What We Become Read online

  “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.

  When the journalists move away, Max surveys the scene. On his way down, he was thinking how extraordinarily lucky it would be to spot her at the first attempt, and yet there she is, sitting at a table quite close to his, with a group of other people that does not include young Keller or the girl who was with them. This time she isn’t wearing her tweed hat, and he can see her short, silver-gray hair, which looks completely natural. As she speaks, she tilts her head toward her companions, showing polite interest (a gesture Max recalls with astonishing clarity), occasionally leaning back in her chair and nodding at their conversation with a smile. She is simply dressed, with the same casual elegance as the day before: a dark, flared skirt and a white silk blouse gathered at the waist by a wide belt. She has on a pair of suede loafers and the same wool cardigan
draped over her shoulders. She wears no earrings or jewelry, apart from a slender wristwatch.

  Max enjoys a sip of the chilled wine, which has made the glass go misty, and, as he leans forward to replace it on the table, the woman’s eyes meet his. The encounter is momentary, barely lasting a second. She is saying something to her companions, and as she does so she glances about, her eyes momentarily meeting those of the man sitting three tables away. They do not settle on him, but keep moving as the conversation continues, and someone says something she listens to attentively, her gaze now fixed on her companions. Max, with a stab of regret and wounded vanity, smiles to himself and consoles himself with another sip of Falerno. It is true he has changed, but so has she, he decides. An awful lot, no doubt, since they last saw each other in Nice twenty-nine years ago in the autumn of 1937, not to mention in Buenos Aires, nine years before that. It has been a long time, too, since his conversation with Mecha Inzunza on the boat deck of the Cap Polonio, four days after she and her husband invited him to lunch with them in their stateroom to discuss tango.

  He went searching for her deliberately that day, too, after lying awake all night in his second-class cabin, feeling the gentle sway of the ship and the distant throb of the vessel’s engines deep inside the hull. There were questions that needed answering and plans to elaborate. Potential losses and probable gains. And yet, although he refused to admit it to himself, there was also an intrinsically personal reason for it that had nothing to do with material considerations. Something unusually devoid of calculation, made up of sensations, attractions, and uncertainties.

  He found her on the boat deck, as before. The ship was traveling at speed, cleaving the thin mist, which the morning sun (a hazy, golden disk rising higher and higher in the sky) was slowly dispersing. She was sitting on a teak bench, beneath one of the three enormous red-and-white smokestacks. Dressed casually in a pleated skirt and striped sweater, she wore flat shoes and a straw cloche hat, whose short brim obscured half her face as she leaned over her book. This time Max did not pass her by with a mumbled greeting, but said good morning, halting in front of her and doffing his cap. He had the sun behind him, the sea was calm, and his shadow moved gently back and forth across the open book and her face when she raised her eyes to look at him.

  “Well,” she said. “The perfect dancer.” She smiled, although her expression as she contemplated him seemed absolutely serious. “How are things, Max? . . . How many young women and old maids have stepped on your toes these past few days?”

  “Too many,” he groaned. “Don’t remind me of it.”

  Mecha Inzunza and her husband had not been to the ballroom for four days. Max had not seen them since the lunch in their stateroom.

  “I have been thinking about what your husband said . . . about places to go to in Buenos Aires to see real tango.”

  Her smile became more pronounced. Pretty mouth, he thought. Pretty everything.

  “Do you mean old tango?”

  “Old School. Yes, that’s what I mean.”

  “Splendid.” She closed her book and moved along the bench, with complete spontaneity, making a space for him to sit down. “Will you take us there?”

  Although he had been expecting her to say “us,” it still took Max aback. He remained standing in front of her, still holding his cap.

  “Both of you?”

  “Yes.”

  Max nodded. Then replaced his cap (pulling it down rather rakishly over his right eye) and sat on the part of the bench she had vacated. The spot was sheltered from the breeze by one of the huge white ventilation outlets placed at intervals on the deck. Max glanced at the title of the book in her lap. It was in English: The Painted Veil. He had not read anything by the author, Somerset Maugham, whose name was printed on the cover, although he thought he had heard of him. Books were not his thing.

  “I have no objection,” he replied. “Providing you are ready to run certain risks.”

  “Now you’re scaring me.”

  She looked anything but scared. Max glanced beyond the lifeboats, sensing her eyes on him. He wondered briefly whether he should feel irritated by some veiled sarcasm, and decided he should not. She could have meant it, although he found it difficult to imagine her being scared in that way. By certain risks.

  “They are in poor neighborhoods,” he explained. “Which you might describe as unsavory. And I’m still not sure whether . . .”

  He fell silent as he turned to look at her. She seemed amused by his calculated, cautious pause.

  “Whether I should venture into such places, is that what you mean?”

  “In fact, it isn’t so dangerous. It’s more a question of not drawing attention to yourself.”

  “How?”

  “With money. Jewelry. Expensive, or overly stylish clothes.”

