Read The Gods of Tango for Free Online

hugging the shoreline and, after the buildings gave way, Vesuvius. From this vantage point the mountain seemed to keep watch over the city, a kind of guardian, or warden, or both.
    The cold penetrated her dress. She pulled the shawl close around her.
    The steamship began to approach along the water, large and strong and armored with hard gray metal. Somehow the sight of the ship made distance seem more visceral, more daunting.
    Papà was also staring at the ship.
    “It’s bigger than I thought it would be,” she said.
    “Bigger than they look in the posters.”
    “Big enough to get lost in.”
    “You won’t get lost,” he said and took her hand, his eyes still on the steamship.
    His touch surprised her, and for a moment she wanted nothing more than to stay here, on this shore with her father. For years now she had been furious at him, for his defeat, the sad hunched shoulders; but today the slouch of him merely inspired a desperate tenderness. His body wasthe only barrier between her and the cold wind that swept in across the water. His hand was callused and worn but the tips of his fingers had grown soft again and lacked the little tough spots they had had when he still played the violin, the skin hardened by a thousand notes of music. The ship arrived at the dock, sounding a long and hollow moan. The crowd around them prickled with excitement. A porter came to take her trunk. She and Papà both stood, bereft of their seat.
    “Leda, carissima ,” Papà said.
    She turned and quickly wished she hadn’t. He was crying. He made no sound and no attempt to wipe the wetness from his face. She looked away.
    “I should board,” she said.
    He nodded, put his arm through hers, and walked her to the gangplank. They pressed toward it, people all around them, and her father held tightly to her arm so as not to lose her in the crowd. Then, before she knew it, she was at the plank and the moment she’d been running from was here, her father’s last touch, she was going to simply break away but then his arms enveloped her so tightly it was hard to breathe.
    “Remember us,” he said into her ear as the crowd pressed her up the walkway.
    She stepped up the gangplank toward the deck and, she thought, toward América, toward Dante, her cousin, her groom, and now that her steps were not on solid earth but on a long board suspended diagonally in the air, she felt that she had finally become an emigrant. An in-between, she thought as her feet reached the deck. A wife, but unconsummated, and on neither Italian nor South American land. I am what is not possible—which makes everything possible, like a leak in the dam of time. The thought both confused and thrilled her. She no longer knew what her own mind was saying.
    The crowd pressed toward the rail to wave their kerchiefs in goodbye to their loved ones on land.
    “Alfredo, do you see me? Alfredo!”
    “Goodbye, goodbye!”
    “Mamma, Mamma—don’t forget me—”
    Leda joined the crowd and craned her neck, but by the time she reached the front she could not find Papà among the people left on land. Perhaps he’d decided to leave without saying goodbye, or else the multitude had made him small, he was just a second son from Alazzano after all—and in that moment she hated them, all of them, every single one of the Italians waving at the dock, for shrinking her father. She waved her kerchief at the volcano. Voices rose and crashed around her, interweaving their cries of God keep us safe and Pater noster and Amalia, ciao, Amalia! and my God the water so much water and Ciao! Ciao, Italia! until one man began a well-known tarantella that spread across the crowd and soon it seemed all three hundred and something Italians were singing it in unison, and Leda sang along, too, having known the song since childhood, a Neapolitan song about love that has no hope and no end.
    The coast receded at a startling pace. Water unfolded long and blue all around the ship like an infinite quilt