The Gods of Tango (19 page)

“What!” one man said, exposing a mouth full of masticated pasta. “No wine for the altar boy?”

“No blood of Christ?”

“Come on, have a little.”

She complied. The wine was sharp, with a hint of vinegar. The men toasted with her, and that was when she realized that she’d been welcomed into their room.

When the time came for sleep, she found a space in the middle of the floor and laid her potato sack out as a pillow. The men—there were eight bachelors in all—took turns pissing into a chamber pot and rinsing their faces at the washstand. They undressed in front of each other, keeping their gazes to themselves, but still, she could not join them, nothing for it, she’d have to sleep in her clothes. Dante slipped out and stood in line at the single toilet with a closed door. At least there was this, a lucky step up in the world, a private place to shit. Her bladder ached so much she had to will herself not to shift from one foot to the other. She was afraid the other people in line might hear her and wonder why she hadn’t used the chamber pot like all the other men, but fortunately the clatter and voices from the nearby kitchen drowned out the sound. Then, finally, she lay down to sleep on the strip of floor for which she’d pay sixteen pesos a month, and found herself wide awake. She’d slept all day, she was off-kilter; and also, the air rippled with breaths and snores and her own terror that one of them might suspect her lie and come over to feel and test the shape of her body, or simply try to steal the violin out of her arms or the pesos from her pockets, in which case she could lose everything, cash, instrument, her false manhood. It took her hours to fall asleep, and, in the meantime, to stave off thoughts of the future, she ran through all the tangos she knew, letting their rhythms swell and ebb through her body.

The next day, when the men went to work and the women set about chores she didn’t dare to offer help with, Dante embarked on a long walk around the neighborhood. San Telmo, it was called. It was different
from La Boca in some ways. It was further from the port, and it had none of the clapboard and sheet metal buildings painted in many different colors. All the buildings were tall old mansions that the rich had abandoned to the foreign hordes decades ago, during a legendary bout of yellow fever. Stately houses now crowded with the families of the poor. Bakers and grocers with their wares in wood crates on the sidewalk, and cafés shut down to sleep for the day. And there was a large plaza called Dorrego at the center of the neighborhood, where men came to drink and play dice in the evenings. And yet, for all the differences, the neighborhood was also similar to La Boca in many ways. There was the confluence of languages, overlapping with each other like streams collapsing into the ocean. Vendors trolled the street with their carts, selling bread fresh from their conventillo kitchens or old boots gathered from God knows where. So many ways of scraping out survival in the New World. So much long hard scraping to be done. She walked broad streets and damp alleys. The buildings cast full-bodied shadows across the cobbles, one after another, street after stony street. The green foliage and brown earth of Alazzano were so far away it almost seemed like a dream. Or maybe that had been the waking time and
this
was the dream, this walking in Dante’s clothes, answering to Dante’s name, in a city so large and crowded it could almost encapsulate a world.

She’d landed with good people. But she could not stay. She realized this two days later, when a bathtub appeared in the bachelors’ room and the men began taking turns stripping and stepping calf-deep into water to scrub off the week’s detritus and indignities. It was everybody’s room and men walked in and out during the baths, to fetch something from their small stashes of possessions, or to prepare for their turn.

“Altar Boy,” said Alfredo, the oldest bachelor, who’d been the first to bathe. “You go next.”

“No, thanks,” she said. She was sitting in the courtyard, rolling her second cigarette in a row. She pictured herself shrinking and disappearing among the shredded leaves, rising to the sky as smoke.

“You may as well take it when it’s offered,” said Emilio, a wiry young man who thrashed in his sleep. “Next week you’ll get stuck with the last bath, when you can’t see through the water.”

The other men laughed. Leda smiled briefly, but her chest constricted as if the sheet around it were a tightening fist. She could not go in there, could not take a turn, and could not tell them why.

“I’m going out,” she said, and she grasped her violin and fled to the street.

