The Gods of Tango (6 page)

There she goes, thought Fausta, that girl like a steel rod hiding in the skin of a rabbit, who jumps at the slightest knock on the door and yet can vomit all night and rise up the next day with vigor, and not only that, but also help a stranger through her sickness the way she did for me on the very first night, she cleaned up the mess on the floor as though it were nothing, as though it were her own. It was kind of her. A kind girl. A
strange girl. Look at her, standing there with that expression of amazement on her face, as though she doesn’t know how she got here to the deck of this ship, or perhaps how she arrived to live inside her own skin, a question to which no one knows the answer except perhaps the priests, and even if they do, who’s to say it’s right?

Blasphemy. I didn’t think that!

The girl. She’s so young. How will she fare here? And me, me, what will happen to me? Ten years, the girl said to me the night that I came dangerously close to spilling out the secret, as we lay near each other in the dark, ten years is a long time. And what I wanted to say back to her, but didn’t say, was this: ten years in the course of a young woman’s life is everything—absolutely everything—her one chance at passion and fertility and grasping at some fistful of the happiness in the world and if you misuse those years they’ll either wither like a putrefying rose or explode and tilt you into horror. I should know. The line on the deck moved forward several paces. There must have been a group of easy approvals or denials, waved on through. Leda’s line advanced in the opposite direction, and now she was out of sight. Fausta crossed herself. She had no reason to think that she wouldn’t be admitted into Argentina, but still, every muscle in her body was tense. If they didn’t let her in she wouldn’t know whether to panic or applaud.

Oh, but it was too hot, how the sun bore down. And not just down, but how the heat hung around them, thick and inescapable. Even with all her wiping of face and neck, she would be sweaty when she first saw Bruno. He would be sweaty as well, no doubt; at home, on days this hot, he’d soak through the handkerchiefs she folded neatly into his pockets. She washed them every summer night and had three ready for him every morning. She’d made the handkerchiefs herself out of torn shirts, there was no buying such luxuries, but she was a good wife, back then, she embroidered the edges into elegance. How would Bruno look today? How had he changed? His letters had grown cold. Terse. Businesslike. She had heard tales, legends really, of emigrants whose very souls were
chilled by life in the New World. In Salerno, she’d had a neighbor whose uncle had returned after thirty years in the mines of Florida. Everybody had always called him Vampata—Blaze—because, when he left as a young man, he’d had so much energy he seemed constantly on the brink of bursting into flames. But when Vampata came home, he was dull as ash, a trudging shell of a man. He never smiled or said a word, only nodded or shook his head in response to questions. He worked in his nephew’s forge all day and kept to himself the rest of the time. The word
vampata
, in her neighborhood, acquired a new meaning. It came to be used for anything that had the life drained out of it. Don’t marry that boy, his mother will make you a
vampata
with her harangues. Come on, smile, what’s wrong with you,
vampata
? This country is a
vampata
now, that’s why the young men all want to leave; who wants to start their life out in a wasteland?

The line shuffled forward again. Closer and closer. Bruno, she thought, if your fire has died I will not accept it. I’d have to kill you, and slowly, with a dull fork. You’re the only thing I have here in this place and if you don’t give me a baby before it’s too late I will never forgive you for the lost years. That girl I shared a room with, she thinks that I can’t wait to see you, I’ve played the role of dutiful wife and convinced everyone of my performance, nobody sees my fury. You were supposed to come home more prosperous than before. You were supposed to give me a life, motherhood, a future that could be endured. I waited for you for one year, then two. Obediently. Only at three years did I grow hopeless, and, Bruno, you must know, from your years in América, what it is to be alone, the toll on the body and its hungers, perhaps worse for men because their hungers are so strong but it cannot be that women do not have them. Look at me. Am I the only woman who has known savage lust? Am I a malformed woman? This is what I’ve asked myself on a thousand and one nights, how God could misshape me the way He did, how He could put so much terrible desire in a woman’s body and then send her husband across the ocean and leave her in his parents’ house,
to wait, untouched, alone. How can you blame me for what happened? For the afternoons in the back of the grocer’s shop, on his sacks of beans and wheat? But of course you would. And that is why I’ve prayed and prayed that when I see you I’ll succeed in hiding the truth so that you, my husband, a stranger to me now, won’t detect betrayal in my face. I didn’t do it to betray you, Bruno, but to be faithful to myself, to my wretched self, which was threatening to die without some touch, and the grocer, your uncle, he gave me that touch, his hands on my naked waist were the hands of a conjurer, he brought me back to life, I came to crave him as I crave the air. Everybody thought that it was good when I took the job there, helping him with his stores, let her contribute a little to her keep, they said, and anyway it’ll do her good to get out of the house. And they were right.

