Heart of Tango by Elia Barceló

The women neighborss sitting around me on low stools they had brought from their houses, were reciting whispered prayers. From time to time someone would approach me with murmured words of condolence that I could barely understand.
    The damp air, hot from the candles that had been lit throughoutthe room, was making me dizzy. Everything smelled of sadness, of poverty, of having reached the end of a dark, narrow tunnel from which I would never emerge.
    I wished I could have run into the streets screaming, tearing off my clothes, until I jumped naked into the river, wished the ocean that had brought me to this strange city would take me in and cleanse me of all my grief and humiliation and finally return me to the distant land I should never have left. But no, I could do nothing but stay there, where I was, feeling the tears drip down my cheeks, making an effort to keep anyone from hearing me weep.
    At some time during that endless night Doña Melina came up to me. She was now but a poor, faded woman, beaten down by the sorrow of losing her only daughter, my poor María Esther, who had died in childbirth along with her baby. She hugged me so tight that the rosary around her neck bored an impression into my chest. I remember feeling ashamed, even through my fog of grief and helplessness, that María Esther had died while I remained alive. Doña Melina parted from me, with a light touch on my cheek. A moment later she vanished, a ghost. We had no time to speak.
    By three in the morning almost all the neighborss had left, promising to come back after sunrise to pick up the coffin and carry it to the church. Two old women, strangers to me, had nodded off in their rush chairs. The candles had burned down until their flames had gone out, drowning in their own wax, dying with a sputter,as in the cathedral of Valencia at the end of a novena, when the sacristan went around dousing the last candles, kicking out the last church ladies, locking all the doors.
    I stood up, feeling light, unlike myself, as if I were the one who had died, and walked around the dark hall, searching for a bit of fresh air by the door that was still ajar. Rain fell meekly, rhythmically, monotonously, as if it had all the time in the universe to finish flooding the earth.
    At that moment, watching it rain, I thought—and it seemed I wasn’t the one doing the thinking—that there was now no-one left who cared that I was alive, and for an instant, in addition to my sorrow and loneliness, I felt something for which I had no name: something like relief, because no-one had a right any longer to expect anything from me. I didn’t think about Rojo.
    Then I heard the sound of a throat clearing in the street, and Yuyo showed up, the skinny squeezebox player who had become a sort of friend, the one who had brought me the piecework that I had hoped would earn me enough to save Papá—the boy from that serenade, which seemed to have happened in some other life, to some other girl. Behind him, unexpectedly, like an apparition, I saw the face of another man, pale, serious. My stomach leapt.
    Both men removed their hats. Yuyo repeated the same words I had been hearing for so many hours: “My condolences, madam. Don Joaquín was a good man. At least his suffering is over.”
    The other man, who was not Diego, said nothing. He lowered his head and followed Yuyo into the drawing room.
    I had to sit down, right there in the hall, because my legs would not support me.
    W hen the squeezebox player told me Natalia’s father had died, for an instant I thought I might go down and pay my respects. I’d never have a better occasion to see her. The thought even passed through my head that I could ask her to be my dance partner, because I knew that she’d need the money and that her husband was off at sea. But it would have been an insult. She was a married lady, not one of the desperate girls I hung around with. A real lady couldn’t