The Gods of Tango
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Synopsis
From one of the leading lights of contemporary Latin American literature-a lush, lyrical, deeply moving story of a young woman whose passion for the early sounds of tango becomes a force of profound and unexpected change.
February 1913: seventeen-year-old Leda, carrying only a small trunk and her father's cherished violin, leaves her Italian village for a new home, and a new husband, in Argentina. Arriving in Buenos Aires, she discovers that he has been killed, but she remains: living in a tenement, without friends or family, on the brink of destitution. Still, she is seduced by the music that underscores life in the city: tango, born from lower-class immigrant voices, now the illicit, scandalous dance of brothels and cabarets. Leda eventually acts on a long-held desire to master the violin, knowing that she can never play in public as a woman. She cuts off her hair, binds her breasts, and becomes "Dante," a young man who joins a troupe of tango musicians bent on conquering the salons of high society. Now, gradually, the lines between Leda and Dante begin to blur, and feelings that she has long kept suppressed reveal themselves, jeopardizing not only her musical career, but her life.
Richly evocative of place and time, its prose suffused with the rhythms of the tango, its narrative at once resonant and gripping, this is De Robertis's most accomplished novel yet.
Release date: July 7, 2015
Publisher: Vintage
Print pages: 384
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The Gods of Tango
Carolina De Robertis
“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.
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