Heart of Tango (5 page)

I ran my thumb across her cheek. She flashed a flat, absent smile at me.

“Tomorrow at La Marina. Remember, kid.”

She agreed without a word. I walked out into the empty street, feeling a vague desire to stab someone.

A
fter a long night of tossing and sweating, I awoke to the thought:
Tomorrow I'm getting married
. Suddenly I felt like a half-dead insect caught in a swirling storm drain, just before the darkness closes in. I shut my eyes tight, said an Ave Maria as my mother had taught me to do when I needed to calm down, pulled the sheets around myself, and wished with all my might that I would keep sleeping for years and years so that tomorrow would never come, so that El Rojo would have time to find himself some other bride and have five children before I awoke.

María Esther's mother, Doña Melina, had come by the afternoon before to tell me that my friend wasn't going to be able to come to my wedding. She was pregnant and suffering from occasional bleeding—normal in the first few months, but bad enough for such an uncomfortable journey to be inadvisable. I couldn't keep my eyes from welling with tears at the thought. I wouldn't even have the consolation of talking with her woman to woman, as I had so often before we were married; she would not be there to help
me into my dress, as I had helped her; I'd have to put up with the Italian girls, who had been hoping to take part in a real wedding while they still waited for weddings of their own.

Doña Melina must have noticed what was going through my head, because she hugged me like a daughter and offered to be the one who helped me get ready for the church. But I told her it wasn't necessary and that I was sure that Gina, Beatrice and Vanina would be delighted to lend me a hand.

“It's normal for you to be restless,” she told me, right before she left. “This is a huge step, dear, but it's one you have to take. Your fiancé is a good man who loves and respects you, and that's the most important thing. If you didn't have him, when your father passes you'll be easy prey for any
compadrito
, like so many girls we both know. Or you'd turn into an old maid, from home to church and back, up all night surviving on whatever miserable piecework you could get, so they could pay you half of what a man makes for the same work. Maybe some day things will change, like they say in the Feminist Union, but for the time being a woman needs a husband, Natalia.”

“And do you think,” I dared ask when we were nearly at the door, “that it's true what they say, that love will come with time?”

She smiled and seemed to stare off at something far away that I couldn't see.

“Sometimes. When both sides put in their bit. If they don't lose their respect for each other, if they work for a future that they both
want to achieve. Look, dear,” she said, taking my arm and putting her mouth up to my ear, as if she feared someone might hear, though we were alone in the house, “I'm going to give you a piece of advice, because I know you don't have anyone else who'll tell you: let your husband know how things stand from the first day; tell him what you like and what you don't like; don't let him think he has a right to do anything just because he's a man. Tell him softly, of course, sweetly, and never in front of others, because one thing a man can't bear is to hear people start telling him that his wife wears the trousers in his house, but don't let him step all over you.” She waved her hand to cut off what I wanted to say. “I'm sure this isn't what you've been hearing up to now, but we aren't living in our grandmothers' times, and I want you to be happy, Natalia. When a woman isn't happy, she turns bitter, and then she embitters everything she touches—her children, her husband, her neighborss. Get as much out of life as it has to give, however little that might be. And remember, you have things that other people would give an arm and a leg for. Don't think about what you're losing, think about what you stand to gain, my dear. Come, give me a kiss.”

We hugged again in the shadowy entrance way.

“Come and see me whenever you want. Ever since María Esther left, I only have men at home, and I'm all alone too.”

That conversation kept going through my head, even after I went to bed, and when I got up I felt confused and frightened.
Doña Melina was right—what she told me was not what I had been taught as a child, not what I had heard from my aunts, my cousins, the maids. She had meant well to tell me, but I would almost have rather heard the usual story: that one must be resigned, make sacrifices, put on a good face, and serve God, one's parents, one's husband, one's children—serve, always serve, because that was what we women were created to do. And the women who don't do so are bad.

I walked around the house in my nightgown, making sure everything was clean and neat, because I wanted to devote the day before the wedding to getting myself ready, and that meant everything else had to be done first. But luckily I had been smart about it, and for the past two weeks had been doing all the chores that needed finishing so that I'd have plenty of time to bathe, wash my hair and do my nails.

My father would be in the workshop until evening, as always. Today he wouldn't even come home for lunch, leaving me to take my bath in the courtyard. I put the big pot to heat on the stove so I could fill the washtub with lukewarm water, and I started bringing out all the things I'd need: the good towel, the perfumed soap we'd brought from Valencia, the cologne, the brilliantine, and the Nievina cream that today I would spread not only on my face but all over my body. My stomach tightened at the thought that someone else's hands would soon be touching my body. Big hands. A man's hands. Rojo's rough sailor hands, as big as baker's
shovels, callused all over from struggling with the ship's cables.

Berstein hadn't even kissed me yet. When I pictured his mustache pressed against my mouth, it made me slightly queasy—not quite nauseous, but enough to set my hands to trembling. Of course, that was probably because I had never tried it; maybe I'd like it, as the Italian girls said about themselves and their fiancés.

It was as hot as blazes, and it hadn't even rung nine yet. The plants in the courtyard were drooping. Even the little tree at the back, the one that put out yellow flowers in spring and whose name I didn't know, looked half dead. Only the geraniums and the carnations remained defiantly crimson, and the climbing bellflowers continued spreading like a flood across the garden wall that separated our house from the neighbors's. I fetched two pails of water from the tank and watered them all, so as not to feel their envious stares while they watched me bathe. The sky was a perfect blue, without a cloud, as if it had been painted, and already the smell of jasmine was strong enough to make your head spin.

