The Gods of Tango (15 page)

“You’ve played before?”

Leda shrugged, then remembered he couldn’t see her. “No,” she said, to avoid a more complicated answer.

Nestore looked skeptical, which gave her a flicker of confidence.

“You put too much pressure at the end of your stroke. Listen.”

They kept on, sounding out a couple of tangos on their two violins. Leda had been practicing these very tunes at night, in silence, and now she could bring them to light, adjust her left hand—she’d been too far up the neck on some notes, not far enough on others—and stroke with a real bow, real horsehair, which sang out with a raspy voice flecked with glints of beauty. Around them people shuffled, coughed, whispered
sharply to each other. Ignore them. Ignore them. There is only this, all the world condensed into four strings.

“All right, now go,” Nestore said. “Back to you, Carlo.”

The two men struck up together, and Leda hovered for a moment, glancing at Nestore’s skillful hands and then at Carlo’s hands on his battered guitar, their aggression on the strings, or was she just imagining it? She didn’t dare look into Carlo’s face. Behind her, nobody danced. Everyone was staring at Leda. Her whole body went hot from their gazes on her, it was too much. Beneath their stares the violin felt impossibly heavy in her grip. She went to her room and listened through the closed door as the dancing slowly resumed, more subdued than before. She stayed inside until the musicians were gone and she could hear the women cleaning pots in the kitchen. If she didn’t come out now, the gossip would surely revolve all the more intensely around her name. She went to the kitchen to help clean.

“Where did you get that thing?” Palmira said. She was drying beside Leda, whose arms were elbow-deep in a tub full of plates and suds.

“I brought it from my village.” She thought of adding
for Dante
, but did not. “It was my grandfather’s.”

“Well, you know,” Palmira whispered, leaning so close that Leda felt the girl’s breath stroke her ear, “I think you play beautifully.”

“Thank you,” Leda murmured into the dirty water.

“You should keep playing,” Palmira said, “no matter what anyone says.”

Leda placed a rinsed plate on the counter between them and let her hand linger on it until Palmira picked it up. For an instant they were touching the same wet object, fused by it. Then the plate left Leda’s grip and dove into the folds of Palmira’s rag. Leda’s ear still stung from the heat of Palmira’s breath, those lips so close to her. She would keep playing. No matter what anyone said. She would go to her room tonight and practice those two tunes until their motions were tattooed into her hands. And if Nestore ever let her play with him again, she’d jump at
the chance, even if it meant all the murmurs against her in the world. Because she’d had a first taste now of playing aloud in a space full of people and the thrill was enough to live for. Sound is pure power. It floods a room. It can even flood the world beyond a room. You might be locked behind a shut door, unable to get out, but the sound of you can pour right through locks and walls into the great air that lies beyond, where anything that breathes—a dog, a queen, a girl like Palmira—can be penetrated by your sound.

I’ve made a mistake, Nestore thought that night as he rinsed his face at the washbasin before work—Sunday night at the brothel was almost as busy as the night before, and he expected to come home at dawn with his fingers sore and satisfied from hours on the strings—I will come to regret teaching that girl, that widow-child, that Leda next door. And in front of all those people. Well. How else was he supposed to find her? He’d called her name out at the gathering because he knew she’d be there. But no. That was not the whole truth. He’d enjoyed what happened to the air when he brought her forward, the hush and horror of women and men. He’d especially enjoyed the women’s horror. And anyway, it served her right for trying to enter a world that wasn’t hers. This way he’d managed to give her what she wanted and punish her at the same time. He’d done it on purpose, because he didn’t know how he felt about the girl, or rather, he felt a lot of things toward her: irritation, curiosity, disgust, and something else, what was it? Recognition.

She had a rare ear. He’d known as soon as she started playing, and then he’d better understood why she’d asked. Unfair of God to put an ear like that on a woman.

