Heart of Tango (3 page)

I had never seen El Rojo wear a cravat. When he visited me on the Sundays he wasn't off at sea, he would wear a black silk ribbon necktie that fell to the middle of his chest and a tight linen jacket that wrinkled the moment he sat down and turned damp under his arms.

At first we scarcely spoke, but later on, bit by bit, while I
worked on my embroidery—my father forbade me to darn or mend things in front of visitors—and the two of them sipped the maté that we had all come to love, he began to tell us stories about his voyages, about what he had seen in distant countries, the dangers he had faced, the colors of the sea and sky when you are in the middle of the ocean and don't know if you will ever reach dry land.

“Sometimes you start to see things that aren't there,” he would say. “Not just you, everybody. Somebody'll say, ‘Look, look, an island,' and before you know it everybody sees it. And then it turns out it was a cloud that melts away a minute later. Sometimes, out at sea, I wonder whether all this”—and he would make a little gesture with his hands, as if to embrace not only our modest sitting room but the whole district, and who knows, maybe all Buenos Aires—“whether all this isn't just a dream too, a mirage that keeps me going and that I myself have just made up. Whether you, Miss Natalia,” he went on with unexpected timidity, “aren't just a story I tell myself, like the story of the sirens that others tell. But that only happens to me sometimes, when the voyage gets long. I think that once you are my wife, Miss Natalia, it won't happen to me any more.”

I thought it odd that a grown man like El Rojo, as big and strong as he was, would get such ideas into his head, but when I recalled our own crossing from Spain I could imagine that on the high seas you might think things that you would never have thought
in your own home, on land, where the ground doesn't swell and the walls don't sway and the view out of the window never changes.

But we had few such afternoons, because, even though Rojo tried to arrange short voyages during the period of our engagement, there were times when we did not see one another for weeks on end and I could even go out on a stroll with some Italian girlfriends who lived nearby and also had seafaring fiancés. We couldn't go dancing, though that was what we loved best, because it wasn't decent to go out dancing when you were betrothed; nor could we go to the cinema hall, because it was too expensive and too dark; but we would get together to sew and chat, or to walk about and listen to the music that filtered out of the cafés, the music of the tango, for which we were all mad.

I remember the first time I heard it. Just one song. I was fifteen, at the ball in the Teatro Principal in Valencia, wearing a pale pink dress and holding an ivory fan that had belonged to my mother. I heard that music there, and all at once I felt as if all my bones had gone soft.

A short, very dark man, costumed with a poncho, spurs, and high-heeled boots, played a kind of accordion that was almost larger than he was, accompanying a couple who danced alone on the dance floor under the astonished gazes of the best Valencian society. One passionate song. A dance of closed eyes and shadows and tobacco smoke in that huge theater of marble columns and crystal chandeliers. One woman, swaying like a flower in the wind,
and one man with the proud bearing of a bullfighter, lifting her, cleaving to her as if bound by a curse.

After that song, the little swell accompanying me took me immediately to the confectioner's shop to have refreshments while he apologized for the spectacle I had just witnessed. That night my dreams were filled with the rhythms of the tango, and when Papá broached the subject of Argentina, the first thing I thought was: “That's where they dance the tango,” and I told him I would go.

Later came Rojo and the afternoons spent embroidering in the sitting room and waiting to get married so that I could go out to dance in some café.

I had been taught the tango by María Esther, a girl my own age who was born in Buenos Aires. She was the daughter of the bookkeeper for an important shipping company, and they had a Victrola at home. We often got together there, just us girls, to practice dancing with each other, dying of laughter when we had to play the man's role, imagining with our eyes closed that we were in the grip of impossible passions like the ones you read about in serialized stories in the Sunday papers. We'd talk about fiancés and trousseaus, drink maté and, taking turns to crank the Victrola, play gramophone records over and over again that made us feel all pins and needles without our understanding why, as if tiny burning insects were crawling through our veins.

