The Gods of Tango (45 page)

“No, it’s all right.”

“Rosa.”

“What happened?”

Dante told her about the note from Carmen and everything that rippled out from it, until Santiago’s death.

“My God. I will kill that Joaquín.”

“There’s been enough killing.”

“I can’t believe Santiago’s gone.” Rosa’s voice rasped with pain. “He was good to me.”

“He was good to all of us.”

“And now they’re after you.”

“Yes.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Leave.”

“Where to?”

“Uruguay.”

Rosa filled the dark with silence.

“I’ll cross the river. Make a new life.” Dante tried her best to sound hopeful. “Maybe even play some tango.”

“Of course you’ll play tango.”

“Don’t forget me,” Dante said, trying to keep her voice from breaking.

“You’re an idiot, Dante.”

“What?”

“Light the candle.”

Dante did as she was told. Rosa’s face appeared, determined, sublime, how had she ever thought this woman was less than beautiful?

“I’m coming with you.”

“You can’t do that,” Dante said, too quickly, belying the hope that pierced her chest.

“Why not?”

“You’re not on the run.”

“But you are.”

“Your career. You’re on your way to the stars.” She could still hear those words in Santiago’s voice.

“I can sing in Uruguay.”

“You shouldn’t have to give that up.”

“Do you want to give me up?”

“No. No.” She was weeping now. “This is all my fault.”

“It’s not. You didn’t wield the knife.”

“But Santiago—”

“—defended you. As he was right to do.”

“The orquesta, it’s destroyed now.”

“To hell with the orquesta.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Why not?”

“The orquesta is life.”

“No,
mi amor
. Life is life. The orquesta was only people playing music.”

“I don’t know the difference between the two.”

“There is a difference.”

“The stage is life for you too. You said so yourself. And if you leave with me, that life will end.”

Rosa leaned forward. “We don’t have the least idea what life can be.”

“We don’t?”

“No.”

“Then how do we find out?”

Rosa wiped tears from Dante’s face with her fingers. The gesture was as firm as it was tender. “We plunge.”

That night, three hours before dawn, two figures slipped through the shadows of San Telmo and onto a boat that waited for them at the La Boca port. One carried a briefcase, the other an instrument case just the right size for a violin. A fishing boat stood at the docks; its wooden body welcomed them without question, as did the fisherman who palmed more bills at once, that night, than he ever had in his life. The two figures went belowdecks and huddled together on a net whose ropes were still wet from yesterday’s catch. As the boat launched onto the Río de la Plata, they held each other close, humming tangos to mesh with the slosh of waves and, finally, falling into a gauzy, dreamless sleep.

Meanwhile, Buenos Aires continued, awake in the night. In a public morgue, the body of a bandoneón player was prepared for burial by two men who remarked to each other on the corpse’s hands, which were stronger than any they’d seen before, fingers muscular from years of music, now clasping each other stiffly across a chest cleansed of blood. They gave up on taming the cadaver’s curls and let them spring in a lush black crown around his face. While they worked, in the cemetery, a tired old gravedigger prepared the hole for the bandoneón player’s final rest. A few meters away, in an unmarked grave, a Polish girl lay buried, her flesh blending slowly with the earth, becoming food for worms that would one day be food for birds.

At that moment, in San Telmo, a woman known only as Mamita sat on her bed, a gray-haired man suckling at her large breasts like a baby. The top of his head was bald and shiny, and there was nothing hard about his touch. She pitied the old sod and gave him five extra minutes, rocking gently back and forth, humming an old tune in her boredom. Nine blocks from Mamita, a young man from the Cilento Coast woke with an ache in his arm, which had broken in his youth and never set right. He’d just dreamed about his dead friend again, first the moment when the bullet blasted open his head, then the two of them together, whole, laughing on a great red ship. His wife felt him stirring and turned to massage the limb, groggily, gently, preparing it for the day’s labor to come.

Two houses down from them, a blind old man who sensed his time to die was close, but not yet here, dreamed an intoxicating dream. He was walking barefoot on a road that led to Naples, or that he hoped would lead to Naples, thinking to his dream-self that, the world being round, all roads could lead to Naples if you walked them long enough. He walked and walked. His feet throbbed with pain. And then he realized that he was not walking on a road at all but on the neck of a violin, long enough to stretch out before him to infinity. The land on either side had fallen away, leaving only blackness. If he fell, he knew, there would be no return. The violin strings cut the soles of his feet but made soft sounds beneath his steps, odd sounds, ghost sounds, sounds to carry a man beyond this world.

Three blocks from him, a woman woke. Her name was Fausta. Her son was crying for her milk. She pulled him close and opened her nightgown at the collar. As he nursed, he locked eyes with her and reached his small hand to her face. They caressed each other in the moonlight, and then, because he did not seem tired and she, too, felt wide awake, she whispered a story to him, an old story her grandmother had told her, the oldest story she knew. There was a time, she told him, when the gods were many and they destroyed the earth with a great flood to make it new. All the people died in the vast rising sea that covered the
land, except for two, a brother and sister, who rode a little raft to a tall mountaintop that kept them safe and dry. They watched the devastation until, finally, the sea receded, and they found themselves in a land they did not recognize, strewn with the corpses of the drowned. At first, they despaired. Then they found their way to the temple of a beautiful goddess, where they kissed the cold stone of the ground. Help us, they said, restore our people, tell us how to make this world ours again. The goddess said: when you leave my temple, throw your mother’s bones behind you. At first the couple balked. Defile our mother’s corpse! How could we do such a thing? But then they realized that they had two mothers, just as everybody does. We have the woman who gave birth to us, as I gave birth to you, but we also have a greater mother, the earth. This mother’s bones are everywhere, in the form of stones. And so, as the brother and sister left the temple, they threw stones over their shoulders and the stones grew and softened into people, until soon the land was full of men and women made from material strong enough to endure this harsh life, and then, my boy, my light, my angel, they filled the air with their song.

