The Gods of Tango (31 page)

Dante spent three nights with Mamita—nights that whipped and lit her, dismantled what she thought she knew—before taking Alma out again. It was the following Sunday. They returned to the park. Just as the deep gold of afternoon light was starting to fade into dusk, Dante whispered in Alma’s ear, “I want to be alone with you.”

Alma leaned against Dante for a delicious instant, then lifted away, her profile calm as a queen’s. “Where?”

Dante had thought about this. Home was a minefield: thin walls, screaming children, La Strega’s all-seeing eyes, families bickering in
many languages and surely casting stares of disapproval at a young woman who disappeared behind a closed door with a man. A single glare from the conventillo women could make this delicate thread between her and Alma shrivel away to nothing. Not to mention the unromantic stench. And so, the night before, she’d done her research with El Loro, who was happy to instruct her in how to find a private place for, in his words, a fuck you earned with something other than pesos. “I know a place in San Telmo where we can get a room.”

Alma looked away, kept walking. To keep up appearances, she couldn’t say yes. But she hadn’t said no.

Dante grasped her arm and steered her in the direction of the tram. “Let’s go.”

The room was dingy and smelled of mold and vinegar. The sheets on the bed had been hastily arranged. But, on a slender end table, there stood a hopeful bowl of water with a single red rose floating on the surface. The rose’s petals were wilted and brown at the edges, but with luck Alma wouldn’t notice. She didn’t look at the bowl when she walked in. She stood in the center of the room, her back to Dante. A graceful creature from another plane, wings folded in wait.

The street murmured at them through the window. Dante closed it, trapping the twilight heat inside. Then she leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette.

“Strip,” she said.

At first, Alma did nothing. She didn’t move, didn’t look at Dante, didn’t say a word. The room crackled with silence. Dante blew slow, controlled smoke toward the ceiling. If the game could not be played according to her rules, then she couldn’t play at all. Perhaps this had been a mistake. There was still time to put an end to it, turn around, leave this place and walk this woman safely home.

And then Alma reached around her back and unzipped her dress.

The body, exposed, arms and thighs and waist a unified song.

Fabric pooled on the scuffed parquet, around high-heeled feet. Spine straight, gaze steady on the wall, a dancer’s focus.

Dante couldn’t breathe. Power and fear of her own power. Thrill. A shivering.

Where was her voice? She summoned it. “The bra too. Panties. Everything but the shoes.”

Is this my voice? Mine?

Alma complied.

The song of her, perfect.

Her body the song that commands the dance.

Dante, who was also Leda, put her cigarette out on the windowsill and came to Alma from behind. She pressed her fully clothed body against Alma’s naked one, careful to keep her groin at a distance to hide the lack of a hard sex (and she remembered how her cousin Dante had felt, back in Italy, under the fig tree, against her thigh, the press of someone else’s lust) and let her hands and mouth lead the way, to the nape of Alma’s neck, the arms, breasts, waist, and neither of them made a sound just as two tango dancers move without a word, shut up and let your body do the speaking, like this, this, this. Alma stood still, arms at her sides, encircled. Her stance relaxed slowly, butter lifted toward the sun.

Alma beneath her hands. Alma at her lips. Alma everywhere, inescapable, the scent of her, the warm flesh offering itself to her tongue, teeth, hunger. The crescendo of her breath. Staccato pain—or was it pleasure?—making her tense and soften in alternating waves. Dante led her to the bed and pushed her onto it. Kissed her hard. She was ready to fight if Alma tried to undress her, but Alma didn’t try: she lay with her eyes closed, willing to be taken, willing to ride the river on a current not her own.

Her legs opened without resistance. But when she felt Dante’s face at her sex, she let out a sharp sound and her body went tense. “What are you doing?”

“What I want to do.”

Alma opened her eyes and lifted her head to stare at Dante as though she’d suddenly grown two heads.

It’s not what you want?
Dante wanted to ask, but couldn’t, as it seemed out of keeping with what a man would do. Instead, she said, “Shhh, lie back, don’t be afraid.”

Alma stared at her a little longer, then lay back. She tasted brighter than Mamita, a hint of bitter orange mixed with copper and fresh-turned earth. She had a different shape, elongated, taut. Unlike Mamita, she gave no instructions or advice; there were no words to guide Dante, nothing but the raw and blinding moment.

She stayed there a long time. She could have stayed forever.

