Heart of Tango (6 page)

In a matter of minutes we were standing at the door to her house. We started tuning up before anyone had even looked out of the windows. Then Canaro lifted his bow, and we began the set with a lively little waltz that had been very popular the previous winter. A milonga followed, then a tango, the night's first.

By then there were men at all the neighborss' doors applauding when each song ended, and a few women at the windows, half hidden behind the lowered blinds. But Natalia's house remained dark, as if no-one there had noticed the serenade, or as if they had decided not to accept our humble tribute.

I had to dry my hands on my trouser legs after each song. Mumbling in a low voice so that no-one could hear, I repeated her name like a prayer,
Natalia
,
Natalia
,
Natalia
, trying to make her get out of bed, come to the window and look at me, though it were for the last time.

By the fifth piece, when our serenade was looking like a town dance and the neighborss had started to make requests—two men had taken to dancing under the street lamp at the corner—my
prayers were heard and the door to the house opened. An older man, no doubt Natalia's father, waited until we finished playing. Then, his face almost breaking into a smile that never quite took shape, he asked, “Did El Rojo send you?”

Canaro performed a florid bow and explained that, as we had learned that his daughter was getting married the next day, we had come to offer the young lady a serenade.

The man smiled and went back inside. I kept staring at the upstairs window, determined not to miss Natalia's appearance. When Canaro gave the next signal I came in as best I could, a few measures late, because I didn't even know what we were playing. It turned out to be Contursi's “Percanta que me amuraste”, “Lover Girl, You Left Me”, a tango that always stirred my deepest emotions, especially after Castriota wrote lyrics and turned it into “Mi noche triste”, “My Lonely Night”.

She opened the tiny balcony, smiling and embarrassed, wearing a white nightgown with a pink shawl draped over her arms and shoulders. Her father stood behind her, turning me green with envy each time he caressed her head and sank his fingers into the soft hair that cascaded down her back.

Natalia ran her eyes across us all, but from the moment our gazes met they never parted. I played as if entranced, paying no attention to Canaro's lead, remembering nothing of the program we had put together, following only the voice of the squeezebox and another voice that sang out inside me, cutting me off from the
outside world, while she watched me through her eyelashes and chewed her lips just as I did.

I don't remember what the final song was; I know only that a moment came when everything fell silent. Don Joaquín, from the balcony, offered us a glass of muscatel while excusing his daughter, who, given the lateness of the hour and how early she needed to rise the next morning, could not accompany us. I understood the old man. I would not have allowed her to go downstairs either, to stand around in her nightgown, mixing with a bunch of strange musicians on her last night as an unmarried woman. But all the time that I drank and joked with the boys, I could not stop picturing her upstairs, so close, so far away, lying in a bed that must smell of carnations and woman-child, waiting to give herself to a man who was not me. From the entrance I could see the foot of the stairs that led to her floor. I had to dig my nails into my palms to keep from climbing them.

Before we left, Don Joaquín, in an outburst of generosity and gratitude, invited us all to the wedding. “As friends, not as musicians,” he specified. I departed thinking that he could not have wounded me more grievously if he had plunged a gaucho dagger into my ribs, yet I would not miss the chance of seeing her again for anything in the world, even though she would be dressed in white, in a church, for another man.

When I reached Uxío's shop to ask him if I could lie down in some corner until next morning, the sky was filled with stars, but
they were all screaming, as if they were made of shattered glass, just shards of something that had once been beautiful and was now broken forever. As if they were splinters driven into the velvet skin of the night.

I
left home walking arm in arm with my father. I had on the white satin dress and the orange-blossom garland, the veil pulled down over my eyes, and clutched a small bouquet of lilies that smelled so sweet it made you swoon. The Italian girls went along behind us, making a racket and chirping like sparrows at daybreak. My father walked slowly, conscious of the importance of the occasion, spiffed out and proud as a peacock in his summer suit, best silk tie and finest panama hat, with a lily in his buttonhole, turning right and left to greet all the neighborss who watched from their doors and windows as we paraded past.

