The Gods of Tango (5 page)

The cold penetrated her dress. She pulled the shawl close around her.

The steamship began to approach along the water, large and strong and armored with hard gray metal. Somehow the sight of the ship made distance seem more visceral, more daunting.

Papà was also staring at the ship.

“It’s bigger than I thought it would be,” she said.

“Bigger than they look in the posters.”

“Big enough to get lost in.”

“You won’t get lost,” he said and took her hand, his eyes still on the steamship.

His touch surprised her, and for a moment she wanted nothing more than to stay here, on this shore with her father. For years now she had been furious at him, for his defeat, the sad hunched shoulders; but today the slouch of him merely inspired a desperate tenderness. His body was
the only barrier between her and the cold wind that swept in across the water. His hand was callused and worn but the tips of his fingers had grown soft again and lacked the little tough spots they had had when he still played the violin, the skin hardened by a thousand notes of music. The ship arrived at the dock, sounding a long and hollow moan. The crowd around them prickled with excitement. A porter came to take her trunk. She and Papà both stood, bereft of their seat.

“Leda,
carissima
,” Papà said.

She turned and quickly wished she hadn’t. He was crying. He made no sound and no attempt to wipe the wetness from his face. She looked away.

“I should board,” she said.

He nodded, put his arm through hers, and walked her to the gangplank. They pressed toward it, people all around them, and her father held tightly to her arm so as not to lose her in the crowd. Then, before she knew it, she was at the plank and the moment she’d been running from was here, her father’s last touch, she was going to simply break away but then his arms enveloped her so tightly it was hard to breathe.

“Remember us,” he said into her ear as the crowd pressed her up the walkway.

She stepped up the gangplank toward the deck and, she thought, toward América, toward Dante, her cousin, her groom, and now that her steps were not on solid earth but on a long board suspended diagonally in the air, she felt that she had finally become an emigrant. An in-between, she thought as her feet reached the deck. A wife, but unconsummated, and on neither Italian nor South American land. I am what is not possible—which makes everything possible, like a leak in the dam of time. The thought both confused and thrilled her. She no longer knew what her own mind was saying.

The crowd pressed toward the rail to wave their kerchiefs in goodbye to their loved ones on land.

“Alfredo, do you see me? Alfredo!”

“Goodbye, goodbye!”

“Mamma, Mamma—don’t forget me—”

Leda joined the crowd and craned her neck, but by the time she reached the front she could not find Papà among the people left on land. Perhaps he’d decided to leave without saying goodbye, or else the multitude had made him small, he was just a second son from Alazzano after all—and in that moment she hated them, all of them, every single one of the Italians waving at the dock, for shrinking her father. She waved her kerchief at the volcano. Voices rose and crashed around her, interweaving their cries of
God keep us safe
and
Pater noster
and
Amalia, ciao, Amalia!
and
my God the water so much water
and
Ciao! Ciao, Italia!
until one man began a well-known
tarantella
that spread across the crowd and soon it seemed all three hundred and something Italians were singing it in unison, and Leda sang along, too, having known the song since childhood, a Neapolitan song about love that has no hope and no end.

The coast receded at a startling pace. Water unfolded long and blue all around the ship like an infinite quilt made by the Fates, or at least two of them, the spinner and the weaver, with no third sister to cut and stop the thread. How vast the ocean. Could the world really hold it? Would the world itself explode? But the great liquid cloth kept unfolding.

She slept terribly that night, unaccustomed to the motion of the ship and wrenched out of her dozes by her bunkmate Fausta’s vomiting, and her own. Nothing had prepared her for the effect of the night sea on the body, the whorl of her insides when she lay down. Fausta, a matronly and grave-faced woman about ten years her senior, vomited first, flooding the floor. Before she could rise to clean it up, Leda did it for her, using the sheets from her own bed to dispatch the mess. She bundled the dirty sheets in the hall outside their door. The pile joined other crumpled heaps of linens scattered along the hall. The stench was overpowering. She returned to the room.

