How well it suits you, Argentine tango!

So many tangos are heavy with nostalgia, sick with longing for a world that has changed beyond recognition. And so many are ballads of regret: telling of lovers slighted (and now missed), of youth squandered, of opportunities lost. I often dance with exuberant gleeful pleasure to the accompaniment of the most tragic of poetry. But, while I can remain unmoved by the thousand tales of woe, the je regrette tout of so many sob stories turned to song, this tango, with its jaunty optimism, almost never fails to tighten my throat and turn my eyes hot and prickly. The title is ambiguous, but I interpret it to mean that the singer, in his velvety tones, is addressing the tango itself, complimenting our personified dance on his dapper new look.

Brother, modernity has caught up with you,†
And the figure you cut yesterday has also changed
It’s only in your melodious measures
That we can find the past, dancing heart to heart.

You’d already left the suburb where you could be seen
Beneath the flickering light of a street lamp
Which outlined your fanciful figure
Dancing to the chords of a street organ.

How well it suits you, the way you’ve changed,
And, in this distinguished setting,
You are entangling hearts together
To the lamentations of a bandoneon.

The skyscrapers look on in wonder
When they see you arrive in your dinner jacket
How well it suits you, Argentine tango,
Song of the soul, immortal song.

The song tells of the tango’s move from its origins in the suburbs under the iconic street lantern (the talk of a “fanciful figure” makes me think of the images of early dancers, rather contorted, often bending sideways at the waist, creating a twisty silhouette), hints lightly at a louche, risqué past and contrasts that with its arrival at the posh salons of the centre of town, just a touch on the flashy side of respectable, still retaining the power to provoke a light frisson of shock.

But, when I hear this tango, I think of a different change. In some ways, it is the opposite journey that I trace in my mind from the one depicted in the tango itself: it’s a journey that begins with the well-dressed, starts with the charmingly dilapidated grandeur of high-ceilinged halls with dark, shiny wooden floors and round tables hung with heavy tablecloths. It begins with the men in suits, doused with strong cologne, the women in their dresses and carefully-applied lipstick. And it ends — for now — behind a tall, wooden-framed door and up a narrow flight of stairs. The room certainly cuts a fanciful figure. It is a former tile factory. A Harlequin patchwork of yellows and browns, a mismatched selection of different tiles, lines the walls and ceiling. The floor is hard and a little sticky underfoot. The young men are in jeans and T-shirts and the women in low-crotch harem pants, culottes and leggings, incongruously pairing leg wear that would be unremarkable at a yoga class with the shiny strappy heels of our dance. At a side table, people are sucking from a shared mate gourd. And, on the floor, boleos fly, giros whirl and rulo decorations churn the air. Male feet trace the half moons of lápices in the spreading patch of talcum powder to which each couple makes a careful detour as they circle the floor.

Well might the skyscrapers look on in wonder — those ugly, half-empty grey towers of Palermo Soho with their huge, sterile, receptions with leather-and-chrome armchairs and potted yuca plants; the windy balconies of Puerto Madero with their views of yachts, slaloming rollerbladers, the Indian red of gentrified old warehouses and the ubiquitous green two-tailed trident — coyly concealing her ample breasts beneath wavy tresses — of an alien coffee chain.

These are the fresh green shoots of renewal. The energy of young bodies rejuvenating the old dance. And, in between the open-embrace giros and the high-energy movements, they walk. Chests touching, arms encircling, dancing heart to heart. Riding the musical time machine that transports them to the past.

A friend passes my chair, his face beautiful in its expression of concentration, his right hand tenderly holding his partner’s back, his feet elegant in their laced-up shoes, his legs lovely in their feline tread. And, just at that moment, I feel a rush of affection as Campos gives voice to the very piropo that I am silently pronouncing in my mind. How well it suits you, Argentine tango! And I hope that as the generations succeed each other, as these young people in their turn grow old and die, that tango will continue in whatever forms the ingenuity of future generations create, but somehow retaining its essence: the embrace and the soulful, immortal song.

†This is my own, rather free, translation.

Moët and the Milongueros

The faces are not beautiful. They are lined and old, the teeth stained a brownish-yellow from years of nicotine and bitter porteño coffee or an unnatural gleaming denture white. The heads are crowned with snowy wisps or shiny boiled-egg pates. The bodies are either spindly or — more frequently — display the swelling bellies that bear witness to a diet of bife de chorizo and brimming glasses of cheap, inky Malbecs. They sit facing me in a tidy line in their shirtsleeves with their jackets hung neatly over the backs of their chairs. A few of them are talking, a few are fanning themselves, but most are simply watching and waiting as the cortina plays.

The dancing is not beautiful to watch. Many of the men are slightly stooped or hunched. The women take small steps, often with bent knees. There are no elegant long strides, no flamboyant or pretty decorations. Only one man makes an immediate impression of elegance — a tall, twisty flagpole in his dapper pale suit, sporting a beaming smile and a dancer’s perfectly upright posture — and he is a well-known tango professional. But my milonga companion Moët has already attuned her eye to the subtle nuances of this unshowy style. She takes a sip from her fizzing highball glass. “There are good dancers here”, she remarks with satisfaction.

A new tanda begins. I think if I didn’t recognise these opening strains, I would be able to identify the orchestra just from Moët’s face. “Troilo!” She pronounces it with a lilting three syllables and her eyes turn soft and dreamy as if she were confessing the name of a secret crush. Throughout the evening, she reacts to the opening bars of almost every tanda with sighs of contentment, ooohs and aaaahs and soft-voiced exclamations of “I love this!” During the cortinas, she  sits back in her chair, sipping from her champagne glass. But as soon as each tanda begins, her spine shoots bolt upright as if she had been galvanised, a Frankenstein’s monster come to life under the electric influence of the Golden Age music. “Oh God!” she exclaims with an almost erotic gasp and a look of urgent desperation when she particularly loves the orchestra (apart from the further Troilo tandas, a set of sweet, quaint instrumental Canaros elicits an especially sharp intake of breath). Only when the De Angelis tanda begins does her face look completely impassive and she turns her back to the dance floor at once.

But I digress. As the opening notes of the Troilo sound, I look across at the men. Their bodies are still, but their eyes are lithely active, vividly, shiningly alive. A small man with a monk’s tonsure hairstyle in a neat navy blue shirt and matching trousers is looking straight at me. I look back, receive the nod and watch him cross the room. I am expecting a stiff torso and a left arm which grips me like the safety bar on a fun fair carriage (many older men are rather rough handlers). But he is meltingly soft. And, suddenly, I am seized by a good feeling, an irrational premonition of happiness — not about this tanda, which is obviously going to be lovely — but about the whole evening. What I thought was a frog in my arms has been transformed into Prince Charming without even a kiss. All it took was an arm around both shoulders and a head nestled in beside his. I am the reverse Sleeping Beauty. My prince’s touch makes my eyelids close, though in tango bliss, rather than slumber, sending me from alert awakeness into a blissful Troilo trance.

As the evening progresses, I benefit a good deal from Moët’s sharp eye for the best dancers (and, as result, have only three mediocre tandas out of a long evening of almost constant dancing). As I take my place on the floor to dance with my current partner for that tanda, I learn to sneaky a crafty glance over at her to register which man she is dancing with. When the following tanda begins, I train my sights upon him. My inviting looks have a gratifyingly high success rate: these men are not coy. Veni, vidi, vici. My look and the man’s nod are like two entangled particles correlating their spins. Till I measure the man’s willingness to dance, there is nothing. But at the moment I try to quantify it, my look produces his complementary nod. It’s the spooky quantum entanglement of the cabeceo.

The floor is lovingly smooth underfoot. The embraces are soft snuggles. These men are better dancers than most of the older guys I’ve encountered. They even smell better — not that I have ever detected even a trace of sour armpit odour on an older Argentine dancer — but these men lack the pungent old-fashioned colognes and musty tweedy jackets (they are mostly in soft cotton shirts) that are the usual olfactory markers of masculine maturity.

