The Gods of Tango (36 page)

“If we find the right man,” Santiago told his musicians, back in the Lair, “we can make this work. Who knows, it might even be a great way for us to expand.”

“These rich people,” El Loro said as he rubbed resin along the length of his bow. He always treated his instrument with tenderness. He must be a good lover, Dante thought, though perhaps a little tentative. “They don’t have the guts to dance, and now they want to change our music to suit them.”

“I don’t think it’s just them,” said Pedro. His hair had grown even shaggier and gave him a wild look. “There have always been lyrics.”

“That Carlitos.” Amato shook his head. “He deserves the good luck. Smart bastard.”

Joaquín lit his cigarette. It hung from his mouth like a dead bird. “The real question is, how do we find the right man?”

“Don Carrasco will help us,” Santiago said. “He’s arranging auditions. We can take our pick.”

Four days later, at seven in the evening, long before the first set of the night, the musicians gathered at Leteo to hold auditions. They sat in the front row of tables by the stage.

A waiter brought them a full bottle of grappa and six glasses, poured for them, and stood by as they raised their glasses in a toast.

“Here’s to the right man,” said Santiago.

“The right man,” the men echoed.

The grappa burned Dante’s throat as it went down. A delicious burn, how had she ever lived without it? She felt an undercurrent of nervous excitement between the men, about who this Right Man was, how he might change the band. Every member of the group deeply affected the whole. Their leap from quartet to sextet had transformed them, thickened the delicate webbing of their bonds, put pressure on their tribe and ultimately strengthened it. This new change, a singer, could enrich them or pull them apart.

The waiter cleared his throat. “Don Carrasco wishes to know whether you’re ready to receive the candidates.”

“Send them in.”

Amato went up to the stage and sat at the piano, ready to accompany songs. The singers entered. There were more of them than Dante had imagined; they kept coming and coming; twenty of them, thirty, forty, in a muted stampede. The band members exchanged glances of surprise,
so many!

“Line up against the wall, please,” Santiago said.

They did so, jostling for proximity to the stage, each out for himself, young men with jet-black hair slicked back in tidy place, old men whose
bellies strained at their tuxedos, poor men torturing their smiles to hide their missing teeth, men with money or at least enough of it to polish up their shoes and add a flash of gold to their cuffs, men lit up with ambition, men struggling to hide their desperation, men fidgeting with nervousness, men who moved as if they did the air a favor. They stared in amazement or hunger at the hall, its opulence, its marble, its brass, its birds hanging from the ceiling, frozen in a travesty of flight.

Dante’s fellow musicians, she realized, were looking at the back of the line, where an applicant had been pushed by the throng of singers.

It was a woman.

She wore a man’s suit and a dark bowler hat. She held a briefcase at her side. Her breasts and hips were obvious under her clothes; she was much too curvy to ever convince the world she was a man. And she was making no attempt to do so. The suit seemed tailored to her round hips. She wore bold red lipstick and black kohl around her eyes. A woman’s face under the arrogant slant of a man’s hat. A woman’s shoulders squared like a man’s, legs farther apart than a woman should ever stand. Dante stared at the apparition, her human echo, her worst nightmare—her face was pretty in a frank, pragmatic way, and she knew that face, didn’t she, think, think, Dante, search your mind—and then she knew: it was Rosa. The woman who’d approached them at La China’s and asked to sing. What was she doing here? How dare she? She had no right to do this, a young upstart from the dance halls, toying with the border that Dante had risked everything to cross, flaunting it for all to see, anyone could look at her and get to thinking about men and women and the lines between them and drop the blinders from their eyes and then how long would it be before they looked at Dante and saw what she really was?

She glanced furtively at her fellow musicians. Their eyes were on Rosa. They spoke to each other in whispers.

“My God.”

“Is that really a woman?”

“You can’t call
that
a woman.”

“What, then?”

“I don’t know. A thing.”

“Who is she?”

“What does she think she’s doing?”

“She looks familiar …”

“Never seen her before.”

“She must be crazy.”

“It’s disgusting.”

“It’s a joke.”

“Kick her out, Negro.”

“Oh, come on. Let her embarrass herself.”

“It’ll be distracting.”

“It’ll be fun.”

“She can’t be here. She’s got to go.”

