Heart of Tango (8 page)

Picturing her naked, trembling, crushed under the weight of
that Teutonic giant, who would be rubbing his coarse paws across her silken skin, I shuddered with revulsion, hatred, impotence. Impotence above all. What could I do? What could I, a nobody, do? A nobody to her. If she had at least given me some signal, if she had said she didn't want to get married, said she needed me to free her, I would have confronted the whole world with the dagger I've handled since I was a little boy growing up in the tenements. But she had said nothing, and my love gave me no rights but the right to burn, slowly, alone, thinking about her and what might have been.

D
awn found me in the courtyard under the tree with yellow flowers, wrapped in a sheet that I had taken from the chest of drawers. Tears rolled down my cheeks each time I felt the shooting pain between my legs or that hot, swollen spot that was beating like a heart.

It disgusted me. Even though I had washed myself over and over again with cold water, taking care not to wake up Rojo or Papá, it disgusted me to feel that my body was no longer mine, that my stupid pride in thinking of myself as the perfect little lady had brought me to this, this new breaking day, this house that was not and never would be my house, this country on the other side of the sea.

Now I was a real woman. Now I had everything I had desired: a house, a wedding, a husband. What came next? Watching the years go by, having children, growing old, dying? If I didn't die of sorrow first. Lost in a land that wasn't mine, tied to a man I now knew was not the one I should be with. What was I supposed to
think about, now that I was married? What plans could I make when Rojo shipped off to sea and I stayed home with Papá to wait for his return? To wait? Wait for him to come back, after weeks or months had passed, so that he could do to me once more what he had just done?

It had been very nice at first, very sweet. He had cradled me in his arms as delicately as my father might have done. He had caressed my hair and cheeks, repeating my name very softly,
Natalia
,
Natalia
, again and again, like a prayer. I asked him what he wanted me to call him. He said Rojo or Berstein was O.K., either one, it made no difference to him.

“But you must have a name, haven't you? The one the priest gave you when you were baptized? What your mother called you when you were little?”

“Yes,” he said, “but I'm ashamed of it.”

“Come on, tell it to me. After all, it's probably German, and I won't be able to pronounce it.”

He put his mouth close to my ear and said, “Heini. My Christian name is Heinrich, but they always called me Heini, until I went off to sea.”

“What's that in Spanish?”

“Enrique.”

“Well, that's not so bad.”

“But in German, Heini also means clod, simpleton, you know? Here I'm El Rojo. For you, too.”

Then he stopped talking, but he kept on caressing me. He didn't limit himself to touching my hair and face any more. It was as if he had suddenly realized that he was my husband, that I belonged to him. And he seemed in a great hurry to make me understand it.

He turned me around, pressed me against the mattress, and kissed me on the mouth, thrusting a tongue that tasted of beer and cigar smoke between my teeth. I felt like vomiting.

A rosy glow spread across the sky, but it was still dark in the courtyard. I heard a cock crow and I burst into tears. It was my birthday, the day when Grandfather Francesc used to take me by the hand before breakfast and stroll with me, just the two of us, first to Mass and to take communion in the cathedral, then to have churros and hot chocolate across the street from the church of Santa Catalina. I'd wear my best dress and my Sunday coat, and he'd have his frock coat and silk hat, along with his cape and walking stick. Afterward he'd take me to the old toy store on San Vicente street and let me choose whatever I wanted: a blond doll, a globe, a box of puppets.

On my last birthday before he died, he offered me his arm after we had our breakfast and, on our usual way to the toy store, he suddenly turned a different corner and stopped in front of a jeweler's. He opened the door for me.

“You're nearly a woman now, Natalia,” he said. “I think you're too grown up for toys.”

And he bought me a ring. The first piece of jewelery I ever owned. The only piece.

Now I had just turned twenty. My present was the pain I felt between my legs. And another ache, much more intense: that of knowing I had made a mistake. And that this error would last forever.

By the time I realized there was someone else in the courtyard it was too late. Whoever it was, he had to have heard me crying. I shrank into the rocking chair, cocooning myself in the sheet in case it was El Rojo.

But it was my father.