There is a gallantry to this way of dancing, to this style that, in this context and with these men, I have no qualms in calling milonguero. Everything important that the music contains and which we might need to express is in the leading and following itself. It is less like a duet than like two voices singing in unison, an octave apart, or two different instruments playing the same melody together and blending their contrasting timbres. The sustained close embrace makes me feel safe and protected, ladylike and in the arms of a gentleman. And we almost always step together. Our movements are often mirrored — unlike the elegant, open embrace giros of tango salón, where leaders and followers perform such different movements from each other.

There is also something very relaxing in the absence of big paradas: those dramatic moments when the leader waits and the follower is placed in the spotlight and can luxuriate in sensual leg caricias, twirly rulos and other playful ways of filling the music and the space. It’s a moment of freedom for the follower, but freedom also means responsibility. The parada sometimes makes me want to exclaim “All right Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up”. But sometimes it’s a relief not to have to perform at all. I can decorate in milonguero style and, in fact, add many little ludic taps and flicks. But I don’t have to. It’s just adding a few sugar sprinkles to the cupcake. It won’t significantly change its taste.

But there is one man who does present me, with a flourish, with a number of invitations — for they are more than simply opportunities — to decorate. Pale of suit and broad of smile, the tall elegant professional dancer whirls me through a fluid set of waltzes, thrillingly punctuated by tiny pauses where he waits, with the subtlest of implied challenges, for my input. “It’s so interesting”, he comments, “you and Moët. You are both wonderful dancers. But you are so different. Completely, utterly, diametrically different! Like night and day!” As he escorts me back to my table, I am pensive, musing on our differences, wondering what he meant and making some educated guesses. But, with an inward shrug, I take my seat again, clink glasses with my melomanic companion and think to myself: “We may be different, but at the milonga we make a great team.”

PS For an alternative view of this milonga, see this description.

Deep cuts

Despite the bright sunshine and almost summery temperatures of this mildest of Mays, we are deep in the winter of our tango discontent. It is the doldrums, the off season, a time of semi-hibernation. Out on the glossy teddy bear brown floor of Canning, half a dozen couples are dancing. The huge shiny wall photo in the background, depicting this same room, festively lit and crowded with familiar faces, forms a rather sad contrast to the sparse scattering of dancers on the floor. The Di Sarlis of this tanda are familiar, but they are overlaid by an unusual amount of crackly static, as though we were listening to them in a greenhouse with torrential rain drumming on the roof. At the DJ’s chair in the corner, hunched slightly over a computer screen, I spot the familiar tufty light brown hair and the skinny torso in a sky blue shirt, the pale eyes whose irises are rimmed with the glassy circles of contact lenses.  This is the man I have come to hear, the Fin of dour appearance who is a guest in this southern city, a man equally at home whirling torches of fire on the stage of a circus and obscured behind a DJ’s laptop. In both cases, I reflect, he as a person remains largely in shadow, hidden by the flashes of his own pyrotechnics. The tango DJ is a wizard of Oz, filling large rooms with the magically-preserved orchestras of yesteryear, unrolling the acoustic yellow brick road we follow and, ideally, concealing his own part in the illusion.

The tanda has shifted now to a sound unmistakably characteristic of the orchestra of De Angelis: needle sharp both in pitch and in tone. The frantically repeated semi quavers of the violins in their upper register sound eerie, almost painful, emotionless and vampiric. The singer is amped up like a pop star, his dark tones dominating over the orchestra, with his tale of a murderer, of children who have become strangers, of a faithful wife bravely wiping away a fat brimming tear as she lays the table with the meal which will welcome home her prodigal husband. To me, the sound is sinister, like the soundtrack of a horror film, and I am half expecting the domestic scene to dissolve into bloodshed and mayhem at any moment. The floor is now completely empty — it is 3am and the nadir of the night. But also, as I am about to learn, its turning point, a kind of acoustic watershed signalling that the adults-only programming is about to begin.

A small group of dancers have begun arriving in clumps. They have come, I know, from Milonga 10, taking advantage of the proximity of the two milongas and the late-night free entry to Canning. I am singing along gleefully, with campily exaggerated vibrato, to the cortina, which has morphed into a relaxed version of “My heart belongs to Daddy” and, as I sip my glass of red wine, I have the sudden sensation of being at a jazz club, a sensation which turns out to be an accurate premonition. Our juggler at the computer is about to switch to his louchly, intriguingly unfamiliar late night music.

I spot a friend and we take to the floor immediately. The tango is “Alma en Pena”, one of my all-time favourites. But I am momentarily disorientated. This is neither Canaro’s sweetly archaic-sounding instrumental version, nor does it have Rodriguez’s strong driving rhythms. The melody is embellished with unfamiliar little skippy dotted quavers, almost like a Scottish folk tune. There are delicate, twinkly, tinkly runs on the piano. The violins are sweet and unobtrusive. A voice is reciting a well-known tale, singing of love letters, crumpled and tear-stained, which, with the masochism of heartbreak, he cannot stop reading, folding and unfolding them until the paper almost comes to pieces in his fingers. But the voice has a velvety quality — like an old much-loved soft toy — that I am not expecting. “Who is this orchestra?” my partner asks. “Tanturi? It sounds like Tanturi, but did he record this track?” It’s like encountering an old friend whose long hair has been trimmed into a tomboyish bob or who has exchanged her familiar jeans and T-shirt for a slinky black dress. My much-loved tango has had a makeover, a change of look, has revealed some of the possibilities which were always implicit in its tune. And I am instantly delighted by the combination of the sweetly familiar and the piquantly new. “This is beautiful!” we both agree.

Several tandas later, I am out on the floor again, experiencing a similar feeling of pleasurable disorientation. These jazzy syncopated rhythms are the signature sound of Biagi’s orchestra. But the sudden dizzying drops into silence that give Biagi its characteristic punch are absent. Instead, there is a rich, soft featherbed of sound underlying Biagi’s funky rhythms and an unusually dramatic, syrupy male voice. Once again, I am striding happily through giros and sacadas with the joyful vigour of an explorer in new territory. I feel like a hiker on a long walk who has reached the limits of his usual terrain, emerging from a deciduous forest onto a high plateau, enjoying the feeling of the wind in his hair, the Alpine plants, the exhilarating views which offer a new perspective, the strange moon-like barren loveliness of the landscape. I cannot even tell if I actively like this sound or not — but I delight in the new pathways forming between ear and brain, the neurons flashing.

Dancing to this music is not so easy, I reflect, several tandas later, as I snuggle up against a American visitor who is fizzily enthusiastic at the Gobbi-Maciel tangos which are now playing. To tell the truth, I am not sure that I am dancing to it at all — I’m just rushing in, like a fool. The music is subtle, richly textured and challengingly unpredictable. We miss accents, we are late for beats, we march our way with incongruous confidence through empty, silent air and a number of my decorations appear at random moments, adorning nothing. But I don’t really care at this moment. I just want to snuggle against this soft chest and my body is squirming with longing to move to these unfamiliar tango sounds, as delicious to me as sharp salty cheese and tangy black olives after the gooey sticky sickly sweetness of a chocotorta. I feel as though I am looking at the tango tapestry from the other side, stepping through the mirror. Cut me. Burn me. I think I like playing with fire.  

