The Gods of Tango (7 page)

She stood against a wall, from which she could watch the remaining
immigrants disembark. The crowd dissipated. Her husband was not there.

She had no idea what to do. She would do nothing. She would wait for Dante to come.

Soon only a small cluster remained on the dock. A stranger had been watching her, a young man whose clothes were worn but clean. His glances made her nervous. She stood up straight and tried to look dignified, pure, a married woman with somewhere to go. The excitement of arrival had disappeared, replaced with a kind of horror at the sheer size of Argentina, its vast unknown expanse, and she here at the lip of it, alone, female, easy prey.

The stranger approached her, hat politely pressed against his chest.

“Signora di Mazzoni?”

She turned to him, blankly. She had never been called a
signora
before, and for a strange instant she thought he was confusing her with her mother. “Yes.”

“I’m here to receive you. I’m a friend of your cous——your husband, Dante.”

“Yes? Where is he?”

“I am truly sorry,
signora
. Dante is dead.”

DUE

A Corner of the Possible

The stranger’s name was Arturo. He said he would take her home.

At first, he tried to explain everything, to tell her the story of what happened to Dante, but his words came out jumbled and Leda could not make sense of them, something about a mistake, a hero, the Buenos Aires port—nothing made sense, the very dock she stood on had become the outer edge of chaos, the air around her rioted, broken, too bright. All she could say was, I’m sorry, I don’t understand you, I don’t understand. And so he gave up and suggested that they get her trunk and go home. She followed him to the warehouse where the baggage was held, not a woman walking, but a ghost of herself, a shadow.

Her trunk was not difficult to find, as they were the last to arrive. The customs official who inspected it had a bulbous nose and a quick smile. When he found the olive jar from the baker’s wife, he grinned. He said something in Spanish, shaking his head, then opened the jar and put an olive in his mouth. Leda did not understand him, though the bones of his words were familiar. Listening to Spanish was like listening to someone speak her native tongue through murky water.

“He says you can’t bring them into the country,” Arturo said.

She should not have cared, it shouldn’t have mattered, but in that moment Leda felt as though the man were taking her last scrap of Alazzano, of her old life; and this so he could have it for himself, this man who didn’t even speak Italian and could not possibly care about the distant valleys of Campania or about lost cousins, first one, now all of a
sudden two. It was not that she wanted to eat the olives herself—in that moment she couldn’t imagine eating ever again—but she wanted to keep them close, intact. She felt as though the customs official were eating a green piece of Dante’s body. But she could not speak or move. She stood watching as the man put another olive in his mouth. His face lit with satisfaction as he ate it. He said something to Arturo. Arturo spoke back, and, though Leda couldn’t understand everything, she could understand various words, inflected as they were with Italian sounds:
husband
and
died
and
come from Italia
, then something else, then
only
.

The official studied Leda with new interest.

Arturo said something else, with the word
exception
and the last syllables inflected politely upward, in the tilt of a question. Asking the man to let her keep the olive jar.

The customs official ate a third olive. Then he said another thing, more slowly, drawled out. The word
young
, then
alone
, and then more sounds punctuated with a slow shake of the head that was at once mournful and shot through with a thread of pleasure.

She had missed something. Arturo’s back straightened, a hunter on alert. His answer had steel in it:
not alone
, he said, and here he spoke with such deliberation that she understood him clearly.
She has me. I was a friend of her husband’s
.

The customs official’s tone became unmistakably mocking. He spoke rapidly, and somewhere in the middle she thought she discerned the word
lucky
.

Arturo’s mouth grew tight and he opened it as though about to speak. He glanced at Leda, who pretended that she hadn’t understood anything. Her blank expression seemed to comfort him.
Yes, sir
, he said.

The customs official closed the lid of the olive jar and waved his hand. The olives would stay, but they were free to go.

