The Gods of Tango (9 page)

The darkness seemed to crash in on them, full of claustrophobic shadows. Yes, Arturo said, I understand.

Whatever secrets drove Dante, whatever ghosts he kept hidden, he still had to modify his dreams. When he arrived, he’d planned to wait until he could afford an apartment of his own, however humble, to marry. Over time, he saw how absurd this notion was in a city that had swelled with so many immigrants seeking a chance at life that rents had soared and sharing a conventillo with one bathroom and one kitchen for sixty people or more had become a normal way of life. If he waited for a full apartment, he’d be an old man on his wedding day and his bride would be long past her childbearing years. The best he could hope for was a room of their own: a table, a bed, space along the walls for the children when they came. This became his new goal.

He spent almost two years saving toward it.

In those years, Arturo found the anarchists, or, rather, the anarchists found him. They were everywhere, expounding in cafés, running union study groups, organizing surreptitiously at the warehouse in defiance of company rules. How they talked: their passionate words and ample gestures encompassed a whole golden future with the sweep of a single hand. There were no leaders—they didn’t believe in leaders—but at the longshoremen’s union, which he soon joined, everyone knew that when Beto spoke, it was time to listen, and that his words would ultimately form the heart of whatever decision was at hand. Beto was a small man, slightly built, who at first impression made you think of an easily startled deer, but when he opened his mouth to talk, his unexpected baritone commanded attention and quickly entranced a room. He peppered his speeches with examples of injustice, rhythmic repetitions, and quotes
from a man called Bakunin. If Beto had been born in another time and social class, he might have become a famous poet, or perhaps a confidence man tricking kings into handing over fortunes. He spoke with a force that seemed to rearrange the world—a force that could surely persuade the president himself, if only Beto could have his ear, that the anarchist revolution was around the corner and would transform Argentina, then the globe, and for this reason Arturo wanted Beto to talk and talk forever. Surely these were not dreams, but prophecies. He, Arturo, would help make them happen. He threw himself into helping the union, distributing pamphlets, attending meetings, and marching in protests and rallies where police gunshots often sent him racing to the closest alley. The adrenaline rush of those moments eclipsed the terrible hollow in his chest and the ache of his limbs. He was alive; he was a man; he had a purpose. He did not need authorities to rule him; he could rule himself. When Arturo looked at his world through this lens, its fractured pieces suddenly coalesced into a shape in which he saw himself, reflected, writ large.

During these years, he and Dante went to Lo de Dalia (and this he did not tell the cousin-bride) once or maybe twice a month. Those nights were like diamonds in a pile of gray stones. Every night, before sleep reached out and grasped him in the crowded dark, he closed his eyes and pictured the brothel girls, one after the other, their naked breasts, their spread thighs, their hips in his work-worn hands as he pulled them toward his sex again and again as if by doing so he could bore right to the center of them and leave his loneliness there, so deeply buried that it would not find him the next day. He thought of rich men like the owner of his company who occasionally stalked the warehouse, hands clasped idly behind his back; men like that could afford girls every night. Every night! He imagined himself with a purse full of pesos, striding into the brothel and taking girl after girl or two at once, his sex in that plump blonde with the strange metallic moans, his hand on the breast of the slim girl Dante liked so much, that quiet wisp of a thing who spoke neither
Spanish nor Italian and lay silent no matter how hard you fucked her, waiting until you finished to murmur in that pebbled language from a cold and distant land. Or, even better, he’d think of taking the girls away from the brothel’s naked stench, to a private room with a clean double bed, satin sheets, mirrors on every wall, and platters of grapes and roast meat burdening a table. They wouldn’t eat at first, they’d have time for that later, they’d have obscene amounts of time to spend together in which he’d miraculously find the courage to find out what the women wanted, what they most enjoyed, and see them in their genuine pleasure because, in a fantasy, even this was possible. They’d beg him to do what he most wanted, and he’d comply. When all three were finally sated, they’d lie close and talk in a common language forged by their erotic love, some mystical blend of their various mother tongues with the Spanish of this land. The girls would cradle his head to their musky breasts. He’d talk. In his sated state he’d be as eloquent as Beto himself—another miracle—bending words around his thoughts with ease. Do you know what’s coming? he’d ask. The naked girls would feed each other grapes and shake their heads. And he’d paint it for them: a new nation beyond nations. We’re going to dismantle all the borders. Patriotism will be shown for what it is, a lie invented by the owning class to undercut the power of workers across the globe. Think of how many of us there are, in Europe, here in América, in Africa—millions and millions of us, separated by borders but bound by our poverty, our dignity, our rights. Where do you come from? Poland? Russia? You come from the people; you are the people. You’re exploited too, and you have rights, just like men who work in factories and ports. See, the anarchists, they’ve understood that from the beginning. Don’t you want to fight for liberation? Don’t you want to be free? At this, their eyes would light up with recognition and desire, and perhaps they’d reach for him and force him to make love to them again before he could continue, and he’d oblige, and, when they’d all regained their breath, he’d say, it’s coming, you know, the revolution. It belongs to all of us. And the two women would curl their warm bodies toward his in assent.