A milonga transplanted: “Sundays at El Beso” in its new home

The entrance does honour to its name. Club Fulgor, the resplendent, glows in an inviting festive lipstick red and holly-leaf green, with the familiar shiny white capitals above the door. I arrive to find a small group of well-known El Beso habitués standing with shoe bags slung over shoulders in the mild autumn evening air outside our beloved milonga’s new home — its temporary new home, I sincerely hope, here among the quiet residential streets of Villa Crespo. I weave among the waiting dancers, air-kissing right cheekbones so as to avoid leaving greasy pink lip gloss stains on their skin, but lightly touching left forearms so as not to seem overly formal or standoffish as I purse my mouth against the empty air. And I learn that we are waiting for the previous milonga to end. Officially, I’m told, at 10.30pm the Club Fulgor matinée dance should be over, but the regulars are reluctant to leave,  to surrender the place to us. Ten minutes later, the door is opened and we enter in a thin stream, awkwardly toting bags and superfluous warm jackets meant for a more severe chill, shuffling around, changing seats as tables are vacated by their owners, left scattered with highball glasses, grease-printed tissue-paper serviettes and wine glasses rimmed with the remnants of vermillion kisses.

The atmosphere is awkward. Susanna, the organiser, has the wide eyes and puckered mouth of an anxious hostess trying to seat guests at a dinner party full of feuding relatives and prickly, distrustful acquaintances. “You can’t sit here”, I am told by an older woman in thick spiky mascara and a tiny shiny sheath dress encasing her ample curves with sausage-casing snugness. Gathering up my things in my arms, I shuffle awkwardly down a few seats to be told I can’t sit there either. “What if these seats aren’t free? I think they’re not free. The couple who were sitting here are probably out on the dance floor,” I am told by a woman in her fifties with stiffly-lacquered hair and a sequined top glinting in the half light. “I think they’ve just left”, I say, signalling to the couple in question, who are standing nearby, shrugging on coats and squishing on hats; and indicating the table with its pool of melted water and golden-yellow dregs in a dimpled whisky glass and a crumpled two-peso note tucked under a saucer. “You obviously don’t speak Spanish”, she says, loudly and sternly, taking hold of my arm roughly with her long-fingernailed hand. “Go away; this table is taken.” An El Beso regular leaps to my defence, telling her, in a speech laden with sarcastic repeated darlings, sweethearts and my loves that the couple have already left and in any case their milonga is over. It’s our turn now.

Out on the floor, my eye picks out two of our couples immediately. The dance floor holds a thin scattering of middle-aged couples, with their slightly hunched postures, the women wobbling on their spindly heels, the men’s left hands clenched tightly around their partners’, the muscles of back and left arm tense and visibly cramped. But among them, two elegant pairs of dancers take long effortless strides around in the floor, embracing with visible softness. A slender blonde circles her partner with long, confident steps while his free foot sweeps around in the graceful semi-circles of repeated lápices. The older couples came here to flirt, to socialise, to give their glad rags an outing, to sip their red wine and to simply embrace and move to the music, to enjoy a healthy pastime (or, at least, that’s how I see them, though it may be simply projection or unwarranted imagination and stereotyping on my part, I know). We, on the other hand, are the earnest students of tango: group classes are our labs, the interviews with dancers at Luna Llena our lectures, solo ochos our homework, Club de Tango our library, iTunes our Wikipedia, performances our examinations. We are the undergraduates of the tango world. And, gradually, but ineluctably, over the next few tandas, gown replaces town on the floor.

It is not easy to use cabeceo here, in the relative gloom. As usual, at the two short ends of the room, the men are clustered. My heart is thumping just a beat or two faster than normal and, between beats, my blood pressure must surely read a few mmHg higher than normal. It is frustrating to be able to see many of my favourite leaders there, sitting in the dim light, and not to be able to read their facial expressions or the directions of their eyes with any clarity. I squint, I stare, I scrutinise. I try to imagine my rods and will them to absorb more light, to try to feel the rhodopsin molecules shape-shifting deep in my retina. In the gloom, everyone seems further away. I want to dance with them; I think they want to dance with me. But the ocular communication on which this transaction depends is photon dependent. I feel my lips pout, my jaw tense, my hands grip the table. See me, damn it, see me! And, at last, it comes: a tentative cocked head, a nod in my direction at which I nod back with flamboyant vigour. Or is it in my direction? I am uncertain until the last moment when my friend is standing in front of my chair.

After the silken wood of El Beso, the floor feels gritty underfoot (later, Susanna will discreetly dust a thin layer of talc over the grime). The music — a lovely tanda of Di Sarli ballads, piquantly spiced up with a single, less familiar track — sounds tinny and hollow. The air is chilly and I keep my cardigan wrapped around me until the end of the first track. “But the important thing is”, my partner tells me between songs, “that we are here, putting a brave face on it. It’s important”, he says, “to remain loyal. To stick with it, in the good times and the bad times. It’s not ideal. But it’s still our milonga.”

Domingo a la noche…

Guest Issue by Derrick Del Pilar

The huge hotel ballroom looks empty tonight. Twenty four hours ago, there were five couples dancing on each square meter tile of portable wood floor—not a crowd at all by Tokyo subway or Buenos Aires milonga standards, but cramped enough to cause quite a few bumps and scrapes at this U.S. festival. But tonight we are enjoying the broad open plains of an uncrowded dance floor—now there are only two couples per tile, and since there are numerous choke points in the line of dance, a selfish leader who wanted to walk a few swooping steps in a row could zoom by one of the dawdlers, like a Ferrari passing on the right, into one of the empty spaces. I would never…

Many of the out of towners—who must return to Monday morning non-tango jobs out there somewhere—have already flown. Many of the locals—who have grown tired of the long drive to this generic airport hotel on the outskirts—have elected to stay home or attend the uncancelled local milonga in the city center. Many of the dancers on the floor—exhausted after the three day grind of classes, overpriced hotel dinners, and constant milongas—have prematurely aged a few years.

I am the captain of this ship of worn out addicts, the high priest of this strangely somnambulistic rite. I sit up on my platform, my face illuminated from below by the steady blue glow of my laptop screen, directing the currents of this churning river of bodies with music, music that many of my acolytes do not understand, peppered with lyrics in Lunfardo, our liturgical language.

Sometimes being the DJ is easy. Sometimes telepathy kicks in and I know exactly which song will cause the hearts to flutter and the eyes to dart around the room after the last notes of my cortina have faded out. Sometimes clairvoyance kicks in and I know what orchestras they will need two or three tandas down the road. When my DJ sense is working with preternatural precision, I can program out the next few tandas and relax a bit: lean back, have a drink, take my eyes off the screen, and just watch the floor, vicariously enjoying the music that I’ve selected. Should I choose to dance, I can descend from my perch and bestow my indulgences upon a lucky woman—for who would refuse a dance invitation from the DJ?

Such predatory abuse of my position often tempts me. But I rather relish the invisibility of the DJ. Physically, of course, the facts of furnishings and room layout often cloister me from the crowd, whether I am back in a booth or, like tonight, up on a pedestal. The cabeceo is rarely cast my way, removed from the sightline as I am. And when I do my job well, the dancers’ gazes are never drawn in my direction by offbeat arrangements or unfamiliar selections—they are too busy scanning the room for partners, irresistibly compelled to dance by the flood of fantastic, timeless music that I unleash upon them.

But sometimes I think that I might be eminently replaceable, that an automaton might be able do my job. The library of tango music on my computer is already optimally organized for such a thing. Each orchestra and singer pairing is carefully and consistently labeled: Troilo/Fiorentino. D’Arienzo/Mauré. Laurenz/Instrumental. Di Sarli/Rufino. D’Agostino/Vargas. Biagi/Instrumental.  Each song is labeled with some key pieces of information: recording year, rating on a 5 star scale (based on popularity, familiarity, and my personal taste). There are number of subjectively defined yet consistently applied categories: Tango–Lyrical. Vals. Tango–Rhythmic. Tango–Sweet. Milonga. Tango–Dramatic. Tango–Guardia Vieja.

Any programmer could write a simple script that would compose coherent tandas based on the classic criteria: Same orchestra. Same singer. Same category. Three to five year range. Only songs rated three stars or higher. Four song sets for tango, three for milonga, three or four for waltz. Cortinas between sets. No adjacent tandas by the same orchestra. No repeats of the same song. No title repeats by different orchestras within an hour or two. They could even be set with variable parameters, so if you wanted to allow sets that mixed instrumental Di Sarli with vocal Di Sarli, or romantic Troilo with rhythmic Troilo, you would merely have to check a box.

