The Gods of Tango by Carolina de Robertis Read Free Book Online Page A

explode and tilt you into horror. I should know. The line on the deck moved forward several paces. There must have been a group of easy approvals or denials, waved on through. Leda’s line advanced in the opposite direction, and now she was out of sight. Fausta crossed herself. She had no reason to think that she wouldn’t be admitted into Argentina, but still, every muscle in her body was tense. If they didn’t let her in she wouldn’t know whether to panic or applaud.
    Oh, but it was too hot, how the sun bore down. And not just down, but how the heat hung around them, thick and inescapable. Even with all her wiping of face and neck, she would be sweaty when she first saw Bruno. He would be sweaty as well, no doubt; at home, on days this hot, he’d soak through the handkerchiefs she folded neatly into his pockets. She washed them every summer night and had three ready for him every morning. She’d made the handkerchiefs herself out of torn shirts, there was no buying such luxuries, but she was a good wife, back then, she embroidered the edges into elegance. How would Bruno look today? How had he changed? His letters had grown cold. Terse. Businesslike. She had heard tales, legends really, of emigrants whose very souls werechilled by life in the New World. In Salerno, she’d had a neighbor whose uncle had returned after thirty years in the mines of Florida. Everybody had always called him Vampata—Blaze—because, when he left as a young man, he’d had so much energy he seemed constantly on the brink of bursting into flames. But when Vampata came home, he was dull as ash, a trudging shell of a man. He never smiled or said a word, only nodded or shook his head in response to questions. He worked in his nephew’s forge all day and kept to himself the rest of the time. The word vampata , in her neighborhood, acquired a new meaning. It came to be used for anything that had the life drained out of it. Don’t marry that boy, his mother will make you a vampata with her harangues. Come on, smile, what’s wrong with you, vampata ? This country is a vampata now, that’s why the young men all want to leave; who wants to start their life out in a wasteland?
    The line shuffled forward again. Closer and closer. Bruno, she thought, if your fire has died I will not accept it. I’d have to kill you, and slowly, with a dull fork. You’re the only thing I have here in this place and if you don’t give me a baby before it’s too late I will never forgive you for the lost years. That girl I shared a room with, she thinks that I can’t wait to see you, I’ve played the role of dutiful wife and convinced everyone of my performance, nobody sees my fury. You were supposed to come home more prosperous than before. You were supposed to give me a life, motherhood, a future that could be endured. I waited for you for one year, then two. Obediently. Only at three years did I grow hopeless, and, Bruno, you must know, from your years in América, what it is to be alone, the toll on the body and its hungers, perhaps worse for men because their hungers are so strong but it cannot be that women do not have them. Look at me. Am I the only woman who has known savage lust? Am I a malformed woman? This is what I’ve asked myself on a thousand and one nights, how God could misshape me the way He did, how He could put so much terrible desire in a woman’s body and then send her husband across the ocean and leave her in his parents’ house,to wait, untouched, alone. How can you blame me for what happened? For the afternoons in the back of the grocer’s shop, on his sacks of beans and wheat? But of course you would. And that is why I’ve prayed and prayed that when I see you I’ll succeed in hiding the truth so that you, my husband, a stranger to me now, won’t detect betrayal in my face. I didn’t do it to betray you, Bruno, but to be faithful to myself, to my wretched self, which was threatening to die without some touch, and the grocer,