Blow-Up (13 page)

“It’s not so bad,” Mauro said in his gloomy mood. “Too bad it’s so hot. They should install air conditioning.”

(For the files: note, following Ortega, the contact between the common man and technology. Exactly where one would imagine a cultural shock, there is, on the contrary, a violent assimilation and enjoyment of the progress. Mauro talks about refrigeration units and audio-frequency amplification with the self-sufficiency of the Buenos Aires inhabitant who firmly believes he has everything coming to him.) I grabbed him by the arm and steered him into the aisle toward a table because he still seemed so distracted and was watching the bandstand of the tango orchestra and the singer who gripped the mike in both hands and moved it slowly back and forth in front of him. We rested our elbows comfortably in front of two brandies. Mauro took his down in a single shot.

“This puts a lid on the beer. Jesus, what a crowd in this joint!”

He called for another one and gave me a break in which to turn him off for a moment and look around me. Our table was next to the dance floor, on the other side there were chairs stretched along a long wall and a pile of women who replaced one another with that absent air taxi-dancers have when they’re working or amusing themselves. There wasn’t much talk and we heard the tango orchestra only too well, backed by squeeze-boxes and blasting away with a will. The singer was very heavy on the nostalgia and had a remarkable talent for making something dramatic out of a beat that was rather fast and basically without cutting-edge.
I cut my baby’s head off and I carry it in a bag …
he held the microphone as if he were about to puke into it, with a kind of tired lasciviousness that had to be organic. For long moments, he’d put his lips against the chrome grid, and a voice like glue emerged from the loudspeakers,
I’m a respectable man
 … ; I thought it would be a better deal to have a rubber doll with the mike concealed inside it, that way the singer could grab it in his arms and get as hot as he wanted while he was singing. But that wouldn’t work for the tangos, better the chrome truncheon with the little skull glittering on top, and the frozen spasmodic smile of the grid-work.

It seems right for me to say here that I come to this dance hall to see the monsters, I know of no other place where you get so many of them at one time. They heave into sight around eleven in the evening, coming down from obscure sections of the city, deliberate and sure, by ones and by twos, the women almost dwarves and very dark, the guys like Javanese or Indians from the north bound into tight black suits or suits with checks, the hard hair painfully plastered down, little drops of brilliantine
catching blue and pink reflections, the women with enormously high hairdos which make them look even more like dwarves, tough, laborious hairdos of the sort that let you know there’s nothing left but weariness and pride. The men nowadays wear their hair loose and high in the middle, enormous, faggoty foxtails which have nothing to do with the brutal faces below them, or with the expression of aggressiveness, ready and waiting its hour, or the efficient torsos set on slender waists. They recognize and admire each other in silence and without letting on, it’s their dance and their meeting, their big night out. (For the files: where they come from, what professions they pretend to during the day, what condition of servitude insulates and conceals them.) They come to this place, then, grave monsters twine with one another in grave esteem, one number after the other they twirl slowly without speaking, many with their eyes closed, enjoying at last complete parity and fulfillment. In the intervals they recover, at the tables they’re arrogant and the women talk in shrieks so that they’ll be looked at, then the gorillas grow more fierce and I’ve seen one let go with a flat of the hand that spun the face and half the hairdo of a crosseyed girl in white who was drinking anise. Furthermore there’s the smell; one could not conceive of the monsters without that smell of damp powder against the skin, of rotten fruit, one thinks of them washing up hastily, the sour washcloth over the face and under the armpits, then what really matters, lotions, hairspray, powder on all their faces, a whitish crust, and under it the dusky patches shining through. They use peroxide too, dark girls raising a rigid ear of corn over the heavy earth of their faces; they even practice blond expressions, wear green dresses, convince themselves that they are authentic, manage even to condescend and scorn the girls who keep their natural color. Looking sidewise at Mauro, I could spell out the difference
in his face with its Italian features, the face of the Buenos Aires docks, with neither Negro or provincial mixture, and I remembered suddenly that Celina was much closer to the monsters, much nearer than Mauro and I. I think that Kasidis had chosen her for the darker part of his clientele, whatever few of them enlivened his cabaret. I’d never been to Kasidis’ when Celina was still there, but I went down afterwards one night to get to know the place she’d worked in before Mauro dragged her out of there, and I saw nothing but white girls, blondes, brunettes or redheads, but white.

