An Outsider In Buenos Aires Goes Incognito, For Love Of Tango

Transcript

ERIC WESTERVELT, HOST:

Novelist Carolina de Robertis is the author of two well-received novels, "The Invisible Mountain" and "Perla." Her third novel, out next week, is "The Gods Of Tango." It unfolds in the dirty, crowded and impoverished immigrant barrios of Buenos Aires of 1913. At the center of the novel is a 17-year-old Italian girl, Leda, who's sent for by her cousin-husband. She leaves her rural village and arrives in Argentina with little more than some clothes and her grandfather's violin. Widowed before her ship even lands in South America, she soon finds comfort and excitement in a new kind of music that's filling the city's courtyards, bars and brothels - the tango. But to play the tango and to survive, she has to pass herself off as a man.

Carolina de Robertis began by telling us how the often overlooked history of tango became the backdrop for her novel.

CAROLINA DE ROBERTIS: Many people in the United States think of the tango as a dance, and it is a dance. It is a beautiful and erotic dance. But it is also a very rich historical and musical phenomenon. It includes people of African descent, immigrants from Russia, from Italy, from many parts of Europe who brought their instruments and their sounds. And these sounds mixed in the cauldron of Buenos Aires to become a new music. So I wanted to explore the immigrant experience. And for a woman immigrant, the only way for her to fully access the underworld of the tango on her own terms without becoming a prostitute was to dress as a man.

WESTERVELT: And in the book, tango music is just coming into its own, really. It's new, it's vibrant, it's expanding from just being just the music of the poor and working classes to a wider audience in Europe and beyond. How did you research the music and the dance?

ROBERTIS: Yeah, that's right. So the book opens in 1913. It's the year that the tango caught fire in Paris. And when it caught fire in Paris then the elite of Buenos Aires began to pay attention and say, wow, we have this thing under our feet that we have disdained, and Paris is listening. Maybe we should put it in our cabarets.

WESTERVELT: You artfully portray the sights and sounds and smells of these poor neighborhoods of, you know, early 20th century Buenos Aires, and you portray Leda's mix of fear and exhilaration as an immigrant to this new, you know, unfamiliar country.

You're an immigrant yourself. Did you have some of those same feelings as you moved around during your life?

ROBERTIS: Absolutely. My parents left South America when my mother was pregnant with me. So I immigrated for the first time in the womb and I was born already an immigrant in England. And then my family moved to Switzerland when I was 5 and to California when I was 10. So I've had many layers of that experience, of being an other, the loneliness that can arise from it, the sense of invisibility but also the potential for cultural freedom. When you're an outsider, it can give you room to shape your own relationship to culture on your own terms.

WESTERVELT: Back to Leda, this teenage widow protagonist in the novel. Leda's attracted to women, so it's not just the tango as music that she can't access openly as a woman.

ROBERTIS: That's right. In the story, Leda is not conscious of that reason when she decides to start dressing as a man. She's thinking about her survival. And it's only later that this other piece rises into her conscious mind. And pretty soon, she can't deny her attraction to women, when she's spending all this time with these male tango musicians for whom it is normal to frequent brothels together. Then she really needs to figure out how she's going to engage with that.

WESTERVELT: Carolina, did you base this character at all on jazz musician Billy Tipton, who famously had to pass as a man for many years?

ROBERTIS: The idea for Leda arose before I encountered Billy Tipton's history. So finding the history was more of a beautiful confirmation of the work that I was doing and of the truth that women have passed as men to survive, to express their gender identity, to live more freely within their sexual identity and for many other reasons throughout history. And that in fact, there are silences around that history, but that doesn't mean that it hasn't happened.

WESTERVELT: There's a passage that gets to some of that. Let's read from that, if you would.

ROBERTIS: Of course.

(Reading) Sometimes deep in the night, she unbound her aching breasts and sat alone in front of a cracked mirror, staring at herself in the light of a single candle, amazed at what she saw - a not man, not woman. A fallen woman, risen man. She couldn't tell what was stranger, that a man existed inside her or that the world accepted his existence. She wondered why no one saw through her disguise. Perhaps people could see only what they expected, what fit inside their vision, as if human vision came in pre-cut shapes more narrow than the world itself. And this allowed her to hide in plain sight.

WESTERVELT: Does that experience of having to hide something to be yourself come from any personal experience?

ROBERTIS: Certainly, my personal experience doesn't exactly parallel the experience of Leda, but I am a queer woman married to a woman. And I think that all of us as queers have the experience of negotiating being out and not being out. As a queer person, you never finish coming out because you're always having new engagements with the world.

WESTERVELT: It's never resolved. Like the experience of being an immigrant.

ROBERTIS: That's right, and one could see it as another beautiful and complex in-between.

WESTERVELT: Carolina de Robertis. Her new novel is "The Gods Of Tango." It's out next week.

Thanks so much for speaking with us.

ROBERTIS: Thank you so much Eric. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.