The Gods of Tango (11 page)

Cora’s mother wept in silence, face veiled, shoulders shaking. Dante stood beside her but did not move to offer comfort. He looked as though he were struggling to keep his face from breaking into many little pieces. In her mind’s eye Leda saw him walking up the hill, carrying his dead sister. And then, without warning, he looked up at Leda and their eyes locked. He knows, she thought with sudden horror. He knows why Cora went mad. He saw, perhaps not everything, but enough. And he hates himself for knowing, for failing. It is that way for me also, she thought at him. Dante took in her gaze and then looked away, at the far boundary of the cemetery, where centuries-old headstones stood impassive in the lucid wind.

That night, Leda lay in bed and tried to speak to her dead cousin. She started slowly. Cora. Cora are you there? My soul-cousin, my almost-sister, where are you? Are you cold? Are you hungry or does that end
after you die? I have not forgotten you,
cara, carissima
. I wish you hadn’t gone and I am shouting for you to come back but I also know that there is no place for you here—can you hear me?—for two years now there has been no place for you in Alazzano, and now, as of tonight, there is no place for me. I am going to fly away from here as soon as I find a way, and whatever trace of you is still here in this world is coming with me, Cora, I promise you this; stay with me in spirit and I’ll take you out of here, together we’ll find a small corner of the possible to call home. I should have done it long ago, should have listened when you asked me to run away, forgive me, Cora, please forgive, I didn’t understand, but you did, back then, you already understood everything, understood far too much, because of him. He turned our village into hell. He tore the veils of night and dirtied the soft insides of days and I am speaking of your father: because when you went crazy he was not surprised and when you went up to the hut on the hill I was forbidden to come see you, we were all forbidden and we all obeyed him, what traitors we all are, cowering at his every word, he was the only one allowed to visit you—the only one—your own father, Cora, your own father—and everybody pretending it is not that, not that, unbelieving, unseeing, afraid—

She howled these thoughts into the night in utmost silence.

The night responded with a barricade of stars.

Dawn was close, less than an hour away. Her first dawn in Buenos Aires. She still sat in her chair, fully dressed, the room’s darkness wrapped around her like a cape. She heard the first stirrings of feet shuffling across the patio to fetch water, she thought, or perhaps to empty chamber pots. Where did the jugs get filled, the pots emptied? So much geography she had yet to learn.

The night’s vigil had given her mind a terrible clarity, the bright sharpness of a knife. The facts unfurled in front of her without grace or mercy. Dante was dead. She was a widow, countless kilometers from
home. Home itself had not been home in a long time. She had not asked to become a widow, she had had no choice. But, she thought, if this is my fate, let me not surrender, let me learn to stand inside of this new skin.

She lit the lamp and let her eyes adjust to the light. Then she picked up the pen and began again.

Dear Mamma and Papà
,

Dante has died. I am sorry to have to give you this news. It was an accident at work, before I arrived, and it all happened quickly, there was no pain. I have a room of my own and good people around me, Napoletanos and Northerners also. They are very kind
.

There is no money to return right now
and even if there were, I don’t think I want to return
but today I am going to look for work.
I don’t want to go back to Italy
.

I don’t know whether I want to go back
.

Please don’t tell me to go b

There is no need to worry. I will write again soon
.

She stopped and stared at her own handwriting for a long time. She stared into the flame of the kerosene lamp. Then she wrote:

There is no such thing as going back. I can’t see the way forward. I can’t see my own face
.

The words scared her. She couldn’t imagine what they meant. She struck them through and scribbled over them until they had been swallowed by black ink. Then she took out a new page and copied the words that were not crossed out into a fresh letter, folded it, and placed it in an envelope she’d brought from Alazzano. Like a pigeon it would fly back with her message. She, not a pigeon, would remain.