But Arturo’s real visits to Lo de Dalia were nothing like that. They consisted of long dull waits and then a frenzied rutting in which few or no words were exchanged. There were always many more men seeking the women’s services than there were women to serve them. The brothel was housed in a conventillo, with the same layout as the building where he lived: a courtyard surrounded by doors past which the girls worked three to a room, their beds divided by sheets tacked to the ceiling. He and Dante would wait their turn for an hour or two in the patio, surrounded by other men. A musical trio played for them, a strange new music, city music, American music, tango it was called, sad or bright, fast or languorous, purely instrumental or sung with lyrics about corncobs or ripe figs or other things that got you thinking about what had brought you to the brothel in the first place, made you want it even more. Golden music to defy the filth of conventillo life. Supple music to wake your bones and make them beg for motion. Sometimes the men danced with each other while they waited—practice, they said, in case we actually find a decent girl to court!—facing each other, clasping bodies, improvising a sweep around the room, and Dante and Arturo joined them, Dante leading, his hand firm on Arturo’s back like a bird who knows the way home. The guitarist in the trio was Arturo’s uncle Carlo (that mad bastard, how had he gone from
cilentano
peasant to bard of brothel tangos? if the relatives back home could see him, oh, what would they say?), accompanied by a flautist and a neighbor, Nestore, on the violin. Nestore mesmerized. He was old but relentless and a wonder on his instrument. His secret, so he said, was a daily tonic of cigars and whiskey.
Epa!
the madam would say, in a voice loud enough to be heard by all the patrons in the courtyard, and perhaps even some of those behind closed doors, Now that’s what I call a song. It takes a real man to play a tune like that!

A real man, Nestore would answer, can do a lot more than this,
señora
. I’ll be glad to show you any time you like.

The madam would curtsy and flash a smile missing several teeth. The men would laugh and nod their heads or flick ash from their cigarettes or impatiently finger the tin chips they’d been given when they made
their purchases, which each would give to the whore like a ticket when his turn finally came. By the time Arturo got inside a room he was drunk on songs and grappa, and then his turn always went by faster than he wanted it to, a blur of limbs, moans, dim light, her open sex all around him and then that sharp good push, a small collapse, perhaps a quick murmur in her foreign tongue, perhaps her silence, time to go.

Then another month of fierce subsistence, longing to return.

The union’s demands became ambitious: eight-hour workdays and a raise in pay. Imagine! To rest every day, and survive! Of course the managers refused the terms, walked out of talks. Strike, the workers whispered on the warehouse floor. Strike, they shouted at café meetings, the word itself an incantation.

It’s going to be soon, Arturo told Dante one night after dinner, as the Di Camillo girls gathered and washed the plates. In a week at most.

Dante dropped his cigarette on the patio floor and crushed it. I hope not.

It enraged Arturo, his friend’s apathy, his blithe dismissal of the dream. How can you say that? Don’t you want better pay? Don’t you want to be treated better than cattle?

The bosses are the bosses. They won’t give up their power.

We’ll make them. Beto says—

Beto’s an idiot. He can’t even hold his liquor.

Arturo tried another tactic. The bosses are nothing without workers. They need us, we’ll show them our strength.

Dante looked at him with the patience of a father schooling a child. Arturo. Use your head. Think of the packing plant.