He’d known only one other person with an ear like that, and that was his father, who was known, in Naples, as Il Magnifico, for his way with the violin. His renown was so great that noble-blooded violinists—the kinds of men who could read not only letters but also notes, who trained
at conservatories and played for lavish operas at the Teatro di San Carlo—had been known to brave the Spanish Quarter’s dirty crowded streets just to spy the rapid magic of Il Magnifico’s hands. Six days a week, Il Magnifico worked in a pawnshop, sweeping the floor and dusting the relics of his neighbors’ broken dreams. He played his violin on the street at night, after work, to escape the single room in which he, his wife, and his seven children lived. Nestore, the sixth child, used to sneak down to the street to watch him play. His mother never tried to stop him: it was hot and stuffy in their room, and there wasn’t room for everyone or, on many nights, enough bread for every child. He’d crouch in the street and watch his father’s hands, straining to memorize their motion, dizzied by the beauty of his sound. Il Magnifico played well-known ballads but also invented songs on the spot, melodies that seemed to weave an aural tapestry out of the chaos of men’s banter, women’s shouts, baby’s wails, men’s boasting, women’s pleas, men’s weeping and laughter and drunken fights.

When Nestore was eight, Garibaldi’s army marched into the city, triumphant, and he went out with his brothers to watch. The soldiers moved in tight formation; they were shaggy from nights in the valleys but walked tall and proud; they were erasing the Kingdom of Naples once and for all to make way for a unified Italy. There would be one flag and one rule of law all the way from Trieste to Calabria. A new era had dawned for the people, or so Il Magnifico told his cousins that night.

Bah, said his cousins. That may be true for kings. For us it’ll be the same as always.

A year later, Il Magnifico decided his cousins were right. He was just as poor as ever, and so were his neighbors, and so, it seemed, were the country peasants among whom riots sparked without end. Soldiers marched down from the North to quell them and, before long, invaded Naples. In 1862, Il Magnifico went through a transformation. He became convinced that all soldiers were
jettatura
and could curse you with a single look of their evil eye. Only the dead, he proclaimed, could be trusted. The
dead began to speak to him in his bed and on the street and through the crumbling stone walls of the neighborhood, whispering mystic axioms, ruthless gossip, and winning lotto numbers. Naturally everyone believed him, at first, about the lotto numbers, as common knowledge had it there were few better experts on the swift turns of fortune than the dead, but after a while his losing streak undermined the authority of his sources. He lost money he didn’t have, money he’d borrowed from his boss at the pawnshop. When he couldn’t pay it back three men broke his nose and arm and told him to watch out for his family.

My arm, Il Magnifico shouted when he got home that night, his face still caked with blood. I’ll never be able to play again.

Play? Mamma shouted back. What about eating? What are we all supposed to eat?

My arm, my arm.

You bastard.

They’re going to come for you, and the children.

Oh God.

My arm. My life is gone.

You’ll pawn your violin.

No!

Will it be enough?

Il Magnifico shut his eyes and didn’t answer.

Children, Mamma said, on your knees, now. Pray to San Gennaro.

All seven children did as they were told. Nestore saw, behind closed eyelids, the decapitated head of his city’s beloved patron saint, as well as a vial of his blood, both of which he had seen before when the priests had brought these sacred relics out into the light to celebrate San Gennaro’s feast day. The crowd had been large, he’d only spied them from a great distance, but he knew they protected Naples so fiercely that, in 1631, they’d saved thousands from certain death when Vesuvius erupted and lava rushed down the mountain and stopped at the city’s border. Still now the head and blood of this powerful saint was all that kept
them from being buried alive like the people of old Pompeii, because, as it turned out, the world was always full of burning ash just waiting to destroy you. San Gennaro, save our family. Save my father. Protect us.

