The Gods of Tango (24 page)

“Get her out of here,” said a man’s voice. The priest’s voice. He had entered through the door from the sacristy.

“You heard him,” the baker’s wife called out. “Let us through!”

The women made way and Cora and the baker’s wife came to the door, the girl still naked and still in the matron’s arms. They walked in unison like a strange four-legged beast, crossing the sun-drenched plaza, slouching their way toward Cora’s house, Palazzo Mazzoni, with a crowd of women in their wake that grew as more women abandoned their washing and their hearth fires to murmur aspersions and shake their heads and stare and clutch their hearts and hold up evil eyes and crucifixes with a pageantry that made Leda think of a saint’s day procession, turned inside out.

When they arrived at Palazzo Mazzoni, Cora’s mother took her by the wrist, slapped her for all to see, pulled her inside, and slammed the door. The crowd waited at the steps, hoping for shouts to leak through the regal windows or for more heinous sounds from the girl. But there was only silence. The crowd dispersed and Leda stayed alone for a long time, watching the windows of the upstairs rooms for hints of what had happened next. She even knocked on the front door but got no answer. By the time she returned to the washing tubs the light had left the village and it was too dark to finish. Mamma would scold her for coming home without the laundry done, but at that point she didn’t care. She could think only of Cora. Her bony wrist in the nun’s clasp. Her wilt against the baker’s wife. Cora,
carissima
, what has happened to you?

The next day the story was all over the village. Cora had walked into the church in the middle of the day, when not even old widow Fiora was in the pews. She was so quiet, at first, that nobody had known she was there until Sister Teresa came into the sacristy to mend the father’s alb and heard humming in the chapel. When she went to look, she found
Cora on her knees behind the altar, completely naked, humming with her eyes on the tall crucifix on the back wall. Her clothes were on the altar. The melody she hummed was so familiar that the words sprang right into the nun’s mind.
Kyrie eleison. Kyrie eleison
. In her shock, Sister Teresa reached for the closest thing at hand that could dispel the sacrilege, a folded altar cloth, and tried to wrap it around the girl and drag her out of the church at the same time. That was when the girl began to scream.

The following Sunday, Cora missed church again. Leda felt the disappointment of the gossips as surely as if they’d given it voice. There would be no spectacle, no blasphemy, no chance to tear down the girl. Still they savored the delicious horror of the story. Madness alone would have been enough of a crime to delight them. But to have it come from the daughter of Mateo Mazzoni, landowner, exploiter of poor men, cause of so much suffering that Christ himself would have flinched to meet him—to see him shamed by his own daughter seemed too good to be true. A revenge sent down from heaven for all the denizens of Alazzano.

Cora Matta, they called her. Crazy Cora. Over the washing tubs, at the outdoor market, the bakery, in the apothecary’s shop. Days and weeks of Cora Matta this, Cora Matta that. She carried the brunt of the sins of her father. Two months passed before the second public sighting of her madness. It took place on a Thursday, when Leda was at home making dinner with her mother. She saw nothing of the incident and only heard about it later. This time Cora was found in the woods east of the village, naked again, her dress nowhere to be seen. She had covered her body in dirt and caked her hair with it, so that she looked like some sort of swamp creature risen from a realm beneath the earth. She had dug a hole in the soil with her bare hands, a low shallow bowl in which she knelt, eating dirt by the fistful. It was the blacksmith’s son who found her this time, a boy of eleven who ran screaming all the way back to his house and dragged his father out to see the earth-witch, or so he called
the apparition he’d seen. The blacksmith tried to talk to Cora but was met with nothing more than a silent gaze that he later said would haunt him to his dying day.

That’s no earth-witch, he told his son. That’s Cora Matta.

He sent his boy for help. It took four grown men to restrain Cora and bring her home.

