The Gods of Tango (41 page)

“I’ve never told that,” said Rosa.

Dante thought of the man, the father of five, his hands stained from the factory. She struggled not to think of Rosa, under those hands, alone with him in the dark. She didn’t know what to say, but Rosa seemed to be waiting, so she said the first stupid thing that came to mind. “Do you miss Uruguay?”

“I don’t know. Do you miss Italy?”

“Yes, but I can’t bear the thought of going back.”

“Why not?”

“A lot of reasons.”

“You’ll have to tell me.”

“I can’t.”

“You didn’t let me get away with that. Tomorrow it’s your turn for the long story.”

She’d made a mistake. She was an idiot. There was so much of her story that she couldn’t tell, it wasn’t possible. “I’d rather listen.”

“Dante.” Rosa was looking out over the water, keenly focused away. “I love the orquesta. I love that stage. I don’t care what the other musicians think of me.”

“They respect you,” Dante said quickly.

“I’m not stupid.”

“They’re afraid of you.”

“Maybe.” Rosa seemed to consider this. “They’ll always see me as a woman first, then as a singer or a person.”

“They think you’re beautiful.”

“I’m not beautiful. You’re not talking about beauty, you’re talking about conquest.”

Startling, such directness. Dante felt a prick of shame, though she couldn’t have said why.

“Look, Dante, what I’m saying is that the stage is everything. It’s life to me.”

Dante nodded, though Rosa kept her gaze on the water and did not see.

“And I won’t do anything that jeopardizes that life. Not even with you.” And then Rosa did something incredible: she reached for Dante’s hand, where it perched on the rail, and held it for a moment before moving away.

Dante stood frozen. Her whole body hummed from the touch of that hand. She didn’t know what to say, and it seemed that there was no room to speak, that a portal between them had closed, and so she stayed in place beside Rosa, looking down at smooth black water that revealed nothing.

She thought about this conversation for days. She could not stop. Rosa’s words,
not even with you
, rang over and over through her mind. Rosa thought that she, Dante, was pursuing her. She was wrong, of course. But Dante could not shake the warmth of Rosa’s hand on hers, its stinging power. Maybe Rosa had not been wrong. Maybe Dante had followed her all this time with hopes more complicated than she’d realized. Lust, after all, was a prismatic thing, refracting differently with different women. Alma, Carmen, Mamita, the dance hall girls, the sparrow-girl. Rosa was unlike any of them. She was honest in a rare, unsettling way. She was a universe, glittering with the stars of her own thoughts. Dante wanted to swim in the space between those stars, to swim in Rosa’s laugh, in her voice, in her silence. Friendship, that was called, wasn’t it; Rosa had no reason to fear. But then there was that hand finding hers on the rail, the duet of their touch, brief, searing. Now, as she rolled cigarettes and oiled violin strings and unbuttoned her shirt for bed, Dante could not stop thinking of that hand. The arm it led to, the body. What she could do with that body. She started touching herself in bed at the thought. She’d touched her sex hundreds of times before,
thinking of this or that woman, but when thinking of Rosa she touched more of herself: the length of her waist, her pelvic bone, the breasts that sprang out of captivity every night, stubbornly resuming their shape. The delicate inner thighs that no one else had ever felt. She wondered at it all, this secret body, warm, insistent. The pleasure was as strong as it was frightening. She should not pursue Rosa. Rosa did not want to be pursued. That radiant moment between them had been a warning. And in any case, it would be an enormous mistake for reasons Rosa could not yet know. She, Dante, was a liar, an impostor, poised to run away at any moment (to where? to Uruguay, perhaps, this nearby land that Rosa spoke of with a prickly kind of longing?) and an entwining would be hazardous to them both.

She vowed to stop thinking of Rosa. But it was too late. At work, at Leteo, she could hardly look at Rosa for thinking about the body beneath that men’s suit, the breasts that pushed the shirt out, the hips defiant in their trousers. Her singing voice had become the most lambent sound in the world. When she changed behind the curtain, after the show, the thought of every move back there consumed Dante.