She knew she should sleep but every muscle in her body felt tense. Outside her building lay the maze of the city, the maze of the impending
day. Dawn light came in, slowly, slowly, accompanied by the rasping sounds of a city that at no moment of day or night ever went completely quiet, and in that fresh weak light she tried to listen to this city full of wheeling destinies she had not yet begun to imagine. The city could kill her, or it could remake her: the distant chafe and hum of Buenos Aires on the edge of dawn just might be the sound of her life starting.

TRE

The Good People of New Babel

It took weeks to grow accustomed to the noise. The clatter and roar never abated, not even at night, not for an instant. She didn’t know how to hear herself inside so much sound. Perhaps silence had existed in this city once, long ago, before the immigrants had poured in with their thousands of jostling voices and hands itching for work, routing any last traces of quiet. In the conventillos—which earned their name, she’d learned, from their cramped spare nature, like the convents that house nuns and monks—there was always the clang of water tubs, the drag of crates across scuffed tiles, the bristling duet of a man fighting with his wife, the shout or squeal or hungry moan of children, mothers’ reproaches and lullabies and threats, the stampede of boys just back from hawking newspapers on trams, the tired laughter of men having a smoke at the day’s end, the gossip of women as they put laundry on the line, the chorus of a family bickering over dinner, scolding the older kids for taking too much bread. On the street, the din thickened with the constant beat of horse hoofs drawing carriages, vendors with handcarts shouting their wares—fresh bread as good as your mother’s! shoes! a pan that will drive your wife wild!—the cracks of whips and groans of wheels, women gossiping through windows with neighbors on their way to the market with their baskets, a respite from the strict sphere of home. And each of those homes, she knew, was as raucous inside as her own conventillo, whole families in each room,
bachelors sleeping limb to limb, snores penetrating the thin walls. In her village, she could walk all the way to the bakery and hear nothing but wind in the olive trees; on nights when the moon was dark, everything slept in Alazzano, even the dirt. Alazzano also never smelled like this, like sixty-three people sharing two broken toilets into whose pits they poured the contents of their chamber pots in a relentless stream. Nor had she known hunger in Alazzano. Here, although she was lucky to eat every day, more than once in fact, some child or another always hung in her doorway staring at her plate, and she couldn’t help giving morsels away.

When she went out, which was not often, she ventured no further than the butcher shop two blocks down, where she made her purchases in accordance with Francesca’s precise instructions. The butcher spoke perfect Italian with a Northern accent. He was polite, but he cut meat with a vehemence that made her nervous. She never lingered in the shop. On the way back home, however, she did linger to talk with the bread vendor who peddled his wares from a ramshackle handcart laden with loaves. His name was Alfonso Di Bacco. He wore a frayed sailor’s cap at a slant. He was wiry, with weathered skin, and he presided over his post as though keeping the only lighthouse on a rocky shore. The first time Leda approached him, she asked for three round loaves, and, even though Francesca had assured her that morning that the vendor was Italian and would understand her perfectly, she found herself holding up three fingers and pointing at the bread.

The man tipped his cap at Leda. “You honor me with your purchase. I cannot see for so much beauty!”

Leda handed him her pesos, scuffed coins donated by Dante’s fellow workers, and the old man stroked them with callused fingers.

“Francesca sent you?”

“Yes.”

“You must be Dante’s widow.”

Leda nodded. Her chest ached. How many people on this street knew her story?

“Terrible, what happened.” He clucked his tongue. “I knew Dante. He was a good man. He died for all of us.”

Her husband, the anarchist Jesus. She wished the man would hand her the loaves and set her free.

“Well? Go on and pick the ones you want!”

She examined the bread and selected three loaves. They were fresh, the crust just the right balance of crisp and smooth. “Does your wife bake these?”

“My daughter. My wife is dead too.”

“I’m sorry.” Embarrassed, she rushed to place the last loaf in her basket. The man reached out and grabbed her wrist.

“Signora,”
he said, “let me give you some advice.” He leaned in so close that she could smell his breath, sour milk and stale tobacco. “Be careful in this city. There are many, many men here, not all of them as kind as I am.” His mouth smiled but his eyes did not. “A girl like you, pretty and clean, will get many offers. But watch out. Not all onions are sweet once you cut them open.”