Beatrice's brother was waiting for us at the corner with his mandolin, ready to escort us to the church singing all the traditional wedding songs from his home village.

Papá smiled at me and gave a little squeeze to my hand on his arm. Despite everything that happened Afterward, which I could not have even imagined at the time, I will always remember him like that: smiling, proud, happy. Happy after so many setbacks, so many
bitter sorrows. It has all been worth it for this, I remember thinking, and I think it must have been my first thought that morning because from the moment I opened my eyes I hadn't had time for anything else, not even for fully comprehending what it was that I was about to do. The Italian girls had shown up early, before the first light of dawn, and were sharing a coffee with me in the kitchen before starting to comb my hair and dress me when Papá ran out of his room to “make himself presentable”. Only later did we realize with guilty laughter that we should have been fasting before communion, and we finally agreed among ourselves that coffee was, after all, nothing more than water with a bit of flavouring. But I was taken aback at not having thought of it, and I couldn't help imagining what Grandmother Begoña would have said if she had found out: that I was a bad Christian and that it would bring us bad luck. So I begged Our Lady of the Forsaken for forgiveness and promised to make confession as soon as I could.

The memory of that man's eyes hadn't let me sleep peacefully all night, and they were still with me, but not fully formed. It was as if they were inside me, watching the same things I saw: the lilies in my bouquet, the smiles on the women neighborss, the newly swept street, the big, dark birds that circled lazily over our heads and then suddenly took off flying as if in fear from the peeling bells of the church of San Juan Evangelista.

The entrance of the church was packed. I had no idea so many people knew us. Or maybe all weddings are like that. The only
wedding I had seen was María Esther's, but she had married in the city, a more exclusive setting. This was La Boca, and everything that happened here was everybody's business.

By the time we reached the entrance my legs were trembling and Papá had to support me for an instant.

“Dizzy?” he asked.

I shook my head and forced myself to smile.

“What's the matter, darling, are you afraid?”

For a moment I couldn't decide whether to tell the truth or to make light of the matter. In the end I nodded yes.

“That's normal, sweet. It'll all be over soon.”

I still don't understand how I managed to utter the words, but right there, standing steps away from the crowd that awaited us at the church door, men smoking cigarettes, women waving their fans, I whispered softly to him, “Papá, why didn't you ever ask me if I wanted to marry El Rojo?”

All color drained instantly from his face. He stared into my eyes and gulped—I know he did, because twice I saw his Adam's apple move up and down, up and down. The aroma of the lilies enveloped us like a warm cloud. Sweat was starting to drip down our temples. Papá raised my veil delicately with one hand, took his handkerchief from his pocket, and wiped my face with it as gently as could be, then dried his own face and put the handkerchief away.

“Don't you want to?” he finally asked.

It was not the time to argue. Everyone was watching us. The
Italian girls, who had gone on ahead, were making signs from the church door as if to hurry us along.

“It isn't that, Papá,” I said, more and more flustered. “Yes. Of course I do. Yes, but—I don't know—it would have been nice if someone had asked me.”

“Didn't
he
ask you?”

I bit my lips and foolishly shook my head.

“But how was I supposed to know that? Confound it! Nobody ever tells me anything. How was I to imagine that Berstein had asked me for your hand without asking you first?” The perplexity he had felt at first seemed now to be giving way to an irritation that could quickly turn into anger. “But honestly, now, Natalia, don't you love him?”

“I don't know,” I dared to say, looking down at my feet.

“Well, that takes the cake! Here I've spent months trying to convince myself that you're not a little girl any more, and now you come out with this.”

“It's nothing, Papá,” I defended myself. “It must be my nerves.”