Twice, Alma tried to get up, but Dante pushed her back down. Finally Alma’s hips began to shake. She made sounds as though she were fighting something back—a jaguar, a shark, a sword of joy. Then she lost the fight, and as sensation stabbed her Dante held fast to Alma’s hips to keep her own mouth fused in place, as she’d learned to do with Mamita, accompanying the storm, swallowed by it, lit up in every centimeter of her body.

Once Alma had fallen back again, gilded with sweat, Dante lay down between her open legs, as men do; their heads were together, their hips were together, her hand was at Alma’s sex, two fingers now inside her and Alma’s eyes were closed, she was lost at sea, she was in no state to look down and discover—and even if she did, Dante miraculously had no fear because there was no room for fear in this moment, only a shocked sense of rightness, of being vital and alive and completely in her skin as she did to Alma what men do.

The pleasure of it, immense, enfolding. Woman all around her. Heat in the marrow of her bones. Washing her skin. Pouring through her arm into her hand where it rocked right in front of her own sex like an extension of it, rocked into Alma, over and over, a ragged rhythm, primal, unrehearsed.

Afterward, Alma turned to the wall and lay still for a long time.

Now the fear poured in. If she suspected. Then she would—it couldn’t be.

“Alma. Are you all right?”

Alma finally turned to face Dante. She was crying.

“I’m fine.”

“Did I hurt you?”

“No.”

“Did I—”

“Shut up, Dante.” Alma reached out and stroked Dante’s cheek. “Just promise me we can do that again.”

“I promise.”

“Your skin. It’s so soft, it seems impossible.”

Dante said nothing.

“So much about you seems impossible.”

“What do you mean?”

“I have to go.” Alma rose and reached for her clothes on the floor. “I’ll be late for work. And so will you.”

Dante walked to work that night on feet that seemed to levitate, stepping on pure air. Was this love? Was this what it felt like? A sweet hollowness deep inside you, desperate to be filled. A joy that bites and slashes. The urge to be with her again, right now, immediately, doing it and doing it and to hell with the rest of the world.

Backstage at La China’s, she found the musicians clustered expectantly around Santiago, who surveyed them like a captain assessing his crew. He nodded at Dante. “There you are.”

“Sorry I’m l——”

“Never mind that,” Santiago said. “I wanted us all to be here for the news. This is our last night here at La China’s.”

Dante was flanked by El Loro and Pedro, and felt them tense.

“We’ve broken through. We’ve got an engagement at Leteo.”

“Leteo?” El Loro asked.

“It’s a cabaret, you idiot,” Amato said congenially.

“One of the finest,” Santiago said.

“Where is it?” asked Joaquín.

“Downtown. Right on Calle Corrientes.”

The men stared at each other.

Here it is, thought Dante. They were about to cross a border into another world. A world where men like her—or any of the men she knew here—didn’t go, didn’t belong. How quickly life could dwarf you. How vast the world. She felt terror, coupled with a rush of excitement and a sense of possibility.

“Do you understand what this means?” Santiago went on. “We’re rising to the top. We’re going to be a real orchestra, making real money. Tuxedos and everything.”

“Tuxedos!” said El Loro, pushing stray fronds of hair from his face.

“You’d better believe it.”

Dante tried to imagine herself in a tuxedo. A new costume of maleness. Would it be easier or harder than what she now wore?

“Leteo,” Amato said, slowly, as if savoring the sound.

The other men were silent for a moment, as the weight of that word hung between them. They stood close in their curtained backstage corner, close enough to breathe each other’s breaths.

“It’s run by a certain Señor Carrasco and his sister,” Santiago said.

“What?” Joaquín said. “His
sister
?”

“I know it’s strange. She’s a widow. Rumor has it they used her money to open the place. But he’s the owner, of course.”

This seemed to put Joaquín slightly more at ease.

“They just opened six months ago, and I met with Señor Carrasco himself today. He’s ambitious. He wants to stake out new ground. We’re going to help him do that.” Santiago looked around at each of his musicians, one by one. “There are to be no mistakes. Make a mistake and get your balls cut off.”

Pedro and El Loro laughed.

“And you’ll be fired from the orquesta.”

No more laughter.

“Anyone who doesn’t like it can leave right now. Understood?”

All the men nodded.

“Anyone leaving?”

The men shook their heads.

“We have to be perfect,” Santiago said. “Better than perfect. We have to play so beautifully they forget their own mothers, forget their own names.”

“We can do that,” Amato said.

“Of course we can,” said El Loro, flashing his bright boyish grin.