The next day, Il Magnifico pawned his violin, walked out of the shop, and immediately took his clothes off on the street corner where he’d always played. He marched, naked, his formidable sex erect and his broken arm hanging at an awkward angle, right out of the Spanish Quarter, toward the Piazza del Plebiscito, where he paraded in front of the Royal Palace until a group of nervous young soldiers shot him thirty-seven times. This was in 1863. Nestore was eleven years old. He never found out what his mamma did to clear their debts with the local mafia, but soon thereafter she gave up completely. She sat all day and stared at the stove as if any moment it might start cooking of its own accord. She didn’t flinch when her two older daughters came home with cash they’d earned on their knees in alleys, didn’t say a word when her second son disappeared into the dank mazes of the Spanish Quarter and never returned. She stopped listening, stopped eating, and stopped breathing soon enough as if by force of her own will. After Mamma’s death, Nestore’s older brother became the head of the household; there was often no bread, no water, no kindness. Nestore roamed the city barefoot, a street rat, picking pockets in the plaza, stealing bones from dogs in alleys, eating garbage, eating nothing. He wandered constantly, propelled by hunger and a wordless, formless rage. He took to going down to the port to watch the droves of country folk arriving to take steamships away to the New World. They had almost nothing to take with them, and looked dazed by the city.
Vedi Napoli e poi muori
. See Naples and die. That was the saying, though whether it meant the city was supposedly so grand you could die happy once you’d been there, or whether it meant the place would kill you, Nestore was never sure. All these people, all these Italians, huddled on the dock, tottering up the gangplank, was this a death for them? Was leaving a kind of death, and, if so, was it any worse than staying put in misery? He thought of his mother’s vacant gaze, of the
unnatural angle of his father’s arm. He thought of food, obscene piles of it, meat and fruit and bread slathered in butter. He wondered where were they going, these ragged masses, what was waiting for them across the water, how they would live, what they would eat, what he might eat if he should join them.

He was nineteen years old when he left. In Buenos Aires he found more grime and poverty, though, back then, in 1871, the waves of immigration were just beginning to rise, and the city did not seem crowded, not to him, not compared to Naples. After a few weeks of sleeping on the street, he found a room in San Telmo—a whole room to himself, a luxury of space made possible by the yellow fever that had gripped the southern neighborhoods of the city: San Telmo, San Cristóbal, Montserrat. The rich families that had lived there for generations were frantically abandoning their homes to build new ones in the north. Their empty mansions were quickly becoming conventillos occupied by new immigrants. Nestore was the first poor person to inhabit his room. When he arrived, there were still two rich families on the block, stragglers caught up in planning their escape. They seemed disoriented and offended by their new neighbors, and never greeted them on the street, never even looked at them, as if they did not exist.
You don’t know how bad it got during the sickness
, his Italian neighbors told him.
They blamed us for the outbreak, fired us from our jobs, our people wandered the streets without work, sometimes without a home, men died in the street of cold or of the sickness and it took hours for anyone to come for the bodies
. Nestore’s room gleamed with gold-leaf wallpaper that had not yet begun to fade. An elaborately carved chest of drawers stood in one corner, wrought with details that must have taken days of sweat and thought and patience to create, all so someone could have a place to store her stockings. In the bottom drawer he found a single bottle of expensive women’s perfume. It shook him. Every night, he sprayed a little of the perfume in the air before going to sleep, and lay down on his pallet under the sweet bite of its scent. He imagined the woman to whom it had belonged. She was a young virgin
of noble blood, an innocent whose heart had been broken by the rapid deaths of all her sisters. She was the only one who had miraculously survived the plague. On her last night in this house, she had lain in bed in a translucent white nightgown that she’d soon removed so she could feel the night air of La Boca on her skin for the last time, because she would miss La Boca, she would miss her childhood, she was not a little girl anymore. She had lifted her thighs to the moonlight and prayed for health. She was hungry for life. She was hungry for a man. And then in a swift act of magic he closed the gap of space and time between them and appeared beside her, in this very room, and whispered
You’re so beautiful, let me show you
, and he made love to her for hours, this noble daughter of Argentina, this girl who saw beyond the terrible things she’d heard about Italians, and she shook with pleasure and amazement as he did all the things he could think of doing to a maiden like that, or so he imagined as he lay alone on his hard pallet, sex in hand.

She became his secret bride. He kept the perfume bottle and summoned her to his side at night long after the scent itself was gone. Over the decades she remained the same, a startled virgin, grateful, voluptuous, perennially pure. He fucked hundreds of whores over the years, thinking of her. She was the only person in the world who truly loved him, who received him with open arms no matter what, the only person he could trust in a city full of people straining to survive.