“I’m sorry,” Fausta said from her bare mattress.

Fifteen minutes later, Leda vomited into her chamber pot. The smell filled the tight space, there was no escaping.

“You all right?” said Fausta.

“I will be.”

“I can’t take twenty nights of this.”

“You won’t. It’ll get easier, you’ll see.”

“How do you know it’ll get easier?”

“Because it has to.”

It was an unfounded assertion, invented on the spot, yet it seemed to comfort Fausta. Her eyes closed and the muscles of her face relaxed. She had the square, strong-jawed face of a woman born to grow old early, Leda thought. That evening, when they’d first met, she had told Leda about her husband, who had been in Buenos Aires for ten years now; he had left Italy after they’d been married for one year in which they’d hoped but failed to have a baby, and when he’d left to
make América
, as they say, to make his fortune, he’d promised to return very soon, after a year, two at most, with money and a new foundation for the family they’d raise. But he didn’t return. The years dragged on. Finally Bruno wrote a letter saying that it would be better for her to come and join him in Buenos Aires. She balked, at first. She wrote back,
I don’t want to go, I can’t imagine, can’t you please come home?
He wrote back, simply,
No
. It was the shortest letter she received from him in all their years of separation, devoid of explanations or even the usual expressions of love. And now, here she was, already twenty-eight years old and childless, crossing the ocean to meet him in a strange new land. And are you glad to be going? Leda had asked her. Of course I am, Fausta had said, that is to say, I want to stay in Italy, but what I want more is to be with my husband, and to start my family before it’s too late.

She had seemed so sure of herself, as she said it. She had spoken in the tone of a nun who didn’t question her faith in God.

Now, Fausta had fallen back asleep. Leda shifted her body on her stripped bed and thought about water and land and the impossibility of human crossings. We are not made for a journey like this one, she thought. These modern ships go against what we are. She wondered how it had been for Dante, during his crossing, whether he had slept the
first night, whether he’d needed bowls. She would have to ask him when she arrived. She had so very many things to ask him.

When Leda finally drifted off to sleep, she dreamed of Vesuvius. She was climbing the side of the mountain. Her feet were bare, and they bled as she walked, but she did not slow down.
I will arrive
. The walk seemed endless and her belly churned with nausea. Suddenly she was at the highest point, right at the lip of the crater. She bent down toward the blackness. It was vast and seemed to have no end. She stared down, petrified. Something flickered in the depths, a pale spark, two sparks, three: the lights of lamps at windows; and then it came into view, Alazzano itself, her village trapped in the crater, and she too high to reach it or get burned by its fires.

Now, on her arrival day, she stood at the rail and watched Buenos Aires grow larger. The waters of the port teemed with ships, and the docks teemed with people. Argentinos. People who inhabited this city’s streets, slept in its beds, listened to its everyday secrets. And somewhere on that dock, Dante. How would he look? How would it be between them? She checked her hat again with her hand. The pins were solid, the pearls still in place. It gave her strength to face this moment, to have such a delicate thing on her head, though she also feared that she would not be able to live up to the womanhood it demanded of her. So far she had succeeded, at least, in transporting it intact across the ocean. This had been her mother’s charge:
don’t let anything happen to your hat
. It had been her mother’s hat, the best one she owned, even before she’d sewn on a strand of real pearls, so that, Mamma said, no matter how exhausted or worn Leda looked after the journey, she would have one thing befitting the dignity of the moment, because you have to look your very best when you arrive in Buenos Aires, you don’t want him to think you’ve fallen, even if you’re tired. Not to mention, Mamma added as she stitched, that you’ll be a bride without a gown. Leda thought about this now as she
leaned against the rail: a bride without a gown. Those words made it sound as though she were arriving naked, stepping off the boat with her elegant blue hat and nothing else, vulnerable, shamed. The image stung her. Perhaps Mamma had meant for it to sting.

