The Gods of Tango Read Online Free PDF Page A

buried city became more alive in Leda’s mind than her own village. He would tell his stories on the shaded patio just beyond their kitchen door, on long summer evenings, as dusk gathered gently around them and as she shelled hazelnuts or peas. As Leda’s hands moved from bowl to bowl, she would see legions of ghosts, with penetrating clarity.Charioteers raising whips over glistening horses. Children squabbling over that ill-fated toy, one of them, a bully, grasping it with both hands, while three others reached for it with arms that would never arrive. And women in their baths. Nonno always managed to include these women in their baths. In old Pompeii, he explained, there were maidservants to pour water over ladies, to wash their bodies, their backs, their breasts. They would be relishing the cool water against their summer-hot bodies, naked in marble tubs, dreaming, if they were maidens, of their wedding nights, of what would happen on those future occasions after all of the festivities were done. He told it that way, with the part about the wedding nights, only when he’d drunk more wine than usual. But Leda could never shake the image of these young women, naked in the water, soaping their bodies, dreaming of a first bout of lovemaking that was never to arrive. She would think of them as she sat by the river, or lay alone in bed—and she thought of them now, on her wedding night: her body flushed strangely as she pictured an ancient bathtub right in front of her, a naked maiden arching her back with her eyes closed, raising her breasts toward the ceiling, shivering at the touch of imaginary hands, oblivious to her fast-approaching death.
    When she finally opened her eyes, light crept in through the window, fresh and tentative. Her travel dress still lay neatly on the trunk. Margherita stirred gently in her sleep. Outside, a sparrow launched a lover’s quarrel with the dawn, and, from the kitchen, she heard the sounds of her mother making coffee. She changed clothes, clasped her hair into a bun, and went to help Mamma, who did not greet her and did not look up. She smelled tart, like smoldering wood and restless sleep. Leda wanted to memorize the smell, to stash it in her mind along with the exact shape of her mother’s body in the kitchen, the space it had occupied for so many years that without her the room would surely implode. Just as the coffee began to percolate on the stove, Mamma turned to her and said, “I can’t.” Leda waited for her to go on, but Mamma only stared at her with liquid and terrifying eyes, those same eyes that had summonedinstant obedience from her when she was a child, could make her feel as though the most hidden parts of her were suddenly laid bare. Until this moment, it had not occurred to Leda that Mamma might be anguished on this day. She was always so tired, harsh with her oldest, the daughter, Leda, who could never do enough or be a good enough girl or ease the edge of bitterness in Mamma, the suffering of the two failed pregnancies and the stillborn that came after Tommaso and wore out her body and probably, Leda now thought, wore her heart out as well, so that she was spent by the time the little ones came, and didn’t seem to care about Leda, didn’t notice her except to criticize or make sure the chores were done. Or so Leda had thought before this look, this moment. She knew nothing about her mother’s heart; she’d assumed it to be closed, exhausted by life, indifferent to her. Only now, moments before leaving, did she grasp that she might have been wrong.
    “Mamma,” she said. She stood, knife in hand, arrested over a loaf of bread.
    “I can’t,” Mamma said again. “You pour the coffee.” And then she walked out of the front door and up the path away from the street, toward the river.
    Tommaso and Papà rose and drank coffee and ate toast and Mamma did not come back. Tommaso chattered about the party last night, who had drunk too much, laughing at his own quips.