Heart of Tango (2 page)

I don't know how long we stayed, because the time that clocks measure is time of a different sort.

At some moment an African boy—one of those street vendors who present you with an enormous bouquet of long-stemmed roses out of nowhere—appeared by our side, displaying a white grin like a gash across a face that looked exhausted from so many rejections, so many couples in expensive nightspots diverting their gaze as soon as he showed up.

She looked at the flowers in fascination, and a wavering smile appeared on her lips, painted in the same deep red as the roses the
boy was selling. Without letting go of her waist, I reached into my trouser pocket, took out a couple of bills, and offered them to him with a smile. He took another look at his bouquet, as if it were hard to decide which one to select, picked out a perfect rose that had barely begun to open, and handed it to her. She looked at me, traced her lips with the rose, snapped off the long stem, put the flower in the cut of her dress, closed her eyes and leaned all her weight against me, yielding to my embrace.

We danced. And danced. Ignoring the cheap parish hall, ignoring the dull couples who counted their steps or who announced their moves in an undertone as if they couldn't turn the music into dance without translating it first into words; ignoring the resentful gazes tossed our way by the women standing against the wall; ignoring the clock that somewhere was ticking down the seconds of a night that I wished would never end.

At some point I began to notice the scrape of furniture being moved, a fluttering as of a flock of startled doves; a quick look was all I needed to understand that the milonga was at an end. Couples were putting on their coats, carting off the soft drinks, emptying out the overstuffed ashtrays. Lone women were leaving two by two, accusing me of something with a toss of their heads toward the dance floor before disappearing into the darkness of the entrance way. The music stopped.

I felt her weight in my arms for a few moments, her head on my shoulder, her leg curled around mine. Then, still not speaking,
we separated. She glanced toward the door, as if making a plea that I didn't understand at the time, looked again at the rose in her dress, gave me a quick kiss on the cheek, parted from me, and walked out, with the grace of a flowing river, into the dark. Her last, sad, sweet smile seemed to hang in the sudden silence, the sudden loneliness that shook me like a spasm.

I went to change my shoes, put on my raincoat, and waited in the entrance that was lit only by the pearly light of the street lamps, until the last dancers left and locked the dance room with a double turn of the key, a definitive and dismal sound.

I lit a cigarette and waited, looking at the reflection of street lamps on my shoes, glancing furtively in the direction of the ladies' room, where she must be getting ready to go out for a night with a stranger, with me. Go out where?

She must have been feeling as breathless as I, which was why she wasn't coming out; the same sudden desire to flee, to disappear, now that the tango had fallen silent.

A car drove down the lonely street, and its sodden sound made me step over to the door and look out. It had started raining. The gentle rain turned the halos around the street lamps into glittering rainbows and made the asphalt gleam like patent leather. Not a soul to be seen.

I came back inside and, with sudden resolve, rapped my knuckles on the door to the ladies' room. Total silence. I opened the door softly and was startled by the darkness within. It was
empty. Not just empty: deserted, abandoned, like a boat left adrift. The way I myself felt.

I returned to the entrance, sat on one of the stone steps and lit another cigarette, though I knew that there was no longer any sense in waiting. She had left.

Had she come without a coat, without a bag, without an umbrella? I made an effort to remember what the dance hall had looked like before I went out to wait for her, thinking that she had just skipped into the ladies' room. It had been empty. There had been nothing there but the C.D.s, which the last couple picked up before they locked the room. And the staircase only led to the ladies' room and the wide entrance way, where I had stood smoking next to the exit.

I went outside into the weary rain which, now that the wind had stopped, was falling almost vertically, and walked with head lowered and hands shoved into my raincoat pockets, back to the old quarter of the city. The night porter gave me the key to my room. I went up and, as always, emptied the pockets of my raincoat and sports jacket on to the dressing table: wallet, passport, keys, business cards, a couple of receipts, and a folded slip of paper that I didn't recognize.

I unfolded it with trembling hands. It was an address in the district of La Boca, Buenos Aires, and a woman's name: Natalia.

The month of August was already half over and the southern winter was in full swing when I finally managed to reach Buenos Aires. No sooner had I set foot in my hotel room in the city center than, in a fever of imminence, I scoured the street directory for the address that was engraved in my memory, though the slip of paper so often unfolded had never left me. It was, indeed, an address in the quarter of La Boca, a small side street just two steps from Calle Caminito.

The taxi dropped me off at the corner, in a poorly lit section that, were it not already familiar to me from previous trips, would have seemed dangerous. Despite the cold I wore my dance shoes because, if I didn't find her at home, I knew where I would meet her. I had dreamt this over and over again, in dozens of hotel beds in dozens of cities where my work had led me over the four months since that April night: the taxi would drop me off at the corner, I'd quickly cross over to the address written on the note and knock on her door, which would be locked at that time of night. I'd look up, searching for the light in her window, and then I'd walk down Caminito, empty of tourists, nobody there to gush over its colorfully painted houses and corrugated roofs, and the shine on my shoes would light my path to Los Gitanos, a tiny nightspot with scarcely six tables where they dance a sensual, raffish, local tango. She'd be there, waiting for me, leaning against the door as she had that night, the smoke from her cigarette describing serpentine curls around her wrist, her eyes dark stars inviting me to dance.

It didn't surprise me to find the house locked and no light in the room upstairs. What alarmed me was the abandoned, funereal atmosphere of the boarded-up windows, the rust-covered knocker, the weeds growing on the front steps.