“No, wait.” Santiago raised his hand, a gesture which never failed to part the seas of chatter and open space for him to speak. “I want to hear her.”

The other musicians’ looks ranged from surprised to amused to annoyed, but no one argued. Dante wished that someone had. She couldn’t relax in that woman’s presence, couldn’t let the knot at the pit of her stomach untie.

It took three hours to get through all the applicants. Santiago gave them all a chance to sing, no matter how scuffed their shoes or gray their skin. A lesser man, Dante thought, would have sent the most pathetic ones away on sight, as they’d clearly never be presentable to the audience at Leteo, but under Santiago’s direction everybody had their few minutes onstage. Some were mediocre; many were good; a few were excellent. After a while they bled together in her memory. Halfway through, as one exited, shoulders hunched in the sense of his defeat, Dante saw that Don Carrasco and Carmen were sitting at the very back of the hall, watching. How long had they been there? Carmen did not meet her eyes, but still, when Dante turned back to the stage she felt Carmen’s presence as a prickle at the nape of her neck.

Finally it was Rosa’s turn, the last one. She rose to the stage in absolute
silence. The musicians did not clink their glasses or shuffle their feet or twitch an eyelid.

“Name?” called Santiago.

“Rosa Vidal.”

“Song?”

“ ‘El Terrible.’ ”

Next to Dante, Pedro let out a sharp sound of disbelief. And Dante herself was shocked at the chosen song, a bold celebration of male bravado—how could a woman ever sing it?

Amato, onstage at the piano to accompany the singers, froze with his fingers over the keys. He looked at Santiago for explanation or reprieve. Santiago only nodded, slowly,
go on, play
.

Rosa opened her mouth, and her voice made the world fall away. It was full-bodied and potent, large enough to fill the stage, the cabaret, the entire city. She seemed to grow twice as tall as she sang, and your ears were made to hear her, your eyes were made to watch her strut and flash, hands hooked loosely in her pockets, chest puffed out because she was, she told us, a man who knew what he liked, a man who went where he pleased, a lover of women, all women,
criolla
women, the best dancer and best knife man at any party, lover of guitars and food and may the noble audience listening now forgive him, he must be frank, he must be true, he must tell them who he really was, El Terrible. Rosa caressed every word on its way out. She was pure vitality. She was the compadrito from the brothels, from the cafés, rebellious, good-natured in his obscenity, unabashed. She swaggered like a man and sounded like a woman and the combination caused a clash inside that could wake the depths of a person, monstrous depths. She leaned into the suggestiveness of each line, eyeing her audience from below the slanted rim of her hat, winking at her audience as if to encourage them to dirty up the meaning of her words, as if to rope them right into her story. El Loro laughed despite himself, turned it into a cough. Dante could not breathe. She wanted this woman to evaporate. She wanted her to become the world. She clutched the table in front of her, groping for stability.

Finally, Rosa finished. Silence returned to the hall. She stood, expectantly, small again, dwarfed by the heavy velvet curtains.

“Thank you,” Santiago said. “That’s all.”

Rosa walked off the stage, picked up her briefcase, and left. Santiago motioned for the musicians to follow him to the backstage Lair.

“What was that!” said Pedro, flinging himself onto the sofa.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Amato.

The men settled themselves on the sofas and chairs, poured whiskey, lit cigarettes.

“Really, Negro,” said Joaquín, “I can’t believe you let her sing.”

“Oh, come on,” said El Loro. “It was entertaining. You have to admit.”

“And the song? ‘El Terrible’?”

“She must have given Don Carrasco a heart attack!”

They all laughed. Dante laughed with them.

“She wasn’t the only one who embarrassed herself.”

“True!”

“Some of those men!”

“Thank God for the good ones.”

“I liked the one who sang ‘Brisas Camperas’—what was his name?”

“He was good. But not as good as the compadre near the beginning, you know, the Russian.”

“He wasn’t Russian.”

“How do you know?”

“His name wasn’t Russian—what was it, Pérez?”

“Well, he looked Russian to me.”