But then the two. The horror of the two.

She was almost at the front of the line. They were waving people through even faster now, she could see the Argentinean doctor looking in the mouth and ears of each man, putting his stethoscope to each heart to listen for what it carried from one continent to another, then removing it quickly, satisfied that, after three seconds, he’d heard enough. She prayed for a safe passage and for Bruno to make love to her that night and for God to hear the clamor of their bodies and in His infinite mercy send them a child. A son or daughter would redeem her life and give her proof of God’s forgiveness. If a child didn’t come it would be proof of His rage. Because her body knew how to conceive: this she knew without a doubt. One. Two. A shout of light inside her and the blood not flowing. The sachet of herbs from the cobbler’s wife was so bitter, so small. The tea from it stung her throat night after night—she brewed it when all her in-laws had gone to sleep—and then blood roared from her and the grocer was angry that she wouldn’t come to the back of his store for three weeks and wouldn’t tell him why. He thought she didn’t want him anymore. Am I too old for you? he said. He was not too old, his touch was ageless in its wanting, his sex always firm with joy and ready for her
as it was not, he said, for his wife anymore. He had four children and he was her husband’s uncle; of course he would not want to know about the teas, the bleeding, and the deep-in-the-night tears for an innocent soul who could not could not come to earth because its destiny would be shattered from the start. And so she told him nothing, even when she returned to him and to their afternoons of pleasure so intense they made her glimpse the golden edges of the underworld. They always made love in perfect silence, attuned to the slightest noise from the shop. Silence gave their movements more ferocity. One afternoon they accidentally broke open the sack of flour that was beneath them, and because the grocer didn’t realize it he kept on thrusting and she sank and sank and sank into the whiteness. The second time Fausta went to the cobbler’s wife, a year after the first, the old woman looked at her with mournful disgust and said, Fausta, I do not give this cure to the same person twice.

Please, said Fausta, you have to help me.

You can die from this, you know.

Please, please.

You can’t go on this way.

I won’t.

Promise me.

I promise, Fausta said without thinking.

You know that I am not a gossip, said the cobbler’s wife. I’m the only woman in this whole city who can hold a secret. But if you break this promise and go back to that man, then I will tell two women, and by night all of Salerno will know.

At that moment something inside of Fausta died. She was trapped. She had nowhere to run. If she did not make the promise she would give birth to a disgrace that would swallow her whole, as well as her husband, both of their families, and a new baby doomed to live forever in the shadow of its mother’s crime.

There was more blood this time, and far more pain. She did not die. But it was the end of her life. She lay in bed for four days, despite her
mother-in-law’s diatribe: you lazy girl, how sick can you really be, what about us? What about your job?

I want to leave my job.

You what?

I want to leave the grocery store.

But why on earth?

I …

Did you fight with my brother?

… yes.

Fausta, you can’t stop working. With all the food we put on the table for you? My brother can be harsh, but I will talk to him.

Her mother-in-law went to the grocery store that very day and everything was arranged. When Fausta returned to work, the grocer did not look at her. They spoke only of the essentials and never of what was already becoming a figment of the past. Soon he was unlovered by time, reduced to being her boss, her uncle by marriage, how had she ever desired that graying man?

