The Gods of Tango (35 page)

Carmen, he said in a steadier tone, you’re being ridiculous.

Am I?

I’m sorry. This isn’t what you want. But it’s not—what you called it. It’s a respectable marriage. And you’ll see, you’ll grow to love him.

There was real hope and real tenderness in his face. He wanted to believe his own words.

And if I don’t? Carmen said.

He took her into his arms and she felt the low thrum of his heart. You will, I promise.

She tried to believe him.

After Carmen married, Don Ruiz arranged a plum job for Felipe Carrasco at a railroad company where he owned shares. Felipe lined his pockets and attracted an aristocratic bride. Carmen tried her best to squeeze happiness from the dry fruit of her marriage. The first six months were tolerable. Don Ruiz was not kind, exactly, but he kept to himself much of the time and seemed to enjoy Carmen’s beauty or, at least, the way others responded to her beauty when she stood beside him. But after six months, Don Ruiz became ill—the doctors found no malady to speak of, except that he was old, until finally the fifth doctor to replace his predecessor supplied a list of diagnoses and useless pills—and angry. The more she tried to soothe him with words or caresses, the more briskly he slapped her away. Everything became her fault: his aches and pains, the maids’ laziness, the rainy weather. By their first anniversary, he’d stopped speaking to her except to spit insults or commands. In bed, he treated her like a mule to be slapped into acquiescence if necessary. He liked to urinate on her. He liked to see her cry during the act. There was no pleasure. She became obsessed with obtaining caged birds and watching them throw their bodies at the bars for a few days before releasing them into the Buenos Aires sky. She strained to memorize the exact slant of their wings as they soared off so she could call it back to mind in times of despair. She bought and released thousands of birds,
and it was never enough, would never be enough until the sky became so crowded with finches and parrots and jays that she could grasp their feathers like ladder rungs and rise up to the clouds.

After three years she went to her brother and said, I’m unhappy, I’m horribly unhappy.

I’m sorry, Carmencita.

He is cruel to me.

I’m very sorry. He looked sincerely pained.

Then help me.

Marriage can’t be undone. What can I do?

Help me escape.

What?

Across the border. I’ll go to France, Morocco, anywhere.

Morocco. You’re crazy, Carmen. What would people say?

I don’t care.

It would ruin us.

Ruin
you
. I’m already ruined.

You’re not. You’re a lady, a respectable wife.

I am nothing. I’m a stain on the bottom of his shoe.

Things will get better with time,
querida
.

You’re wrong.

More firmly, he said, You have to go back home.

I’ll kill myself.

No, you won’t. You wouldn’t shame us that way.

What do you know?

But he was right—she couldn’t kill herself. She tried: she kept poison close at hand and put her lips to it several times over the years. But some phantom force always brought the vial back down. She wanted to leave, yes, but not by dying. She wanted to live.
But
, she sometimes asked herself as she lay beside her husband,
for what?

Bird after bird lashed at its cage with frenetic wings.

Ten years into her marriage, her husband took her, only once, to see
tango at Club Armenonville. It was the first luxury cabaret for tango in Buenos Aires, and that year, 1913, all the people of their class went at least once between trips to the opera to see what the commotion was about. Carmen both loved and hated the opera: loved the soaring grief and passion of the characters, which spoke directly to her soul, but loathed the crowd at Teatro Colón, which clapped primly after each act as if they gave a damn about heroic love or tragic loss but then spent the intermission hissing petty gossip. Still, the opera had been a comfort, before she found tango. At Armenonville, Don Ruiz looked on at the spectacle, impassive. They did not dance. But even so, Carmen was amazed: the dance was like nothing else she’d ever seen, a couple’s dance that was not a series of predetermined steps but, rather, improvised. The bodies of the dancers had to talk to each other. A secret communication flowed between them—how did they do it? how did they know what they knew? The dance and its music shot through her skin and right into her blood, where it woke a part of her that had been in a stupor, a kernel full of rage and joy and claws and dreams, livid with life, biding its time.

