The Gods of Tango (32 page)

It was not that the rich men who came to Leteo were so different from those at La China’s. In fact, Dante recognized a few faces from the dance hall. Here, though, those same men acted proper, and brought women on their arms. The women wore fine gowns and pearls and drank champagne and, when they danced, kept their paces modest, did not press into the embrace. This was a civilized tango, after all, and these were civilized ladies. They were chaperoned and danced only with men from their own tables. They came in groups, or with their husbands, but they never came alone.

Except for one.

Every night, an exquisite woman occupied a small table at the hall’s edge. She wore daring evening gowns, lower-cut at the collar in that Parisian style just coming into fashion to the alarm of the Buenos Aires elite; only, unlike the bright colors imported from Paris, her gowns were
always black. Her black hats were extravagantly decorated with black velvet bows or tall black plumes. Even sitting down, she seemed tall. Ageless. Impenetrable. Back straight with the posture of an arrogant dancer. She sipped her oporto and watched the crowd.

“Who’s that woman in the back, alone?” El Loro asked, in the Lair, at intermission.

“That,” Santiago said, “is La Viuda Ruiz. Don Carrasco’s sister.”

“Viuda?” El Loro looked up from his violin in amazement. “
She’s
a widow?”

Dante, too, was surprised, even though she herself was a widow and hardly looked the part. But all the widows she’d known in Alazzano were stout, veiled, resigned down to the slouch of their spines. This woman was the opposite of resigned. She exuded power. She seemed to know that she turned men’s heads. Her very dresses made a mockery of the widow’s duties; they drew the eye right to her bare flesh and whispered
stay
.

Pedro whistled and played a long, languorous chord on his bandoneón.

El Loro smiled and opened his mouth.

“Shut up,” Santiago said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Don’t start. Not a word about Doña Ruiz. Don’t even
think
of her, you hear? Doña Ruiz is not a woman. She’s your boss’s sister. Understand?”

They complied. But even so, the next time Dante went onstage, she snuck a glance at Doña Ruiz. The widow was watching them with the calm alert gaze of a general just before battle.

The money was good, damn good. Amato gave his wife a Singer sewing machine and his mistress a Parisian coat. El Loro rented another room for his family in their conventillo and, in a flush of optimism, got engaged to
a sweet Russian girl who lived across the hall. Pedro appeared wearing gold rings that flashed as he pressed music from his bandoneón. No one knew exactly what Joaquín did with his money; he said nothing about it, and seemed unchanged. So did Santiago. All of them, at Santiago’s insistence, bought new tuxedo suits from a tailor on Corrientes, a gentlemen’s tailor, who received them with a kind of shock but served them nonetheless. Dante held her breath when the tape measure approached her groin, but there was no close touch, she was not discovered, she was safe. If the tailor noted anything suspicious about her proportions, he didn’t say a thing about it, the picture of discretion. When the suit was done, it was as supple as a second skin. She hadn’t worn such well-fitting clothes since La Boca. They made her feel powerful, potent, the world in her reach.

The money had a similar effect. Money opens many kinds of doors in a city. You can go into a restaurant and dine right next to respectable couples, never mind their stares. You can buy five kilos of meat at a time if you want to, or a strand of pearls, or perfume bottled on the other side of the world. Dante bought all of these things: the meat for La Strega, the pearls and perfume for Alma. She saw Alma once a week, on Sunday afternoons. The biting winds of autumn cut short their walks on the promenade. No matter. Dante took her to a fine salon that served high tea, complete with scones in the British style, fresh jam, delicate cakes, and whipped cream that glistened in a polished silver bowl. Alma fingered each pastry as though on the brink of some incomparable communion, and her eyelids fluttered closed with pleasure as she ate. Dante watched her raptly, her whole body on fire. After tea, they crossed town to San Telmo, to that dingy room with the bowl of water and its single wilted rose (sometimes it was red, sometimes white or pink or yellow, but it was always wilted). There they stole hours of visceral wonder. Alma was always naked, Dante fully clothed. She always put her mouth on Alma first, to make her delirious, to make her surrender, to make her believe, as she seemed to believe, that the thing Dante did next was what
any man would do. As an added safety measure, she sometimes blindfolded Alma with a handkerchief and tied her hands together behind her back. Why? Alma asked the first time, and Dante, reaching for a reason, said, Because you look beautiful this way. Which was also true. In any case, it was an unneeded precaution. Alma took what came and gave no sign of wanting to reach down or undress her lover or do anything other than ride the waves. All week Dante thought about seeing her again. She even dared to dream into the future, about days with Alma, hundreds of them, strung forward into the great fog of time. Since becoming a man, she’d thought about the future only in immediate terms—Tomorrow, Next Week, Next Month If I’m Still Here—so deeply did she believe that she’d die young, if not at some knifepoint, then struck by the lightning of God’s vengeance for her sins. But none of that had happened. God was bored or distracted or rationing his bolts, and, as for knives, at Leteo there were fewer of them in trouser legs, more of them on linen cloths, it was a different life now, almost civilized. If she could live into the future, how many nights of music, how many days with Alma, months and years of tango and sex, enough to live for.