PART THREE

OTTO

Bright Jagged Thing

Rosa and Dante lived together in Montevideo for fifty-one years.

They settled in Ciudad Vieja, the city’s historic center, which jutted into the Río de la Plata like the thumb of a stalwart hand. The river was a marvel, a different color every day: blue, brown, silvery gray, sometimes smooth as a mirror, sometimes whipped into waves full of white tongues. The water stretched out to the horizon as though it were the sea itself, and perhaps it was the sea, wide as it was, an estuary, a mixing place, not yet the Atlantic but shot through with its salt. The waterfront reminded Dante of the Bay of Naples, only without the volcano on the skyline. Home and yet not home, known and unknown. In those first ecstatic and uncertain months, they took long walks along the shore, talking or moving in silence, looking out over the water, searching it for secrets of the deep. The day they married, they celebrated with a long stroll from their apartment in the Old City down to the Punta Carretas lighthouse, where they climbed down the rocks and laughed as waves crashed up to them and swallowed their bodies to the thigh.

They soon found that Rosa had been right about the tango: it was thriving in Montevideo, there was more than enough room for two performers fresh from Buenos Aires cabarets. They joined an orquesta that played at hotels and bars and theaters—at Politeama, Artigas, Stella D’Italia, even at the elegant opera house, Teatro Solís. Rosa’s act shook the stages of Montevideo. There would be no lack of work.

In their first summer, Rosa and Dante hung a mosquito net over their marital bed, and when they made love beneath it they were no longer in Uruguay, no longer on earth at all, but weightless, suspended, shimmering like cosmic beasts aloft between stars.

“Never take that thing down,” said Rosa. And they did not.

The Argentinean police never came to their door. They were free. And they were happy, almost obscenely so, aware of the enormity of their luck, as if the gown of reality had torn and they had managed to worm their way out through the hole. But there were also sorrows. For a long time, Rosa was haunted by the father of five, who lived, as far as she knew, in this same city, and whom she sometimes glimpsed in crowds until the stranger would turn and reveal himself to be another man, and who invaded her dreams until she found, by word of mouth, a healer in the dusty neighborhood of Punta Carretas, a tiny woman who sat in the back of a butcher shop and listened with the stillness of an owl, then dispensed remedies that gradually expunged the nightmares from Rosa’s sleep. In 1919, news from Argentina told of a Tragic Week, so it was called, in which the police shot down anarchists and tens of thousands took to the streets to protest, resulting in riots and massacres, hundreds dead, thousands wounded, tens of thousands imprisoned. For weeks, Dante could not sleep, thinking of her cousin-husband’s exploded skull, thinking of El Loro and Arturo, two anarchists who might have been at those very riots, though really any of the others from the conventillos—Francesca, Carlo, Valentino, Fausta, La Strega, Palmira, any of their uncles or daughters or children—could have been on those same streets, and so she pictured all of them, one by one, vivid against her dark ceiling as she wished them safe from harm. (Years later, she would meet El Loro again on a tango tour through Montevideo and be thrilled to find him alive; he came to their apartment for dinner and they reminisced warmly over Rosa’s gnocchi and a long slow bottle of whiskey; it was marvelous to see him, he seemed genuinely happy for their marriage and never brought up Dante’s secret, never even seemed to flicker, as if there had been no secret at all, as if that moment in the Lair had never
happened. They drank and talked until dawn, swapping stories about Amato’s life in Paris with the same wife and a new mistress, it seemed, and Pedro’s successes in New York, both men riding the waves of the tango’s stratospheric rise across the globe to make new lives on distant shores, like tango exporters, El Loro said, or tango missionaries, Rosa said, and they all laughed, and then they mused over what the hell had happened to Joaquín, who had never been seen again, and toasted to the old days and above all to Santiago’s memory, his immeasurable imprint on their lives). The letters from her father trickled down to once a year after her mother died. Even when they came, they told her almost nothing. It was to be expected, but still, it shredded her inside to think of her mamma buried in a tomb she’d never see, to be left wondering about Tommaso’s life after he lost one of his legs in the war, to never meet her many nieces and nephews. To never again see or hear or breathe the air of Italy. On some days, this seemed an impossible sacrifice. On other days, it seemed no sacrifice at all, a mere illusion, as Italy was not far away but deep inside her, in the pulse of her veins, the shape of words in her mouth, the volcano dreams that still greeted her in sleep.

A few times a year, Dante sent Alma money for her daughter, whose name, it turned out, was Miriam. In return she received occasional brief notes, not of thanks but of acknowledgment:
your envelope arrived, Miriam is well, growing quickly
. No photographs, no anecdotes or details on how the money was spent.

“Why do you do it?” Rosa asked her, gently.

Dante could never fully answer the question. It was too tangled in the briars of lost Italian hills and the sticky labyrinth of the past. “Because I want to” was the best she could manage, and Rosa accepted this as answer enough.

As the 1920s unfolded, they watched the tango rise into an unimagined glory under Carlos Gardel’s explosive fame, and with the advent of the radio and its power to amplify a single human voice across invisible
waves into thousands of homes. Gardel’s voice spilled from windows and invaded every sidewalk, as did the voices of other singers, even women, because now women could not only sing tango but do so in evening gowns fit for queens. Tango singers were no longer purveyors of vice; they had become the height of glamour.

“Well look at that,” said Rosa. “Who would have believed it?”