The Gods of Tango (4 page)

“A wedding gift,” her father said, quietly, so as not to wake her little sister. “Give it to Dante.”

She stared at him.

“Let it bring you both a little beauty.”

The King of Naples, writhing in his four-hundred-year-old grave. She should say no. It seemed a sacrilege for the instrument to leave Italy. But was it any less of a sacrilege for it to stay here, silent?

Her father pushed the violin toward her and her hands gripped the case before her mind could decide. Still she couldn’t speak. They stood awkwardly for a moment, the air thick between them, and then he was gone.

She could not bring herself to open the case and look at the violin. Not yet. She put it in the trunk, sat down on her bed, and tried not to think, tried to rein in the unbroken horses of her thoughts. Here she
was: a bride on her wedding night. With no groom to do the things that were supposed to be done. She closed her eyes. It was as dark behind her eyelids as it was inside the room. She let her mind loosen its moorings and float out into the great night world, where it soared, strangely, to Mount Vesuvius, visible from the hills beyond her village, presiding over the earth like a green-mantled king. When she was a girl and had a rare slice of time all to herself with no peas to shell or water to carry or hens to pluck, she would scale the hills just to stare out at the landscape, at the volcano, searching for some hint of the deadly fire inside it, the red-hot ferocity that had destroyed the ancient city of Pompeii. It was her grandfather who had told her the story of Pompeii. Her nonno, her mother’s father, had rarely missed the chance to tell a good tale, and liked none better than the one of that great city which some years ago (that was how he put it,
some years ago
, as though the story had been handed down only a generation or two) had been buried by the volcano’s eruption. Thousands died, he said. It was terrible, so sudden. Women caught naked in their baths never again put on a robe. Children fighting over a wooden doll never had the chance to make amends. Husbands on their way home lost the chance to kiss their wives ever again. All of them were buried in mid-stride, mid-scuffle, mid-lather of their lovely thighs. Can you imagine? All that life and heat and dreaming packed inside them and then—
whoosh!
—they were nothing. They were dead. It can happen that quickly,
cara Leda
. That’s the thing about life. We think we are so strong, we think we are so real, but there are things that are much more real than us, and stronger, and we forget about them until it’s too late and they’re burying us in ash. Her grandfather’s tales of old Pompeii stretched on and on, sometimes for hours, until that paralyzed and buried city became more alive in Leda’s mind than her own village. He would tell his stories on the shaded patio just beyond their kitchen door, on long summer evenings, as dusk gathered gently around them and as she shelled hazelnuts or peas. As Leda’s hands moved from bowl to bowl, she would see legions of ghosts, with penetrating clarity.
Charioteers raising whips over glistening horses. Children squabbling over that ill-fated toy, one of them, a bully, grasping it with both hands, while three others reached for it with arms that would never arrive. And women in their baths. Nonno always managed to include these women in their baths. In old Pompeii, he explained, there were maidservants to pour water over ladies, to wash their bodies, their backs, their breasts. They would be relishing the cool water against their summer-hot bodies, naked in marble tubs, dreaming, if they were maidens, of their wedding nights, of what would happen on those future occasions after all of the festivities were done. He told it that way, with the part about the wedding nights, only when he’d drunk more wine than usual. But Leda could never shake the image of these young women, naked in the water, soaping their bodies, dreaming of a first bout of lovemaking that was never to arrive. She would think of them as she sat by the river, or lay alone in bed—and she thought of them now, on her wedding night: her body flushed strangely as she pictured an ancient bathtub right in front of her, a naked maiden arching her back with her eyes closed, raising her breasts toward the ceiling, shivering at the touch of imaginary hands, oblivious to her fast-approaching death.

