The Gods of Tango

That afternoon, Leda went out to the market, her small chance of escaping the conventillo by herself. Francesca had warned her very clearly to head right down the block to the stores and vendors, then return quickly home. But she was starved to see more of the city. The conventillo caged her in. She hadn’t planned to break the rules and stray, but, after filling her basket with loaves from Alfonso Di Bacco, who extolled her beauty and dispensed paternal advice as he had come to do each day—where there’s life, there’s hope—choose neither linen nor a man by candlelight—the best word is the one that goes unspoken—she stood at the corner and stared down the block at unknown buildings, unseen doors and rooms and lives, carriages pulled by horses clopclopping their way to places they knew and she did not, their manes gleaming in the late sun before they dove into shadows, and she thought, what harm can it do to walk a little in the light of day? Can it really be so dangerous? She set out down the block, crossed the street and kept walking. People, streaming everywhere, women in doorways, old men in cafés or pushing ramshackle handcarts, calling out not in Italian, but in Spanish, that strange language that sounded like the Italian of an alternate planet. A planet of drunkards, perhaps. Already she understood more glimmers of it, which meant she was either learning Spanish or getting drunk on this place, or both. The streets were crowded with people, innumerable people who’d arrived before her to the land of promise and already staked their space. Land of promise you have promised too much already to the thousands. She walked on. Her ear caught shreds of other languages. She heard a woman in a doorway speaking sounds unlike anything she’d heard before, at once angular and melodic. For all she knew it could be the tongue of demons or the gods. Further on, children called to their mothers from inside the house, in Spanish, Italian, another unknown tongue. Two girls with baskets walked purposefully past her, gossiping in French. At a café, an old man told a joke in the Neapolitan dialect to a group of men who laughed appreciatively. More Napoletanos. She had imagined, in her brief visit to Naples, that that would be all she’d see of the city, but Naples had followed her across the ocean. It surrounded her. It had invaded Buenos Aires. And isn’t that strange, she thought, the way one city can swirl inside another; the way you can be in one country yet carry another country in your skin; the way a place is changed by whoever comes to it, the way silt invades the body of a river. She was that, a speck of silt. The thought thrilled her but it also made her want to weep without reason, or for reasons utterly unknown to her. With every immigrant she passed she longed to stop and stare into his or her face and ask with nothing but her gaze And you? What are you here for? Why did you come?, as though just looking at them might unlatch the trapdoor to their hidden stories. And the stories would be infinite, no two alike, burning with hope and loss and vigorous despair, told in more dialects than even God could possibly speak, and yet, she suddenly saw, it was possible that somewhere beneath the surface all their hidden stories held the same thread, a single hum of longing, I came to live. Surely this was true for all of them, including her. And Buenos Aires, tell me, is there any chance that I can forge a space for myself somewhere in the folds of you? (She turned a corner and kept walking.) Will I ever rove these raucous streets with familiarity and with no fear? She walked and walked. The thrum of her feet, the thrum of the city. She felt hypnotized, expanded, and all the things around her—doors, people, brightly painted walls—threatened to tear her open with their sheer existence. She had never felt more awake in her life. The voices of the city blended and poured into her, filling her up, radiant, sweetly fatal, and that was when she understood that whatever this city was, whatever it held, she wanted it. All of it. She wanted Buenos Aires inside her, around her, covering her skin like a film of sweat. She wanted the breath of this city in her lungs no matter the danger, no matter the other story about the good girl who stays locked inside with needle and thread until she can get back to her home village, to hell with that story, she wanted freedom, wanted to taste this place even if it killed her. She felt exhilarated and afraid of her own exhilaration. Was she going mad? Cora, is this how it was for you? She stopped, leaned against a wall, and closed her eyes. Her mind warred between collecting itself and falling even deeper into thrall. 
            “Señorita?”
            She opened her eyes. A man stood before her, hat in hand. He had a kind enough face but his gaze was too raw. He said something in Spanish that she did not understand. Then he smiled and placed his hand on her arm. Her skin prickled. She tried to pull away, but his hand followed and gripped her tightly. 
            Leda tore away from him and ran.