Feeling tightness in my chest, I walked to the milonga, wishing I hadn't left my hat in the hotel, noting how the damp air seeped through the upturned collar of my coat and strove to free my hair from its slick layer of gel.

The notes of the tango filled the street with nostalgia. Four candles burned on the empty tables in the nightspot. By the abandoned bar, a mature couple danced alone with the languid nimbleness of lifelong tangueros.

I stood watching through the window, unable to accept that she wasn't there. I stayed for a long time, hypnotized by the guttering light of the candles, feeling each note of the tango stab me within, until the barman noticed my silhouette and invited me in with a wave of his hand. I shook my head and left as if I were being pursued, running away from my failure, and walked for hours through deserted streets until I found a taxi to take me back to my hotel.

I returned the next day, after a night of terrors and nightmares, after half an hour on the phone convincing the people who had contracted me that jet lag had left me with an impossible headache.

The port of La Boca was cold and foggy with the solitary, mean look peculiar to ports that have been condemned to a slow death.
A few tourists wandered, looking lost, past the false cheer of the painted houses; the cold was damp, insidious, tenacious.

Not knowing how I'd got there, I found myself in a museum I'd visited on other trips, an uncommonly sad museum, deserted, with large and poorly lit galleries, its walls painted in unlikely colors—bilious green, dirty yellow, faded blue—and covered with paintings from every style and every era, in an incomprehensible cacophony, as if they had been relegated there all the better to be forgotten.

With the vague idea that, seeing as I was already there, I might as well head up to the third floor and take another look at Quinquela's paintings, the brazenness that matched the tango so well; with the anguish I was feeling, with the stench of death that hung over La Boca, I crossed an enormous gallery, empty of visitors, where the brushing of my footsteps against the floor created a whisper of echoes.

And then I saw her. At the far end of the gallery, to the left, between a horrid landscape of the pampas and an incongruous scene of ladies in mantillas and gentlemen in top hats leaving High Mass, there she was, looking at me from the obscure depths of an oil painting framed in heavy, gilded wood. Her eyes shone as they had at the milonga, half closed in pleasure, as if she were listening to the beat of a tango that was being played only for her in the solitude of that dusty museum; her intensely red lips were gently curled, as they had been then, into a slight smile that was both
pained and provocative; her black hair was pulled back in a tall chignon and held in place with a tortoiseshell comb. In the cut of her dress, held in place by a black silk corset, a rosebud stood out, red and barely beginning to open, against her pale skin. A variety of hothouse rose that did not yet exist when her portrait was painted.

The small medallion on the frame, right below the spot where her hands—the same hands that had rested on my shoulder and held my own hand—were clasped at her waist, read: “
Tango is a whispered cry
. Unknown artist. Ca. 1920.”

T
here were two days to go until my wedding day, three days until my birthday. That was how I had planned it. I loved the idea of being a wife already on the day I turned twenty, and of being able to say for the rest of my life that I had married at the age of nineteen. In the month of January. In the middle of summer.

I still wasn't used to everything being all topsy-turvy, to sweltering in the heat when it was supposed to be cold, to being so poor all of a sudden, to being surrounded by people from so many different countries, so many of whom still spoke Spanish badly.

We had come to Argentina two years earlier, just Papá and I. And thanks to El Rojo—Berstein, that is, my future husband—we had moved into a house in La Boca. Papá spent the few savings we had managed to keep with us from Spain on opening a small carpenter's shop, where he also made shoemakers' lasts, his actual profession.

My grandfather had owned a factory in Valencia that made
shoemakers' lasts. Papá managed it for a few years, until my grandfather died and my uncles burned through the inheritance in a matter of months and left us out on the street. Then Papá, who had already been a widower for years, decided to leave Valencia, where there was no longer anything to keep him but Mamá's grave, and set off for Argentina.

It hadn't been easy for me. I had been raised in a tiny village near Vitoria with a Basque father and a Valencian mother. I had to move to Valencia when I was eight, after Grandmother Begoña died and Grandfather Francesc set aside all the quarrels that had separated him from his daughter and offered my father a job at the factory. And then again, at the age of seventeen, I had to bid farewell to the world that I had built for myself and follow my father to Buenos Aires.

At first I planned to stay in Valencia, but that would have meant living with my aunts and uncles and silly cousins, or else getting married within a couple of months to one of the little swells who kept trying to court me and who, though I had never much liked any of them, I had liked even less since the factory had sunk into ruin, because they were suddenly acting as though they would be doing me a big favor if they were to lead me to the altar.

So I came with him, to start over one more time.

Then El Rojo. That was one of those things one would never have done if one had thought it through first. But I caught his eye, I was the right age for getting married, we owed him so much, he
was a good man, and Papá, who was in poor health, had given him his word, because he was panicked by the thought of dying and leaving me all alone so far from home.

And to tell the truth, when I was running to the grocer's on an errand on that January morning, with its infernal heat and the pungent, humid odor rising from the river, I felt happy. Like every girl my age, it thrilled me to think about my wedding, about the bulging trousseau that was stored away in the good trunk, about the wedding dress hanging in the mirrored wardrobe that we had brought from Valencia, about the idea that I would be called
señora
, about the party we'd throw for the few friends we had here, and about—well, every wedding has its groom.

Mine was tall and stout and wore a beard, a mustache, and long, reddish-blond hair. He was fifteen years older than me, a boatswain on a freighter, and German, though he spoke Spanish very well. He was a real man, not like those spoiled little pale, perfumed, cravated Valencian toffs who used to escort us from High Mass when my aunt and cousins and I rode along the Alameda and down Viveros in the chaise.