Heart of Tango Read Free

day, after a night of terrors and nightmares, after half an hour on the phone convincing the people who had contracted me that jet lag had left me with an impossible headache.
    The port of La Boca was cold and foggy with the solitary, mean look peculiar to ports that have been condemned to a slow death.A few tourists wandered, looking lost, past the false cheer of the painted houses; the cold was damp, insidious, tenacious.
    Not knowing how I’d got there, I found myself in a museum I’d visited on other trips, an uncommonly sad museum, deserted, with large and poorly lit galleries, its walls painted in unlikely colors—bilious green, dirty yellow, faded blue—and covered with paintings from every style and every era, in an incomprehensible cacophony, as if they had been relegated there all the better to be forgotten.
    With the vague idea that, seeing as I was already there, I might as well head up to the third floor and take another look at Quinquela’s paintings, the brazenness that matched the tango so well; with the anguish I was feeling, with the stench of death that hung over La Boca, I crossed an enormous gallery, empty of visitors, where the brushing of my footsteps against the floor created a whisper of echoes.
    And then I saw her. At the far end of the gallery, to the left, between a horrid landscape of the pampas and an incongruous scene of ladies in mantillas and gentlemen in top hats leaving High Mass, there she was, looking at me from the obscure depths of an oil painting framed in heavy, gilded wood. Her eyes shone as they had at the milonga, half closed in pleasure, as if she were listening to the beat of a tango that was being played only for her in the solitude of that dusty museum; her intensely red lips were gently curled, as they had been then, into a slight smile that was bothpained and provocative; her black hair was pulled back in a tall chignon and held in place with a tortoiseshell comb. In the cut of her dress, held in place by a black silk corset, a rosebud stood out, red and barely beginning to open, against her pale skin. A variety of hothouse rose that did not yet exist when her portrait was painted.
    The small medallion on the frame, right below the spot where her hands—the same hands that had rested on my shoulder and held my own hand—were clasped at her waist, read: “
Tango is a whispered cry
. Unknown artist. Ca. 1920.”

TWO

    T here were two days to go until my wedding day, three days until my birthday. That was how I had planned it. I loved the idea of being a wife already on the day I turned twenty, and of being able to say for the rest of my life that I had married at the age of nineteen. In the month of January. In the middle of summer.
    I still wasn’t used to everything being all topsy-turvy, to sweltering in the heat when it was supposed to be cold, to being so poor all of a sudden, to being surrounded by people from so many different countries, so many of whom still spoke Spanish badly.
    We had come to Argentina two years earlier, just Papá and I. And thanks to El Rojo—Berstein, that is, my future husband—we had moved into a house in La Boca. Papá spent the few savings we had managed to keep with us from Spain on opening a small carpenter’s shop, where he also made shoemakers’ lasts, his actual profession.
    My grandfather had owned a factory in Valencia that madeshoemakers’ lasts. Papá managed it for a few years, until my grandfather died and my uncles burned through the inheritance in a matter of months and left us out on the street. Then Papá, who had already been a widower for years, decided to leave Valencia, where there was no longer anything to keep him but Mamá’s grave, and set off for Argentina.
    It hadn’t been easy for me. I had been raised in a tiny village near Vitoria with a Basque father and a Valencian mother. I had to move to Valencia when I was eight, after Grandmother