The Gods of Tango (27 page)

Sometimes, Leda dreamed of Vesuvius, that she was climbing its slopes on bare feet. Her feet bled but didn’t hurt her. She walked and walked until the volcano erupted with what looked at first like lava but, on her arriving closer, revealed itself to be a glowing river of people, pouring down the mountain on all sides, droves and droves of immigrants flying past her with startled expressions on their faces as the victims of Pompeii might have had, except unlike those ancient victims these people were alive, completely alive, arms outstretched in a futile attempt to hold on to something, anything—a branch, a rock, a memory—as they soared down slopes and out to the horizon, which swallowed them by the thousands, leaving not a single trace.

El Cuarteto Torres had many successes and only occasional humiliations, such as managers who sent them off without pay, which happened only twice: once at a grim little brothel and once at a clean hall whose owner flashed a menacing smile and simply said, “I already paid you.”

“You didn’t,” Santiago said, his face a wall of calm.

“You’re trying to cheat me.”

“Sir, we agreed to payment at closing time.”

“Listen,
negro de mierda
, get out of here before I call the police.”

Santiago did not flinch and did not move a muscle in his face.

El Loro spat on the floor and said, “You can’t do this!”

Dante stared at El Loro in surprise. She’d never seen him act this way. He was always mild-mannered, even sweet, the kind of immigrant boy who respected his elders and strived to keep the world free of friction. She was seeing another side of him now, the side that flared up at injustice, a brave side or a stupid one, perhaps; she couldn’t decide. The dance hall owner leaned forward. He was a small man with enormous ears and too much grease in his hair. Even I could take this bastard, Dante thought, and only the specter of almost certain prison stopped her. “Get this kid out of here.”

“Let’s go,” Santiago said.

“But no, Negro—” El Loro protested.

“You heard him,” Pedro said. “Let’s go.”

They walked out into the night. The street blared at them, raucous, hostile. They walked to the corner and paused under a streetlamp to light their cigarettes. It was five a.m. and men spilled out of the bars and dance halls, filling the sidewalk, humming or bantering with each other or striding off alone into the darkness.

“You should have punched him,” El Loro said. He was sulking now, his spark turned to ash.

“We’ll have our revenge,” Santiago said.

“Oh yeah? How? By reporting him to the police?”

“Don’t be stupid,” said Santiago. That silenced them for a moment.
Obviously the police would never take the side of a fistful of
tangueros
from the tenements over a business owner.

They started walking again, toward San Telmo, smoking, their instrument cases in hand or slung over their shoulders. The sky to the east grew pale. On a broad avenue, a lamplighter had begun to extinguish the streetlamps, raising up his pole to flames enclosed in glass high above his head, snuffing them out with a swift flick of the wrist. His face was tired, expressionless. How many lamps did he put out in one morning? Hundreds? Thousands? How many little fires burned in this city? Dante felt dizzied by the thought.

“We could break in and steal his money,” Pedro said. Dante wondered how serious he was. His tone was light but his eyes glittered.

“No.”

“I’d like to smear my shit all over his pretty walls,” El Loro said.

That made Pedro laugh. El Loro laughed too. There was a unity between them then, a boyish ease, that Dante couldn’t help but envy.

“No,” Santiago said again. He was walking in front of Dante, she couldn’t see his face.

“I was joking, Negro.”

“I’m not taking any chances. I want things clear.”

“I thought you said we’d have our revenge.”

“Not that way.”

“No? Then how?”

The four musicians’ steps drummed softly beneath the din.

“By succeeding.”

Dante gazed out at the street, at a carriage drawn by a horse the color of garbanzos. The curtains at the carriage’s window were closed; anything could have been happening inside there, anything at all. She felt a chill at Santiago’s words, a strange mixture of dread and hope.

“What about our pay?” said El Loro.

“Don’t worry.” Santiago stopped to flick his cigarette butt into the gutter. “We’ll have another job before you know it.”

And they did.

