What We Become (9 page)

“What are
compadritos
?” she asked now.

“What were they, you mean.”

“Do they no longer exist?”

“Things have changed a lot in the last ten to fifteen years . . . When I was a child,
compadritos
were young men of humble background, the sons or grandsons of the gauchos who rode in with the cattle and dismounted in the working-class suburbs of Buenos Aires.”

“They sound dangerous,” remarked de Troeye.

Max made a dismissive gesture. They were relatively harmless, he explained, unlike the compadres and compadrones, who were much rougher characters: some were real villains, others only appeared to be. Politicians would employ them as bodyguards, or during elections, and so on. But the authentic compadres, who often had Spanish surnames, were being replaced by the sons of immigrants who tried to emulate them: petty criminals who still adopted the old ways of the knife-fighting gauchos, but without possessing their code of honor or their courage.

“And is authentic tango a dance of
compadritos
and compadres?” asked Armando de Troeye.

“It used to be. Those early tangos were openly lewd, with couples bringing their bodies together, entwining their legs and thrusting with their hips, like I said before. Remember that the first female tango dancers were camp followers and women from the brothels.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Max could see Mecha Inzunza's smile, scornful yet fascinated. He had seen that same smile before in other women of her class, when topics like this were mentioned.

“Hence its bad reputation, naturally,” she said.

“Of course,” Max went on, still addressing her husband out of politeness. “Imagine, one of the earliest tangos was called ‘Give Me the Tin . . .' ”

“The tin
?”

Another sidelong glance. Max paused, searching for how best to put it.

“The token,” he said at last, “which the madam gave each client, and which the whore in turn gave to her mack, who cashed them in.”

“Mack, that sounds foreign,” said Mecha Inzunza.

“It comes from
maquereau
,” de Troeye explained. “The French word for
pimp
.”

“I understood that perfectly, my dear.”

Even when tango became popular and was danced at family gatherings,
cortes
were banned on grounds of indecency. When he was a child, tango was only danced at afternoon shindigs in the Spanish or Italian social clubs, in brothels, or in the
garçonnières
of well-to-do young men. And even now, when tango had taken the dance halls and theaters by storm, the ban on
cortes
and
quebradas
remained in place in some circles. The “leg thrust,” as it was crudely termed. Once the tango became socially acceptable, it lost its character, Max concluded. It became slow, calculated, less lewd. This was the tame version that had traveled to Paris and become famous.

“It was transformed into that dull routine we see in dance halls, or into Valentino's ridiculous caricature of it on screen.”

Max could feel her eyes on him. Avoiding them with as much calm as he could muster, he reached for his cigarette case and offered it to her. She took one of the Abdul Pashas, inserting it into her short ivory holder. De Troeye did likewise, and then lit his wife's with his gold lighter. Leaning slightly toward the flame, she raised her eyes, looking once more at Max through the first puff of smoke, which the light from the window turned a bluish shade.

“And in Buenos Aires?” asked Armando de Troeye.

Max smiled. He had lit his own cigarette after tapping one end of it gently on the closed lid of the case. The turn in the conversation enabled him to meet Mecha's eyes once more. He held her gaze for three seconds, maintaining his smile, then addressed her husband again.

“In the slums of the suburbs a few people still dance tango with the occasional
quebrada
and leg thrust. That is where the last of the Old School Tango survives. . . . What we dance is actually a watered-down version of that. A tasteful habanera.”

“Is it the same with the lyrics?”

“Yes, but that's a more recent phenomenon. At first tango was only music, or couplets sung in the theaters. When I was a boy it was still rare to hear tango sung, and when it was, the lyrics were always obscene, stories with double meanings told by shameless ruffians. . . .”

Max paused, unsure if it was appropriate for him to carry on.

“And?”

It was Mecha who had posed the question, toying with one of the silver teaspoons. That decided him.

“Well . . . you only have to consider some of the titles from back then: ‘Que polvo con tanto viento,' ‘Seeds in the Wind; ‘Siete Pulgadas,' ‘Seven Inches'; ‘Cara Sucia,' ‘Dirty Face'—all of which have double meanings, or ‘La c . . . ara de la l . . . una,' ‘The F . . . ace of the M . . . oon,' written like that, with three dots in the title, which, forgive me for being crude, actually means ‘La concha de la lora,' ‘The Floozie's Muff.' ”

“Floozie?”

“A word for ‘prostitute' in Buenos Aires slang. The sort Gardel uses in his songs.”

“And muff?”

Max looked at Armando de Troeye, without replying. The husband's amused expression gave way to a broad smile.

“Understood,” he said.

“Understood,” she repeated a moment later, without smiling.

Sentimental tango, Max went on, was a recent phenomenon. It was Gardel who popularized those melancholy lyrics, filling tango songs with cuckolded hoodlums and fallen women. His voice turned the ruffian's shamelessness to tears and regret. Poetic guff.

“We met him two years ago, when he was touring in Rome and Madrid,” said de Troeye. “Charming fellow. A bit of a gossip, but pleasant enough.” He looked at his wife. “With that fixed smile of his, remember? . . . As if he could never relax.”

“I only saw him once, from a distance, eating chicken stew at El Tropezón,” said Max. “He was surrounded by people, of course. I didn't dare approach him.”

“He certainly has a good voice. So langorous, don't you think?”

Max took a puff of his cigarette. De Troeye poured himself another brandy and offered Max some, but he shook his head.

“Actually, he invented the style. Before, there were only bawdy rhymes in brothels. . . . He had no real predecessors.”

“What about the music?” De Troeye had raised his brandy to his lips and was looking at Max over the rim of the glass. “What, in your opinion, are the differences between old and new tango?”