  She threw back her head and gave a loud laugh. That relaxed, healthy laugh. Almost athletic, Max reflected absurdly. Fashioned on tennis courts, at beach resorts, and in Hispano-Suiza two-­seaters.

  “I see. . . . Must I disguise myself as a tart in order not to stand out?”

  “It’s no joke.”

  “I know.” She looked at him, suddenly serious. “You would be surprised at how many little girls dream of dressing up as princesses, and how many grown women long to dress up as whores.”

  The word whores had not sounded vulgar coming from her lips, Max noticed with surprise. Only provocative. As one would expect from a woman capable of going to a disreputable neighborhood, either for pleasure or out of curiosity, to see tangos. Because there are ways of saying things, the professional dancer concluded. Of uttering certain words or gazing into a man’s eyes, the way she was doing at that moment. Whatever she said, Mecha Inzunza couldn’t be vulgar if she tried. Second Lieutenant Boris Dolgoruki-­Bragation, when he was alive, put it quite well: when it happens, there is nothing you can do, and nothing you can do will make it happen.

  “I’m surprised your husband is so interested in tango,” he managed to say, collecting himself. “I thought he was . . .”

  “A serious composer?”

  Now it was Max’s turn to laugh. He did so with the sophistication and calculated poise of a man about town.

  “You could put it that way. One thinks of his music as being on a different level than that of popular dance.”

  “Let us call it a whim. My husband is an extraordinary man.”

  Inwardly, Max agreed with her. Extraordinary was undoubtedly the right word. As far as he knew, Armando de Troeye was among the half dozen most famous and best paid composers in the world. Of the living Spanish composers, only de Falla could compare.

  “A great man,” she added a moment later. “In thirteen years he has achieved what others can only dream of. . . . Do you know who Diaghilev and Stravinsky are?”

  Max smiled, vaguely offended. I am a lowly ballroom dancer, his expression said. I have heard of them but that is all.

  “Of course. The director of the Ballets Russes and his favorite composer.”

  She nodded and went on to say that her husband had met them in Madrid during the world war, at the house of a Chilean friend, Eugenia de Errazuriz. They were there to stage a performance of “The Firebird” and “Petrushka” at the Teatro Real. At the time, Armando de Troeye was a very talented composer, but relatively unknown. They got along, he showed them Toledo and El Escorial, and they became friends. The following year, he bumped into them again in Rome, and through them he met Picasso. When the war was over, and Diaghilev and Stravinsky took “Petrushka” to Madrid again, de Troeye accompanied them to Seville to see the Easter processions. They returned bosom pals. Three years later, in 1923, the Ballets Russes performed the premiere of “Pasodoble for Don Quixote” in Paris. It was an astonishing success.

  “You probably know the rest,” Mecha Inzunza concluded. “A tour in America, the triumph of “Nocturnes” in L
ondon, where the concert was attended by the King and Queen of Spain, the rivalry with de Falla, and the magnificent sensation caused by “Scaramouche” last year at the Salle Pleyel in Paris, with Serge Lifar dancing the lead and sets by Picasso.”

  “That is success,” observed Max, dispassionately.

  “What is success, for you?”

  “Anything over five hundred thousand pesetas a year, guaranteed.”

  “Well . . . you are easily pleased.”

  He thought he detected a note of sarcasm in her voice, and looked at her curiously.

  “When did you meet your husband?”

  “At the house of Eugenia de Errazuriz, in fact. She is my godmother.”

  “I imagine life with him must be interesting.”

  “Yes.”

  This time the monosyllabic reply had been abrupt. Neutral. She was staring past the lifeboats toward the sea, where the sun, climbing higher into the sky, was illuminating the gold and gray misty air.

  “What has any of that to do with the tango?” asked Max.

  He watched her tilt her head as if there were several possible answers and she was considering them one by one.

  “Armando is a joker,” she said finally. “He likes to play games. On many levels. Including in his work, naturally . . . Risky, innovative games. That is precisely what fascinated Diaghilev.”

  She remained silent for a moment, contemplating the cover of her book, which showed a debonair gentleman gazing out to sea from what looked like a Mediterranean cliff top, with umbrella pines and palm trees.

  “He often says,” she resumed at last, “that he doesn’t care whether a piece is written for piano, violin, or the town crier’s drum. . . . Music is music. And that’s that.”

  Away from their sheltered spot, there was a gentle breeze stirred only by the ship’s movement. The disk of the sun, increasingly resplendent, warmed the wooden bench. Mecha Inzunza rose to her feet and Max instantly followed suit.

  “And always with that humor, so typical of my husband,” she went on speaking openly, continuing where she had left off. “He once said in an interview that he would have liked to compose the way Haydn did, for the amusement of a monarch . . . A symphony? Voilà, your Majesty. And if that doesn’t please you, I shall turn it into a waltz and put words to it. . . . He likes to pretend his works are commissioned, although they aren’t. It is his private joke. His affectation.”