Heart of Tango (11 page)

“Señor Monteleone?” he asked.

“The same.”

“I have a proposal to make you. May I buy you a drink?”

We went to the bar, sizing each other up. Me, my stomach in a knot, thinking he must be some sort of agent who wanted to hire us; he, smiling and at peace, leading me to guess that his proposal wouldn't signify much of a change in my life.

“My name is Nicanor Urías. I am a painter.”

We ordered two glasses of gin. The guy must have noticed my
puzzlement, because he quickly added, “I would like to paint a series of portraits on the subject of the tango, and you caught my eye. I would like you to model for me. I will pay you well, if you are willing to pose a few times in my
atelier
. As for the hours, whatever is most convenient for you.”

“How much?”

“A hundred pesos for five sessions. If it takes more sessions, thirty pesos each.”

The guy had to be off his rocker. My flat cost me forty-five a month. If this wasn't a con, I'd just solved three months of rent.

“Why me?”

“Because I like you.” He saw me recoil and hurriedly said, “Don't get me wrong,
compadre
, I'm not one of those. What I like is your shape, that chiseled face, your stare, your expression, do you know what I mean? I've never seen anyone who embodies the spirit of the tango as you do.”

“Don't you also need a woman?” I asked, thinking of Natalia and how handy it would be for her to make that kind of dough, never needing to know that it had come to her through me.

“I already have one in mind, but thanks.” From the way he glanced at Malena, I guessed that he thought I was talking about her and that, for whatever reason, she wasn't right for him. Though when I saw her at that moment, following the painter's eyes, I also realized that, although Malena was what we called a lioness in my district—a real woman, as the Gallegos would say—she wasn't
the spirit of the tango, in his words. The spirit of the tango was Natalia, and suddenly I didn't want him to know it.

“Well?”

“Agreed.”

We shook hands, finished our drinks, and he gave me his address. Then the break ended and I found myself once more on the dance floor, my body turned to tango, my soul far, far away.

W
hen I came home from church after the funeral and shut myself up alone in the house, I felt something I had never felt before: utter helplessness, such loneliness as I wouldn't have believed I could possibly hold inside without dying too. I'm not sure how long I cried, but it must have been a long time because next thing I knew I realized I was hungry and couldn't remember when I had eaten last.

So, what with my grief and my self-pity and my shame at feeling hungry with Papá barely two days dead, I decided that I had to keep going, had to serve myself some of the vegetable stew that I still had stored away and get back to doing the piecework that Yuyo had brought me and keep breathing and washing my face and going to sleep at night in the bed that wasn't mine, in that house that was too big for me by myself, where everything reminded me of Papá and the two short years we had lived there.

Then all the days merged into one: getting up, buying a little bread and milk, sewing, sewing, sewing. Sometimes by myself,
sometimes with the Italian girls, who would laugh and gossip around me until they remembered that I was in mourning and fell silent again.

I had no news from El Rojo and one fine day I realized that I'd never even asked whether he knew how to read and write.

Once a week I would go to the shipping company to collect his wages, lining up with all the sailors' wives, then go by the market and return home. I rarely went to church because it was full of sad, lonely women, all in mourning like me. The few saints in the church were also sad and poor and looked as lonely as we did.

Winter came, expenses went up, coal was dear, and I had to make do with a small charcoal brazier to warm my legs while I sewed. I had heard nothing about Diego. I would have fallen apart with embarrassment if I had tried to ask Yuyo about him, and after Papá died I no longer had an excuse for going to Uxío's shop. He was still stuck inside me, like an infected thorn. I was often overcome by dizziness, walking home from the market, when I would turn a corner and see a man who reminded me of him, the way he moved, the play of sunlight on his hair.

I was going soft and sad, like a fig in the fruit basket that no-one feels like eating. I noticed it and felt sorry for myself, but I didn't know what I could do to change.