Then her husband died, suddenly, in his sleep. Age and a weak heart, the doctor said; his cluster of maladies had finally overwhelmed him. Carmen was free. She put on black clothes and went right to her brother.

You owe me, she said. I did all of this for you.

You’re right, he said, I’m sorry. I do owe you.

She was so surprised that for a moment she didn’t know what to say.

What can I give you? he went on. I could send you to Paris.

No. I have money now. I can send myself to Paris.

Then what?

I want a cabaret.

What are you talking about?

It was the first time she’d said it aloud. There was nothing she wanted more than a place where she could not only dance tango but dance it on her own terms, be in charge.

Listen, she said. I want a cabaret, but I need you to run it with me, or
else no one will take it seriously. I’ll put down my money and make you the owner. It’ll be good business for you. All I ask is that I get to name it, decorate it, spend as much time there as I like, and have the final say on anything concerned.

The brother agreed, and seven months later Cabaret Leteo was born.

Dante was listening with her head on Carmen’s naked breasts, fondling the nipples, drunk on their shape. She thought of what they had been through, these breasts, this body. She thought of the multitude of birds hanging from the ceiling in the great hall. “And the name?”

“What name?”

“You named the cabaret, right?”

“Yes.”

“Why Leteo?”

“For the river in the underworld. You know the story?”

She did. Cora had loved the stories of the ancient underworld. “It’s the river people drink from when they die, to forget their lives.”

“To forget their suffering.”

“Yes.”

“That’s what I want this cabaret to be. A river to drink from. Each dance is a cup from the river.”

“A cup of forgetting?”

“Forgetting is joy.”

Forgetting. The elixir of forgetting.

The thought of it stayed with her for days. She pictured a great chalice at the center of Leteo, presiding over the dance floor, overflowing with mystical waters. To forget. Ever since Cora’s death, she had longed to forget; that longing was part of what had driven her across the ocean. Because, while she still lived in Alazzano, there were things she had tried and failed to cut out of her mind. Like the sounds of Cora’s exorcisms, screams from the grand old house where all the doors and windows were
shut tighter than the fist of God. Like the nuns trooping in and out like black-robed armies, faces stern, determined to destroy their enemy at any cost, although they failed in their attempts and finally surrendered to the devil-girl, a hopeless case, nothing for it but to send her to live far up the hill in that dilapidated hut as though she were a mangy dog, or worse than a dog, because strays could roam the village plaza in search of scraps to call their own while Cora was locked in by several bolts and forbidden any company save the monk who brought her meals twice a day and checked to make sure she had no way to hurt herself (and her father, her father visited as well, the only one allowed, but forget, forget, forget). Leda was a coward, a shameful coward, which was why it took her four months to sneak out in the night and make her way to the hut through a forest that even in the light of a three-quarters moon (she didn’t dare go at the full moon, the most wicked time) terrified her, absolutely terrified her, each crackling leaf and whispering branch reminding her of old stories in which girls were eaten by monsters, stolen by witches, swallowed by holes that opened to pits of endless darkness. I’m not afraid, she lied to herself as she walked, over and over, not afraid. She saw the hut at long last in the low defeated light. She looked at it and looked at it and did not approach. She’d knock the next time.

The second time she came, she heard weeping. It was Cora. Still her voice. The same voice that had told her the most luminous stories the world had ever carried on its back, the same voice that had drawn her to the river, mothered her more than her own mother, urged her to be brave. Now she hesitated at the door. What if Cora didn’t want to see her? What if she bit and scratched her like an animal, as the village gossips claimed she would? In the end, she slunk away. Next time, she would knock.

But the next time she went, she did not knock; she couldn’t because she heard something, or maybe she didn’t, there was no reason or all the reason in the world for her to run the way she did, racing home so fast the trees blurred as she sped by them. When she woke up the next morning
she couldn’t remember what had made her run, she’d forgotten what it was she’d heard, forgotten everything except this: she would never go back to that hill.