Would anyone really notice the difference between me and the program? I ponder this as I watch the tired festival attendees during this tanda of Fresedo. During the D’Arienzo/Echagüe milongas they acted twitchy and frantic, during the Troilo/Fiorentino they seemed emotionally exhausted. But between the sweet strings of “Sollozos” and the first powerful piano notes of “Buscándote,” they have transformed. Those who were sitting rubbing their feet are now on the floor. The choke points and empty spaces have smoothed out, and the floor is circulating more evenly.

We are due for vals. During the cortina, I decide which ones to play. There are so few vals tandas per evening and per festival that I hate to be repetitive—but the other DJs, friends of mine from the festival circuit, have already played most of my favorites. Scrolling through my list, “Claro de luna” by Canaro catches my eye. No one has played this compelling, medium paced vals yet this weekend—perfect, I think for this time of night. Driving enough to energize the dances, yet calm enough not to wear them out. But the rating is only 3 stars, and there is an asterisk by the name, which in my notation system means that the sound quality on the file is sub par, and since I haven’t been able to get my hands on a disc with a better transfer, I have never played it at a milonga. But it’s late, the festival is almost over, and bad sound quality or not, I love this vals. Everyone has returned to their seats, there are only a few seconds left in the cortina. I drag “Claro de luna” over and drop it next in the queue, then round out the tanda with “Salud, dinero, y amor” and “En la noche azul,” two songs with good sound quality and high ratings.

I am suddenly itching to dance, so I ignore etiquette and dash down to a friend’s table to scoop her up before someone can cut me off with a cabeceo. Her embrace is soft and snuggly, and we dance simply, in and out of cross system with smoothly pivoting strides, spinning evenly and deliberately. After the vals is over, one of the festival teachers, a tall porteño with a well-groomed moustache, shouts “Let’s hear it for the DJ!” and suddenly everyone on the floor bursts into spontaneous applause. I feel my cheeks flush a bit, my ego swells up in ecstasy. The rest of the tanda flies by—we whirl around the floor, I am giddy, from joy and from fatigue.

I have to beg my friend’s pardon for not escorting her back to her seat, and I run back to the pedestal in a state of mild panic, since I have not set up the next tanda yet. When I get to the computer everyone bursts into applause again. This time my face grows unbearably hot, and I know it must be bright red. A fine rivulet of sweat trickles down my brow as I scroll through the tango music library with no idea of what to play next. I finally select a Pugliese/Chanel tango, and because everyone is still on the floor applauding, I start to manually fade out the cortina. Everyone is beaming, no one leaves the floor, except for the teacher who gave me the shout out. He is heading straight for the DJ station.

“Just so you know,” he says to me in Spanish, “those valses you just played, they were Tete’s favorites. The first one instantly reminded me of him, and it was so nice to think about him as I danced it. And then the next one reminded me of him too, and the last one even more. What a beautiful tanda I had thinking of Tete! Thank you.”

Would my hypothetical DJ computer program have picked those three valses, and put them in that order, tonight, at this exact moment? Perhaps. As I watch the dancers move with new energy and purpose and joy through the last two tandas of the festival (Di Sarli/Durán follows the Pugliese), I am content to let my ego stretch and unfold, knowing that tonight, for at least a moment, I was inspired, I was irreplaceable.

The sedentary and the mobile

“I’m not sure my friends will come”, he says. “They find this milonga rather intimidating.” I snuggle deeper into my woolly cardigan, shivering under the icy blasts of the air conditioning. “C’mon, let’s go”, he suggests, as the sweet violin strokes of Di Sarli set the cold air vibrating. The floor is a murky pool, a rock stadium abandoned by musicians and fans alike and, for a moment, it feels odd to stride along, filling this dingy place with the ephemeral trace of our elegant giros and lápices, our paradas and leg caricias, like a lady in twinset and pearls strolling with surprising confidence through a slum neighbourhood, leaving a scent trail of Chanel no. 5 amid the heaps of litter, the broken bottles and urine-soaked tramps she passes. This dark basement seems designed for loucher things: for the repetitive, fast-paced beat of music played at a volume that makes your heart thump painfully against your rib cage. The floor should be squeaky underfoot from spilled beer; there should be women sobbing snotty mascara-streaked tears onto scratchy toilet paper and swallowing ecstasy tablets in the toilets, couples snogging with desperate fervour in corners. Instead, here we are: in a pinstriped dark suit, the trousers creased with fierce precison, and a sleek black wispy dress, tracing simultaneous large circular rulos on the floor with incongruous elegance. As so often in Buenos Aires, the still, inanimate world can be cheap and ugly, but there is great beauty to be found in the movements of the human body.

La Viruta can indeed be an intimidating place, I reflect, as we return to our table to squat uncomfortably amid unruly piles of discarded jumpers, scarves and jackets. Our clothes appear to be stubborn masochists with a sly tendency to slip from chair backs onto the floor to be kicked and trodden. A tanda of intense, dramatic ballads is playing now. My table companions sit in glazed-eyed silence. An acquaintance is waving in my direction from his side of the table and tries, repeatedly, unsuccessfully to address a few words to me above the music. I get up and shuffle around to an empty seat next to him, bumping my hips painfully on the corners of chairs and tables, feeling as clumsy as a dolphin on a beach, a dancer off the floor. As we talk, his eyes are disturbingly, distractingly mobile, busy with ocular multi-tasking. Male friends are walking by and must be high-fived, slapped on the shoulder and (if they are special chums) accused of insanity, idiocy and homosexuality in the friendly ritual insults of male bonding. Female friends are eyed carefully and, perhaps, I think, filed away as future dance partners for later in the evening. As the tanda switches to a more danceable set of Tanturis, I have a moment of hope that he will say the magic word bailás, but my Prince won’t kiss me tonight, but leaves me to slumber on in my cold casket.

La Viruta is a world divided in two: split between the static and the mobile. Women are the sedentary sex. And most of the most confident among the men sit, too, with the exception of the row of men in front of the long bar, mostly standing gazing out with seemingly unfocused eyes, like spectators at a harbour watching a departing ship.

Only a few men pace slowly around the edges of the room, eyeing the tables as they pass. I watch as one such wandering unfortunate approaches our table and addresses my female neighbour with the exact word I was hoping to hear from my dancer-acquaintance. He hunches down slightly towards her. “¿Bailás?” Her eyebrows rise several centimetres and her lips furrow as she looks at him aslant and then she turns and glares fully at him. Any uninitiated bystander who didn’t speak Spanish would surely assume from her facial expression that he had just asked her to suck his dick. “No.” He glances over at me with hangdog hopefulness and I shake my head slightly, trying to look rueful and sympathetic to his plight. Five minutes later, a second stray man approaches my popular neighbour. This time she sighs audibly and then turns her whole body away from him ostentatiously without a word. Beggars definitely cannot be choosers at this milonga.

But among these wandering barks, these ships in the night, there are a few good dancers, a few men who came here not to sit and watch, not to drink and gossip, but to dance. I spot a favourite partner — off the floor, he is an awkward, skinny, lanky-haired, bow-legged twenty-two year old Argentine boy, but I know that once I take him in my embrace he will be transformed: like the geeky librarian beloved of old Hollywood films, who takes off her glasses and shakes out her hair to become instantly sexy. He hovers behind our table looking straight in my direction and we exchange smiles and nods but he walks towards me with hesitating steps nevertheless — even at that short distance cabeceo is difficult in this murky den — and, when he arrives level with my chair, asks “¿Bailás?”