When she finally opened her eyes, light crept in through the window, fresh and tentative. Her travel dress still lay neatly on the trunk. Margherita stirred gently in her sleep. Outside, a sparrow launched a lover’s quarrel with the dawn, and, from the kitchen, she heard the sounds of her mother making coffee. She changed clothes, clasped her hair into a bun, and went to help Mamma, who did not greet her and did not look up. She smelled tart, like smoldering wood and restless sleep. Leda wanted to memorize the smell, to stash it in her mind along with the exact shape of her mother’s body in the kitchen, the space it had occupied for so many years that without her the room would surely implode. Just as the coffee began to percolate on the stove, Mamma turned to her and said, “I can’t.” Leda waited for her to go on, but Mamma only stared at her with liquid and terrifying eyes, those same eyes that had summoned
instant obedience from her when she was a child, could make her feel as though the most hidden parts of her were suddenly laid bare. Until this moment, it had not occurred to Leda that Mamma might be anguished on this day. She was always so tired, harsh with her oldest, the daughter, Leda, who could never do enough or be a good enough girl or ease the edge of bitterness in Mamma, the suffering of the two failed pregnancies and the stillborn that came after Tommaso and wore out her body and probably, Leda now thought, wore her heart out as well, so that she was spent by the time the little ones came, and didn’t seem to care about Leda, didn’t notice her except to criticize or make sure the chores were done. Or so Leda had thought before this look, this moment. She knew nothing about her mother’s heart; she’d assumed it to be closed, exhausted by life, indifferent to her. Only now, moments before leaving, did she grasp that she might have been wrong.

“Mamma,” she said. She stood, knife in hand, arrested over a loaf of bread.

“I can’t,” Mamma said again. “You pour the coffee.” And then she walked out of the front door and up the path away from the street, toward the river.

Tommaso and Papà rose and drank coffee and ate toast and Mamma did not come back. Tommaso chattered about the party last night, who had drunk too much, laughing at his own quips. He seemed nervous; he tended to chatter more when he was nervous, a trait that had always grated on Leda, though now it simply made her see the boy in him. The delicate boy who sang to the chickens and cried for hours when first forced to slaughter them. He’d groomed his hair carefully this morning, the way he did for special occasions, dipping the comb in grape-seed oil and forming a perfect part. She tried not to think about never seeing him again. She tried not to think of her mother at the river, and was still pushing the image from her mind when the carriage arrived.

And then they were all outside: Leda, her father, Tommaso, and the children, who’d been shaken out of their beds and gathered in a blurred,
obedient mass to say goodbye, still wearing their crumpled party clothes from the night before. Together, the coachman and her father lifted the trunk up into the carriage. She kissed each of the boys, who understood nothing, and then Margherita, who clung to her neck as though it were the mast of a sinking ship. Tommaso kissed her and for once had nothing to say. Her father reached out his hand to help her up into the carriage. Still no sign of Mamma. How could she leave without kissing her mother goodbye? But she had no choice, Mamma had run away by her own will and if she went to look for her in the woods she might not find her in a whole day’s searching, might still be scaling hills riddled with undergrowth when the ship pulled out of Naples this evening. She had to leave. All the goodbye kissing was done, and Leda had her hand on the door of the carriage, already halfway in. Her father took her gently by the arm and helped her up, then entered and sat beside her. She looked down at Tommaso and the children through the window of the raised cabin. They looked very small.

“Ciao, Leda!”
the boys called. “
Ciao
, good luck in América!”

Their tone was light, jubilant. As though América were a village just past Naples.

They waved at her as the coachman stirred the horses into motion. She waved back until they were out of sight.

Her father held her hand. She closed her eyes and pretended to sleep. The hard clop of horses’ feet against cobblestones gave way to the soft thud of packed earth, which told her that they were out of the village now, no longer in Alazzano but on the dirt roads that led up toward Trinità and through it, until they widened into the long straight road northwest toward Naples. And Naples was closer with each hoofbeat. She wanted to watch the road change, but if she opened her eyes Papà would know she was awake and might try to talk to her. She couldn’t stand the thought of what he might say. So she kept her eyes closed and followed the contours of the land in her mind. The slopes and curves. The infinite shades of green. The rumble of the carriage lulling her into
a voluptuous cloud that held her suspended in its folds but she was not asleep, she was not dreaming, it was really true that she was now inside a carriage with her father as they rode a long band of golden dust through stark air toward a great void.