“I feel like a tango now,” Mauro complained. Finishing his fourth shot, he was a little drunk. I was thinking of Celina, she’d have been so much at home here, exactly where Mauro had never brought her. Anita Lozano was accepting the loud applause of the audience as she waved hello from the bandstand, I’d heard her sing at the Novelty when she’d been at the top of the bill; she was old and skinny now, but still had voice enough to do a tango, even better as a matter of fact, she had a way of singing it dirty, and the hoarse voice helped some, especially if the lyrics really had to be belted out. When she’d been drinking, Celina had a voice like that, and suddenly I realized that the Santa Fe was Celina, the almost insupportable presence of Celina.

It’d been a mistake for her to go off with Mauro. She put up with it because she loved him and he had dragged her out of Kasidis’ greasy squalor, the promiscuity and the shots of amber-colored sugar-water amid the preliminary stumbling of knees against knees and the heavy breathing of the customers. But if she hadn’t had to work in the dance halls, Celina would have enjoyed staying there. You could tell by her hips and her mouth, she was built for the tango, from top to bottom, born to make that scene. Which was why Mauro had to take her to dances, I’ve seen
her transfigured just walking in, just the first lungful of hot air and the sound of accordions. At this moment, stuck and no way out at the Santa Fe, I could measure her magnificence, her courage in repaying Mauro with a few years in the kitchen and sugar with the
mate
in the patio. She had renounced her dance-hall heaven, her fiery vocation, anise and creole waltzing. As though condemning herself knowingly for Mauro and Mauro’s life, intruding hardly at all on his life, just that he should take her out to a party once in a while.

Now Mauro was going past with a good grip on a colored girl taller than the others, with a shape nicer than most and good-looking besides. I had to laugh at his instinctive and at the same time deliberate choice, the chick was the one least like the monsters. Then the idea recurred to me, Celina in some way had been a monster like the others, except that elsewhere than here and during the day, it was not as apparent. I wondered if Mauro would have noticed it; I was a little afraid that he would blame me for dragging him to a joint where memories sprouted from everything like the hair on your arms.

There was no applause this time, and he came over with the girl who, outside of her tango, seemed suddenly to have grown stupid and open-mouthed as a fish.

“I want you to meet a friend of mine,” he said to her.

We muttered “Enchanted to meetcha,” coastal style, and without further ado we bought her a drink. I was happy to see Mauro getting into the swing of things, I even exchanged a few words with the woman, whose name was Emma, a name that doesn’t fit skinny girls very well. Mauro seemed pretty well turned on and talked of orchestras with the short sententious phrases I admired him for. Emma rambled on with the names of singers and memories of Villa Crespo and El Talar. At that point, Anita Lozano announced an old tango, and there were cheers and
applause from the monsters, the pimps especially stood by her to a man. Mauro was not so clobbered as to forget everything, and when the piece opened with a gut-twisting few bars from the accordions he shot me a look like a punch, he was remembering. I also, I saw myself at the thing for the Giants, Mauro and Celina holding one another tight, this same tango, she hummed it all night long, even in the taxi coming home.

“Are we gonna dance?” Emma said, sucking noisily on her grenadine.