The third and final occasion took place a month after that, two and a half hours after midnight. Cora was found in the central plaza of Alazzano, under a full moon. The whole incident might have passed unnoticed if the blacksmith’s wife had not woken from a nightmare and stepped out for a breath of air, only to hear a melody borne on the dark breeze. She’d followed the sound out to the plaza, then rushed back home for her crucifix, the best protection against the kind of devil-work she’d seen, and in the process she woke half the village and drew them out of their beds to wallow in the spectacle. Leda woke to the sound of footsteps on the street below her window and voices muttering their alarm.

Cora Matta, Cora Matta
.

Dirt in her—

The devil—

Shhhp! The horror
.

Leda’s gut clenched at the sound of her cousin’s name. She snuck out of her house despite the absolute certainty that Mamma would beat her if she heard of it. To her surprise, the rest of her family seemed to sleep through the noise. She walked the two blocks to the plaza in her nightgown. The night air chilled her skin, an exhilarating, unfamiliar feeling that might have caused her pleasure if she hadn’t been so scared for Cora.

She expected to find a tight knot of women and men around her cousin, beating and attacking as they had inside the church, but instead she saw a wide circle of figures around the plaza. In the light of the full moon, the townspeople looked like silhouettes of Death, their crucifixes held out before them, their Our Fathers and Hail Marys a low blanket
of sound. At the center of the human ring, many paces away as though no one dared get too close, lay Cora. She was fully clothed this time, splayed out on the ground with her limbs extended in the shape of a five-pointed star. She must have gone to the woods first, because her hair and dress and exposed skin were matted with dirt. She was droning the same tune she had the first time,
Kyrie eleison, Kyrie eleison, Kyrie eleison
. It was not a hum but an openmouthed sound, a wordless
aaaahhh
somewhere between a song and a moan. Her voice skulked under the surface of the town’s muttered prayers, almost but not quite drowned out.

Leda walked toward the center of the circle. “Cora,” she said. “Cora.”

Cora kept on droning and ignored her.

Before Leda could reach her cousin, someone came up close behind her and held her back. “There’s nothing you can do, child,” the person said. It was the baker’s wife. “Come on. Step back.”

Her arms were kind but firm and Leda struggled against them. She called out. “Cora!”

Cora sat up and met Leda’s eyes for the first time since the madness had begun.

And it was what Leda saw in those eyes that took the fight out of her. It was not madness in that gaze, but something else she’d never seen before. In that moment, standing in the moonlit plaza restrained by the baker’s wife, Leda felt something inside her come undone, the fragile hooks that give shape to the mind and keep it from devolving into chaos. She knew nothing, could do nothing, had nothing to hold on to except the melody that Cora had spun and spun without its words,
Kyrie eleison
, whose meaning now swallowed the night.

Lord. Have mercy.

She might have stayed at Il Sasso forever if not for Santiago.

He arrived one night in December, when the first hot breaths of summer were forcing men’s jackets off and sweat onto every forehead. He
was an elegant man. His clothes were not fine, but they were ironed and the trousers creased. He wore his hat at a confident tilt. He seemed to be in his late thirties and had a sensuous face, the black curly hair of a Sicilian or what the Spaniards called a Moor, and eyes so large and liquid that women surely drowned their hearts there of their own free will. He did not dance. Instead, he leaned at the bar and watched the band intently, eyes fixed on Dante. It made Dante nervous to have someone watching her so closely. Who was this man and what was he looking for? Did he suspect her secret? But how could that be? Nobody had suspected her until now, to the point where there were moments she herself forgot that she was not a man. What if he’d been sent by someone who had known her as Leda? Fausta. Arturo. Nestore. Someone who had caught her trail and sent a man to track her down. There was no logic to this fear—none of these people had any reason to bother, except perhaps Arturo, and surely he had moved on by now and found another bride?—but still it caught Dante by the throat and made her stumble through the rest of the set.

When her band took a break, she tried to avoid the stranger, but he followed her to the far end of the bar. “Dante?”

“Yes.”

“Santiago.”

She started to turn away.

“Let me buy you a drink.”

“What do you want?”

“Just to talk to you.”

Dante hesitated. If this man was in fact spying on her for someone who’d known her before, she didn’t want to hear what he had to say. But it might be worse not to. “One drink,” she said.