Then, one gray June afternoon, as Alma lay naked in the crook of Dante’s arm, she said, “I’m pregnant.”

She hadn’t heard right. She couldn’t have heard right. “What?”

“I’m pregnant,” Alma said again, more quietly this time.

The walls weren’t solid anymore. Nothing was solid.

“Maybe your … time, is simply late.”

“I’m never late.”

“This could be the first time.”

“It’s not.”

“How do you know?”

“I know,” Alma said, her irritation palpable. What did men know of these female matters, after all?

“Whose is it?”

“Whose else would it be?”

“I don’t know, Alma, you tell me.”

“How dare you?”

A stain snaked down the wall by the window, brown, menacing. Dante had never looked at it before.

“Why would you doubt me?”

She couldn’t say why. Her tongue silenced. Alma had believed it, all of it, Dante’s plan had worked, better than she’d dared to hope. Perhaps too well.

Alma was pouting. Waiting.

“What are you going to do?”

“What are
you
going to do?”

Dante opened her mouth to say something but nothing came out.

“I thought you were different from other men.” Alma sprang up from the bed and reached for her clothes. “How wrong I was.”

Dante watched her dress, paralyzed. If Alma was really pregnant, she wanted to help her. But then, she was lying about there being another man—or other men. Deceit either way. Deceit at every turn. It hurt her head.

Alma was dressed now, hair unkempt but elegant already. Her belly gave no hint of what it contained. “Well? Is that all you have to say?”

What if she wasn’t pregnant at all? What if she just wanted money? What if this was what she’d gone to bed with her for—with
him
for—in the first place? How could she have been so stupid, so trusting?

“Bastard. Faggot. Coward.”

Dante rose to her feet. Alma flinched but didn’t step back.

“Alma,” she said.

Alma looked into Dante’s eyes and ran out of the room without closing the door.

For the next seven days, Dante thought—in the depths of night, on the gleaming stage, on walks through the early winter rains—about what to do.

Only one thing was clear: she could not be the father. She could not
make a woman pregnant, could not even lie naked with her; she knew how those things worked, what it took, and she knew she didn’t have it; she was a farce, an aberration masquerading as a man. Even so, Alma must be suffering. She didn’t want to be cruel. She didn’t want to be one of those men who turned their backs on women when they were vulnerable. The thought of it pushed at the pit of her stomach, an aching fist. She should offer her money, or marriage. Marriage! She tried to imagine it, the rest of her life hitched to a lie. It seemed a nightmare, a false life, an interminable cage. Of course, she, too, was lying; but her lie freed her to live her truth more fully than she otherwise could. Perhaps, for Alma, this lie felt similar, a key to her best authentic life. Dante strained to imagine this. She didn’t know, couldn’t know. It shocked her to realize that, for all the raw hours they’d spent together, for all the intimacy she had with Alma’s body, she knew very little about her mind.

