The Gods of Tango (29 page)

These talks, these moments, made Dante feel like part of something larger, a long tradition of wandering musicians who gave a little joy in exchange for a coin or bit of straw on which to sleep. She had heard, back in Alazzano, of minstrels through the ages who lived simply, close to the ground, eating on some days and starving on others, existing at the world’s edges and bringing music to the center with relentless hands. She felt part of their ancient nameless ranks, and this moved her. It also moved her to play outside, in the quieter lands outside the city. Green. For the first time since she’d come to the New World, Dante’s eyes could feast on boundless green again, in the low hills around them, the long flat fields, the groves of great old trees whose sumptuous branches dripped with tiny lights like wayward stars that shone all night as wealthy couples, on vacation at their families’ estates, danced and forgot themselves—and the stubborn mosquitoes, and the dark of the surrounding land—in the arms of tango. The women wore heavy ruffled dresses that buttoned primly all the way up to their necks, and elaborate hats that looked, to Dante, heavy enough to cause perpetual headaches. Their dancing was just as prim: their feet dutifully stepped back or to the side in response to the man’s moves, but rarely attempted a
gancho
, rarely slid a calf between a man’s legs—an unseemly act—and even when they did it was a quick and timid motion, obscured by floor-length skirts. Even so, the women looked thrilled to be dancing. It seemed to Dante that the dance floor gave them permission they didn’t otherwise have: permission to move, permission to touch a man in public, permission to breathe a slightly looser breath.

“Would you look at that.” Pedro whistled. “Ladies dancing tango. I never thought I’d see it with my own eyes.”

The rich were infinitely fascinating to Dante. They were good to play for in many ways. They gave money freely, tossed their bills into the musicians’ bowl without a second glance, as though it were not money
but old rags they were casting to the side. She’d never seen this kind of wealth before; in her village, her family, the Mazzoni family, had always been the richest, and her uncle Mateo had accepted his aristocratic status like a debt owed to him. But these people made Mateo Mazzoni look like a pompous country fool. Their clothing dazzled. Their posture spoke of majesty, or at least of a kind of virtuosic arrogance. They had books, they had paintings of themselves in cavernous houses, they had educations that grasped the heights of human thought, at least the men. Their gaze flicked across musicians on a stage as it might across a cadre of servants. Everything in order, yes, nothing more to care about or see. And yet, Dante would think: you don’t see us but you need us. You need this tango. That is why you came here, to this summer theater, in your gleaming carriage and polished shoes. You need the tango and we’re the ones who have it, so take this, bastards (line of melody spools out under her fingers) and take this too (staccato notes that mesh with the piano’s snarl) and this and this and if you think for an instant I don’t own you then it’s you who are the fool.

The men never looked twice at the musicians, but some of the ladies did. Young wives, solid matrons, virgin girls. When their husbands or fathers were distracted, they stared at the musicians with expressions of curiosity or longing or discomfort, as if the coarse men onstage were wolves on the loose, rarely seen in their own confined lives, keen to maul them if they weren’t careful, and as if they, the ladies in question, weren’t at all certain that careful was what they wanted to be.

The musicians of El Sexteto Torres were entirely proper with these ladies, except for a few long intermissions when Joaquín or Pedro or Amato disappeared at the same time as a lady who returned with a ribbon of mud at the hem, a single unclasped button at the throat. These moments were discussed among the musicians with the silent language of looks: amusement, envy, admiration, and, from Santiago, disapproval—one feminine complaint and they’d be out on their ears—mixed with an almost paternal resignation,
boys will be boys
. Most of the time, however,
the musicians saved their lust for the town brothels or, sometimes, an easy chambermaid, kitchen girl, or innkeeper’s daughter. Pedro, in particular, seemed to make a new girlfriend in every place without trying. Girls would follow him from room to room with young-fawn eyes. He neither encouraged them (as Joaquín did, for himself, with mixed success) nor turned them down. Sometimes they fell away, chastened by their fathers or Pedro’s tepid response or their own goal of chastity. At other times Pedro took them to a barn, a yard, a rooftop, and left town with a lock of hair, a tear-filled goodbye, a promise to wait for his return. He put these promises in his pocket like small change, quickly accepted and forgotten. Dante pretended to share the other men’s admiration. She kept her own ventures to the brothels, ramshackle sheds nailed to the backs of town bars where she cashed in her chips like all the others, so as not to draw attention to herself, but, once alone with a girl, did nothing more than stare at her sublime body—sometimes fully naked, sometimes breasts, bared thighs, a rump bent over with the skirt thrown up—as she raged inside with a thirst she could not slake.

