‘The Gods of Tango,’ by Carolina De Robertis
In Carolina De Robertis’ third historical novel set in South America, the author is as ambitious and audacious as her beguiling protagonist.
“The Gods of Tango” takes us from Italy to Argentina and Uruguay, exploring Leda’s difficult immigration, gender fluidity and passion for music.
De Robertis, daughter of Uruguayan parents, was raised in Europe and California and now lives in Oakland with her wife and two children.
After 20 cramped days at sea, Leda meets Arturo, who explains that Dante has been killed in a labor dispute.
Just beyond it, double doors let out into a long, open patio crammed with washing tubs, tables covered with fabric and other sewing supplies, dilapidated crates, laundry flapping on haphazard lines, women scrubbing and cutting and shelling and sewing and sweeping, and children, children everywhere, playing with wooden spoons, sharpening knives, mending ragged clothes, helping to scrub and cut and shell and sew and sweep, wiping snot from their grimy faces with their hands.
De Robertis vividly conveys Leda’s turmoil as she resolves to stay in this city, to ride horseless carriages through the Babel of strange languages and traditions.
On the street, the din thickened with ... vendors with hand-carts shouting their wares ... the cracks of whips and groans of wheels, women gossiping through windows. ...
Alazzano also never smelled like this, like sixty-three people sharing two broken toilets into whose pits they poured the contents of their chamber pots in a relentless stream.
A sadistic customs agent eats Leda’s precious olives from home but allows her to retain the family violin.
Dressed in her husband’s clothes and sporting a man’s haircut, Leda disappears from the conventillo into the dodgy Buenos Aires nightlife, posing as a musician named Dante.
“The Gods of Tango” is a rousing tale of sex, violence, exhilaration, poverty, luck and redemption.
De Robertis demonstrates a keen historical sense as she attends to immigration patterns, wars, the rise of the notorious Perons in Argentina, and eventually the protests of the Tupamaros in Uruguay.