He returns me to my seat as the jazzy cortina sounds: I am happy, but longing for more. And from my seat, within the tiny circle of realistic cabeceo distance, I can spot very few potential partners. There is the table of slickly-suited professional dancers, mafia lookalikes in their beige double-breasted suits, who I know will probably spend the evening laughing and gossiping (at least, I assume it’s gossip, together with the bottle of Malbec on their table, that is provoking those bursts of laughter); there is a male friend who often dances with me, but is tucked in among several women and another who is chewing the end off a medialuna and is forbiddingly clad in a fleece and tightly-wound scarf. I’m too impatient to just sit and wait and trust to luck tonight. What the hell. Defying the unspoken gender rules of the place, I get up and begin my stalking.

I pull back my shoulders, tense my upper abdominals slightly and lift my rib cage, walking with the self-consciously erect posture of a confidence I do not feel. I take little furtive glances around as I go. Mr Pre-Columbus is here, as always, leaning back against the bar with a slight smile on his face. I have just reached optimum cabeceo distance and am about to train my ocular weapon upon him when I watch him effusively greet and begin a conversation with a male friend. Onwards.

I am in luck: Four Eyes is here tonight, sitting alone among medialuna crumbs and cold coffee. I don’t try to elicit a cabeceo: I know his vision is not sharp enough. I sit down at his table, hug him through his big cable-knit cotton jumper, and, as the last song of the tanda plays out, exchange the happy small talk of one who knows she is about to have some delicious dances. I am thrilled to hear the opening chords of “Buscandote” and Four Eyes is beaming as he asks “¿Bailás?” And aaaaaah! I love to dance Fresedo like this: slow paced, with many pauses which I fill with my most feline decorations: my free foot sliding up the back of my own leg and then down the front, stroking his ankle in a miniature caricia, tucking behind the other in tiny enrosques. And then flying through giros in sudden, exciting bursts of acceleration. I cannot purr, but I let my feet speak for me, express my enjoyment of the whipped cream and dulce de leche of this sweetest of orchestras and my happiness at being in the capable chubby arms of Four Eyes who smiles his way through the pauses between songs and is still smiling as we walk off the dance floor arm in arm.

My friend The Poet is here, sitting at a table sipping a café con leche with his usual meditative expression. I know that he is indifferent to the unwritten sexual etiquette of the milonga, to the politics and game playing. If I want to dance with him, I can just go up and ask him directly, I know, and he will usually accept if he likes the orchestra (no Pugliese or Varela, none of the emotion-soaked songs that make my eyes prick with tears when I’m premenstrual though they seem a little on the histrionic side the rest of the time, no big, hefty ballads or high drama for him). I pause, a couple of tables away, waiting out the cortina, silently praying for a tanda of scratchy old Canaros that I know he would love, observing him to try to read his body language, to weigh up his tiredness at this breakfast hour against his temptation to dance.

As the cortina is replaced by the inviting urgency of a fast waltz, a familiar pair of twinkly eyes catch mine, bushy eyebrows rise and a head nods towards the dance floor. I smile and bob my own head in vigorous assent, at which my friend and his neighbour both get up at once from their seats. With apologies to the neighbour, I link my arm under my friend’s. “Terpsi”, he says, “you were clearly wanting to dance with someone specific.” “Ah, yes”, I said, “The Poet.” “Will I do instead?” “His loss is your gain”, I tell him, with a playful pouty smile.   Sometimes, I reflect, as I embrace him under the multicoloured lights of this seedy basement venue, good things don’t come to she who waits. Sometimes, you might as well just go out and look for them. 

Seeing ourselves as others see us

We dance with treacly slowness, tucked carefully into a corner, pausing every few beats in a kind of freeze frame. The photographer’s lens is trained upon us and the consciousness of that pulls my body up, tall and proud. I feel that I have gained two centimetres in height and half a cup size in my unusually erect posture, torso stretched to full length. I am conscious of my back leg, extended behind me. My skin is sticky with patches of concealer hiding the red speck of a burst blood vessel, the rounded whiteness of a small pus-filled spot nestling against the wing of my nostril and a small, scaly red patch which threatens to become one of my periodic eczema flare-ups. My lips are self-consciously, brazenly scarlet and gloopy with gloss. I am glad that I am not always under this kind of scrutiny and relieved when the photography session is over and my partner removes his jacket and rolls his sleeves up to the elbow, like a gardener ready to dig deep, to get stuck in to the rest of this beautiful Di Sarli-Rufino tanda.

But, out on the floor, it is hard for me to relax. The song is a smooth-surfaced, moonlight-reflecting silvery pool of sound, but my partner is perceptibly tense and anxious and, by contagion, I am, too. I close my eyes to try to dive deeper into the lilting liquid urgency of Rufino’s lovely voice, but then I remember the reminders that I must always keep my eyes, with their heavy coat of black mascara, open, make sure my head is held in a position where my face is clearly visible at all times because it looks better that way. I am suddenly, irrelevantly, conscious of my elbow — it looks ugly when it is raised and I have a tendency towards tensing up my left-hand side. I focus on the mudras of salón style: now, in close embrace, my hand cups his right shoulder blade and now, as I pivot into a tight back ocho, I slide my hand out to take hold of his upper arm near the shoulder. Perhaps my arm looks more graceful now?

An evil spirit has taken possession of us and even this — the grandest, the most classic, the most demanding of all orchestras — cannot exorcise it. I have heard the dreaded mantra repeated too many times, in too many forms, and now it is word made flesh, expressing itself in a palpable tension in my partner’s body, in his eyes directed subtly but unmistakeably downwards towards my legs and feet: watching, checking, supervising. Well-meaning, earnest, anxious in their gaze. What I like to see when a couple is dancing…; what I would like them to see in us…; I like to see…; that move is pretty…; we need to project an image of…; it looks ugly when…; it looks beautiful when… It is like the refrain of a catchy pop song, a melody I loathe but which whines like a mosquito in my ear, worming its way in, flashing electric through my helpless synapses and emerging from my own unwilling lips, as I catch myself unconsciously humming its monotonous chorus.

I would like to honour the tango gods with a upright torso, with a pointed foot twirling in perfect circles like a compass pencil, with painted nails glistening red against a snowy shirt, with the long lean lines of an extended leg.

But I cannot find it in myself to care about the human spectators, cannot use that feeling to motivate my dance. They seem so incidental to the scene from my perspective here on the floor: almost jarringly irrelevant at the rare moments when I accidentally catch their eye. I am swimming far out at sea and they are pin figures watching from the shore. It is the music which provides the buoyancy, which allows the body to become a graceful thing. And the music will not wait. It doesn’t pause while I adjust my posture; it doesn’t fit itself around our pretty figures. It is rushing past and I snatch at it as I go — trying to soften a weight change to suit the mood of a lyrical moment on the violin, flicking a foot rapidly around and over my own ankle as the bandoneon plays a fiddly, rapid syncopated series of semiquavers. There is no time to worry about how I look: the musicians are playing and I must stay with them, follow their dictates, stay in time, keep my body focused on an imaginary conductor.

And, right now, at this moment, while this tango plays, there is only one person I would like to reach with my dance, only one single man I want to provoke, to please, to move: my partner, my collaborator, my opponent, my frustrating challenge, my tango nemesis. I have no Burnsian desire to view us through the eyes of a bystander, to enact a tango pornography, a simulacrum of pleasure to titillate viewers. Perhaps it’s selfish, solipsistic or even misanthropic. But I don’t dance for them. I dance for me. And, besides, I think the Buddhists are right. Real beauty is mud born.

Bondage and freedom

Obediently, I bend my head forward slightly and rest my sweat-dampened forehead against the curve of his cheekbone. Immediately, the word is a smaller place: my gaze is forced diagonally downwards to take in a small wedge of smooth pale brown floorboards. My neck is bowed, my eyes submissively lowered and my sight line ends in a pair of pretty strappy tango sandals encasing a dancer’s beaten-up feet: chipped toenail varnish; greyish-white callouses peeking out from the sides of the big toes; angry red welts from old mosquito bites and a stripe of white against my tanned brown skin revealing the design of my street sandals. I don’t want to watch them — or to watch over them, inspect them or monitor them. I would like them to have their own freedom and life. But, instead, they wait with docile quiescence, ready to execute orders, to act as a second pair of legs for the leader, to travel in the directions he indicates. They are like two twin taxi drivers with their radios tuned to central office. No. 182: pick-up corner of Corrientes and Esmeralda; destination unknown. 