She woke to the din of voices. She was leaning against her father and had left a trail of spit on his coat sleeve. He had not noticed; he was staring out the window at a crowded street. Naples. Her first time there. Every building was taller than she’d imagined possible. Here was a church whose façade seemed carved straight out of the imagination of crazed angels: tall arches, cherubs wailing at beheaded saints, balconies lined with decadent pillars. Here was a fountain filled with nymphs, their thin robes clinging to their breasts as they lilted toward the water, captured in stone, arrested in motion. And everywhere, people; the scent of horseshit and sweat and rotting melon rinds; men in hats and women with baskets and vendors with laden carts, all crowding the sidewalk with such force that she couldn’t understand how they wove past each other, how they knew where they were going, how they found space between the bodies of others to move their own. Would she ever learn to walk like that? A man was hawking fish, he had the best catches from the morning, his fish, his fish, you should buy it now, if your husband died with this fish in his belly he’d die happy. Milk, milk, another man had milk, and if you had it any fresher you’d be sucking from the teat. The people on the street walked without slowing down, their eyes focused far ahead as though they could see the future and were striding right toward it.

The carriage paused at an intersection. At the corner stood a woman in a dress of that bright red color women were never allowed to wear, or so Leda had believed for as long as she could remember. Could this color possibly be considered decent in Naples? But it was not only the color. The cut of the dress dipped dangerously and bared the woman’s pale, freckled shoulders. If flesh itself could laugh. A terrible sight. Leda could not wrench her eyes away. The woman was standing still, and,
when a man slowed to look at her, she smiled and let him look. Leda was looking, too, although the woman could not see her, and for an instant she pictured opening the carriage door and stepping out without a goodbye to her father, without retrieving her belongings, out toward the red woman and into the great river of Napoletanos, an insane act since it could only lead to the gutter and even worse things that awaited young women who abandoned their trunks and patient faraway grooms to dive alone into the large and dangerous arms of a city. What a shocking thought, where had it come from?
Behave yourself
, her own mind said in her mother’s voice; and then, right after it, Cora’s voice,
Go on, go on, what’s a little water in your skirts
—and then she could not think anymore, she was in the river with Cora and Cora was screaming, dying, she was going to drown right along with her but she had to live, she had to live, she would not go in, she would not dive out of this carriage into the river of Napoletanos or get close to the red woman; the man on the street who’d looked at the woman had now walked off and the woman was alone again, her dress a bloody stain on the crowd, and the carriage drove on with Leda still inside it, still a good wife, a sane girl, a lady. The red woman disappeared, and Leda expunged the hazards and sharp edges from her mind.

“We’re almost there,” her father said.

They spent two hours at the port, waiting for the steamship, watching the throng of people grow around them, more people than Leda had ever seen gathered in one place, several villages’ worth of people crushed onto the platform. How could so much of Italy leave its own land for the Américas? Who would be left? Of course, some of the people in the port, like her father, were not leaving but were here to bid their loved ones a last goodbye: there was the close-clasping mother, the last-chance-to-give-instructions father, the relatives clustered like human fortresses about to crumble, the men smoking and all talking at
once, the women weeping lavish tears, the milling, the cold, the patting of backs again and again, the undercurrents of dread and longing for the parting moment when the goodbyes would finally be done. Her father must feel that way too. Their conversation had petered out. He must be tired. He was standing because the few benches on the platform were occupied by elders, and he’d insisted on letting her sit on her trunk. She unwrapped the brown paper packets of bread, cheese, and olives she’d packed that morning.

“Come, Papà, sit down with me to eat.”

“I am fine standing.”

“No—there’s room for both of us here.”

“You sit, Leda.”

She stood up. “I won’t sit unless you sit with me.”

He did not look her in the eye. “You’ve always been stubborn.”

They sat beside each other on the trunk, eating slowly, looking out at the boats and ships, the city hugging the shoreline and, after the buildings gave way, Vesuvius. From this vantage point the mountain seemed to keep watch over the city, a kind of guardian, or warden, or both.