So that morning, when I went to collect the wages, it took me a long time to react when Don Julián, the shipping company bookkeeper, asked me into his office, because I had gone slow and
lost the habit of speaking and listening to what I heard around me.

“What?” was as much as I could say. I groped blindly for a chair to sit down.

The man rounded his enormous dark wooden desk, pulled out a straight-backed chair for me, adjusted the pince-nez on his crooked nose, and mumbled something like “I'm sorry, madam,” which for some reason sounded completely out of place to me.

“Excuse me,” I said when I felt able to speak again, “I don't think I've properly understood you.”

The bookkeeper returned to his spot behind the desk, straightened his white oversleeves, and played for a few moments with the black rubber eyeshade he had set on the desk when he saw me enter his office.

“We don't know for certain what happened. We were expecting the
Southern Star
to reach Salvador da Bahia on the fifteenth, but it never arrived. We have learned that it set sail from Tenerife on the anticipated date, but after that—nothing. It disappeared. We didn't say anything to the families until now, because there was still a possibility that a storm had thrown it off course or pushed it toward the coast of Africa, but by now …”

It was so hot in that office. I noticed I was suffocating in my tight-collared black dress, with the long mourning veil pushed back over my shoulders. I would have given anything for a glass of water, but it didn't occur to me to ask for one. I looked at the clasped hands in my lap as if they didn't belong to me, and tried to understand
what exactly it was that this man was trying to tell me. That Rojo had died, too, like my father? That I was a widow? That I was alone, once and for all?

“Believe me, I am sorry,” Don Julián insisted. “You hadn't been married long, had you?”

“In January it would have been one year,” I said, my mouth dry, surprised that so much time had already passed.

The bookkeeper closed his eyes for an instant, as if concentrating to form a question that he didn't want to ask. I turned to peer out of the window, which looked out on to a small back courtyard, dark and dirty, filled with unrecognizable rubbish.

“… family?” I heard, as if from a great distance. “Did you? Have any—any family?”

The word was one I recognized, but it sounded as odd to me as if he had said “parallelepiped” or “solfatara” or any of those words one learns in school and then forgets their meaning.

“My father died in June.”

“Oh dear. Dear me. My deepest sympathies, madam. However, what I—I meant to ask, whether you and your husband had children.”

“It has barely been seven months since my wedding, Don Julián.”

“Yes, of course, excuse me. But you're not … ?”

I looked at him uncomprehendingly. He stared back at me. The situation grew more and more embarrassing.

“With child?” Don Julián finally completed his question with a visible effort.

“With child?” I repeated, looking down at my flat stomach, swathed in the black dress of deep mourning, two tightly clasped hands lying across it like a dead butterfly.

“With child, madam. Pregnant. Expecting.” The man was starting to lose patience.

I blushed. I felt my ears turning red, felt the heat rising in my cheeks and chest, and was furious that he would notice.

“No, Don Julián. I mean, I don't think so. It's been seven months since I saw—saw my husband,” I managed to say, trying to maintain my dignity. “Why do you ask?”

The bookkeeper pulled up his oversleeves again, shifted papers about, picked up a purple pencil and a moment later stuck it behind his left ear with a fluid and unconscious motion. He had an ink stain on his index finger and thumb.

“You see, Señora Berstein.” It was the first time I had heard anyone call me by Rojo's name, and I almost burst out laughing. “The company has a compensation and pension fund for the families of its sailors, in case of demise or permanent disability, but as you had been married for so short a time and had no offspring … I am sorry, truly sorry.”

It took me several seconds to realize the meaning of his words.

“So,” I began, and had to clear my throat loudly, because it was
so dry, because I didn't know how to go on. Papá had always taken care of these matters. “My husband's wages …”

“The company will pay the wages he was due, through the last month worked, no worries. You may come back on Saturday.”

“And after that?” The voice that emerged from me was so weak, so timid, I was ashamed of myself, but I felt unable to control it.