“Here”, he suggests, “put in a rulo and there” — he is trying to be helpful, I know – “do a couple of little taps with your free foot.” But I don’t hear the kind of urgency in the music here that makes my foot respond with a swishy flourish of fast circles on the floor, nor the kind of little syncopated staccato rhythm there that makes me eager to tap out a brief accompaniment. I have no free foot, I feel. I have a foot that is not sustaining my body weight — but it is enslaved to the demands of an aesthetic, to decorations danced for their own sake, like curly doodles in a margin: meaningless meanderings, a fury of firulete, signifying nothing. My legs long to speak. Yes, I would like them to be beautiful, to speak in a voice that is harmonious and pleasant to the ear. But, more important to me than their accent, tone or exact word choice is the content of what they are longing to say. A clear, unequivocal statement of listen, this is my music. This is how I hear it. 

As he leads me into a parada, at last I have my chance. My foot caresses his leg slowly, luxuriantly and then I feel it, the unmistakable tiny tug of impatience. “Step over during the weak beat and arrive on the next strong beat”, he tells me. My foot is reluctant. I can hear the music’s pulse, but I resist the tyranny of being dictated to by bar lines or counted notes. And the strong beats don’t seem so strong to me within the rich, velvety, smooth flow of this Caló. To me, the tango is like a train journey and its underlying pulses are like the horizontal frets linking the parallel railway tracks. Running along beneath us are the steady beats of one and three. But, out of the window, a complex rhythmic landscape of forests, mountains, rivers and towns is passing by. And, within the carriage with me are the fellow passengers the lyrics describe: in this case, a nostalgic lover is crying bitter tears of frustration over a girlfriend who will never return. Those are the things that catch my attention, that send a longing down deep into the nerves of my leg, conditioned to respond in the achingly inadequate language of tango adornos. By comparison, those strong beats are weak and powerless over me and I see no reason to be bound by them, to let them silence my powers of expression.

And what is left to me, when that expressiveness has been taken away? Then, there is only following: meek attempts to fulfil the wishes of another. I become an instrument: albeit played upon by a skilled musician’s hand. His bow is glistening with resin; his strokes are light; the curves of my wooden body fit snugly beneath his chin. But I am no Stradivarius. My technique is flawed and — without the chance to join him in play, to harmonise with his melodies, to sing along — there is only technique and the only thing to focus on, in me, are my imperfections: the tension in my left shoulder; the back ocho not tucked neatly, cleanly, around him in my giro; the unpointed toe. I have only my body to offer and my body is weak, an imperfect expressive medium, a clumsy tool. The thing that is strong, is powerful in me, is precisely the element that is missing, that I have no chance to contribute: my emotional response to the music.

The teacher watches us with a furrow of concentration. “It’s an old-fashioned idea”, she says, “the man leads and is in charge; the woman follows. But I don’t agree with it.” “No!” he says, with the choked voice of suppressed emotion, “I’m not interested in that either. I don’t want that.” “Dance to express what you feel”, she tells me, “don’t worry about him. Bother him, annoy him, create difficult situations, challenge him, don’t make his life too easy in the dance. Take what you need. And if that creates problems for him: let him solve them.”

I stand straight and tall, lifting and broadening from my solar plexus more than I normally would. This makes it impossible to rest my head comfortably against his in the traditional Villa Urquiza style configuration with our faces turned slightly towards an imaginary audience, and I am happy to be freed from the demands of creating an image for view, of feeling like part of a static photograph. I hold him firmly with the fanned-out fingers of my left hand, less to feel the movements of his back as to let him feel me. Here I am, like it or not.

This tango is a power ballad and I am the embodiment of its emotional force. It is deeply redolent of musty old testosterone: in the longing and nostalgia expressed in Berón’s silky baritone; the pointed double-time repetitions that hammer in the ends of phrases produced by male fingers dancing over bandoneon keys smooth with use; the male violinist gracefully bending and unbending a black-jacketed arm; the lyrics and the music written by slick-haired Argentine males; the male speaker lamenting his love with the mildly sexist masculine petulance of tango. It’s a man’s world. But most — probably all — of these men are long dead, and I am alive, not only alive but full of vitality. And it’s my female body which lends them visual and tactile expression.

I feel a forward ocho lead, but I let him wait — yes, I will dance the ocho, but first there is a sweet, high melody on the violin that my free foot must paint in patterns on the floor. He leads a parada and I hover for a moment, waiting to ride the wave of an acceleration which I know is imminent in the music. And then I sweep around with a swift suddenness that visibly startles him. My legs are lewd, my feet immodest encroachers: tapping his ankles in little teasing enganches, riding up his shins, rubbing twistily against each other, sliding over the slippery polycotton material of his trousers. My foot whirls in rulos that mark the ends of phrases with angry defiance. And I end by moving in very close, to the accompaniment of the airy piano flourish so characteristic of this orchestra, but not like a little girl snuggling up with a teddy bear. Here I am; deal with it. 

“I loved that!” he says. The teacher applauds gleefully and high fives me. And then she narrows her eyes slightly as if concentrating their beam to a sharp focus. “Terpsi”, she says, “you need to practise this. And not just when you are dancing.”

Small World

A science-fiction fantasy.

The women were three uncomfortable, elbow-jogging rows deep that night. As I tried to tuck my shoe bag — bulging awkwardly with my bulky street shoes like a strange foot-eating python — under my seat I felt other shoes being slid away. I bent down to peer at the floor and tried to rearrange the mess of footwear and handbags (and a cardigan which had slithered to the floor like a discarded snakeskin) and still find a comfortable way to rearrange my legs in their habitual cross, right over left. My neighbour slipped an iPhone553 out of her bag, unrolled the tissue-paper thin screen, consulted it with a slight frown and then – poof — she was gone. Transmilonga teleporting is always a risky strategy, I reflected. Clearly, wherever she was going, there were plenty of leaders: but her iPhone display could only show crude statistics. Were they good dancers? And would she get to dance with them? Those were the big unknowns.

A gentle heat radiated out from my handbag and I felt my upper arm, resting on the tabletop grow slightly warmer: it was my phone’s discreet thermal ring. I glanced at the display and punched the receive button. An avatar message. Who did Maria think she was trying to kid? I thought, as her slender, bug-eyed mini avatar began to materialise. That avatar must have been created at least ten years ago — when she was 10kg lighter, too. The little translucent figure danced across the red tablecloth in a pattern of repeating forward ochos. A slim-hipped virtual mini-Maria sipped coquettishly from an acorn-sized virtual mate gourd and then her familiar voice sounded in my earpiece: “I’m going to Seoul tonight, for a special treat. To dance with a Javier”, she said, “see you tomorrow.”

I am as fond of dancing with Korean boys as anyone else. And I’d love to see one of their patented Javier Rodriguez®™ clones striding confidently heel-toe around the dance floor. But I’m not sure I would want to dance with one. Call me an old fashioned fuddy duddy, but tango was designed to be danced with real partners in my opinion. Those holographs may be feline of walk and twisty of enrosque, but surely they can’t feel the same as a real man? Tango is about more than steps, more than skill and proficiency. It’s about holding a warm human being in your arms: feeling the slight scratchiness of five o’clock shadow against the side of your face; smelling the mixture of washing powder and clean starchy cotton; the woodsy, herbal, smoky smells of male perfumes; the faintly orangey top notes and the deliciously subtle, unnameable musky base notes of the scent of their necks. It’s about not knowing what will happen: it’s about the human uncertainties, the mistakes, the spontaneous games, even the bumps and collisions. Besides, the only holograph I could afford a tanda with was my fuzzy old copy of Sebastian Achával®™ that had come with my second-hand iPhone547. And Sebas malfunctioned if I tried to slip in even the most unobtrusive adorno. It was way too frustrating to try to dance with it. Orchestra not recognised, it complained in an annoying ‘neutral Spanish’ (actually Columbian) accent if you played anything more daring than “Yuyo Brujo” or “Sinsabor”. I think if I had tried to stream a Gobbi or Firpo track it would have spontaneously combusted. The real Sebastian Achával with his slinky pointy-toe walk and his buttery-smooth moves, had long since been vapourised and shot out into space, of course. “Sebas”, my virtual zombie, was only good for the most basic and repetitive of solo practice.