They chain-smoked, refilled their glasses, and kept talking, comparing and contrasting the different candidates, the debate soon locking into the Russian versus the Brisas Man. They were both excellent singers; the Russian had a majestic quality to him, while the Brisas Man was a natural charmer sure to win over the ladies. The Russian had the best voice. Not true. The Brisas Man was agile in his phrasing. The Russian seemed more trustworthy. The Brisas Man seemed like more fun to have around.
Dante argued for the Russian, though she could easily see both sides and would be happy either way.

Finally, they noticed, as if of a single mind, that Santiago had not yet said a word. He sat in his armchair, listening, bandoneón on his lap, fingers roving the keys without pressing down as if holding a quiet conversation with his instrument. They turned to him and posed the question without opening their mouths,
and you?

Santiago looked at them through the gauze of cigarette smoke. “I want the girl.”

“The girl!” El Loro looked stupefied.

Joaquín leaned forward in his chair and spread his hands open. They were enormous, his hands, long-fingered, muscular, disproportionate on such a lanky man. “You can’t be serious.”

“She’s good,” Santiago said.

“But she doesn’t have balls,” said Joaquín, and the other men laughed.

“Yes,” Santiago said, “she does.”

Silence. Dante was afraid to look at Santiago, afraid her mask might slip.

“We’ll be the laughingstock of the tango world,” said Pedro.

“Maybe we will, maybe we won’t.” Santiago’s fingers still flew across the keys, more quickly now, chasing a tune with an urgent drive. “But we’ll be doing something new. That’s good for tango, and good for the cabaret.”

“Or disastrous,” Joaquín said.

“Maybe.”

“They’ll never allow it.”

“Maybe not. But I’ll tell them I want the girl.”

“With all due respect,” Joaquín said, “it’s a mistake.”

“I say it’s not,” Santiago said.

“And if we vote?” Joaquín pressed.

Santiago’s fingers went still. “There’s no voting here. This is my orquesta. Anyone who doesn’t like it can go.”

No one moved. The air itself seemed to prickle.

“Negro,” said Pedro, “you’d trade us for some girl?”

“I’m asking you to try something different.”

“Different,” Joaquín said, “isn’t always good.”

Santiago lowered his bandoneón into its case and said, in a measured tone, “That’s what people said when I hired you to play bass.”

Joaquín looked both astonished and furious. He opened his mouth as if to protest, but nothing came out.

Santiago shut his instrument case with a crisp click.

“Is this even tango anymore?” Pedro muttered.

“What do you know,” Santiago said, “about what the tango is?” Pedro flinched as though he’d been slapped.

“Anybody else have a grievance?” Santiago said.

Silence.

“I’m with you,” Amato finally said. “She’s one hell of a singer.”

“I’m with you too,” El Loro blurted, looking amazed at himself.

Pedro glared at El Loro, who raised his arms in a gesture of helplessness.

Dante felt her tongue cut in two: half of it wanted to cheer for Santiago and for the arrival of this strange talented girl, but the other half burned to defame her, crush her, push her out of the world to keep it safe.

“Good,” Santiago said.

And he was gone.

Santiago braced himself for battle as he crossed the great hall. If it had been that hard to persuade his musicians—they were good men, but they didn’t risk, they didn’t try to look past the damn patch of ground in front of them to the horizon let alone beyond it—it would surely be near impossible to persuade Don Carrasco. He took the stairs slowly, counting them as a trick to calm his mind.

But Don Carrasco’s office door was closed. The headwaiter stood beside it like a sentinel.

He’s not here, the waiter said. He went home.

But we were supposed to meet.

Yes, he left a message for you.

Ah?

He says to go arrange your business with Doña Ruiz. The waiter gestured across the hall. She’s in her office.

His sister?
Santiago thought.
He left his sister in charge?

The waiter marched down the stairs, duty fulfilled.

Santiago knocked at the widow’s office door.

Come in, a voice called.

The space was dim and made him think of forbidden steeples, places never meant to be entered. It was larger than Don Carrasco’s, which surprised him, and made him wonder, as he often did, about the mysterious arrangements of this family. There was a blue divan in the corner, and high windows that made stark rectangles of the night. The widow sat behind an ornate desk that had surely cost as much as Santiago’s annual earnings. She looked up at him with an inscrutable expression that did not change as he launched into his argument for the woman-singer, Rosa Vidal, who, though unconventional, had, he felt, a talent that could not be ignored.