Mauro didn’t even look at her. It seems to me that at that moment we overtook one another in the depths. Now (now when I’m writing) I see a single image from my twenty years at the Barracas Sporting Club, I dive into the pool and at the bottom I come face-to-face with another swimmer, we touch bottom simultaneously and see each other imperfectly through the sour green water. Mauro pushed his chair back and braced himself with an elbow on the table. Same as me, he was looking at the dance floor, and between us sat Emma, confused and humiliated, though she tried to cover it up by eating the french fries. Now Anita began to sing breaking the beat, the couples danced nearly without moving from where they were and you could see that they were listening to the lyrics with desire and misery mixed, and all the dulled pleasure of cheap night life. Faces were turned toward the stand and you could see them, even twirling, fixed on Anita bent intimately over the microphone. Some of them moved their lips reciting the words, some of them with stupid smiles that seemed to come from behind themselves, and when she finished with her
you were so much, you were so much mine,/and now I look around for you and cannot find/you
, and the accordions came up simultaneously and full strength, the reply was a fresh violence in the dancing, lateral swoops and figure-eights interlarded mid-floor.
A lot of people were sweating, one chick who would have chewed off the second button on my jacket brushed against the table and I could see the sweat oozing from the roots of her hair and running down the back of her neck where a roll of fat made a tiny whiter rivulet. There was smoke pouring into the room from the next patio where they were scoffing down charcoal-broiled meat and dancing
rancheras
, the cigarette smoke and the barbecue laid down a low cloud which distorted the faces and the cheap paintings on the wall opposite. I think the four shots I’d drunk helped somewhat from inside, and Mauro was holding up his chin with the back of his hand, staring fixedly in front of him. The focus of our attention was not the tango which went on and on up there, once or twice I saw Mauro throw a glance toward the stand where Anita was going through the motions of wielding a baton, but then he turned back and fastened his eyes on the couples. I don’t know how to say this, it seems to me I was following the direction of his look, and at the same time I was directing his; without looking at one another we realized (it seems to me that Mauro realized) we were both seeing the same spot, we would fall on the identical couple, seeing the same head of hair and trousers. I heard Emma saying something, some excuse, and the section of table between Mauro and myself was left somewhat clearer; still we did not look at one another. A moment of immense happiness seemed to have descended upon the dance floor, I breathed deeply as if to participate in it, and I think I heard Mauro do the same. The smoke was so thick that the faces on the other half of the floor were blurred, so much so that the line of chairs for those who were sitting it out could not be seen, what with the bodies in between and the haze.
You were so much mine
, weird how Anita’s voice cracked over the speakers, again the dancers (always moving) grew immobile, and Celina who was on
the right side of the floor, moving out of the smoke and whirling obedient to the lead of her partner, stopped for a moment in profile toward me, then her back, again, the other profile, then raised her face to listen to the music. I say: Celina; but it was a vision, a knowledge without understanding it, how, at that moment, understand it, sure, Celina there without being there. Suddenly the table shook, I realized that it was Mauro’s arm that was shaking, or mine, but we were not afraid, it was something closer to dread and happiness and stomach-shakes. It was stupid, really, a feeling of something apart which would not allow us to leave, to recover ourselves. Celina was still there, not seeing us, drinking in the tango with all of her face changed and muddied by the yellow light of the smoke. Any one of the dark girls could have looked more like Celina than she did at that moment, happiness transfigured her face in a hideous way; I would not have been able to tolerate Celina as I saw her at that moment, in that tango. I had enough intelligence left to gauge the devastation of her happiness, her face enraptured and stupid in her paradise finally gained; had it not been for the work and the customers, she could have had that at Kasidis’ place. There was nothing to stop her now in her heaven, her own heaven, she gave herself with all of her flesh to that joy and again entered the pattern where Mauro could not follow her. It was her hard-won heaven, her tango played once more for her alone and for her equals, until the glass-smashing applause that followed Anita’s solo, Celina from the back, Celina in profile, other couples and the smoke blocking her out.

I didn’t want to look at Mauro; then I recovered myself and my famous cynicism was racking up the defenses at top speed. It all depended on how he would get through the thing, so that I stayed as I was, watching the floor empty little by little.

“Did you see that?” Mauro asked.

“Yes.”

“You saw how much she looked like her?”

I didn’t answer him, my relief was heavier than any pity I felt. He was on this side, the poor guy was on this side and would never come to believe what we had known together. I watched him get up and stagger across the floor like a drunk, looking for the woman who looked like Celina. I stayed quiet and took my time over a cigarette, watching him going and coming, this way and that, knowing he was wasting his time, that he would come back, tired and thirsty, not having found the gates of heaven among all that smoke and all those people.