The church bells—poorly forged, tinny, but wedding bells after all—were still ringing. People were drilling holes in us with their stares. The Italian girls hopped from foot to foot, unable to understand what we were still doing there, facing each other, talking as if it were the most normal thing in the world. And at that moment, Berstein appeared in the door of the church, with a pathetic mien, I thought, like a lost dog in a distant port. He was
wearing a natural-colored pinstripe suit, stiff collar and drooping ribbon necktie; he had washed and combed his red shock of hair, and he was grasping the brim of his hat as if it might fly away like a live bird. I suddenly felt so sorry for this mountain of a man waiting, so humble and so clean, for me, that I flashed him a smile, turned back to Papá, and asked, “How's my lipstick?”

“You've chewed it all off,” he answered, also smiling broadly. “Shall we go in?”

“Let's go, Papá.”

“Confound it, Natalia, you gave me such a start! I'm too old for shocks like that.”

We set off walking slowly, solemnly, receiving people's smiles and congratulations. Berstein went back into the church to await me at the altar, as we had planned. Papá, leaning close to my ear, whispered, “You look beautiful, darling. If only your mother could see you. She would be so proud of you.”

My eyes welled with tears and, when the opening strains of the wedding march were played on someone's violin—we had no organ in the church of San Juan in La Boca—I suddenly recalled how my mother had married the man she had chosen herself, twenty-odd years ago, over the objections of her entire family. I understood then two things with utter certainty: that she would not have been proud of me, and that it was too late now to turn back.

T
he wedding couldn't have seemed longer if I'd been holding my breath underwater the whole time. At first I thought for a moment, standing at the threshold and watching them talk before she entered arm in arm with her father, that something might be going on. Perhaps they had just become aware of some impediment. Perhaps their hasty marriage was being called off. But it must have been nothing, because Don Joaquín simply dried Natalia's face with his handkerchief—she seemed to have been weeping—and they entered the church.

After that, things stayed on course. A mountain of a man, redheaded and smiling like an idiot, waited for her at the altar next to a blond woman in a black mantilla. The four of them knelt. I stood to one side, pressed against a column, so that I might at least watch her profile, silhouetted against her father's.

She seemed startled, like a small animal. The priest sprinkled his Latin phrases over them in the meantime, making the congregation rise and kneel like puppets on strings. It had been many
years since I last entered a church. Though I only vaguely recalled what I was supposed to do, I moved my lips in the responses without taking my eyes off her, the only flame that attracted me among all those candles, hoping for a miracle that was not to come. I knew it would not come when the priest, aided by two altar boys, spread a white cloth that covered her head across the man's shoulders. It was a symbol of the wife's subjection to her husband, but it reminded me instead of the sheets that would cover the two of them in bed that very night.

Then came the business of the rings and the “I do”s. The man pronounced his in a loud, decisive voice. She uttered hers like a prayer, like a light breeze whispering among the reeds.

There was nothing else to see. When people started standing up to receive communion, I took my leave of Natalia forever and fled, planning to get on the first tram that would take me to the center.

Outside I ran into the boys, who were rolling cigarettes and waiting for the crowd to come out so they could follow them to the hall where the wedding feast would be held. I couldn't slip away unseen, as I had hoped. By the time I realized this the bride and groom were leaving the church, arm in arm, surrounded by a mob of friends congratulating them in several different languages.

My gaze briefly crossed Natalia's, and I felt that she was calling out to me, begging me not to leave her. Perhaps I was mistaken. Perhaps that sudden flash in her eyes had nothing to do with me
or my presence, but I made up my mind to drain this cup of poison to the last drop and accompany her as far as I could, so I let the boys drag me along with them, and together we walked for blocks until the music told us where to enter.

The hall was already full of dolls who had beaten us there, waiters standing about with their arms folded, and children running between the legs of adults and hiding under the white cloths of the three tables set out in a U. Canaro greeted Firpo with a nod. The boys on the bandstand smiled at us, recognizing us as colleagues. If it surprised any of them to see their competitors there, they didn't show it.