Don Julián turned his hands palms up and slightly shrugged. I stared at the papers scattered across the desk as if the solution to my future life lay in them, while silence stretched out between us. I knew there was nothing else to say, but I couldn't stand up and leave the office. My knees had turned to rubber, and my whole body shook.

“I know this is a hard blow,” the man said at last, “but you are very young, dear. You will put your life together again, believe me.”

How? I wanted to scream at that man. How am I going to put together a life that I never had to start with? How am I going to keep from dying of hunger and loneliness in a strange land, with no family, no friends, no-one who cares what happens to me?

“If you would prefer,” said the bookkeeper, standing up, “we could also exchange Señor Berstein's final wages for a return ticket to Spain on one of our freighters. A ship is leaving for Cádiz in two weeks. Think it over, Señora Berstein.”

“I'm not Señora Berstein any more,” I said in a low voice, holding on to the desk to stand.

“Of course you are.”

“Aren't I his widow?”

Don Julián just looked at me across his desk.

“There is no evidence to verify his death.”

“What . . . what does that mean?”

“That until the bodies of the crew have been recovered, or until the legal waiting period is past, you are still a married woman.”

“The legal waiting period?”

“The law stipulates ten years. If I can do anything else to help you . . .”

He rounded his desk once more, took me by the elbow and, slowly but firmly, led me toward the exit.

“Time goes by quickly, as you'll see”—one step—“and, given that you are in mourning for your father already”—two more steps—“and now, with the loss of your husband”—we were almost at the door—“I doubt you will feel up to remarrying”—his hand on the knob, the door opening onto a gray hallway with a wooden bench on which other women were waiting, wide-eyed, surrounded by small children—“but later on, you'll see. Or, think about the company's offer, and return home. There you'll have family, people who love you; we'll keep you informed if anything turns up. Good morning, Señora Berstein.”

Another woman, her eyes wide open, with a baby in her arms and a little girl clutching her skirt, stood up and entered the office that I had just left.

I knew almost all the women waiting on the bench by sight, but
I didn't want to sit with them and talk about my misfortune, so I pulled up the thick black veil that I had thrown over my shoulders when I entered the office, covered my face, and left the building with a drunken gait while the women whispered behind my back.

I was almost at the door to my house when I realized two things all of a sudden: that I had no memory of how I had got there, and that I hadn't shed a tear.

T
he storm caught up with us along the coast of Brazil after a voyage where everything had gone wrong. The
Star
sank in a matter of minutes, almost before we had time to understand we were really lost. All I remember are huge roaring waves that surged over us in the darkness, the shouts of the men who already figured they were as good as dead, and the creaking and cracking of timbers and derricks, snapping like toothpicks crunched in a giant's jaws. I don't even know what happened to us, if it was just the sea roiled up by a passing cyclone, or an unseen reef that scraped a hole in our hull, or a blow from the tail of some sea monster, as Marco screamed before he disappeared, swallowed up by darkness.

At moments like that you don't think. Anything could be true.

The only thing I do know is that I grabbed on to a broken mast and held tight, along with a fellow sailor, Ochoa the engineer, who complained all night long while the waves churned and shook us and hardly gave us time to breathe, and around us the few other survivors floated away until they were lost to sight.

At some point it was just me left. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again Ochoa wasn't there any more. The body of the sea was like an enormous animal breathing under me, making me rise and fall at its whim, and overhead the gray sky starting to glow pink.

I believe I saw four mornings dawn before the current swept me close enough to some coast that, in spite of my thirst, cold, hunger and exhaustion, I managed to swim to shore.

I've never been afraid of death, and during those days I discovered that at any other moment in my life I would have let go of the broken mast that held me up and carried me along on the waves. If I didn't, it wasn't out of fear, it was just because the image of Natalia was etched on my memory and had taken the place of all the church images of the Virgin that when I was little had stood in for my mother's face, which I never got to see.