Heart of Tango Read Free Page A

Begoña died and Grandfather Francesc set aside all the quarrels that had separated him from his daughter and offered my father a job at the factory. And then again, at the age of seventeen, I had to bid farewell to the world that I had built for myself and follow my father to Buenos Aires.
    At first I planned to stay in Valencia, but that would have meant living with my aunts and uncles and silly cousins, or else getting married within a couple of months to one of the little swells who kept trying to court me and who, though I had never much liked any of them, I had liked even less since the factory had sunk into ruin, because they were suddenly acting as though they would be doing me a big favor if they were to lead me to the altar.
    So I came with him, to start over one more time.
    Then El Rojo. That was one of those things one would never have done if one had thought it through first. But I caught his eye, I was the right age for getting married, we owed him so much, hewas a good man, and Papá, who was in poor health, had given him his word, because he was panicked by the thought of dying and leaving me all alone so far from home.
    And to tell the truth, when I was running to the grocer’s on an errand on that January morning, with its infernal heat and the pungent, humid odor rising from the river, I felt happy. Like every girl my age, it thrilled me to think about my wedding, about the bulging trousseau that was stored away in the good trunk, about the wedding dress hanging in the mirrored wardrobe that we had brought from Valencia, about the idea that I would be called
señora
, about the party we’d throw for the few friends we had here, and about—well, every wedding has its groom.
    Mine was tall and stout and wore a beard, a mustache, and long, reddish-blond hair. He was fifteen years older than me, a boatswain on a freighter, and German, though he spoke Spanish very well. He was a real man, not like those spoiled little pale, perfumed, cravated Valencian toffs who used to escort us from High Mass when my aunt and cousins and I rode along the Alameda and down Viveros in the chaise.
    I had never seen El Rojo wear a cravat. When he visited me on the Sundays he wasn’t off at sea, he would wear a black silk ribbon necktie that fell to the middle of his chest and a tight linen jacket that wrinkled the moment he sat down and turned damp under his arms.
    At first we scarcely spoke, but later on, bit by bit, while Iworked on my embroidery—my father forbade me to darn or mend things in front of visitors—and the two of them sipped the maté that we had all come to love, he began to tell us stories about his voyages, about what he had seen in distant countries, the dangers he had faced, the colors of the sea and sky when you are in the middle of the ocean and don’t know if you will ever reach dry land.
    â€œSometimes you start to see things that aren’t there,” he would say. “Not just you, everybody. Somebody’ll say, ‘Look, look, an island,’ and before you know it everybody sees it. And then it turns out it was a cloud that melts away a minute later. Sometimes, out at sea, I wonder whether all this”—and he would make a little gesture with his hands, as if to embrace not only our modest sitting room but the whole district, and who knows, maybe all Buenos Aires—“whether all this isn’t just a dream too, a mirage that keeps me going and that I myself have just made up. Whether you, Miss Natalia,” he went on with unexpected timidity, “aren’t just a story I tell myself, like the story of the sirens that others tell. But that only happens to me sometimes, when the voyage gets long. I think that once you are my wife, Miss Natalia, it won’t happen to me any more.”
    I thought it odd that a grown man like El Rojo, as big and strong as he was, would get such ideas into his head, but when I recalled our own crossing from