The ship made contact with the port.
Clank
. The yoke of land. Leda felt a rush of excitement around her. Three hundred and sixty-eight Italians pressed their way toward the gangplank to taste their first encounter with Argentina. A small cluster of men walked up the gangplank and boarded the ship, uniforms starched, buttons gleaming. Three of them wore stethoscopes.

“Form two lines, please, and have your documents ready.”

The crowd obeyed. Leda joined a line, trying to edge toward the front, but the men’s bodies pushed her out of the way. Her heart beat loudly in her chest. Her skin was lined with sweat from the humid air. The line snaked back and forth along the deck, and from where she stood it was impossible to see the docks below the ship. She took out her handkerchief and wiped her face; she had to look fresh and healthy for the officials, so they could have no reason to deny her entry. Of course, from everything she’d heard, there was no reason to worry. Argentina was promoting immigration. They wanted workers. They did not take the old, sick, or unsound of mind. She was young and healthy, though she’d lost weight from motion sickness and her frame had become even skinnier than before. Her bones jutted. She wiped her face again. She hoped there would be no problems. As for soundness of mind, she sometimes doubted that she had it, as she had always been strange, off-kilter to the rhythms of those around her, but surely that was not a reason to be denied the Américas. She was very good at hiding her strangeness. The line inched forward. She would be standing here a long time. She was hungry and hot. Dante must be close now, just down the gangplank on the dock, waiting for her. She wondered what was going through his mind. What he would think when he first saw her. Would he see how thin she was? Would he want her less than before? She squared her
shoulders and stood tall. Dante, she thought, it’s too late to return me. We are going to start our family, our home, our children—she had not thought much about the children, though she knew they were part of it, inevitably, a few hazy forms around the dinner table, though not too many, not a large brood please, she had seen too many women, including her mother, buried in their own progeny—and it shall be good. We will lose the old nightmares and launch new dreams.

There was Fausta, in the line snaking in the opposite direction, ahead of her. She wore a gray, loose-cut dress, and her stout body slouched forward slightly. Leda waved and smiled, and Fausta nodded back, but tightly, sternly, as though this were a dangerous time for pleasantries. Her face was closed, formal, nothing like the openness of that one night halfway through the trip when they lay and talked for hours, in the dark, because neither of them could sleep, sharing hopes for the next chapter of their lives—their hopes more than their fears: Fausta’s hope that she would be able to find the thyme, coriander, basil, and oregano she needed to cook properly, Leda’s hope that her new house would have a window overlooking a tree by which she could sit and sew (or read, she thought, but all she said was
sew
), her hope that Dante would not have changed too much.

And if he has? Fausta said.

Then—I don’t know.

He’s still your husband, Fausta said firmly. You owe him your respect.

No matter what?

No matter what.

Leda stirred in the darkness, adjusting her body in a vain attempt to get comfortable on the lumpy bed. Are you worried about whether Bruno has changed?

No.

Leda wondered at the confidence in Fausta’s voice. Ten years is a long time, she said.

You were seven years old ten years ago.

Yes.

So what can you possibly understand?

Leda shrank from the thorn in those words. You must love him very much, she said more softly.

Of course I do.

Fausta said this with a vehemence that bordered on a warning. Leda thought it best to change the subject. Tell me more about how you’ll use the basil, she said.

The New World basil will be sweet and tart and plentiful, I will grow it on the windowsill the way we did at home, it will brighten my sauces and sing in my salads and if we’re ever sad I’ll pass a sprig under our noses, we’ll be cured. Listen, Leda, there are bound to be demons in this city: if they ever arrive at your house, use basil. Eat it. Smell it. Cover bad things with it. Dip a sprig in water and sprinkle it into every corner, and sing a song, any song, the happier the better, so the evil eye will go away. Will you remember?

I will.

Now, as they stood in the blazing sun waiting for their test, Leda envied Fausta the strength of her conviction, her unwavering love, her trust that even if her husband had changed, her own formidable devotion would dissolve the intervening years like salt in a cup of water. Perhaps marriage could contain such magic.

Though even dissolved salt, for all that it vanished from sight, still left traces that stabbed the tongue.