The Gods of Tango (2 page)

He’s really there, in Argentina.

He looks happy.

He looks too skinny.

Look at those parrots, they’re big enough to eat him!

Don’t be ridiculous, Mario. Those are fake. Just painted wood.

How can you be so sure?

I have eyes in my head.

You don’t know anything, you idiot.

I was just—

No fighting today, for the sake of God, Leda’s mother said.

How about we let his bride take a look?

That’s right! Leda, do you want to see?

The photograph arrived in Leda’s hands. In it, Dante stood surrounded by strange ferns with enormous fronds and two garish parrots that, although she believed her brother’s insistence to the contrary, seemed intensely alive. His mouth curled into a smirk, and a cigarette dangled from his hand, unlit.
I own this place
, his posture seemed to say. Of course, just because that was the place where he’d found a photographer to take his portrait didn’t mean the whole city looked that way. She knew this; at least part of her knew this. But the image still glowed in her mind.

Now, on the steamship, she wondered how it would be with Dante, tonight, her first time. How he would touch her, and for how long. Whether it would hurt or give her joy, the way it did for brides in ballads. Whether she would think of the white figs in their orchard, how they glistened when you pressed your fingers into them. Whether she would think of nothing. Whether she would think of home.

A cluster of men in front of her had had their fill of the approaching land, and when they moved, she stepped forward to the rail and leaned against it. Wind whipped her face and stung her nostrils with saline air. She feared the wind might tear her blue hat right off her head, despite the several pins she’d used to place it, and losing the hat—the finest thing she’d ever worn, with real pearls stitched on,
fit for a bride
, her mother had said—would be unbearable, so she reached up and gripped it with both hands. The throng around her seemed to melt away (as it surely did for everyone else: 368 Italians, all wandering their own private visions of Argentina in their minds) as her eyes roved the distant city, Buenos Aires, lying low across the water. The buildings were still so small that she could not discern anything about them, except, of course, that they existed—that while she and her compatriots still had no idea what they would find when they disembarked, they would at least find something, a true place that might show them what they’d ridden across
the open ocean for; that the Américas were more than some fable concocted by ship lines and ticket agents and relatives with their carefully calibrated letters home, even if seeing that the Américas exist does not at all reveal the true mystery, a mystery much harder to resolve, namely, what the Américas actually are.

Leda stood for a long time, watching Buenos Aires glide toward her, and, because she did not yet dare to imagine its buildings, how she would fit inside and between them, she pictured herself in that garden with Dante, strolling past exotic ferns and sleeping curled together beneath them as they might under the wings of a great forgiving swan.

Leda’s wedding had been quick and simple, finished before the tang of communion bread could fade from her mouth. Since bride and groom were on different continents, they were married by proxy, with Dante’s father, her uncle Mateo, standing in at the altar for his son. Leda wore a simple linen dress she’d borrowed in haste from a cousin. It was too short for her—Leda was the tallest girl in Alazzano—and bunched awkwardly at the hips, but overall, with white carnations in hand and hair and her mother’s borrowed pearls at her throat, she looked enough like a bride to satisfy the throng of relatives and the melancholy priest. She would have worn her mother’s bridal gown, as was the custom, but there was no time to tailor it since Leda was to marry immediately and board a ship to Argentina the following day, and though her mother in her youth did not yet have the formidable girth she did now, she did have curves back then that her wedding dress made clear, a voluptuousness that put Leda’s hipless, flat-chested form to shame.
How could I have given birth to a girl with nothing on her?
her mother would sometimes say. They both knew the answer; on her father’s side, there had been two great-aunts famous for their tall and sexless forms. They lived their entire lives as spinsters. People called them the Nails because of their long thin bodies, harsh temperaments, and tendency to stick together as though they
belonged in the same box. As Leda stood at the altar, listening to the murmurs of the priest, she thought she could palpably feel her mother’s relief that her daughter was getting married and therefore saved from life as a Nail, though she could not tell whether her mother’s relief outweighed the sorrow of losing that same daughter to an unknown country far away. Ever since Dante’s letter had arrived,
send Leda, I am ready
, the air around Mamma had been sharp and heavy as an impending slap.