They stood at the crowded bar, and when their grappas came they shot them down in unison.

“They said you were good,” Santiago said.

Dante wondered who
they
were.

“And they were right.”

She almost thanked him but didn’t want to seem soft. She nodded briskly.

“I came to hear you.” He leaned closer. There was something electric about his presence; the air around him came alive. “I’m forming an
orquesta
and I want you to join us.”

Not what she’d expected. For a moment she couldn’t speak. Santiago waited with an unreadable expression on his face. She collected herself. “Where?”

“There’s a dance hall that wants to contract us, where customers know how to pay. Nothing like this place. Well heeled.” He gestured to the bartender to fill their glasses. The bartender, pouring whiskey to a loud fistful of men at the other end of the bar, waved back in exasperated assent. “But there’s more than that. There are cabarets opening up downtown, as fine as anything in Paris, and I’m telling you right now, one day my orquesta will play there.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

“And you need a violinist?”

“I need you.”

Something swelled open inside her. She tried not to show it. “What’s your instrument?”

“The bandoneón. There’ll be three of us, soon four.”

The bartender returned, filled their glasses, and disappeared again, picking his hairy ear as he went. Dante had said one drink, but here she was, another shot, more warmth as it went down.

“When would we start?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow!”

“Or else I lose the contract. Dante. Quit this sad place and come play some real tango.”

Dante fingered her shot glass. Her fellow musicians were starting to
head back to the stage. The fistful of men were on their third round of whiskey, their voices rising, banter on the verge of aggressive. There might be blood tonight.

“Listen,” Santiago said, and his eyes glittered with the reflected flame of a lamp, “you’re a young man and you seem new to the city. Am I right?”

Dante raised her eyebrows and didn’t answer.

“Right. So you may not realize that the tango is changing. Transforming. This winter, all those months we were huddled in the rain, it was summer over in France, and guess what those Parisians were doing?”

“Sitting in the sunshine?” Dante asked, imagining white parasols, a sculpted green park, cuff links that glinted with light.

“Dancing the tango.”

“Our tango?” Dante said, amazed, both at this news and at the
our
that had just escaped her mouth.

“Of course, yes, our tango. What else? You ever seen the rich boys who come down here for a drink and an easy girl?”

“Of course.”

“Well, seems some of them took the dance on their Paris vacations. Showed off to the French girls. It sparked a fire. Now all the fancy ladies in Paris want to dance the way these whores are doing it here at old Il Sasso. Can you imagine?”

Dante shook her head. She couldn’t. The Old World, Europe, ignited by songs from the grim conventillos of New Babel. To think she’d crossed the ocean to find this Argentinean music, only to find it sailing back to Europe, closing a vast loop around the world.

Santiago went on. “We still have no idea what the tango can become. It wasn’t long ago that there was nowhere you could dance it in public. There’s a whole high-class side of this city where, a few years back, they’d sooner have swum in piss than danced the tango. You probably haven’t seen that side of Buenos Aires yet.”

Dante shook her head.

“I didn’t think so. Well, it’s there, and let me tell you something about the rich: they follow Paris. And with Paris dancing tangos, everything will change. It’s not just about making money. This music of ours is going to rise up into something.”

The guitarist was starting to glare at Dante. Time to get back to the stage.

“What kind of something?”

“A mark on history. Even if nobody knows about us, even if no one remembers our names. Music that sings after we die.”

The way he was speaking. The thrill of it. “I have to get back to work.”

“Don’t go back up there. Forget this place. Walk out with me tonight, right now. I’ll pay your night’s wages, we’ll practice until dawn.”

He was staring at Dante now with a look that flustered the woman in her, a look that would have seemed seductive if she weren’t disguised as a man. Behind him, the whiskey men were arguing now but there were no knives out, she couldn’t make out their words. A whore came over and draped herself between the two ringleaders, smiled like her mouth was a weapon all its own. Distraction. God bless the whores.

“Where do you work, other than here, Dante? At a cigarette factory?”

Her spine went tight. Had he been spying on her after all? What else did he know? “Who told you?”