On some nights, she woke suddenly in the darkness, enraged at Alma for trying to trap her. On other nights she lay awake consumed with thoughts of Alma’s lovely belly, swelling with new life, miraculous, vulnerable. Emotions tore at her from all directions. There was no precedent, no example she could turn to for guidance. She had never known or even heard of anyone in a similar predicament. Joan of Arc’s ghost haunted her nights, standing in the corner of her dark room like a prison guard, wearing dull armor and a crown of flames.
You’re disgusting
, the ghost whispered,
unspeakable, like nobody else in the history of the world. I am not with you. No one is with you, you’re alone
.

She saw Alma one more time, the following Sunday, at the usual hour, at the door of her home. Alma came out dressed for the park, wearing a sleek blue hat that Dante had bought her a few weeks before. She looked equal parts wary and hopeful.

“You came back,” she said. “I didn’t know whether you would.”

“Listen to me, Alma.”

Alma waited, somewhat sulkily.

“I want to help you.”

Alma didn’t blink.

“I just need you to tell me the truth.”

“I already have.”

“The whole truth. About the other man. Or other men.”

Alma said nothing. She stared out at the street, where a carriage laden with coal was making its noisy way toward the boulevard.

“I know I’m not the father. I can’t be the father. Just be honest with me, and I’ll help you.”

“Why don’t you believe me?” She said it in a child’s plaintive voice. Dante lowered his voice and glanced away in a gesture of shame. “Because I’m sterile.”

Alma flinched. “You’re lying.”

“It’s the truth.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Look me in the eyes and tell me you’re not lying.”

Dante held Alma’s gaze. She opened her mouth. But then, she found the words wouldn’t come, because she was in fact lying, though not in the way Alma thought, and not in a way Alma could imagine. She stood for a few moments, mouth agape, hands empty. Finally, she said, “It’s the truth.”

But the silence had been too long and spoke more volubly than her words. They both knew it. Alma shook her head in disgust. “I hope you rot in hell,” she said, and then she went back inside and slammed the door and Dante stood looking at it for a long time before he turned and walked down the street, past clusters of immigrants spilling from their doors, grasping at Sunday, drinking grappa from the bottle, laughing too loud or grimacing as they tightened their shawls against the wind.

“Good riddance,” Pedro said when he found out. “The last thing you need is some knocked-up slut to chain you down.”

Winter shrouded the city in cold thunderstorms. Leteo’s owner, Don Carrasco, had feared the rain would keep the clientele away, but it did not. Santiago composed new music that the sextet played at Leteo for the first time, melodies that rippled with energy and flourish, and that spread across the city that winter, bringing prestige to both the band and the cabaret where they’d had their debut.

The news from Europe became worse each day. All the time there were new battles. Her father’s letters were short and grim. A munitions factory had opened in nearby Salerno. The chickens were laying smaller eggs. Able-bodied men had been taken from the village to go fight in the distant war, among them Tommaso, the baker, and all the blacksmith’s sons.
The baker’s wife
, her father wrote,
won’t leave the church, she has to be dragged from the pews in the evening by the nuns
.

Her brother Tommaso. Off at war. The word
taken
made it sound as though he’d been packed into a burlap sack and carried like so much fresh-ground flour. He’d always been a sensitive boy, her brother, drawn to storytelling and games of the imagination. He fought with the village boys because he had to, coming home scratched up by fists and brambles, but they were amicable fights, no broken bones, no end to friendship, and most of the time he lost. The thought of him in a war zone turned her stomach and made her mouth sour.

She wasn’t the only one at La Rete affected by the war. The German bachelor had two brothers and an uncle on the battlefield, a fact he kept extremely quiet about to stave off the smoldering rage of his neighbors, because their nations were enemies back in the Old World. The French family in the back room on the right lost all their relatives, twenty-four of them, in a battle that destroyed their village. La Strega’s two brothers, three nephews, and eleven male cousins had all been conscripted as
soldiers. “Half of Scylla went,” she said quietly, in Italian, out of respect for the French wife who was wringing linens at the other end of the patio (it was the first time she’d left her room in three weeks; the other women had done her laundry and brought her meals without a word for all those days and hidden all the rope and knives and never asked her to stop weeping or be quiet, not at any hour of the night). “And for what! A battle that’s far away from us. What do they want with some poor Southern fishermen? They cast nets. They gut fish. They’ll be no good with a gun.”