There was, after all, a need for bands like theirs, with a strong sound and men willing to break their backs to keep the crowd dancing. Every day, it seemed, there were larger crowds, new halls. The tango was changing: everybody, not only the poor, wanted to dance it. Not only that: the sound itself was changing, some instruments rising into prominence while others began to disappear. By the winter of 1915, as the Great War raged across Europe and shook the immigrants of Buenos Aires awake at night with terror for their loved ones across the ocean (and Leda learned in a brief letter from her father that Alazzano was safe from bombs and guns for now, though what the
for now
meant for the months ahead she didn’t dare to wonder), the tango without the bandoneón was no longer considered true tango. That strange German instrument had been absorbed into the music, altering its essential texture and slowing its pace, because there’s only so fast that fingers can fly across the bandoneón’s keys and press the air within it. The bandoneón brought a velvet longing to the tango, and made it slower and statelier than when Leda had first heard it. And at the same time, other instruments—flute, guitar, mandolin—were falling out of fashion. They were becoming part of the old sound, the old tango, quickly fading into oblivion, into the abyss of the past, while the new tango rose, a luxurious sound, featuring more musicians—five, six, seven—and, if a venue wanted to be truly chic, a piano to give the sound complexity and finesse. The introduction of the piano changed everything. Pianos could not be slung over your shoulder or tucked under your arm. Each venue had to provide its own, and that took space and money. In turn, if a venue obtained a piano, the bands it hired had better have a pianist in their ranks.

After all, you couldn’t have the piano bench sitting there looking empty and alone like a jilted bride while the orquesta played.

That’s what La China Irene said when she told Santiago she’d bought a piano for her dance hall.

It was a good hall, larger than most, and quite clean. It had no windows.
The walls boasted exotic tapestries and stained-glass sconces. The stage looked like the work of an erratic, fevered carpenter. There were women for hire, but only to be danced with, and they dutifully kept up the pretense that they weren’t for sale in any other way. The men who came to this place to dance were, after all, often gentlemen from across town. If you wanted to rut like a common animal, La China would say, you’d come to the wrong establishment. If a man and his dance partner slipped off early, whether for a drink or perhaps a walk in the park (and here she’d meet your eyes as if to dare you to suggest there could be any other reason) then that was their private business and had nothing to do with her. La China’s establishment was so respectable that she had a man guarding the bathrooms at all times to ensure that couples did not slip in together. She managed the place for an owner who never showed his face; as long as she kept the clients and the pesos pouring in, she reigned freely, a queen in garish necklaces whose laugh could infect your dreams.

El Cuarteto Torres had been playing at La China Irene’s for three weeks when she announced the piano.

“For the best clientele,” she said, “it’s necessary. You understand.”

“Of course,” Santiago said. They were in the tiny curtained space La China referred to as
backstage
. El Loro and Dante were tuning their violins, close enough to hear each other’s breath. Pedro sat on a crate beside them, wiping his bandoneón in the semidark.

“I’m sorry to have to let you go,” said La China.

“But you don’t have to let us go.”

“You have no pianist!”

“Yes we do.”

She raised a painted eyebrow. In her youth, as a newly arrived Andalusian immigrant, La China had worked the back rooms; Dante thought of this with amazement, unable to picture this woman as anything but stout and formidable, bedecked in plumes that rose from her dress like soldiers at attention. “Ah? Where?”

“We’ll have one in—When does your piano arrive?”

“In two days.”

“We’ll have our pianist then.”

“That’s absurd, Santiago, you won’t have time to practice—”

“It’s enough time. Don’t you worry.”

“Santiago,” she said, “you know I’m fond of you. But I won’t have my clientele forced to dance to your rehearsals.”

“Chinita,” Santiago said, “I promise we’ll be ready, we’ll be everything you dream of, and if we’re not I’ll give back all the money you’ve paid us these past three weeks.”

El Loro didn’t take his eyes off his tuning pegs, but his face went tense. Pedro flicked his rag in noisy protest. All that pay had already been split between the four of them, and it was likely that each had already spent his share on rent or bread, as Dante had herself. How could Santiago put that money on the gambling table? What if he lost?

“All right,” La China finally said. “But you’d better be good.”

“I promise, we’ll have the crowd by the balls.”

La China left through the red cotton curtain, leaving a trail of rose perfume.

