enemies to join forces with your unlucky stars and then suddenly there you are, encircled, nowhere to run, and what is there left for you to do? I’ll tell you what’s left, a simple choice. Either you can die right there or you can flee to another land and start a new life with nothing but your skin and what’s inside of it. That’s what Federico did: he fled. Right into exile. Not freely, mind you, but as a prisoner flanked by soldiers. But before he left, before the soldiers came for him, he opened his bedroom window, stood overlooking the sprawling lands of Naples, and played his violin. He played a dirge that seemed to rise straight from the red core of the earth. The only person who heard it was a count who later told anyone who would listen that it was the saddest and most beautiful song he ever heard in his life. When the king had finished playing, he gave the count the violin.

You keep it, he said. I’m done with music.

The count protested at first. But what about your sons?

King Federico only shook his head. The violin has to stay.

Whether or not the king ever played another violin during his years of French exile is unknown, a detail lost in the folds of time, so, Leda, I can’t give you that piece of the story. But the count kept the violin and passed it down within his family, which eventually, in 1815, sold the instrument to my great-grandfather in order to pay off debts, and my great-grandfather received, along with the thing itself, the story of the King of Naples’s dirge, which of course gave the instrument a higher value (whether or not it was actually true, Leda thought as she listened, but she said nothing since it was clear that her grandfather would not harbor a drop of doubt). And so the hands of the king had played this very violin, on that last day of Naples’s independence as a kingdom all its own. What exactly did he play, that Federico? How did the song sound? We’ll never know. That’s what happens to melodies: they get lost in the air. Just like memories. And the body. Memories and melodies and the body dissolve after we die. A musical instrument is not like the body, not at all; like the soul, it carries on.

Leda went up to the deck. It was a hot, humid day, and beads of sweat clung to the foreheads of men, who far outnumbered women on the ship, and who were mostly young, though few as young as her own seventeen years. There was hope in their wide gazes and a frenetic anticipation about them; 368 tightly strung human wires. The women were mostly wives on their way to meet their husbands in Buenos Aires, just like Fausta (and like me, Leda thought, remember, remember, I’m a wife too). The deck burst with people, just as it had the day they’d left Naples. There were no longer any lazy card games with which to kill the hours. Boredom had sloughed overboard into the sea. Everybody was on their feet, crowded against the rail, craning their necks in the direction of land.

Argentina. She pressed into the throng, toward the rail. To her right, a young woman murmured a rosary. To her left, a man in his forties was
drying his tears, while the younger man beside him smoked a cigarette with indifference or, Leda thought, a convincing performance of indifference. His demeanor seemed the most theatrical of all. She smelled sweat and tobacco and the hopeful tang of cologne. In front of her, three or four chaotic rows ahead, two men were exclaiming to each other about the land they saw.

“
Che bella
. Beautiful.”

“Yes. Beautiful.”

Again and again they said it, as though repetition would solidify the truth of the phrase, make it strong enough to sustain them as they disembarked. Their voices wove through the wails and murmurs in the crowd. She gently jostled forward. A man in front of her moved away, apparently having seen enough, and she slunk into his space before it could close, before anyone could notice. She was starved for the sight of land, not just any land, but this land—Buenos Aires, her new home. Over the past three weeks, she had spent many hours alone at these rails, staring out at endless ocean, trying to imagine what Buenos Aires would be like. Over and over she tried to picture the city, but her mind’s eye could conjure only the lush tropical ferns and trees of the Botanical Garden, where Dante had taken a photograph of himself when he’d first arrived, to send to the family back home. It had been passed around the table at Sunday lunch, to clucks of admiration and bemusement.