The Gods of Tango by Carolina de Robertis Page B

though the man were taking her last scrap of Alazzano, of her old life; and this so he could have it for himself, this man who didn’t even speak Italian and could not possibly care about the distant valleys of Campania or about lost cousins, first one, now all of asudden two. It was not that she wanted to eat the olives herself—in that moment she couldn’t imagine eating ever again—but she wanted to keep them close, intact. She felt as though the customs official were eating a green piece of Dante’s body. But she could not speak or move. She stood watching as the man put another olive in his mouth. His face lit with satisfaction as he ate it. He said something to Arturo. Arturo spoke back, and, though Leda couldn’t understand everything, she could understand various words, inflected as they were with Italian sounds: husband and died and come from Italia , then something else, then only .
    The official studied Leda with new interest.
    Arturo said something else, with the word exception and the last syllables inflected politely upward, in the tilt of a question. Asking the man to let her keep the olive jar.
    The customs official ate a third olive. Then he said another thing, more slowly, drawled out. The word young , then alone , and then more sounds punctuated with a slow shake of the head that was at once mournful and shot through with a thread of pleasure.
    She had missed something. Arturo’s back straightened, a hunter on alert. His answer had steel in it: not alone , he said, and here he spoke with such deliberation that she understood him clearly. She has me. I was a friend of her husband’s .
    The customs official’s tone became unmistakably mocking. He spoke rapidly, and somewhere in the middle she thought she discerned the word lucky .
    Arturo’s mouth grew tight and he opened it as though about to speak. He glanced at Leda, who pretended that she hadn’t understood anything. Her blank expression seemed to comfort him. Yes, sir , he said.
    The customs official closed the lid of the olive jar and waved his hand. The olives would stay, but they were free to go.
    Outside the warehouse, Arturo lifted her trunk onto a wheeled cart and led her to the street, where they boarded an enormous public carriage with no horses to pull it. A tram, Arturo called it. A young man who was also boarding helped Arturo hoist the trunk up into the maincar. Arturo’s hand was warm and damp when he helped her up the three stairs. He insisted that she sit on her trunk, to be comfortable, though her knees pushed up against his knees and the calves of other men, all standing around her and holding a pole above their heads. It was mostly men on the tram, and the few women had seats. The sharp smell of sweat overpowered the air. The posture of the standing men, with their arms high to grasp the pole, struck her as very strange, but she understood the reason for it as soon as the tram lurched and rattled into motion. A new seasickness engulfed her as they began to navigate the city.
    “It won’t be long now,” Arturo said. “We’re not far from La Boca, where we live.”
    The tram lumbered through the crowded streets. Leda’s neck grew sore from craning her head toward the open windows, but she could not tear her eyes from what she saw: an intricate maze of buildings so tall they plunged the cobbled alleys into shadows and, inside that maze, men smoking on doorsteps, men shining shoes on overturned buckets, men shouting their wares, men driving carriages and shouting at their horses, men walking so fast, where were they going? and she, where was she going? The air suffocated, thick and hot and rank. Dante. She couldn’t absorb the news; it kept rising up and slapping her in the face like that garish children’s toy that springs out of its box. It made her face ache, her bones ache, her mind ache. A man got onto the tram wearing strings of garlic draped across his chest, hundreds of heads of garlic, like copious pearls or