The men voiced their agreement, and Leda loved them, every single one of them, for their obsession, for the tribe they’d created, a silent pact between the mortal souls of men. For just a moment, standing behind the flimsy curtain at La China’s surrounded by musicians, her body still glowing with sex, she had the most incredible feeling, one she wouldn’t have thought possible: the world felt hers.

SEI

A Cup of the River of Forgetting

Never, in the history of the world, had there been another place like Cabaret Leteo. Dante was sure of it. When she stepped through its doors, the city fell away: all the noise and bluster of Buenos Aires disappeared, not only from her senses, but from her thoughts and, almost, from her memory, replaced by the lavish atmosphere of a contained world. She and her fellow musicians came in through the service entrance, which led to a vast kitchen with enough pans and knives and cooks to set a banquet fit for the gods. And as they quickly wove their way past crates of high-piled vegetables and great boiling pots to reach the white double doors that led to the great hall, Dante thought of them, the gods, the old ones Cora used to tell stories about—one born from her father’s forehead, another from the ocean foam, others on a hidden island shrouded by their mother’s exile—and she imagined them gathering at the front entrance of this tango cabaret, ravenous, itching for a dance. The front entrance seemed designed to entice them. Dante had seen it: the tall ornate double doors opened into a foyer of mirrors and polished brass. Low light from the crystal chandelier played and wept perpetually, a subtle song of flame and shadow. Plush red carpet covered the floors. The coat check was flanked by crystal vases, each the size of a large dog, their long-stemmed flowers watching the room like a many-headed beast.

Whether one entered through the front doors or the back, all roads led to the great hall. It was circular, with ceilings so high they evoked
a sense of sky, and a stage raised a full meter from the ground. A wide clear space opened below the stage, reserved for dancing and ringed with round tables sheathed in white linen. White napkins fanned artfully in wineglasses. At the height of business hours, waiters glided unobtrusively from table to table, elegant in their black and white uniforms, discreetly taking orders and disappearing through the double doors to the kitchen.

Paintings of nymphs and satyrs hung along the walls, and naked statues of them stood watch as well, scattered across the room, towering between tables, so that patrons could enjoy their wine or
bœuf au vin
almost within reach of bare breasts. Flocks of multicolored birds—toucans, starlings, ravens, thrushes, jacamars—hovered close to the high ceiling, frozen in mid-flight, the strings that suspended them invisible to the mere mortals below. But the decoration that most stole Dante’s gaze was a mirror right across from the stage. It was four meters long and painted with a giant peacock, its blue and livid green feathers fanned in a great half circle that gleamed, majestic, flecked and rimmed with gold. Whenever Dante glanced in the mirror’s direction, she glimpsed shards of herself caught between the long bright feathers.

She learned to walk quickly through the slice of the great hall that led from the kitchen to the door backstage. The hall scared her; it was too sumptuous; it was made for old gods and rich men, not for her. She held her breath as she walked, exhaling only when she’d arrived in the musicians’ dressing room and closed the door behind her. The air was more familiar there: cigarette smoke and sweat and the sticky thickness of men in an unventilated space. It had none of the polish of the great hall or the foyer, but to the musicians, after the curtained corner they’d crammed into at La China’s, it seemed the height of luxury. There were two velour sofas, only marginally stained. The parquet flooring was not missing a single piece. The wallpaper bore a red, yellow, and orange fleur-de-lis pattern, which, along with the fact that there were no windows, gave the room a dim and cave-like feeling, as though they
were not so much musicians as lions gathered in their lair, as Pedro said one night, joking, and that’s what they called it from then on, the Lair. They met there six nights a week, just before midnight, and opened their instrument cases as though undressing beautiful ladies. They tuned their instruments and discussed the lineup of songs or simply spoke to each other without speaking, as men do, as musicians do, itching with silent excitement and the stiff fit of their borrowed tuxedos. They were not gentlemen but they would be as elegant as if they were; they’d put the real gentlemen in the audience to shame. Look at us as we step out onto the stage, as we bow to your polite applause; see how immaculate our suits are, how painstakingly polished our shoes; you may laugh at us, we see the condescending smiles, but we are not down there with you in the hall where you mock us, we are here in a separate realm entirely, a realm we call the stage, and which is neither palace nor tenement, neither your space nor that of the poor; it is our space, the space of music, and music is a thing which we will make for you out of thin air and send pouring out to your fine tables where your ears and minds and blood will be invaded by our sound.