He hugged me clumsily. Then he helped me to my feet, dried my tears with his palm, sat on the rocking chair and took me in his arms, as he used to do when I was very little and he sang songs to help me sleep. And he, the man from Navarre who had never wanted to learn the Valencian language, started whispering into my ear.

Perleta, perleta meva, no ploris, perleta, no ploris.

Don't cry,
perleta meva
. My little pearl. Mamá's pet name for me.

I
met him at a milonga one Saturday in November, just past midnight. The streets lay dark and deserted under a snowfall that had lightly sugared the cars and roofs, creating the ghost-city illusion I knew so well from so many other nights in so many other towns in central Europe, when, leaving the theater or the concert hall, I would walk to my hotel to change my clothes, grab my dancing shoes and head back outside to look for the dance floor that would once more give meaning to my existence. My nocturnal existence, of which my colleagues knew nothing, thinking me unsociable and excessively conscientious about my responsibilities as first violin.

As I walked along I wondered, with half of my mind, how it was possible that a woman of my age could let herself be carried away like this by her passion for the tango, instead of retiring to her room to wake refreshed and relaxed for the concert in Salzburg the next day. But the other half of my mind simply kept my feet moving along the white-caked sidewalk, wondering, with a glimmer of
self-irony, what I expected to find in Landsberg at midnight on a frosty Saturday.

I arrived nearly out of breath, snow sprinkling my shoulders and my nose reddened, and passed through the door of the theater without stopping to think about it, afraid I'd find the same disappointment I had on other occasions: a poor, sad dance floor, a surplus of women leaning their elbows on the bar, pretending to be indifferent but staring daggers at the woman who had just entered without a partner to compete with them for the few unattached tangueros, men who took turns asking them to dance and made them feel for a few minutes the sweet delirium of surrender to a stranger who picks you up and carries you off and decides for you.

The heat came rushing to my face, and an unexpected wave of nausea washed over me in an instant, leaving me feeling shaky in its wake. There were only two women talking with each other at a small table. On the improvised dance floor staked out in the middle of the Stadttheater foyer for the milonga, seven or eight couples danced with eyes closed in the dimness that was scantly lit by a couple of dozen red candles, the kind people bring to cemeteries to celebrate All Saints' Day.

I took off my overcoat while my eyes adjusted to the darkness. I leaned over to tighten the buckles of my shoes and felt the familiar tickling sensation of someone staring at my movements. I looked up and there he was, on the stairs, like an image ripped from an old print: black trousers, waistcoat crossed by a silver watch chain,
white shirt, cravat, hat pulled jauntily low over a pair of intensely burning eyes.

In my tango dreams he must have looked just like this. If I had been a woman of the past century in some hovel in La Boca, this man would have driven me wild. The stories I had told myself on nights spent at different hotels were interwoven with the lyrics of the tangos I knew so well: songs of desertion and estrangement, of tragic, passionate love, of tobacco smoke and rum-drenched nights punctuated by the sweet, sorrowful, rending wail of the bandoneón. But I was a woman of the twenty-first century, and I knew the difference between life and dreams, between stories made up on my lonely nights and the small-bore reality of a snow-covered town. And in this reality, I couldn't be bought so cheap, with an intense stare, a tight waistcoat, a dancer's slender body. Even if he were sincere, perhaps he was only trying to live out his own nighttime dream, which would dissipate like night mist at daybreak before the mirror of some drab bedroom suite.

I felt tempted to walk over to him and try a joke about his vintage tanguero costume, but someone had just changed the music. Gardel's muddy voice was singing the opening strains of “Volver”, and when I saw him move in bold, fluid steps toward me, my impulse to laugh at him unexpectedly vanished. His eyes were green. They flashed between long, dark lashes. He did not speak, did not smile. He stood before me, tall and straight yet languid, like a leather whip, waiting.

I set aside my unlit cigarette on the table and stepped ahead of him on to the dance floor, sensing in my wake an indefinable aroma, a mixture of old-fashioned cologne and black tobacco. A warm sensation hit the back of my neck and spread down my icy spine.