Sixteen days since Carmen left. Seventeen. The baths at Salto must be wonderful; stay away, Carmen, stay a long time. Dante didn’t leave. How could she go? She didn’t know how much more time she had, or how her story would end, and it was bound to end badly but it wasn’t over yet. The nights at Leteo were beautiful. Rosa’s act had staying power, the crowds continued, and she’d begun to receive offers from other orquestas and cabarets, each of which she’d turned down.

“She’ll leave us one day,” Santiago said.

“Oh yeah?” Joaquín said. “For where?”

“For the stars.”

“You owe me,” Rosa said on a walk home together.

“What do you mean?”

“I told you my story of becoming, or whatever you called it.”

“Yes.”

“And you still haven’t told me yours.”

“I can’t, I really can’t.”

“Why not?”

“A man has his secrets.” She tried to make it sound witty.

“And a woman doesn’t?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“They can’t be bigger secrets than what I told you.”

She longed to tell herself to Rosa. To have a person, a single person in the world, who knew who she was. She longed for it so much it made her bones ache.

“I know what your problem is.”

“Oh really? What?”

“You think you’ll shock me. But I can’t be shocked.”

Dante laughed.

Rosa stopped and took out a cigarette. She was not laughing. She handed a cigarette to Dante and accepted a light. “Why don’t you start with your big secret.”

Dante took a long, slow drag of her cigarette. Across the street, a grocer was setting up crates of his wares with the help of a small boy. The man looked haggard, the boy half-caught in dreams. “I’m going to run away.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“Where to?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why?”

“I’m in trouble.”

“What did you do? Kill somebody?”

“Worse.”

Rosa met her gaze, completely calm. “I’m listening.”

“It’s La Viuda Ruiz. She left because of me.”

“What did you do to her?”

“What do you think?”

Rosa flicked ash from her cigarette. A light rain had begun, and tiny drops caught in her hair. Across the street, the grocer grimaced at the sky. “And she didn’t like it?”

“No, that’s not the problem.”

Rosa flashed a smile at Dante so direct that she blushed and looked away.

“I’m sorry,” Rosa said. “I know this is serious. You want to run. But maybe you can work it out—apologize, send her flowers, lick the mud off her shoes, she’d like that.”

“It’s too late.”

“Why?”

“She holds power over me.”

“She holds power over all of us. So what?”

“She holds more power over me.”

“Do you love her?”

The question unsettled Dante. This damn rain, wetting her forehead, darkening her sleeves. “I don’t know.”

“Then you don’t.”

“I don’t know what love is.”

“Well, whatever it is, you can’t have it with her.”

“Why not?”

“Because she’ll never
see
you.”

Dante thought of Carmen, wearing nothing but a blindfold, crying for more
dirty conventillero
, shrinking back from a cigarette burn. She thought of Rosa as a girl, locked in her room, listening to her mother with the man she called Señor. “Nobody will ever really see me.”

Rosa focused on lighting another cigarette, cupping her match against the rain. “That’s up to you.”

“No, it’s not.”

“I’m waiting.”

Dante looked into Rosa’s face. The hiding of the past four almost five years crashed over her, and she felt she’d trade all the careful safety of her life for just one moment of being fully seen. By Rosa. By this clear-faced peerless woman standing in front of her. She almost spilled her secret, but then Rosa shrugged in resignation. “It’s getting late,” she said and resumed their walk.

Another week passed. The urge grew, to reveal herself, to tell Rosa everything: the whole of her, the ocean-story, all of it rushing to the surface whenever she saw Rosa, demanding air and light. Maybe Carmen would never return. Maybe she could live forever inside this space, a life that swung between the two poles of the stage and these walks home, requiring nothing more.

They did not touch again, but, sometimes, when silence swelled languorously between them, Dante thought she felt the hum rise up between their bodies as it had in La Boca. Surely Rosa felt it too. At times she seemed to reach the verge of saying something and then change her mind, close her mouth, close her face, rein herself in.

“You’re beautiful, Rosa,” Dante ventured one night, in one of those moments.

“Shut up.”

She didn’t push it any further—didn’t dare.

The world seemed too small for them, for her and Rosa. If they weren’t careful they might make it explode.