That is when she began to age. Her body became matronly, thick waist, heavy hips. Her passion closed in on itself until it vanished altogether. She lived that way, a goodwife, half-dead, for three more years, hoping for nothing except the tenuous dream of Bruno’s return. But then the letter came telling her to come to the New World, and now she was here at the gate of the Américas, a dozen paces from the gatekeepers. The doctor would not hear the hidden cemeteries of her heart. He would not see, on examining her teeth, the unsaid words haunting her mouth. How many secrets were being smuggled, on this day, into the New World? She looked out at the dock, with its wooden awning under which she could hear the roil of a gathered crowd (Bruno surely among them). The awning had no label, but it seemed to her that it should wear a gargantuan sign emblazoned with the words
LAST HOPE
, because that was what this place was to so many of the people on this ship, you could see it on their faces full of hunger, and why else would they have come?

She was next in line. The man in front of her stepped forward and opened his mouth for the doctor. Fausta tried to imagine her own future, as a trick to calm her nerves. She would have—how many children? Was there still time for three? Boys, all boys, and they’d distract her from the sorrows of daily life, they’d redeem the ones who had to die. She was getting nervous now; these thoughts weren’t helping. She shifted her tactic to picturing the future of that girl Leda. She was lucky, that girl, she had it all ahead of her; a pristine canvas; as young as Fausta had been when she married. She could see Leda’s vibrant future stretching out before her. Four children, maybe five. A long marriage that might have its torrential fights but ultimately would become solid and happy, a bulwark against the world. Joy in her role as a mother; and, one day, many years from now, that Leda girl—no longer a girl—would take her whole big family back to Italy, where she would watch her great-grandchildren play in the orchards of her youth.

As she stepped forward and opened her mouth for the physician, Fausta held these predictions in her mind like talismans.

Leda had no trouble with the doctor’s exam. It was perfunctory, and went by with surprising speed. The examination of her papers was equally smooth. The men were quick and businesslike, there were so many people to admit to their nation, all in a day’s work.

She stepped onto the gangplank. Below her lay the dock, a long platform packed with people whose faces tilted eagerly upward to receive their wives or cousins or nephews or neighbors from Italia, their voices raised in wails of joy and chanted names—
Francesco! Emilia! Alessandro! Vito!
—as though the calling were a kind of invocation, as though their loved ones could appear here from Italia on the power of the crowd’s voices alone. The migrants on the gangplank surged with a current of excitement, and she was not Leda, in that moment, but a single drop in a river pouring from ship to dock with a force of its own, longing
to merge with a new soil, unified in its direction, down, down, down. She searched the crowd with her eyes. A swarm of faces looking up at her, then quickly past her, at the rest of the immigrants slowly pouring down the gangplank, she was not their arrival—
Paolo! You’ve arrived! Paoooolooo
—though the faces were Italian, as were the words they called out—
Blessings of all the saints! A joy a joy
—she listened keenly for Dante’s voice, but could not hear it.

Her foot touched land. It was a concrete slab, not yet the feel of Argentina’s earth, but it thrilled her. Three men from behind her excused themselves as they walked past, directly to the warehouse that held their baggage, there was no one waiting for them and they would make their own way. They would take their baggage to the Hotel de Inmigrantes, a place that Argentina had designed especially for immigrants who arrived with nowhere to stay, where they would receive room and board for five days while they began to look for work—a help, surely, but still she pitied them, so alone, so far from home.

To her left, two brothers found each other. They wept and laughed and slapped each other’s backs.

Just beyond them a man was greeting his wife with a long and tight embrace, they were swaying and murmuring to each other, no longer at the port of Buenos Aires but in a private universe all their own.

Dante, where was Dante. She looked and looked but could not find him. She wove through the crowd in search of him, pushing past the many bodies. It was too loud, there were too many voices shouting their excitement, her fellow emigrants were scattering and no longer part of a merged river, she was alone. She began to feel afraid. Was it possible that he was late, or had forgotten the day she was coming? Or that he was playing a trick as he sometimes liked to do, when they were children, crouching behind a rock when Cora went to call him in for dinner, making her climb the hill in search of him when all the while he was just at the edge of the garden?