            She was lost. One turn, two, and she was on a block she’d never seen before. Old men played dice on the sidewalk, bickering in a strident Italian. They spoke her language but now she was afraid to ask for help, and the thought pushed in before she could stop it, I want my Mamma, Mamma where are you? But Mamma was not here, she was unreachable, twenty steamship days away across a great blue ocean of impossible. She tried going the other way. Her arm ached from the basket’s weight, she shifted it to the other side and kept walking and walking until she reached the end of a street that let out to the port, and there she saw the ships and cargo, men working high up on ladders, hauling crates, sweat beading on their faces, and one of them—Dante! Her cousin, her husband!—turned as if to call to her, but no, he was not Dante, his gaze moved blankly on and he wiped his face and resumed his burden. Dante was dead and did not work here anymore. You are alone, Leda. Alone.
            It took her another hour to find her way home.
            “Where were you?” Francesca scolded as soon as she arrived. “You can’t just wander around this city. You don’t know what happens to women out there.”
 
 
            That night, Leda couldn’t sleep. She tossed and turned, feverish with thoughts. She thought of the city, pulsing beyond the walls of her conventillo, bursting with life and noise and peril. The thought of Dante and the moment at the port: it was him, it was not him, he would never be at the port again. His absence stabbed her. She wondered what he’d felt when he’d walked the streets she walked today. Whether they’d amazed him as they had her. She longed to ask him. Longed to close the gap between his life and hers. 
            She went to the armoire and opened its doors for the first time.
            His clothes were all there, as promised. Musty air welled toward her, tinged with the scent of mothballs, dry sweat, and decay. At first, she touched the clothing with trepidation, not wanting to disturb its sleep; but then she found herself taking out a pair of trousers, a shirt, a vest, a jacket. She laid them on the bed in the shape of a man. They were empty clothes, nothing more. She touched them again. How had they felt against his skin? And then, before her mind could ask her body what it was doing, she was taking off her nightgown and putting on the shirt, trousers, vest, in an act that would surely scandalize the living if not the dead. Her hips slipped smoothly into the trousers. Her body flushed with hot alarm. What if someone walked into her room now? No, that would not happen. No one ever walked into her room after she retired for the night. Still she could not shake the sense of an unutterable danger. Dante, can you forgive me? Am I violating your memory, or paying it tribute?
            It was shocking, how comfortably his clothes fit. The shirt swelled a little over her breasts. It felt strange to have two layers of fabric between her thighs. How different it must be to walk with the sheath of trousers between your legs rather than a crowd of petticoats rustling around them. She tried it, stalking the room, hesitantly at first, then more boldly, imagining how Dante might have strode on his way to work in the mornings, full of muscle and determination, full of hope. And if he passed another man he would not modestly bow his head and avert his eyes, but rather nod to him, chin high, shoulders squared against the world. Wasn’t that how men did it? She wasn’t sure. She knew how it looked from the outside, this walk of men, but not how it felt from within. She tried it, walked an imaginary street, passed an imaginary man, nodded, not slow-forehead-down, as women do, but quick-chin-up. She felt preposterous, but she also felt something else: a delectable rush.
            She took the clothes off, quickly, then stared at them, bunched on the floor. What had she done? She would never do that again. In that instant, with all her soul, she swore that she never would.
            She broke the vow the following night.
            This time, she put the clothes on slowly, buttoning with fingers still sore from a day’s sewing. Then she looked at herself in a hand-mirror, tilting it up and down her body in the lamplight. She looked like a man. She felt like a man—or, at least, she felt the way she imagined a man might feel: emboldened, like she could walk all the way to the end of her neighborhood and people would leave her alone. Like she could walk into a café in the middle of the night and the barman would serve her, casually, like she was just a normal customer, like all she was asking for was a damn drink.
            But she was not a man. She was a woman.
            Wasn’t she?
            What kind of woman does this thing you’re doing right now?
            The question rose out of the air and coiled around her. She didn’t want to think about the answer but she also didn’t want to take off Dante’s clothes.
            You should take them off. You disgusting girl. Take them off.
            She stood still for a long time. Something broke apart inside her. She sensed that the longer the clothes stayed on her body, the more irreparable the change would become. And yet she made no move to take the clothes off. Instead her hands reached for the instrument case and took out the violin.
            She played. 
            The moves were becoming more familiar to her hands. With men’s clothes on, her hands moved more smoothly, with more strength and confidence, and this surprised her. It was difficult to keep silent—she longed to hear the motion of her fingers, to test the quality of her sound. But she did not break the silence; the silence was her shield, her refuge. And soon her fingers’ music filled her mind and drowned out the hostile voice that had demanded she take the clothes off. The voice slunk into the corners of the room, where it crouched, shrunken in momentary defeat, helpless in the face of silent music.