She wandered for the next few hours, thinking fiercely. She was furious at herself for not having figured out this dilemma before. Each moment demanded so much attention, all her senses on alert, that she was not preparing for the future. She turned a corner. It was Saturday evening and the streets teemed and hummed. She had to prepare for the future. She could never bathe with the bachelors. But she could not live without bathing, or without changing her clothes, which she had not done for three days. She’d tried to rinse her armpits at the washbasin without removing her shirt, but it wasn’t the same, and made her look eccentric, if not outright crazy. Refusing to share the bathtub had made it even worse.

She had no choice but to look for a private place to live, a small miracle for an immigrant.

She began her search immediately. She asked women at windows, old men in doorways drinking
mate
, shopkeepers with dubious smiles. It was such a strange request, a private room, that people looked at her with amazement, no doubt imagining perverse reasons a young man would have to seek such extreme conditions.

It was a grocer who gave her the clue she was searching for.

“Go to La Strega,” he said. “She lives around that corner, there, three doors down. The blue door with seven silver nails hammered in beside the doorbell. Don’t ask me what the nails are for. They’ve just always been there, and nobody removes them, even though they have nothing to hold up. La Strega talks to everyone and everyone talks to her. If the place you’re looking for exists, she’s the one who’ll know.”

Leda thanked him and walked to the corner, thinking, La Strega! The Witch! A name that conjured up a picture of a hunched woman with a withered face and eels slithering through her hair. How did anyone come to live with a name like that?

But La Strega turned out to be a smiling woman, tall and plump and almost beautiful, old enough to have children her own height but young enough to turn heads on the street. She looked Dante up and down, briskly, then ushered her into the foyer of the conventillo, from which Leda saw a cluster of women and girls taking down linens, men smoking, and small children playing at battle with sticks for swords.

“So. You’re looking for what?”

“A private room.”

“Hmmm!”

“It can be small. I don’t need much. Just a door and walls.”

“We don’t have anything.”

“I’ll pay eighteen pesos a month.”

La Strega looked shocked. She started to say something, then shut her mouth, gathered herself. “Well. Let’s see. You see those stairs?” She gestured across the courtyard, where a narrow flight of stairs rose over the bathroom to the crumbling balcony above. “That door at the top? That’s a room, a closet, really. We use it to store things, but I suppose we could clear it out for you.”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“I want the room.”

“Wait a minute. You haven’t even seen it.”

“That’s fine.”

“It’s tiny. Just enough space to lie down and sleep.”

“I don’t need much.”

“And the roaches. It’s right over the kitchen. Look, young man, I just want to be honest about everything.”

“That door up there, it closes?”

“Yes, of course.”

“That’s all I need,” said Leda.

“Why does it matter so much to you?”

“Because I’m a musician.” Strange, bold, to clasp that label to herself.

“I can see that,” La Strega said, gesturing toward the violin case.

“So I’d like to practice. If I can close a door then I can play without disturbing my good neighbors.”

“You can play in the patio, you know. You don’t need a private room to do that.”

La Strega tightened her lips and took a good look at Leda, who cringed with panic. What a stupid thing to say. How many musicians were there in San Telmo who practiced in the communal patios of their conventillos, surrounded by relatives and strangers? She reached around in her mind for a better lie, but came up dry.

“You have a secret, don’t you?”

The panic grew. She had nowhere to run.

“Well, listen.” La Strega bent closer. She smelled like bread and orange rinds. “I don’t care. God knows that in this city we all do strange things to survive.”

That night, Leda brought her sack of belongings from the other conventillo—the men’s disappointment at her departure surprised her—and moved into her room. The place was as tiny as La Strega had said it would be—not a room at all, but a closet—and it stank of mold and rot. There was no bed, just a pallet on the floor, and no window either. The only indication of day or night came from a strip of light under the door. But it was hers. His. Was it for Leda or for Dante? For the woman under her clothes or for the man she was now dreaming into being? It didn’t matter. That first night she woke up gasping for air and had to walk out onto the small landing that overlooked the central patio below. The patio was empty and the doors were closed; her neighbors were all asleep. She’d met only a few of them, more tomorrow. She smoked a cigarette, which had quickly become a delectable act, and gazed down at the black and white floor tiles, up at the tentative stars. She thought
about stars, about distance, about closed doors and open hands, as her cigarette smoke rose into the night sky and disappeared.