While I was indulging those grumpy musings, black letters imitating a cutesy, curly olde worlde ink pen script began to flow across the tablecloth. The next tanda will be Troilo. My fingers slid underneath and I tapped the off button, provoking a rather filthy look from my neighbour. I shot her a challenging glance of self-conscious superiority, trusting that she wouldn’t dare to switch the display back on. That would be tantamount to admitting that she couldn’t recognise the orchestras without technological assistance. Besides, she could always crane her neck over to the next table if she really wanted to read them. But I personally don’t like to be told which  orchestra is about to play. I really savour that moment of suspense as the opening bars of the tanda sound. I feel like a skilled and knowledgeable oenophile, swirling liquid rubies in a big-bellied glass, letting the first sip of grapey richness hit my palate. It would spoil the experience to be told in advance, by some over-eager waiter, “This, Madam, is a vintage Chateau Obama from 2098.”

Let’s face it: why would I dance tango if I weren’t like this? Self-indulgently sentimental and nostalgic for a past that is not my own. I wish I had been alive in El Beso’s heyday, when intrepid tourists spent many hours cooped up in airborne metal boxes to come here When the world was a big place and travel was still a physical thrill. When Buenos Aires still felt like a place of pilgrimage, a tango Canterbury. And now look at us, I thought. iPhones, I knew, were gently warming breast pockets all over the planet, alerting their owners to the message: “Special discounts for El Beso tonight! Entry fees to Argentina half price!” But, even so, half the seats reserved for male teleportees were empty that night – which was not so surprising. Even at cut price, it wasn’t cheap to come to Buenos Aires, with our galloping hyperinflation and the Kirchner so overvalued against most other currencies.

But, even as I was thinking that, as the last notes of the cortina were sounding, a form was materialising onto one of the seats. And, although I was not conscious of feeling any emotion, I noted with surprise that my heart was thumping rapidly and palpably and a sudden jolt of adrenalin left me feeling queasy. It was him. He was here. Or, at least, he was here in a manner of speaking. Of course he couldn’t afford the hefty teleportation duties — this was just an avatar, a live letter as Tango Telecom so quaintly call it. That phrase always conjures up images of ancient heroines running breathlessly to mailboxes, slicing open thick, snowy envelopes with bone-handled letter knives, or women in old-fashioned blue jeans made of real, stiff denim, hunching over heavy, solid monitors, clicking eagerly on emails and instant message icons.

The Troilo began to sound and, as I looked over with shiny, eager eyes, his avatar nodded and winked at me. My sweetheart, you have come back to me. I knew this wasn’t real and I was even faintly aware that I must look a little naff, a little desperate and over eager, dancing with a shadowy construction made purely of photons, insubstantial as the wind. But it felt so much like him. He folded back a pair of imaginary spectacles and flashed me his habitual, timid half smile. His back felt lighter, thinner and colder than usual, but I rested my hand against it with all the tenderness I could infuse into my fleshly fingers. Could he feel it through his virtual reality suit? I felt the slight crackle of a light electric shock as my right hand curled its fingers around his photon hand. And the smell of his neck and face was metallic and pungent. He couldn’t afford the upgraded avatar, I felt, with a sudden rush of tenderness, and had to send me this approximation, with cheaper, artificially-simulated smells. But he sent it.

And now we were dancing together again at last, there at the still point of the turning world, at the tango Delphi. I tried to infuse my dance with an extra dose of vitality. I felt very real and alive, after all: my pulse was beating in my throat; the sueded soles of my tango heels were sliding along the smooth wooden floor; my armpits were slightly damp with sweat; a single hair stuck to my forehead, scratchy and ticklish; my back twisted towards him as I began an ocho; my free leg traced a loopy snail-shell pattern on the floor and now, as I prepared to step over in a parada, I caressed his trouser leg with as delicate a pressure as if there were a real leg within it.

I knew he wasn’t really there. He was thousands of kilometres away: dancing awkwardly and heavily on his own in a claustrophobic thick black virtual reality suit, blocking out his surroundings with headphones and goggles: looking like a deep-sea swimmer, a tango scuba diver. But, as a blast of cold from the air conditioning hit me, I imagined that this light and air had somehow carried his essence to me. In the wind, I hear his voice, Fiorentino sang. In the murmur of the leaves. And the air caresses me like a kiss. I felt a sudden wobbliness in my stomach and a tell-tale hot prickly sensation behind my eyeballs. The singer had been dead for centuries and he lived in a time before they had avatars or teleportation, but, nevertheless, he seemed to voice my thoughts that night. He hasn’t come back. He won’t return. It’s just the moaning of the wind I hear. And it only makes me suffer all the more. 

The tango snob

A fiction with “a hero whom no one but myself will much like”

My bicycle dynamo made a high-pitched squeaky whirr, like a strange species of cicada, and my wheels produced a dull squishy sound as I traveled over dead leaves. My fingers stuck to the handlebars, which had turned metallic and chilly in the early autumn evening. I should have taken my gloves, I knew. The familiar sound of Di Sarli instrumentals diffused out into the night from the elementary school hall. That meant, I reflected, that the lesson was still in progress. The porch with its triangular hood of tiles,  the large arched windows, and the sleek Lexuses neatly slotted into the parking spaces – it all made me think less of a school than of a faux Victorian Episcopalian church. I dismounted carefully, removed the dorky and unstylish, but essential, bicycle clips and smoothed out my pant legs with care. “I’m old fashioned”, I sang under my breath, channelling a Chet Bakerish suavity, but having to switch to a breathy falsetto for the high notes: “I love Di Sarli; I love this old-fashioned dance.” I hummed a few more bars in a desultory fashion, unable to think of any further lyrics and involuntarily changing key and beginning to lose the tune. Thank God a sense of pitch is not a requirement for tango, I thought.

Louise was on the door. I bent down awkwardly to kiss her, feeling ridiculously bulky and tall. There was a momentary confusion about which cheek to aim for and we almost kissed each other on the mouth. I turned my head quickly away to avoid an unduly intimate gesture and felt Louise’s lips inadvertently make full contact with my right nostril, damp and slightly snotty from my ride.

Crouching awkwardly in front of the Lilliputian mirror in the boys’ restroom, I smoothed out a cowlick of hair and adjusted my shirt. And then took a seat at one of the flimsy round tables and replaced my sneakers with my trusty black suede shoes, scuffing up the soles carefully with a stiff brush. The students were still walking clumsily in awkward open embraces to the strains of “Nueve Puntos”. Melissa was teaching that night. She looked over and flashed me a big-toothed smile which faded suspiciously quickly as she turned away. She doesn’t like me, I know. But what can I do, ladies and gents, I thought, she feels wobbly and awkward and my left arm aches after half a song. She is a beautiful human being, I’m sure, but I really hate dancing with her.   

The lesson ended and people began to arrive, swaddled in the first thick scratchy scarves of the season. The women stamped their booted feet on the welcome mat like sexy equestrians just back from a ride, making their shiny ponytails swing back and forth. Tiny flyaway hairs leapt up as hoods were pushed back and woollen hats removed from female heads. The men preferred just to tough it out: it’s not manly to admit to feeling cold. I kept a rough tally of the sexes: so far there were three of us and — oh God! — nine of them. Or, let’s say, eight and a half, since Ling can lead. I know what you’re thinking, dear reader: this ought to have been my dream. But in fact it was my nightmare.