She buried her desire but couldn’t kill it. The urge sat beneath her skin, like the urge to tear a scab off and damn how it heals, damn the scar it leaves, better to let the broken flesh hit air, to tell the truth of your life no matter the cost so that even if it kills you, at least, after you die, the story of your days won’t completely disappear from the earth. Just one person can do that, can, by listening, make your story exist beyond your skin. The power of it thrilled her, terrified her. At night she dreamed of riding horseback in Joan of Arc’s armor, through a forest in the dark,
tearing branches as she went, following a voice that sang tangos with the immanence of a ghost, Rosa’s voice, and she searched for her in tree after tree but couldn’t find her; the voice seemed to come from one direction, then another, then from nowhere and everywhere, and as she rode the armor rusted and broke off in slabs that took her skin with it, leaving chunks of flesh along the forest floor, she was almost there, but where?—she reached a river where a body lay, bloated, the face mangled, it was her own face.

She woke from that dream and decided to do it. To tell Rosa the truth, open her world to her. As she dressed for work, she gathered her courage.

But before she got her chance, that very same night, Carmen returned.

She stood at her small table, in the back of the great hall. She wore red again, and she looked radiant, freshly scrubbed somehow, though there was also something brutal about her, in the set of her jaw and her general’s stance. Incredibly, the ruby necklace draped her throat.

They were performing “El Terrible,” which had become one of Rosa’s specialties, and never failed to shock and delight the crowd. Rosa sang with one hand slung in her pocket, the other raised toward the chandelier. Her curved backside in those men’s trousers, her voice rippling into the hall—she, too, was beautiful, and more than that: a miracle, a creature that, like dragons or unicorns, could exist only in realms of invention like the stage. In that moment, the stage, that rectangle of illuminated space on which Dante stood, felt like the only safe place in the world. She could not believe the ruby necklace. It could not possibly be for her. She looked past Rosa, past the elegant couples dancing and sipping wine, at Carmen, straining to read her expression across the hall. Carmen gazed back, unwavering, ferocious.

Dante didn’t know what to do. She was terrified to go upstairs, and terrified not to.

She still wasn’t sure five hours later, at the end of her shift, in the Lair, as she closed her violin into its case and smoked a cigarette to calm her nerves. When Rosa emerged from behind the curtain in her dress, she glanced a question her way:
coming?

It had become their routine, to leave together.

Dante found herself shaking her head.

The other men were busy putting away their instruments and didn’t seem to notice. Only Amato, smoking on the sofa, watched out of the corner of his eye. The look on his face was not unkind.

Rosa nodded quickly—did she look stung? did she know? but even then why would it sting her?—and ducked out of the Lair.

Dante went upstairs. It was five in the morning. Carmen stood behind her desk at the window, her back to the door, looking out at baroque roofs and balconies. This woman, fearsome, larger than life, how did Dante ever imagine that she knew her?

Carmen did not turn. Dante stared at her exquisite back, framed by the red V of her dress. She shuffled to make her presence known. Waited. “You lied to me.”

“Carmen,” Dante said.

Carmen stood still, impassive.

“I didn’t lie.”

“How can you say that?”

“I never said I was a man.”

Carmen laughed, quick, sharp, almost a bark.

“You never asked.”

“Then I should ask now.”

“You know the answer.”

“Who else knows?”

“No one.”

“Only me?”

“Only you.”

“Well, then. I am asking.”

“I don’t understand.”

Carmen turned. Such hard elegance, it hurt to look at her. “What are you?”

Dante had no answer. The question was a door into madness.

“The things you did. How could you possibly have fooled me?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m not the first one?”

“No.”

Carmen flinched. “What kind of woman does those things?”

“A woman like me.”

“So you’re a woman?”

“I don’t know.” The purity of madness, the limpid air. “I’m a tanguero.”

“That’s why you do it? To play tango?”

“That’s why I started.” That, and to survive, she thought—but that second part exposed another gulf between her and Carmen, as wide as the first one, wider than words could reach across.

“I can’t imagine you in a dress.” Carmen’s face contorted. “I’ve tried to imagine, and it disgusts me.” She walked to the front of her desk and lit a cigarette without offering one to Dante. “I don’t—I’m not one of—those women. You know what I am saying?”