When she went back inside, she slept deeply, alone with the roaches and her violin.

Babel. Now she truly lived in Babel. This conventillo had three rooms bursting with Calabrese, relatives of La Strega’s husband; a French family in another room; a quiet childless couple from Spain that piled in with the Calabrese; a network of Lebanese brothers and uncles and wives and children whose exact relationships took weeks for Leda to decipher; and an assortment of single men who spoke to each other in a Spanish inflected with various accents.

Their home was called La Rete. It was the first conventillo that Leda had known to possess a name, and this gave it a distinctive feeling, as though it were its own miniature city inside of the larger one. The atmosphere at La Rete was as friendly as it was chaotic, the courtyard a realm of constant washing, sewing, folding, peeling, fighting, smoking, whittling, chatting, playing, shouting, laughing, whispering as if a lowered voice could pull a magic curtain of privacy around you, which, thanks to the tacit code of conventillo life, it sometimes did. When she felt lonely, Dante sat with La Strega as she scrubbed linens or pots in the courtyard, listening to her stories about Scylla, the small fishing village on the Calabrian coast where she was born, and that, for all its poverty, had made its mark on history as the place where Odysseus had crashed all but one of his ships. According to La Strega’s version, that great Greek warrior had been navigating through the narrow strait between the crags of Scylla and the island of Sicily when a terrible monster—some said a witch—attacked them and caused the ships to break apart and men to break their skulls against the rocks. “Homer didn’t know this,” La Strega said, “but two of those sailors were skewered underwater on a single spear. Their skeletons remained for a millennium.” And then she smiled
as though describing the sweetest blossoms of her homeland. “As for the Sea-Witch, who lived up on the crags and beat Odysseus, I’ve never seen her, but they say she never died. We used to leave out figs with bread and honey to appease her.”

Dante kept her eyes on La Strega’s washing tub. She worked with great efficiency, her hands as skilled as Mamma’s or her own. It was difficult to sit and watch a woman work without joining in, wringing out blankets, washing shirts. Her hands were unaccustomed to such stillness. She smoked cigarettes to keep them occupied. Even this, the listening to La Strega’s stories, was dangerously un-male of her. But it delighted La Strega to have a new audience. Her mind was bright with bleeding sailors, broken ships, honeyed offerings.

La Strega’s name had clung to her ever since she first opened her mouth in Buenos Aires and told the founding tale of her village. At first she didn’t like being named for the witch, but then she got used to it, partly because it linked her to Scylla, and partly because she had no other choice: in Argentina, nicknames stuck to people with such strength that their original names often went forgotten. She missed Scylla so much, she told Dante, that the pain of it was physical.

“What do you miss?” asked Dante.

Everything, La Strega told her. The high cliffs whipped smooth by the Mediterranean. The briny smell of the wind. The old stone houses on their narrow streets overlooking the water, perched above it as if constantly collapsing into the sea. The baskets of fish the men brought home on good days, sleek, silvery, eyes glazed from the sight of Death. Above all, the nets that hung everywhere—on walls, across doorways, draped over tables to dry in the sun. La Strega had learned to mend nets the same year she learned to walk. All the girls did. Not only that: in Scylla, all the babies were born into a net—the older women spread it on the ground so that the new mother could lie or stand or squat over it until the baby came. Everybody knew, in Scylla, that it was bad luck to give birth without a net under the woman as she opened. La Strega suspected, though she couldn’t prove, that the custom had originated as a kind of
protection against the Sea-Witch and her great skill at decimating lives. When she became pregnant in Buenos Aires, she was terrified to give birth without a net, and tried desperately to find or make one, but she and her husband couldn’t afford the rope, so she’d had to give birth onto a naked tile floor, not once but four times. To make up for this tragedy, she’d named their home La Rete. The Net. Her best attempt to battle the bottomless threat of the evil eye.