November unfurled its brazen spring throughout the streets of Buenos Aires. By December, the air was a thick hot brew you could get drunk on. Dante lived for the moment, in the moment, as though there were nothing but the cabaret, the upstairs room, nights with tango and mornings with Carmen. At home at La Rete, she was El Tanguero, the one who played in front of gilded crowds, envied and revered. La Strega’s daughter married and Dante paid for her crisp white dress, never worn by anyone else, as fresh as a wordless page, and for the feast that took place in the central patio. La Strega thanked him with tears and copious blessings on his future progeny, should he ever have them, and he should have them, good boy that he was, you, Dante, like a son to me. She embraced him so heartily that Dante had to close her eyes against the hallucinatory power of her breasts.

El Sexteto Torres did not travel that summer, deciding instead to stay on at Leteo, where the crowds continued at a steady pace. They’d been a sextet now for a year and a half, and Dante could no longer imagine their sound without Amato or Joaquín, the chords and ornaments of piano, the bedrock of long deep strings. Their sound had grown lavish, as well as tight: they meshed with each other, knew each other’s sonic shapes, nested together without thinking.

For the New Year, 1917, Carmen planned a lavish party, complete with rare wines, towers of French pastries, several piglets choking on the polished apples in their mouths, and trapeze artists to slice the air between acts.

The musicians toasted with champagne in the Lair, half an hour before midnight.

“Here,” Santiago said, raising his glass, “is to the best year of our lives!”

“Which one?” Amato said, grinning. He’d grown portlier that year, and had a fourth child with his wife, and one with a mistress, all of whom he talked about with pride. “The one that’s ending or the one to come?”

The men laughed.

“The one to come,” Santiago said, his expression serious.

“I don’t know, Negro.” El Loro raised his violin into the air with a triumphant flourish. His wedding was just a couple of weeks away; the entire band had the day off work to attend the ceremony at a synagogue in San Telmo. “This year’s been pretty good!”

“Hear, hear!”

“At least on
this
side of the Atlantic.”

“At least for us.”

“I mean look at us!”

“Look at this!”

“Can things really get better from here?”

“Just you wait,” said Santiago. “You won’t believe your eyes.”

They played beautifully that night, and the trapeze artists flew and sparkled and did not fall (the blond one, Pedro later told them, made pretty little sounds in bed and bent the way you dreamed she would), but much of the pork and pastries went uneaten, as crowds did not appear in the droves that had been hoped for.

“Where was everyone?” Carmen moped, upstairs. “Why didn’t it work?”

“It worked just fine,” Dante said, tying her blindfold.

“It could have been better.”

“Shhhh—”

“Why didn’t—”

She trailed off into incoherent sounds.

Three days later, a new sensation hit the tango world. That young singer Carlos Gardel, of whom Amato had spoken with such warmth and admiration, had presented, as part of his appearance at the Esmeralda Theater, a new phenomenon called a tango canción: a tango that revolved around vocals rather than instruments, in which the lyrics not
only accompanied the tune but told a story; in this case, in the song “Mi Noche Triste,” the story was of a man whose woman has broken his heart and left him to face the sadness of night. The audience had roared with applause at the end, enraptured, transported, sold. One reviewer called it the start of a musical revolution:
the soul of the tango can be sung!

“As if we didn’t know that in the conventillos,” El Loro grumbled when Santiago read the article aloud in the Lair.

“It’s not the same,” Joaquín said, with a haughtiness that sent a prickle down Dante’s back. “They’re talking about art.”

“Art does happen in the conventillos, you know,” El Loro said, an edge to his voice.

Joaquín squinted at El Loro and opened his mouth, then hesitated.

“One thing’s for sure,” Amato said. “If Carlitos keeps going with this, and he will, the world won’t be able to turn away.”

Don Carrasco was beside himself. He wanted a singer. Now he understood why their New Year’s party hadn’t worked; they’d failed to keep abreast of a rising trend. All the most important cabarets would now have a singer; he could see the wave, and they’d join it. He pulled Santiago aside just before intermission to tell him his new vision. There would still be dancing but there would also be a show. People could sit and sip their wine and watch the spectacle; it was clearly what they wanted, so it was what they’d get.