Free The Gods of Tango by Carolina de Robertis Page A

water as it lunged toward the impossible horizon.
    At the Buenos Aires port, Arturo didn’t recognize his second cousin’s uncle Carlo and walked right past him, still scanning the crowd.
    Arturo! It’s me, Carlo!
    Arturo turned. Carlo had gone gray in the fourteen years since he’d left Italy, and had a scar now from his right ear to his chin. He wrapped Arturo in an embrace so tight that the pain squeezed his eyes shut. Arturo saw the scar on the backs of his own eyelids, enormous, glowing, a great red slash. When he opened his eyes, he caught sight of Dante walking away. He called out. Dante, come back!
    Dante turned.
    You weren’t going to say goodbye?
    I’m sorry.
    This is my uncle Carlo.
    The two men kissed in greeting. Dante looked uncomfortable, and, as often happened, Arturo could not interpret the expression in his eyes. Before his friend could escape again, he told him the address of his new home. Come see us, he said. We might be able to help.
    Dante nodded with an indifference that made Arturo think he’d never see him again. They kissed goodbye and left the port with their trunks on wheeled carts, Dante to the Hotel, Arturo and Carlo to the nearest tram station.
    When Dante appeared at the conventillo on the fifth day, Arturo was overjoyed. He’d begun to feel shaky in this strange city without his friend’s effortless confidence. Even if Dante’s swagger was false, it lulled Arturo, flecked his fears with bright spots of calm.
    How was the famous Hotel de Inmigrantes?
    Dante shrugged. Nothing worth any fame.
    I’m glad to see you.
    Is there room for me here?
    Arturo wasn’t sure, but he said, mio amico , if there isn’t room we’ll make some.
    He’d been sleeping on the floor of the middle room on the right, which was populated only by single men, and so had come to be called la Camera di Scapolo—the Bachelor Room. When he arrived, six bachelors already slept there: four of them shared two beds, head to toe, and two more slept on the floor, on straw pallets woven by Francesca’s daughters across the patio. Arturo slept along the far wall, if you could call it sleep, the restless hours spent prone in that hot airless room. With Dante added, it would be even harder to breathe. But the other bachelors welcomed Dante, in part because one of the men, a brooding Ligurian, would be staking out a room of his own soon with a cousin about to arrive, and in part because there were never enough pesos to go around.
    Dante slept beside Arturo, as his brother had when they were little boys. His friend’s breaths were a soft slow loop of sound that carried him gently toward sleep.
    It wasn’t hard for Arturo and Dante to get jobs. One of the men in their room worked for an export company that needed strong young bodies in its warehouse, having just lost a few to illness or death. Side by side, they loaded and unloaded cargo at the docks, eleven hours a day, sweat pouring down their bare backs in the unrelenting sun. They came home streaked with dirt, bones screaming, to a hot dinner from Francesca and her daughters, who fed the bachelors for a small fee. Arturo worked until his back throbbed and blisters riddled his hands and feet. He worked until he started to see—and this he would never admit to a soul on earth—his mother’s face, bent over him, cooing a song of comfort, rubbing his worn skin, enfolding him the way she had long ago when he was a little boy and his father had finished beating him and gone to bed. When he was seven, one of the beatings broke Arturo’s arm, and it had never set right, always gave him trouble, even now. His mother had tended to him at home rather than calling on the village healer and incurring further gossip on the family. When she’d wiped up all the blood, iced the bruises, and made a rudimentary cast out of old cloth, she embraced him, hummed into his ear, and crushed his face to her breasts. This memory was the warmest thing his mind possessed. Mamma, Mamma, my arm