“For richer or for poorer?” the priest said.

“Sì,”
said Zio Mateo.

“Sì,”
said Leda, and her voice echoed from the vaulting ceiling, making the saints shiver in their alcoves.

The vows continued. Zio Mateo did not look at her. He had always had an impenetrable mind. He was the kind of man who seemed to live somewhere other than inside his own face. At family gatherings he either brooded in silence or launched long impassioned monologues that no one dared interrupt. Now that she was marrying his son, she could not read his expression, it had no message for her, no blessing and no unblessing, just a slightly bored acceptance, as though he were fulfilling a minor legal duty in whose outcome he was not invested. As though he did not think about his younger son in Argentina, did not wonder about the sweat and noise of Dante’s days, the slow push of his nights, the married life he was about to start. As though he’d grown tired of his role as patriarch and this ceremony didn’t matter, had no weight inside him except as a burden. The weary, beleaguered patriarch doing his duties at the altar. But he was a lie, an impostor, it disgusted her to give her vows to him, this man who had set in motion a family curse so strong that not even death could break it, a family curse that now could mar her marriage before it even began. She reminded herself that he was just a stand-in for the husband to whom she was actually binding her life, but the revulsion remained, knotting her stomach, darkening the wide church air.

It was winter, an unusual time for a wedding, and when the party of
fifteen or so walked down the church steps onto the plaza, cold air pricked Leda’s face. She had imagined that the world might look different than it did when she first entered the church, that it might glow with some secret light to which only married people were privy, that her eyes might have gained the power to glimpse some hidden texture of the world that might make it more comprehensible, more able to align with the world she carried inside. Countless times she had been told
you’ll understand when you’re grown up
—and here it was, the threshold of womanhood. But the spell hadn’t worked. The world was the same. Her brother Tommaso was talking, as always, making her father laugh, but she could not follow what they were saying to each other. Papà’s arm was interlocked with hers, and she was comforted by this, her father’s gentle touch, almost timid, a lost bird.
I swear it’s true
, her brother said,
it hit him right in his youknowwhere
. Her father laughed again, perhaps a bit too hard, a sound forced from his throat. Her mother walked behind them, emanating chaos. The three little ones swarmed around her, along with other children and their mothers. What were the women talking about? She picked out the words
grandson
and
oranges
and
never ever ripened
. Their voices rose and fell in melodious, competing waves. Zio Mateo and his oldest son, Mario, walked in front, silent. The wedding party crossed the plaza, their steps echoing on the same cobbles as always, rounded, gray, slightly uneven, stones her ancestors had walked across to go to mass, or play chess, or wash clothes in communal tubs, ever since the first known Dante Mazzoni had fled his native Puglia in 1582—after siding with the French Bourbons in a failed attempt to overthrow Spanish rule, which left him suddenly on the wrong side of the law—and settled here in Alazzano, a tiny village in a valley of figs and ghosts and olive groves. Now the Mazzoni family owned half the land around the village, and yet was crushed by debt and other demons that were making the youngest generation slowly disappear, some overseas, some into oblivion. Although it was not accurate to say the Mazzoni family owned the land. It was one single member who owned it. Zio Mateo. Leda’s father
was the younger brother, Ugo, owner of nothing, not even of the house he lived in by the grace and generosity of the brother who had inherited everything and thanks to whom her family, Ugo’s family, could eat and farm and breathe.

What experts we are at hiding poison, she thought as the wedding party reached the door of Mateo’s house, Palazzo Mazzoni, the largest house in the village. His wife, Crocifissa, had set out the tablecloths, plates, and silverware hours before, and now she and the other women vanished into the kitchen. Leda tried to join them but her aunts glared at her and blocked the door.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“Not today.”

“Not in that dress, you don’t.”