“And you, do you love El Rojo?” María Esther asked me one day when it was just the two of us alone. She was betrothed to a
rich farmer she scarcely ever saw, so rarely did he come to Buenos Aires.

“He's my fiancé,” I recall answering her, almost feeling offended, because for the moment I couldn't think of anything else to say. “Do you love Luis Alfonso?”

She broke out laughing. “He's my fiancé!” She tossed my own answer back at me.

Then we both had a good laugh. Afterward a silence fell, until my friend finally broke it. “You know what, Natalia? Mamá says that men
do
, and women
are
. Okay, so you and I
are
.”

“I don't understand what you mean.”

“Men work, move around, come and go, play, drink, some of them kill. They shave in the morning, so they scrape off the skin they had the day before. That way they don't grow, they're always new, get it? But we just
are
. Girls, mothers, wives. We're sweet, polite, faithful, good. We grow, we become. They'll ask a man, ‘What do you
do
,
compadre
?' Us, they ask, ‘What
are
you, a missus or a miss?' Get it?”

I didn't laugh this time because it wasn't funny any more. I had never thought of it that way, but funny it was not.

“When you get married to El Rojo, you'll be his wife, and I'll be Luis Alfonso's. Nobody will ever ask us, ‘What do you do, ma'am?' because everybody already knows what.”

“But that's a good thing, isn't it?”

María Esther shrugged her shoulders and brewed some more
maté. “Wouldn't you like to dance the tango in a theater and hear the applause and have men look at you with desire and bring you flowers?”

“I don't know. I don't think so.”

But that was a lie, because when María Esther screwed up her eyes and looked at me closely while asking her question, I could hear the tango in my head and I knew that, yes, I would love it; but I also knew that it could never be, and that after I got married to Rojo I would only dance now and again at parties with him, when he was home from his ship, and only until our children arrived at that—and they would arrive, because that's why one got married.

“It wouldn't be decent,” I added.

“No. Definitely not decent,” she said with a mischievous smile, offering me a cigarette from her father's case.

She ran to shut the sitting room door and we took refuge behind the green velvet curtains, keeping the windows half-open so we could toss out the stubs if anybody walked in.

“So why are you telling me all this?” I asked.

“I don't really know, Natalia. It must be because I'm afraid of getting married and having to move so far away, out to the pampas, and be stuck there forever with Luis Alfonso. I . . .” She took a deep drag of her cigarette and stared out at the water of the port, already turning the amethyst color that announces nightfall. “I don't know whether I love him, get it? I like seeing him, I like it when he takes me to the theater, and I don't mind it if he grabs me when Mamá
isn't looking.” She paused again, avoiding my eyes. “We've even kissed a couple of times, and, well, it wasn't bad. But I've read how you're supposed to feel when you're in love and—that's not what's happened to me, kid. That's all.”

She carefully stubbed out the cigarette on the window sill and tossed it almost angrily into the street. I threw out mine as well and put my hand on her shoulder. “That isn't really so, María Esther.”

“Of course it's true.”

“No, I mean the things you've read. That's just literature, lies that writers have made up.”

She stubbornly shook her head. “When I was fifteen, there was a maid we had that Mamá had to fire, because, well, you know . . .”

I quickly nodded, not wanting her to think I was stupid.

“She told me about what you feel when your man touches you, when he just looks at you and it's like liquid fire is drenching you and trickling down inside you, like wild horses are dragging you and you can't stop them.” She sighed deeply. “That's what I want to feel, Natalia, just once, before I get married,” she said firmly, turning her defiant face toward me.

Before I could answer, Doña Melina came in to light the oil lamps and we had to drop the subject, but from that day on I avoided being alone with her because I knew that her next question was going to be: “And you, Natalia? Wouldn't you like that?”

María Esther got married in the spring, in November, and Afterward we only wrote to each other, but she had promised to
come to my wedding and I was burning to ask her, now that she was a married woman, whether she still dreamed about dancing in the theater or experiencing the book kind of love that's like fire running through your veins.