Max leaned back in his chair, tapping his cigarette gently so that the ash fell in to the ashtray.

“I am no musician. I simply dance to make a living. I can't tell a quaver from a crochet.”

“Even so, I would like your opinion.”

Max drew twice on his cigarette before replying.

“I can only talk about what I know. What I remember . . . The same happened to the music as to the dance and the words. The early musicians were self-taught, they played little-known tunes, from piano scores or from memory. On the hoof, as they say in Argentina . . . like jazz musicians when they improvise, inventing as they go along.”

“And what were the orchestras like?”

Small, Max explained. Three or four musicians, the bandoneon providing the bass notes, simpler harmonies, faster paced. It was more about the way they played than the music itself. Gradually, those orchestras were replaced by more modern ensembles: piano instead of guitar solos, violin accompaniment, the drone of the
squeezebox. That made it easier for inexpert dancers, the new fans. Professional orchestras adapted overnight to the new tango.

“And that is what we dance,” he concluded, slowly putting out his cigarette. “That's what you hear in the ship's ballroom and the respectable establishments of Buenos Aires.”

Mecha Inzunza stubbed out her cigarette in the same ashtray as Max, three seconds later.

“What happened to the other sort?” she asked, playing with the ivory cigarette holder. “The Old School Tango?”

Not without some difficulty, Max took his eyes off her hands: slender, elegant, refined. Her gold wedding band glinted on the ring finger of her left hand. He looked up to find Armando de Troeye staring at him, expressionless.

“It still exists,” he replied. “On the fringes, though it's increasingly rare. Depending on where it's played, almost no one dances to it. It's more difficult. Cruder.”

He paused for a moment. The smile now playing on her lips was spontaneous. Suggestive.

“A friend of mine once said there are tangos to cry for and tangos to die for. . . . The old-fashioned tangos belonged more to the second category.”

Mecha Inzunza had propped her elbow on the table and was cupping her face in her hand. She appeared to be paying close attention.

“Some people call it the Old School Tango,” Max explained. “To differentiate it from the new, modern tango.”

“That's a good name,” the husband said. “Where does it come from?”

His face was no longer expressionless. Yet again a friendly gesture, that of an attentive host. Max spread his hands as though to state the obvious.

“I don't know. The Old School was the title of an early tango. I couldn't say for sure.”

“And is it still . . . obscene?” she asked.

Her tone was unemotional. Almost scientific. That of an entomologist investigating, for example, whether copulation between two beetles was obscene. Assuming, Max concluded, beetles copulated. Which, undoubtedly, they did.

“That depends where you go,” he replied.

Armando de Troeye seemed delighted by the conversation.

“What you're telling us is fascinating,” he said. “Far more than you could imagine. And it changes some of the ideas I had about tango. I want to see it for myself . . . in its authentic surroundings.”

Max frowned, cagily.

“It certainly isn't played in any respectable venues. None that I know of.”

“Are there authentic places in Buenos Aires?”

“One or two. But to call them unsuitable would be an understatement.” He looked at Mecha Inzunza. “They are dangerous places . . . inappropriate for a lady.”

“Don't worry about that,” she said with icy calm. “We've been to inappropriate places before.”

It is late afternoon. The setting sun over Punta del Capo casts a reddish glow over the villas on the green hillside. Max Costa, in the same navy-blue jacket and gray flannel trousers he was wearing when he arrived at the hotel (he has only changed his silk cravat for a red necktie with blue polka dots tied in a Windsor knot), comes down from his room and mingles with the other guests enjoying a predinner drink. Although the summer and its crowds have gone, the chess contest has kept the place busy: nearly all the tables in the bar and on the terrace are full. A poster resting on an easel announces the forthcoming game in the Sokolov-Keller duel. Max pauses to study the photographs of the two adversaries. Beneath pale bushy eyebrows of the same color as his hair, which reminds
Max of a hedgehog, the Soviet champion's watery blue eyes gaze suspiciously at the pieces on a chessboard. His round face and coarse features evoke the image of a peasant studying the board in the same way generations of his ancestors might have surveyed a field of ripening grain or clouds passing overhead presaging rain or drought. As for Jorge Keller, he looks almost distracted and dreamy as he gazes at the photographer. Max thinks he can detect a touch of naïveté, as though the young man were looking not at the camera but at someone or something slightly farther off that has nothing to do with chess, but rather with childish dreams or vague fantasies.

A warm breeze. The murmur of conversation and soft background music. The terrace at the Vittoria is spacious and splendid. Beyond the balustrade is a stunning view over the Bay of Naples, which is beginning to be bathed in a golden light that gradually spreads across the horizon. The headwaiter shepherds Max to a table beside a marble statue of a half-kneeling naked woman peering out to sea. Max orders a glass of cold white wine and glances around him. The atmosphere is one of elegance, as befits the time and place. There are smartly dressed foreign guests, mostly those Americans and Germans who visit Sorrento out of season. The rest are Campanella's guests, whose travel and hotel expenses he has paid. There are also chess lovers who can afford to pay their own expenses. At a neighboring table, Max recognizes a beautiful movie actress accompanied by a group of people that includes her husband, a producer at Cinecittà. Hovering nearby are two young men who look like local journalists. One has a Pentax camera slung around his neck, and each time he raises it, Max hides his face discreetly behind his hand or turns to look in the opposite direction. It is unconscious, a reflex, that of the hunter careful not to become the hunted. These old gestures, second nature to him now, he had developed instinctively as a professional to minimize risk. In those days, Max Costa was never more vulnerable than when exposing
his face and identity to some detective capable of asking what an experienced con artist, or gentleman thief, as they were referred to euphemistically in another era, was doing in a given place.