Outside the warehouse, Arturo lifted her trunk onto a wheeled cart and led her to the street, where they boarded an enormous public carriage with no horses to pull it. A tram, Arturo called it. A young man who was also boarding helped Arturo hoist the trunk up into the main
car. Arturo’s hand was warm and damp when he helped her up the three stairs. He insisted that she sit on her trunk, to be comfortable, though her knees pushed up against his knees and the calves of other men, all standing around her and holding a pole above their heads. It was mostly men on the tram, and the few women had seats. The sharp smell of sweat overpowered the air. The posture of the standing men, with their arms high to grasp the pole, struck her as very strange, but she understood the reason for it as soon as the tram lurched and rattled into motion. A new seasickness engulfed her as they began to navigate the city.

“It won’t be long now,” Arturo said. “We’re not far from La Boca, where we live.”

The tram lumbered through the crowded streets. Leda’s neck grew sore from craning her head toward the open windows, but she could not tear her eyes from what she saw: an intricate maze of buildings so tall they plunged the cobbled alleys into shadows and, inside that maze, men smoking on doorsteps, men shining shoes on overturned buckets, men shouting their wares, men driving carriages and shouting at their horses, men walking so fast, where were they going? and she, where was she going? The air suffocated, thick and hot and rank. Dante. She couldn’t absorb the news; it kept rising up and slapping her in the face like that garish children’s toy that springs out of its box. It made her face ache, her bones ache, her mind ache. A man got onto the tram wearing strings of garlic draped across his chest, hundreds of heads of garlic, like copious pearls or bullets. Was he selling them? Collecting them? Following some witch’s instructions to break a spell? He stood a few paces from her and her nostrils filled with garlic. She closed her eyes. The noises blurred around her. She felt a hand brush the back of her bare neck and jolted awake; don’t rest, don’t doze; Arturo was in front of her and seemed to have noticed nothing. Behind her faceless hordes of men. She could still feel the fingers on her nape, damp, crawling. She sat tense for the rest of the ride until the tram finally pulled to a stop where Arturo gestured for them to descend.

The street teemed with pedestrians and drawn carriages. The buildings seemed made of an odd combination of materials: wood and metal sheets and corrugated iron, slapped together and brightly painted: red, orange, yellow, blue, green. She smelled fresh-baked bread and horse piss and onions frying on a fire. An old man played a violin on the corner while, at his feet, a small boy rolled cigarettes with the concentration of a priest preparing bread for communion. The song had a vigor that belied the old man’s stony face; its melody rose and fell and refused to resolve, roving with a kind of desperate beauty that cut into Leda’s heart. What was this music?

She turned to Arturo, but he’d stepped ahead to ask the boy for help with the trunk. They lifted it together, Arturo working hard to make the task look effortless, to hide his exertion. They walked to the middle of the block and stopped in front of the worn red door of a building pressed against its neighbors, so that they looked like one long house. Judging by the distance between this set of doors and the next, her home seemed to have many rooms and two floors—two floors! For this Dante took so long to gather up the money! Why did he think they needed so much? He could have called her over earlier.

“Here we are,” Arturo said. “This red door.”

“You live nearby?” Leda said.

He looked surprised. “I live here. With you.”

She had mistaken his kindness. How could she have been so stupid. She thought quickly: he looked stronger than she was, but she was taller, she could outrun him, but she wouldn’t know which way to run.

He saw her expression and went red. “No, no—in another room. With my mother and sisters.”

The boy was watching keenly now. Leda tried to ignore his curiosity. “All of you, here? In this same house?”

“There are many of us here. Many families in one building. A
conventillo
. Dante didn’t explain?”

“No.” She had always imagined, even in the humblest incarnations
of her new life, that she and Dante would have a house to themselves. A private space at the end of the world, far from their own family, that was her dream, even if it were a one-room hut with a dirt floor like those occupied by the humblest citizens of Alazzano, the ones who cleaned the homes and stables of landowning families like her own. It had not occurred to her that the space would be immersed in the noise of other families, that their fellow immigrants would crowd into the same refuge. How naïve she had been. I do not know this place, not even from my dreaming, she thought as she followed Arturo and the boy through the front door.