“What were you talking about?” said Pedro. “You don’t have a pianist!”

El Loro leapt in: “How are we going to—”

“Shut up, both of you!” Santiago said. “Just leave it to me.”

He left La China Irene’s that night for the bars and cafés of Buenos Aires, trolling for a pianist, just as a couple of years earlier he’d gone diving for a violinist and found Dante. Who knew how many bars he went to or just what he did there. Dante pictured him scanning each stage, searching for pianos, slipping cash to bartenders in exchange for information, listening and moving on, over and over.

The following day, when Dante arrived at Santiago’s home on Calle Defensa—a front room in a conventillo that his family cleared out of during rehearsal time—there were not one but two strangers in the room.

“This is Amato.” Santiago glowed with triumph as he gestured toward the man perched on a stool in the corner. “Pianist.”

Amato nodded at them all. He seemed older, in his late twenties, with an unshaven face and a slight paunch that gave him an air of authority. Pedro, El Loro, and Dante nodded back, in that manner that was not so much an affirmation as a flinch of the chin.

“And this is Joaquín. He plays the bass.”

Joaquín was a tall, lean man, standing guard over an enormous black instrument case. His face seemed at once mournful and refined, as if he’d made a home for himself inside of sadness and elevated it to an art.

“He’s joining us too?” El Loro said.

Santiago nodded. “We’ll be a sextet.”

“I’ve never seen a bass in a tango group before,” El Loro said.

“We don’t need one,” Pedro said.

Santiago turned to gaze at Pedro, and the air grew tense. Pedro did not say, did not need to say, that more musicians meant less pay for each of them, that he didn’t want to share his cut with this Joaquín, who watched the exchange without a sound, his face solemn, unreadable.

“It’s not about what we need,” Santiago said evenly. “It’s about what we can become.” He let those words land in the middle of the room, where they hovered, daring anyone to contradict them. No one did. “Joaquín has something to bring us that no one else can. We’ll be original, a band like no other. The tango is for dancing. Rhythm matters. That’s why there used to be drums.”

Dante felt a jolt of surprise. She had never heard of, and could not imagine, drums in the tango. She had so many questions, but was too embarrassed to ask.

Fortunately, El Loro was less inhibited. “Drums! Are you joking?”

“No.”

“What kind?”

“African drums,” Amato said. It was the first time he’d spoken, and his voice was deep and rich, the voice of a man twice his size.

“And what happened?” El Loro asked.

“It changed,” Amato said.

“Everything changes,” Santiago said quickly. “Nothing wrong with that. Tango is still changing and we’ll be part of changing it.”

Pedro looked doubtful, but he said nothing. El Loro seemed curious and a little bewildered. Amato tapped his thigh as if playing imaginary piano keys and, when he caught Dante looking at him, flashed a warm smile, as if they’d been friends for a long time. Joaquín studied a spot on the far wall. Santiago took a moment before he spoke again.

“We could be part of something bigger—much bigger. Don’t you want that?”

The question was for all of them. No one answered aloud. The question swelled open and filled the space between them.

“Let’s get to work,” Santiago said.

There was no piano in Santiago’s home, so Amato sat on a stool and watched the other musicians as they played, fingers roving across the empty air. Joaquín’s bass notes grafted to their sound with startling ease. They did more than graft: they dug a deeper well for music to inhabit, pushing open low foundations for the high flights of violins, the smooth wails of bandoneóns. He was a firm yet agile player; Santiago had chosen well. A genius, really, that Santiago, he’d brought them all together and now they formed something they could never have shaped in isolation, a thick bright sound all their own. Inside that sound, Dante felt close to the other men, almost fused to them, in a manner more immediate than sex, or so she imagined based on what she’d gleaned from the matrons of Alazzano and from brothels and bars. There was nothing husband-wife, nothing man-and-whore, about this communication. No one yielded and no one conquered. Each musician penetrated the others and was penetrated at the same time, each man exposed: you, you ache like this, you spark like that, here is what drives you. And as for me, here, this, ache, spark. Every human being has unmapped regions within, hidden from view, but lock rhythms and the secret parts spill out and gleam.