Free The Gods of Tango by Carolina de Robertis Page B

hurts at the end of every Buenos Aires day. And something else hurts worse, at the center of my chest: it is an empty place that will never be filled as long as I am far from home in a crowded noisy city that never shuts up or slows down. He had not expected to miss his village the way he did—not the fear, not his father, not the days when there was only a crust or two of bread that his older brother might rip from his hands, but the sun and air and space, the luxurious green. He hungered for trees. He had taken them for granted, like breathing. Now they were gone, replaced by the relentless noise and stink of a city where there was nowhere to be alone, nowhere calm, nowhere pure—thoughhe didn’t dare complain. There were young men in his village who would cut off a limb for the chance to come to the Américas, who looked on with envy during his last days after his mamma had shown him the wad of cash she’d miraculously gathered, thanks to skipped meals and relatives and fervent prayers to the Virgin, for his escape. And look at the other men who surrounded him here. Look at Dante, working with grim ferocity, and never a protest in his voice or even in the muscles of his face; that man had a strong will! and goals! and he was going to build something if he had to push his body past its breaking point to do it.
    I don’t understand, Arturo said. What keeps you going?
    They were on their walk home, and for a moment he heard only the round beat of their shoes against stone streets.
    Ghosts, said Dante.
    What ghosts?
    None, no ghosts, don’t be stupid, he said quickly. I just want to eat and to raise a family, like everybody else.
    This was all he would admit to. But on two separate nights, Arturo had woken to his friend thrashing beside him, caught in a nightmare, talking in his sleep. No. No. Cora! The first time, Dante struggled as if under attack. Arturo shook him and whispered as loudly as he dared.
    Dante. Dante!
    Dante opened his eyes.
    You were dreaming. It was a dream.
    Dante made a strange, strangled sound.
    Do you need something? Water?
    No. Sorry I woke you.
    Forget about it.
    Dante closed his eyes. Arturo didn’t know whether he was asleep or pretended to be, but they didn’t speak any more that night.
    Six weeks passed before it happened again. Arturo shook him awake as he had before, then whispered the question he’d been carrying since the first time. Who is Cora?
    Dante was silent for so long that Arturo thought he’d fallen back asleep. Then he said, very quietly, Nobody.
    Arturo hesitated. But—
    And if you ever say that name to me again I’ll beat the lights out of you. Understand?
    The darkness seemed to crash in on them, full of claustrophobic shadows. Yes, Arturo said, I understand.
    Whatever secrets drove Dante, whatever ghosts he kept hidden, he still had to modify his dreams. When he arrived, he’d planned to wait until he could afford an apartment of his own, however humble, to marry. Over time, he saw how absurd this notion was in a city that had swelled with so many immigrants seeking a chance at life that rents had soared and sharing a conventillo with one bathroom and one kitchen for sixty people or more had become a normal way of life. If he waited for a full apartment, he’d be an old man on his wedding day and his bride would be long past her childbearing years. The best he could hope for was a room of their own: a table, a bed, space along the walls for the children when they came. This became his new goal.
    He spent almost two years saving toward it.
    In those years, Arturo found the anarchists, or, rather, the anarchists found him. They were everywhere, expounding in cafés, running union study groups, organizing surreptitiously at the warehouse in defiance of company rules. How they talked: their passionate words and ample gestures encompassed a whole golden future with the sweep of a single hand. There were no leaders—they didn’t believe in leaders—but at the