I had spent a lot of time thinking it over since then, every night when I retired to my single's bed (now that I was about to get married, I always thought of it as a single's bed), and I imagined Berstein in his nightshirt sprawled next to me in bed and knew that this was not it, even though the serialized stories that writers make up never mentioned this, nor did my father, who hadn't explained to me what was supposed to happen when Rojo and I were left alone at home after the wedding.

I don't know whether I would have had the courage to ask my mother, but asking my father was impossible. Despite all the horrible tales that I had heard told about what happened on one's wedding night, I knew that my father would never allow anything bad to happen to me and that, if all the married women I knew had survived it, so would I.

And now that it was just two days away, now that the wedding dress was hanging in my wardrobe—white, with a veil, because my father had decided to spend whatever it took on his only daughter's wedding—I continued to think about it, but from a sort of distance, as if it were somebody else thinking about it, while I was dreaming about the ceremony and the bouquet and, most of all, about the ball Afterward, which my girlfriends and their fiancés
would attend, as many of them as were on dry land, and also my father's associates; a ball where the bandoneón would play, and where for the first time I'd give myself over to its magic in the arms of a man. The arms of Berstein. Of Rojo. Of my husband.

That is what I was thinking about when I entered the grocer's shop belonging to Uxío, a Gallego who had spent half his life in La Boca. My father had sent me to the shop for a bottle of Spanish wine that he wished to set aside for a drink with his new son-in-law when the time came.

The sunlight was so bright outside that I could only see shadows when I entered. There was a strong smell of wine and sawdust, a smell of single men, which, for all that, brought to mind fond memories of the tavern on Quart street where I used to go with Amparo as a young girl to buy the red wine that Grandfather Francesc loved.

Suddenly from the dark depths of the rambling shop came the unexpected rending wail of a bandoneón. Still half blinded, I turned like a compass needle toward the sound, leaning my hand on the zinc counter to steady myself, and I involuntarily noticed that four men playing cards at a table next to the billiards had turned to gaze at me, while a skinny boy against the wall played the squeezebox.

My stomach leaped into my chest. A young man, his hat pushed back on his head of black hair, wearing a collarless white shirt and braces, stared at me as if I were an apparition.

“Here for Don Joaquín's wine, dearie?” Don Uxío's voice boomed behind my back.

I nodded yes, unable to take my eyes off the man who had stood up holding his cards in his hand.

Everything turned red. His stare, meeting mine, was like a needle tattooing my heart.

And suddenly this was it: the liquid fire, the powder exploding in my veins, the red-hot iron branding me forever. This was it, María Esther.

When the grocer handed me the bottle refilled with wine, my hands trembled so that I didn't dare touch it, and I had to draw my handkerchief from my sleeve and wipe my brow.

“Damn this heat!” Uxío exclaimed. “Have a bit to drink, sweet.”

He set a small glass of cane liquor down next to me and, without thinking, I, who had never before drunk more than a sip of sweet wine, tossed it down in one gulp.

It burned, like his eyes.

I picked up the bottle and walked to the door, not looking back. I heard someone say, “Diego, kid, what's up with you?” And, refusing to turn back in, I walked out of the shop into the light, into the heat.

There were two days to go until my wedding day, three days until my birthday.

“F
ine-looking kid, isn't she?” said the Gallego, setting the bottle of cane liquor down on the table.

Murmurs of agreement. It was all I could do to pry my eyes from the door through which she had gone out. I sat back down, distractedly showing my cards.

“Hey, kid, what're you doing?” said Flaco Martínez, looking crestfallen at the hand I had been dealt.

Paying him no mind, I poured myself a drink and slammed it back.

“Her name's Natalia,” the Gallego explained. “She's Don Joaquín Irati's daughter—Basque fellow who came over from Valencia a couple years back.”

“She's a fine girl,” De Bassi agreed.