They entered a dim foyer. Just beyond it, double doors let out into a long, open patio crammed with washing tubs, tables covered with fabric and other sewing supplies, dilapidated crates, laundry flapping on haphazard lines, women scrubbing and cutting and shelling and sewing and sweeping, and children, children everywhere, playing with wooden spoons, sharpening knives, mending ragged clothes, helping to scrub and cut and shell and sew and sweep, wiping snot from their grimy faces with their hands. They looked up and stared as she stepped into the glaring light.

“Leda!” a round-faced woman called out. She stood, wiped her hands on her skirt, and approached, arms open. She was stout and erect, with an edge of metal in her, like the matrons in Alazzano who could tear a person to shreds with their wagging tongues, though Leda tried not to think of them as she received the woman’s customary kiss.

“I’m Francesca,” the woman said. “We have been waiting for you!”

All eyes were on her, it was too much, she was so tired. Some were smiling, but others—the children, always the most honest—simply gazed as though she were a fascinating specimen just fished out of the water, the virgin widow, the grieving bride. Some women seemed to look at her with pity, others as though sizing up the wares at a market plagued with thieves. There were so many of them, did they all live here? And without men? But no, it was the middle of the day, the men
must be at work. And so there were even more people than this. She smelled urine and stale oil. Arturo had disappeared through one of the many doors that lined the courtyard, carrying her trunk. The courtyard was like the heart of a labyrinth, with doors on every side, no clear way out. Some of the doors were open, others closed. She wondered whether one of them led to her room, if in fact she had a room and was not meant to sleep here in the unroofed center among the crates and washing tubs.

“These are my daughters,” Francesca was saying. “Palmira, Diana, and Silvana.”

One by one, the three daughters—one Leda’s age, two younger—approached and kissed Leda’s cheek. The other women in the patio introduced themselves and kissed her and pointed out their children, some of whom kissed her dutifully while others hung back in defiance, and all of their names swam into Leda’s mind only to vanish immediately. She could not retain a single word. She hoped her smile was convincing. The women were chattering around her about how pretty she was, how young, how was the boat, how did she feel, until finally Francesca took charge and grasped Leda’s arm with all the firmness of a mother. “Come. I’ll show you your room.”

She had a room. It was the last one on the right. The air inside was thick and hot, unventilated, and then she knew why all the families congregated in the center patio. It wasn’t that they lacked their own spaces but that, inside, there was not enough air. Her room contained a wooden table, two chairs, a chipped armoire, a washbasin, and two narrow beds with rusted metal frames and burlap blankets, with an empty chamber pot under one. There was no stove. The walls had long ago surrendered the whiteness of their paint.

Arturo and the neighbor boy were in the corner, where they’d just placed the trunk. Arturo gave the boy a coin and sent him away.

“Sit, sit,” Francesca said, drawing out a chair. She exuded authority. Her accent was unfamiliar, though it sounded Northern Italian. From Genoa, maybe, or Milan.

Leda sat.

“You must be hungry,” Francesca said. Eyebrows raised in expectation.

“Please, don’t trouble yourse——”

“Arturo,” Francesca said, “tell Silvana to make the lady a plate.”

Arturo nodded and was gone.

“That boy, Arturo. He’s got a good heart. You can trust him, and I should know. He’s not my son, but I’m the closest thing to a mother that he’s got here. Same went for Dante. And for you.”

“Thank you,” said Leda, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say after such pronouncements. And then, stupidly, “I’m Leda.”

“Yes, I know.”

Francesca studied Leda for a long and silent minute. Leda looked away, at a spot where the paint had peeled from the wall to reveal the wood beneath.

“You must want some time to refresh yourself,” Francesca finally said. “I’ll leave you. There’s water in the jug under the basin.”

Then Leda was alone. She stared at the jug. She should use it to wash her hands, her face, but she could not rise. She could not move. The closed door made the air inside untenably thick, but she needed privacy more than she needed physical comfort. Outside, in the patio, she heard the sound of water sloshing in tubs, and the giggling of girls rose above the din of voices. Were they laughing at her? They shushed each other, but kept laughing.