I filled the tub—half hot water, half cold, to avoid a shock—then undressed, after looking in every direction to be sure no-one was spying on me, and slipped into the water with a sigh. It felt so good it seemed a sin, but I knew that it was all right, that every girl has a right to enjoy her last bath before she's married, even if it had to be like this, in a foreign land, without her mother, without a girlfriend to talk to, without any feeling of liquid fire from the man who would soon be her husband and all but her master.

Against my will I began to think about the man from the day before, at Uxío's. I remembered most of all his gaze, though I couldn't have told you what color his eyes were; the tension of his lean body; his long, fine fingers holding aloft a fan of cards. They had called him Diego.

I lathered all over with soap, trying to change my train of thought: the wedding dress was ironed; the stockings wrapped in tissue; the shoes in the box; the veil pinned to the garland of wax orange blossoms. Papá would pick up the bouquet on his way home from work, and at night he would give me Mamá's good earrings, the ones he had been saving for my wedding, which I could hardly remember because she had only worn them on important occasions.

It crossed my mind that it would have been nice if we could have arranged for the portrait. That had been an idea of Papá's, soon after we arrived in La Boca. Although it sort of embarrassed me at the time, now I was thinking that it would have been nice. Papá had heard of an artist, a fellow named Nicanor Urías, who people said was a magnificent portrait painter, and Papá had got the notion into his head of commissioning him to paint my picture so that my children would always have something to remember their mother by. He never mentioned it, but I always knew how much it pained him not to have so much as a photograph of his own wife, and sometimes I also thought that, with all the money my uncles had squandered in Valencia, we might have commissioned
one of my mother when she was young and beautiful, before the illness that finally killed her had aged her prematurely. It could have been hanging in our sitting room right now, and I could have looked at her whenever I was alone in the house, and from her eyes, so sweet, so cheerful, felt that she was still watching over me.

But like my mother's portrait, mine was not to be. Papá told me that Urías' prices were too high and, now that we had to lay on the wedding, we couldn't afford any more expenses. But the Italian girls told me that the problem wasn't the money; it was that the artist had a bad reputation. People said he was a bit of a sorcerer, because his mother was a Brazilian witch, and they said his portraits looked so good and so lifelike because when he painted them, he imbued them with a bit of the soul of the person he was painting.

I found this impossible to believe, and I was very surprised that my father, such a religious and serious man, would think that there could be any truth in it at all. Perhaps it was simply that the painter was a mulatto and Papá preferred not to deal with colored people. Or maybe it was really about the money, because he also went to speak with another artist, someone named Quinquela Martín, who was painting portraits of people in the district for an exhibition he was putting together, and he came back saying the same thing, that for the time being we had to think about the wedding preparations, and that later on we would see.

I don't know why, but that day, while I was getting ready, all I could think about were things that could never be, while the things
that really were possible, that were necessarily going to happen, slipped like soap through my fingers.

I washed my hair carefully, rinsed it out with a bit of vinegar to bring out the shine, and let it lie loose on my back to dry while I combed it. Then I put on the cream, skipping my back because I didn't want my hair to get greasy again, and opened the violet cologne, which reminded me of my mother and of Valencia.

It was only then that I remembered I would have to spend the rest of the day in the kitchen baking the tarts, fairy cakes and rolls. I burst out laughing at the image of how sweaty I'd be all over again by nightfall, after hours at the oven. But at least my hair would be clean, and I could always take another quick dip in the tub, unless it occurred to my fiancé to come and visit us after supper.

What, I wondered, was he doing just then? Bathing like me, getting ready for his wedding night? Or out with his friends, taking leave of his bachelor life, swilling cane liquor in some tavern? And the other man. What was that man doing while I was here drying my hair in the courtyard?

Feeling foolish and a bit guilty, I started picturing how the day before my wedding might have gone if things had been different—if we had still been living in Valencia, if my mother hadn't died, if I were about to marry a man like the fellow in the shop.

I would have woken up then in a house full of women, listening to the comings and goings of maids while Mamá sipped chocolate with me and talked about all the things that needed to be
done. I wouldn't have had to step near the kitchen, for Grandfather would have asked Remedios to take care of all the baking, and someone else would have been in charge of decorating the hall for the party Afterward. We would have gone to the cathedral at mid-morning, to give thanks to God and to watch over the floral arrangements . . .

The church! I had completely forgotten that I needed to go to church at six that afternoon to confess. But, dear Lord, what was I going to confess? That I had enjoyed my bath? That I had wasted time thinking about vain and impossible things? That I was dreaming about the wedding dance and tango music? That I had imagined, though only for a moment, that the hands that would caress me on the day after my wedding might have been those of a man I had seen for scarcely one minute in the shadowy depths of the grocer's shop? Could any of these things be sins?

I kissed the medallion with the image of Our Lady of the Forsaken, patron saint of Valencia, that I had worn around my neck since First Communion, and without giving it another thought I went inside to finish getting everything ready.

I
left La Marina wearing my dancing clothes and my hat. My heart was beating at a frenzied pace. I gripped the guitar as if it were about to fly away and gulped at the night air, full of the seaside smells of stagnant water, oil from passing ships, and occasional whiffs of the jasmine and carnations that women grew here and there by the doors of their homes.

I was nearly out of breath when I reached the Royal. There the boys were, smoking languidly and joking around as always. The lights of the café reflected off their pomaded hair, making them look like respectable gentlemen despite the musical instruments they carried and the party atmosphere wafting through the district. They had left their hats inside the Royal and were all wearing suits and bow ties. I noticed for the first time since I met them that I was the only one who didn't wear a stylishly trim mustache. This frivolous detail made me feel different once more, as I had on so many other occasions in life. Different, odd, out of
place. The only one for whom this was not a mere Saturday night lark.

We all set off as a gang, debating what kind of program we should offer, the pros and cons of our favorite songs. I took little part in the discussion. My mind was off in other matters, and everything seemed fine to me so long as I could see her again.