Arturo didn’t want to think of the packing plant, where the anarchists’ strike had been repressed by the police, with guns, shots, four workers dead. And in any case that wouldn’t happen here, not with Beto at the helm. They would win, they had to win, he knew without a doubt because he’d seen it in vivid visions as he lay awake on his pallet in the darkness, visions of Buenos Aires after the revolution, a city in which
workers rose each day to work in dignity and decided for themselves when they would start and end their labors, sailors and factory workers and mothers and whores and stevedores, all with their disparate native tongues and myriad homelands alive inside their skin, gathered together to forge a transformed city in which everybody had enough to eat and a ventilated room to call their own, in which workers rose onto rooftops in the mornings to howl their freedom across the city like proud roosters and gathered in the middle of the street at night to dance the unabashed tangos of the people who had once been called the poor. The vision was so marvelous that the world had no choice but to make it true. But he lacked the language to transmit this to his friend. Instead he said, You can’t stand on the sidelines.

I just want to live my life.

As a scab? As a traitor to your own kind?

Is that how you think of me?

It’s not how I want to think of you.

Dante stared. Arturo hadn’t meant his words to come out so harshly—or maybe he had, but hadn’t thought they were so capable of wounding. He stared back. Dante was the first to turn away.

That night, they slept with their backs to each other.

Four days later, Arturo joined two hundred men in a picket line outside the warehouse. It was hot already, humid, one of those January dawns where the sky bore down on you like a threat. They stood in front of the warehouse doors, facing the blue and yellow and green and orange houses of La Boca’s edge, built with salvaged sheet metal and planks, held together as much by nails as by immigrants’ wild hopes. They would guard the entrance against scabs; he expected Dante to be one of them. So he was shocked to see his friend appear suddenly at his side, as if from nowhere, cigarette in hand.

I’m glad to see you, Arturo said.

Dante shrugged.

Vindication. He had done it. He had persuaded one more man to join
the struggle. And not just any man, but this man, Dante, a good man, his best friend. The rust-colored warehouse now looked, to him, like an ancient fortress, one they could storm and destroy. Behind him somewhere ran the river, blocked by the warehouse but still wet and full and dark with power that was surely on their side. He strained to sense its presence and to call it to arms as he chanted along with the other men,
justice for the workers! We demand our rights!

Ten minutes later the police arrived, on horseback, riding right into the crowd of protesters. Disperse!

The crowd jostled back, men pushed into other men. A chant struck up and rose over the throng.
Oppressors, oppressors
—

Disperse or we’ll shoot!

Oppressors! Arturo shouted, raising his arms.

Dante grasped his arm and wrenched it down. Not so loud. Careful.

How can you say that,
mio amico
? This is the moment!

I want to see you get out of this strike alive.

Arturo shook off his friend’s grasp. I’m not a coward, he snapped. Oppressors, he shouted, oppressors!

One of the horses was becoming agitated by the crowd. It stamped and whinnied, raised its front hoofs dangerously close to Beto’s head. The officer who rode the horse could not control it—he clenched his crooked teeth in concentration—but no, Arturo saw, that was not it at all: the officer was not trying to calm his horse but riling it up, pulling its bridle, digging his heels into its sides, pressing it into a trap of men. The horse bucked and shivered, searching for a way out. It looked desperate, capable of anything. The officer’s gun was cocked and he had the face of a man bent on breaking several bones.

Rage surged in Arturo, red and immense. He was not a helpless boy anymore, he would not stand for it.

He grasped a rock and hurled it at the officer with a shout.

The rock grazed the policeman on the shoulder, and he immediately turned his face and gun toward the source of the rock. Arturo met his
small green eyes for an instant before he ducked. The officer fired. The shot hit Dante square between the eyes—and this, too, Arturo did not tell the cousin-bride sitting across the table from him, listening to his story: he said
a shot
but did not say who’d provoked it or where it landed or how Arturo, crouched just centimeters from Dante’s face, felt the flecks of blood and skin and shredded bone strike him in a hot spray that had never fully washed off of his skin because it was part of him now, the shredded skin still singed his own; and he had no words to tell the girl across the table how Dante had crumpled like a marionette whose puppeteer had gotten tired and snipped the strings, or how the bullet made a terrible mistake when it exploded Dante’s head because it should have killed Arturo, as the policeman knew because he scowled in disappointment before turning toward a new distraction to his left, as Arturo knew from the nights he’d spent up alone thinking not of whores or revolutions but of the crime he was committing by still walking this crude world, as God himself must know up in His heaven where He sat, all-seeing, fearsome, enraged that he, Arturo, was still alive and sitting in this airless room talking to Leda instead of the man who was supposed to meet her, the man she married, the man she surely loved.