The living room smelled of rosemary chicken, tomato sauce, and freshly baked sweet cakes. The men settled down to smoke, the children went outside to play, and Leda found a chair in a corner, though she would have liked to join the children in the dirt. She fixed her gaze on the oil painting that hung over the fireplace, of a vineyard beneath a clear blue sky. At one edge of the vineyard, an unusually tall fig tree caught sunlight in its leaves. She remembered that tree. It used to stand at the edge of Zio Mateo’s land, at its border with that of a neighbor, Don Paolo. They had disputed over their property line, a fight they’d inherited from their grandfathers. In particular, Don Paolo had wanted the rights to the fig tree, whose fruits were his mother’s favorite. After a long battle, a local judge had decided in Zio Mateo’s favor, though Don Paolo’s mother would spread the rumor that the judge had been bribed. Once he’d won the settlement, Mateo had taken an ax and cut down that fig tree with his own hands, because he wanted to, because he could. And then nobody in the entire village could enjoy its fruits ever again. In the painting, however, the tree’s broad leaves continued to reach upward, their five sections resembling fingers splayed open to the air.

Leda shifted her weight restlessly. This living room made her think,
how could it not, of Cora, who used to live here, who used to call this home. How could there be a wedding day without her?—especially since it was Cora’s brother she was marrying. Cora her soul-cousin, her almost-sister who’d opened the world to her when they were very small, before the nightmare, when their spirits were so large they could have eaten the whole sky and called it breakfast, licked their fingers and been ready for more, Cora who’d seemed to understand the world from the inside in a secret way that Leda was hungry to know also, who’d brushed Leda’s hair and warmed her milk when Mamma was too tired to notice, who’d sung her the lullabies that mothers sing for girls, who’d taken her to the river to fetch water and shown her how to brave the shallows, ankle-deep, calf-deep, even thigh, she was so bold, Cora, bright as hellblaze on a Lenten night, skirts hitched up in heedless fists, and laughing. Leda, two years younger, stood at the shore, scared to wade too deep, staring at her feet through the cold translucent river as it ran and ran and kissed her skin and Cora splashed her and said
Go on, go on, what’s a little water in your skirts?
Cora teacher of secrets, such as how to pluck a chicken (soften its skin, she said, so the feathers are glad to slide out; they don’t fight you if they’re warm enough; dip the bird in boiling water and let heat work its magic, then get a good grip, strip it bare) and also how to read. She read aloud to Leda on winter evenings in this very living room, in that dark-honey voice of hers that made each syllable sound delicious. She loved the books that chronicled journeys most of all. The
Odyssey
. The
Inferno. A History of Joan of Arc
. In the end she’d put the volumes down and started to tell the stories in her own words, a mix of telling them from memory and embellishing the bones. Odysseus unlashed himself and swam out to the sirens. Joan escaped from prison before she could be burned. The road through the inferno became riddled with the dead of their own village, the grocer’s wife, the long-gone priest, their ancestors whose names still bristled on the pages of records in the church. Even hell could seem appealing to a village girl itching for adventure, a village girl like Cora. Listen, Leda, she’d said, imagine traveling to places where you recognize nothing, not even your
own face. Just imagine. And Leda did imagine. When Cora was nine, at the stone washing tubs on the village plaza, she learned about the bleeding of women. Leda was seven then. They say it hurts, Cora whispered, and Leda was terrified. Don’t worry, Cora said. It’ll happen to me first, and by the time it’s your turn I’ll know how to help you. But it didn’t happen that way. By the time Leda’s blood came, Cora was gone.

Within an hour, the wedding party had swelled with guests. The entire 107-person population of the village seemed to have come, as well as a few guests from the two nearest villages up the mountain, Monte Rosso and Trinità. As there was no groom to speak to, everybody wanted to talk to Leda, congratulate her, and ask questions about Argentina that she could not begin to answer. The married women formed a knot around her that refused to be undone.

“Are you ready? You’ve packed everything?”

“She’d better have. The carriage comes at dawn.”

“At dawn!”

“Your trunk must be full to the brim.”