Except with the tango. The music itself. It seemed to carry something of this land in it. It seemed a strange thought, absurd, that music could somehow contain the pulse or imprint of the earth where it began. It seemed like the kind of thought that got people carted to insane asylums. And yet, some nights, as she played on those torchlit summer stages, she felt the continent beneath her feet—the bedrock buried far under the wooden planks—moan in grief. Or perhaps it was pleasure. She didn’t know. But the moan was there; it wrapped itself around the backbone of Joaquín’s bass, those solid notes that formed a skeleton around which the melody could flex and breathe. The moan sailed along the underside of the bandoneón’s warm howl and echoed between the piano’s restless notes. It rose and fell around them, a ghost-sound in their midst, a disembodied echo, a throb of untold wounds and glimmers and urges and colors; the throb of América; the continental heartbeat, unleashed.

She kept this secret along with all the others.

She played for herself.

She played for no one.

She played for América.

El Sexteto Torres returned to Buenos Aires in March 1916 with a new fame along the edges of the tango world, which itself had continued to expand: new cabarets were opening, riding the wave of the dance’s growing popularity in the upper classes, competing to create the most lavish havens for the form.

Their first job back in the city was at La China’s. Santiago was in a buoyant mood that night; he’d found a cabaret that wanted to hire them, and that told him to come back two days later to sign a contract. The news sent sparks through all the men. A cabaret would mean the other side of town, more pay, a vaulting leap from the ill repute of dance halls into the polished glamour of the Argentinean elite.

At intermission, a young woman approached them in their cluster beside the stage. She wore a simple yellow dress, and her short black hair curled richly around her face. She was pretty in a plain way, easy to pass over in a crowd. You had to look close to see the delicacy of her features, the feline intensity of her eyes.

She didn’t say anything at first, simply stood there and watched them until their conversation ebbed to silence and they turned her way. Roosters, Dante thought, ready to pounce, waiting to see whose prize she’d be.

“You could use a singer,” the girl said.

“Is that right?” Joaquín said, cigarette barely moving between his lips.

“You should audition me.”

Amato laughed, then Pedro, then the rest of them.

“I mean it. I’m good. And I know a lot of tangos.”

The men went silent as they saw her seriousness. They stared at each other, then settled on Santiago.

“Women can’t sing tango,” Santiago said.

“Of course they can,” said the girl. “And they do. Look at Linda Thelma. Pepita Avellaneda. Andrée Vivianne.”

The men took a good look at her, slowly, toe to head. The girl did not blink. Behind her, two men were vying for the attentions of a dance hall girl who accepted a cigarette from one and a light from the other, her face a mask, just another night’s work.

“What’s your name?” Santiago said.

“Rosa.”

“Well, Rosa. You’re right, some women do sing tango. But they can’t sing the entire repertoire, because most lyrics are from the men’s point of view. Their loves, their troubles. So the songs wouldn’t make any sense. I’m sorry.”

The girl stood very still, her back straight. Dante marveled at her courage. If it had been her, standing there in a dress and lipstick, she might have turned and run the other way by now.

“You haven’t heard me yet,” Rosa said.

“We could find a private place for that,” Pedro said.

She glared at him.

“I’m sorry,” Santiago said, “but we’re not looking for a singer.”

Rosa hovered for a moment, then turned and walked away.

Dante watched her go. Delicious from behind.

The other men were watching the same thing.

“She had some nerve,” Pedro said.

“She might be good for other things,” said El Loro.

“She’s all right,” Joaquín drawled. “I’ve seen better.”

“We all know
that
.”

“Well, I’d do her.”

“Loro, you’d do anything that moves.”