Louise looked up at me from her seat by the door with friendly raised eyebrows and then got up and walked over to me with a girl on her arm. “This is Sunita”, she told me, smiling, “it’s her first time here. She just moved here from Atlanta.” Sunita hovered awkwardly next to me, holding a bulky, precarious bundle made up of coat, scarf, gloves, hat, purse and shoe bag. I offered to get her a drink and walked over to the buffet table at the far end of the room to fetch her a Diet Coke at her request, allowing her time to install herself. The table was, as usual, paved with lemon bars cut up into fat fingers; rectangular brownies; and cookies the size of dinner plates, studded with the dark brown nipples of chocolate chips. A silver samovar at one corner released a frothy stream of cider. I poured Sunita’s dark, metallic-smelling diet soda into a flimsy plastic cup and served myself a fully-sugared one in default of anything better, though wishing, as always, that they had beer.

“So, are you from here originally?” Sunita asked me. She was a babe. I tried to keep my gaze politely focused on her big Bambi-lashed eyes, heavy with mascara, but it wasn’t easy. Certain parts of her body seemed to emit special sticky photons. In particular, the slice of bare skin between her top and her skirt: hazelnut brown, curving outwards in a lovely slight semicircle with a few peachy-fine hairs catching the light. “That’s a very nice skirt”, I said, forcing myself to register the black silky material and uneven hemline, in case I was asked any follow-up questions. By now, Laurenz was playing, the bandoneon solos fast and urgent. Sunita was shifting in her chair, shooting me longing glances. “Would you like to dance?” I asked, feeling that it was a rhetorical question — and hoping against hope that she had had good teachers in Atlanta. She leaped up instantly and in a second we were on the floor.

Even before we embraced, I had a sinking feeling. And, soon, I was asking myself how a girl who weighed maybe 110lbs soaking wet could put so much achy pressure on so many parts of my body at once. Her forehead butted hard against my chin and I found myself worrying that her gloopy lip gloss was going to leave a fatty stain on my shirt collar. She nestled against me on the right hand side of my body: left arm deep, deep around me; torso half turned away at a 45 degree angle; the weight of her arm and upper body pulling painfully and awkwardly on my shoulder just where I have an old college athletic injury; her right hand not so much holding mine as using it to push herself away, as if her right breast were some kind of private erogenous zone which must not come into contact with my torso under any circumstances. Time seemed to expand. Pedro Laurenz’s fat fingers appeared to be moving over his bandoneon in slow motion. I felt as though I were wading through chest-deep water, pushing a giant tangle of foam noodles, as if I were at some kind of nightmare aqua aerobics class, incongruously set to tango music. There were no cortinas that night, so after three songs I beamed with as much fake warmth as I could as I thanked her and strode off the floor.

Back in my chair, I faced a row of six women, like a man in front of an ocular firing squad. I couldn’t help but feel for them: there they were, in their pretty tango dresses and expensive shiny heels, with cardigans and shawls around their shoulders, still chilly and goosebumpy in this underheated, echoey hall, as they hadn’t yet had a chance to warm up in a pair of friendly tango arms. Anne shot me a look of obvious hostility and frustration with pursed lips and slightly flaring nostrils. I would have danced with her — if she didn’t fall so heavily onto her back ochos; if she didn’t grip my biceps so hard during giros with her spiky-fingernailed left hand, pulling me off axis; if she were capable of at least taking steps of different lengths — instead of thrusting her leg out at full stretch at the slightest forward impulse and changing weight onto a stiff foot with an almost audible plonk.

There was a palpable increase in the level of female misery suddenly as a familiar and much-loved tango began to play. The women shifted in their seats, readjusted the cashmere wraps around their shoulders and the courageous little half-smiles on their faces. The music was urgent, nostalgic, and romantic, with a silky smooth baritone voice lamenting his past above achingly sweet flourishes of violins and urgent syncopations of bandoneons. I am far from the big city, among strange streets, but I respond when I hear a tango playing. I was in my own home town, but, for a moment, I felt like an exile and I wished the neat bicycle lanes, the orderly streets, the large houses with their three-season porches, the conifers — all of it — could be replaced by the stinking diesel smells, the treacherous patches of dog shit, the people carelessly jostling me as they passed and tossing old bus tickets and cough drop wrappers straight down onto the sidewalk with complete disdain. God, I realised, I miss Buenos Aires! I longed to dance but Steph, the one good follower in sight, was already getting up to embrace a creaky-limbed older guy. And where was Tina tonight? And, more to the point, where was Toni?

At that moment, I spotted Liz in my peripheral vision. She was looking especially frustrated. I was careful not to look or smile in her direction. How perverse the tango world is, I reflected, here I am deliberately ignoring a beautiful, intelligent, charming young lady — girlfriend material, in fact, under other circumstances. If only her dancing didn’t suck quite so badly. But I saw her hesitate and then, with a brave little shrug, she strode straight towards me. “Would you like to dance?” she asked, smiling with closed lips and fingering a dangling curl of hair nervously. Feeling like a horrible cad, I answered, “Sorry, but I think I’m going to sit this one out. I need to, er, get a drink.” Ignoring my soda sitting neglected on the table, growing flat, I slunk over to the buffet table again and pretended to examine the offerings, feeling a deep frustrated twitchy longing to dance but keeping my gaze firmly fixed, with glazed eyes, on the bake sale spread out on the back table. I took a cookie I had no intention of eating and stuffed a few dollars into the honesty box. And, just as I was doing so, felt a friendly tap on the back.

At last she had arrived: Toni. Her hair was a stiffly lacquered grey helmet as usual and I breathed in the familiar sickly sweet smells of hairspray and a powdery, flowery perfume as I hugged her. But I didn’t care. “C’mon, let’s dance”, she said, with the relaxed confidence of a woman talking to a man young enough to be her son. And now, at last, for the first time that evening, I was dancing. Really dancing. Not pushing an obstacle; not trying to compensate for the erratic movements of a woman wobbling around in her stilettos; not gritting my teeth at an aching back. Just listening with my body as Toni’s light feet flicked and flew through a thousand pretty decorations. Just moving to the music, feeling soft footed as a panther. Just dancing my own dance and knowing that Toni would be there with me, always, exactly, miraculously where she needed to be, as if she could somehow read my mind.

I was happy not to have to engage in conversation. “Is that shoulder still bothering you?” she asked at one point. “No, it’s fine; I’m fine”, I fibbed. I didn’t want to hear one of her habitual good-natured lectures on the benefits of homeopathy and Bach flower remedies, which I would listen to with pursed lips, carefully repressing the sceptical comments I was tempted to make. But I loved the somatic conversation we had with each other out there on the floor, although I could feel the envious, bored and frustrated glances of the other women upon us as we danced one track after another until, all too soon, the “Cumparsita” sounded.

As I crouched outside in the darkness of the parking lot afterwards, unfastening my bicycle lock with clumsily numb fingers, Karen approached me. “Hey, how are you?” I asked politely. “It was a bit quiet tonight”, she said. “I didn’t get to dance at all. We need more men. Or I need to learn to lead or something.” I felt a pang of guilt and sympathy. “Hey”, she said, trying to keep her voice light and flirtatious, “we haven’t danced for the longest time. What would it take to get you to dance with me?” Beneath her actual words and her pseudo-playful tone, I could sense the note of accusation. What she really wanted to ask was, Would it kill you to dance with me? “We’ll dance again soon”, I said, with a slightly uneasy sense of committing to an unpleasant future duty. “Hey, I’m sorry you didn’t have a good night.” I touched her lightly on the upper arm and debated whether or not a hug would be appropriate. But she seemed to draw back slightly, so I simply swung my leg over my crossbar, waved, and pedaled off for home.