His gaze was too sharp, Leda could not hold it. She looked down at the brown, bare humps of bread.

“Do you understand me?”

“Yes,
signore
.”

“Well then! Welcome to Argentina. Here, take this loaf too, a gift from me—no, no, take it. For your new home.”

As she walked away she couldn’t help but see, in her mind’s eye, a man being sliced in half like an onion. Ribs and heart and clockwork parts exposed for all to see. The image made a laugh rise up inside her. She turned to look back at the bread vendor, who was watching her and who touched the brim of his sailor’s cap, smiling to bare the dark holes where his teeth had been.

On her second day in Buenos Aires, Leda began sewing with the women of the Di Camillo family. They made clothing for a store in a fashionable
neighborhood across town that sold shirts for gentlemen. Francesca insisted that Leda join them, and that no, don’t be ridiculous, it didn’t take work away from them, there was plenty of work to be done.

“Getting enough work isn’t the problem.” Francesca pursed her lips as though referring to an impossibly behaved child. “The problem is living off the pittance they give you in return.”

The three Di Camillo daughters set up their sewing station in the central courtyard six days a week, as soon as the men left for the factories or the port. The men were gone at dawn, all except Carlo, scarred Carlo, who slept during the day and worked at night (Francesca wouldn’t say what kind of work the old man did, but she said
work
as though she feared the word would dirty her mouth if it stayed too long, which, of course, made Leda follow Carlo with her gaze—though she studiously pretended not to do so—in those rare moments when he came out of the Camera di Scapolo during the day for a bit of water and then slunk back to his room without saying a thing). Once all the men except Carlo were gone, two sisters cleaned up breakfast (if there had been breakfast; on some days there was nothing, on better days a bit of yesterday’s bread or coffee with milk for the men, on good days enough for the women and children too) while the third sister brought out chairs, a slab of wood they placed over two cinder blocks to serve as a table, and burlap sacks filled with fabric, scissors, threads, and the patterns assigned by their employers, designed to help them cut fabric into shapes they’d assemble into shirts and trousers. They spread their supplies over the table and a couple of extra chairs. They set up in a corner that started in the shade and later bore the brutal lacerations of the sun, but there was no moving to follow the shade because the rest of the courtyard burst with running children, wailing babies, sharp-tongued mothers, the endless cooking and washing and piecemeal work of a horde of women and girls from the adjoining rooms. By day the courtyard hummed with women’s labor, overrun with it, a fleeting factory that disappeared at night when the men came home.

Within hours of working with the Di Camillo girls, Leda felt enshrouded
by their collective concentration. They did all the work by hand as they could not afford a sewing machine. Francesca reigned over her three daughters with prescience. She knew when a stitch was going awry, even if it occurred beyond her peripheral vision. She sensed when a pot in the kitchen needed a girl to run in and stir. She punished her daughters with a slap when they made a mistake or got distracted, but this was seldom necessary, as the girls were already thoroughly trained. They were allowed to talk as long as they kept up the pace of their work.

The oldest sister, Palmira, looked about Leda’s age, only she was much more beautiful, with a voluptuous figure, an easy laugh, and eyelashes long enough to whip you when she blinked. Silvana, the youngest, worked quietly to the side, and seemed shrouded in a world of her own, beyond the bounds of chatter. She was the one assigned to the scissors: whenever there was a need for more fabric to be cut, it was she who laid out the patterns, sliced exacting lines, and piled identically shaped pieces on the makeshift table. Diana, the middle girl, seemed about twelve. She was skinny and restless and hated sewing, as she readily proclaimed to Leda within the first hour of work.

“There’s nothing duller, is there?” she said, in a low enough voice for her mother not to hear. “Stitch after stitch, they’re all the same and by the end of the day your hands are so sore you want to peel your palms off. Honestly, I’d rather do anything else—laundry, cooking, run down to the market for bread.”