The men laughed. El Loro blushed and pushed his hair away from his face. When it fell back over his eyes, he let it stay there.

“Boys,” said Santiago, “three more minutes. Last chance for a piss or a drink.”

Two days later, when Santiago went to sign the contract with the cabaret, the waiter who answered the service door didn’t let him in. The owner had signed on a rival orquesta, he said. Santiago protested that they’d promised him the job already, that his orquesta was better than those idiots and everybody knew it, until finally the waiter took pity on him and told him the truth: the owner had balked at the sound of the group’s name—not its formal name, El Sexteto Torres, but its underground, tip-of-the-tongue name, El Sexteto del Negro Torres. On hearing this, Santiago had stood for a moment in silence, then turned and walked back down the alley without another word.

He told his men about it that night, behind the curtain at La China’s, in a dull monotone they’d never heard from him before.

“Bastards,” said El Loro, and again Dante was struck by his indignation in the face of wrongdoing, the intensity of his voice.

“We’ll make them sorry,” Joaquín said. He was tuning his bass in the far corner, and didn’t take his eyes off the strings.

Amato slapped Santiago’s back in reassurance. “Something else will come through.”

“I don’t want ‘something,’ ” Santiago said. “We’re better than just ‘something.’ ”

Dante heard a catch in his voice that sounded like despair. Just a hint of it, but more than she could stand.

“We’re the best,” she said forcefully, “thanks to you. One day everyone will know it but you can’t give up hope.”

All the men stared at her, at him, Dante, the skinny kid who always watched conversations with eyes wide and mouth shut.

Santiago blinked.

“Well, Chico, listen to you,” El Loro said.

“So the kid’s got something to say,” Amato said.

Dante shrugged.

Santiago was still staring at Dante, with a mix of pride and surprise. His mood seemed lifted. A warmth spread through her solar plexus at the thought that she’d helped.

La China was glad to extend their contract. They were her pride, her special power, an emblematic offering in an ever-growing world of tango. Her hall had become what she’d most dreamed of it being: a fashionable underground destination for rich men who wanted to get away from their ladies, rather than take them out as they might do at a cabaret. Here at La China’s, they could dance the tango the way they most wanted to: not with the woman held at a modest arm’s length, but with her pulled in so close that their two torsos almost fused, so close that the scent of her hair could dominate his lungs and mind. They could slide into ganchos with abandon, not worrying about too much skirt to get lost in—the dancing girls at La China’s wore short dancing dresses of the kind upper-class ladies would rather die than wear—or the impropriety of tangling thighs. Best of all, with the right whispers into the girls’ ears, they could persuade their dance partners to continue the party off the dance floor, at a dingy hotel or in the back of their carriage while the driver sat quietly outside, holding the reins in the lamplit night.

Sometimes, the musicians struck up romances with these dancing girls, though it was clear that they were not serious girlfriends, let alone future wives. You seduced her with sweet words and songs and flowers and saw how much you could get out of her for free or, at least, for the indirect cost of flowers, dinner, little gifts here and there. El Loro had a romance with a girl called Raquel with a mare’s build and black hair you could drown in. Dante watched them together with hunger, though not with envy, exactly, as you can’t envy the impossible, and romance was impossible for her. Until, one day, El Loro told Dante he’d caught the eye of Raquel’s friend.

“Alma, you know the one, short? Great legs? Don’t tell me you didn’t know. She’s been trying to get your attention for days now.”

Dante stared at him, blankly.

Pedro laughed and wiped sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief, elbows at rest on his bandoneón. “If that girl were flirting with me like that, I’d have her in bed in seconds.”

“Oh, please,” said El Loro. He was rubbing resin on his bow and swatted it through the air in a mock reprimand.

“I could do it, you know.”

“Without your own girl finding out?”

“Why not?”

“Well anyway, forget about it. Alma doesn’t want you. She’s only got eyes for Dante.”

“No kidding?” Dante said.

“Dante,” Pedro said, “you can really be an idiot sometimes.”

“Hey, he can’t be too much of an idiot,” Amato cut in. “You’re not the one who’s about to bed that Alma.”