I'd danced before with shady characters, old-school machos, the sort of professional
porteños
who exaggerate their Argentine accents to make you understand that you've found the real article, what you've been looking for your whole nocturnal life as a single woman who loves the tango. When I turned around to let him embrace me, I was ready to hear his hoarse, languid voice asking me what was my name, where had I appeared from, what was a nice woman like me doing in a place like this.

He didn't say a word. He put his hand on my back and the music wrapped around us like a silk handkerchief. For a moment I felt his breath against my cheek, and suddenly the hall and the couples around us and even the very floor we danced on ceased to exist. Never before had I felt such passion for the dance. All my experience, all my years of dancing tango, all the courses I had taken in Buenos Aires dissolved in his presence. I was simply a soul, dancing, dangling from a sorcerer's spell, flying and sinking, following his light like a nocturnal butterfly. In his arms my body grew supple and submissive, yielding to his desires before my mind consciously picked up on them. It was like being in another world, like being both alive and dead, and at the same time yearning that it would never end, that this state of grace might never be broken.

I don't know if I closed my eyes. I remember the texture of his waistcoat, the play of his shoulder muscles, the warmth of his hand against my back. I don't know if we danced for hours or minutes or centuries. I know that at some point he took off his hat and I saw his black hair glistening with brilliantine, his tanned young face with deep, vertical wrinkles like razor cuts down his cheeks, and his half-closed eyes watching me with such passion as I shall never encounter again.

We danced. Danced the music, danced the stories I had told myself, danced memories of a time gone by that I had never known. We danced nostalgia and grief and madness and the only words between us were the words of the songs we danced. What could we have said to one another? When two people speak without words, what needs to be said aloud? Should I have told him about my nomadic life, about the hotels and the contracts and the envy of my colleagues? Was he going to tell me about his nostalgia, about his underpaid work in some dance studio, about the European women who saw in him the fiery and temperamental Latin lover they had been searching for, someone who would take them briefly out of their comfortable routines until they grew frightened of what they were doing and dropped him?

A cheery, playful milonga had just started playing when a rose peddler came up to us, an African teenager with a dazzling smile. He waved over the peddler without thinking, then grimaced and returned his hand to my back. But the boy pulled out a rose and
offered it to us, happy to be selling one flower after so many tries, so many polite refusals, so many eyes avoiding his. He shook his head as if it pained him to disappoint the African vendor, but then, a second before the boy caught on, he quickly took off his watch and handed it over in exchange for the flower. The boy smiled again and gave him the flower without accepting the trade, then slapped him on the shoulder, uttered a few words I couldn't hear, and wandered away amongst the tables.

He then snapped off the stem and placed the flower in my hair, viewing me with pride, as if I were his and he were decking me out for a ceremony. I pulled my handkerchief from the cut in my dress, not knowing why, and held it to his lips. He kissed it with a smile, his first smile of the night, and folded it in his breast pocket like a magician's prop, fanning its lace edge against the black cloth of his coat.

Perhaps it lasted only a few seconds, but this scene is so deeply engraved in my memory that when I close my eyes I can see it like a film, all in black and white except for the red rose. Then a milonga drew us back in, and then another tango, and then some songs by Pugliese—“Yuyo verde”, “Farol”, “Recuerdo”, especially “Recuerdo”—that made him close his eyes and grit his teeth, as if he were recalling something painful and distant.

At some point I reluctantly noticed a general movement in the hall. I held on to him as if he would otherwise dissolve into air. Time was up. Couples started separating and saying their goodbyes
to acquaintances. Others blew out the candles and gathered up the C.D.s they had been playing all night long. The tinkling of the last drinks could be heard over the music, the conversations of couples making plans for Sunday afternoon, breakfast invitations. Minutes slipped away like pearls from a broken necklace. I didn't want it to end. After being in that other world, I'd have to return to reality now, a reality that I could tell would be nasty: a snowstorm that must have grown more intense, the cold outdoors, the words that would come, that would necessarily have to come, whether to say goodbye or to leave together for my hotel, to exchange addresses or to decide if we were going to his place or mine, where do you live, do you have a car, what do you want to do. When all I really wanted was to stay on here, to keep dancing, for the night never to end, not to become a casual lover, but for him always to be the stranger who helped me discover the passion for the tango that I had thought I already knew.