Another night at La Viruta//Otra Noche en La Viruta

It´s a Saturday night, let´s say. I´ve just been at a traditional milonga, i.e. one where the music is played in tandas of four or five songs and people sit at tables around the room, making eye contact and subtle head signals to get dances. But it´s 3.30am and things are winding down, so I decide to hit the major league, to get out of the shallow end, to play with the big boys, even though they sometimes play rough — at La Viruta. Even on the earlier nights, no self-respecting dancer would arrive at La Viruta before 1am and 3.30am is a pretty average time to arrive on a Friday or Saturday.

La Viruta is, rather weirdly, located in the basement of the Armenian cultural centre, in Armenia street, in the heart of touristy, flashy, all-fur-coat-and-no-knickers neighbourhood Palermo-Soho, which is nothing like either of its namesakes in London or NYC. After I enter, I change back into my tango heels and check my rucksack in at the cloakroom, as La Viru is notorious for theft. I check my ego in while I´m at it. It´s not particularly fragile, having been toughened up by several years of merciless criticism by my teacher, but anyone who isn´t in possession of a Y chromosome is likely to take a psychological battering at La Viru, a shrine to Argentine machismo.

First of all, I case the joint, squinting in the low lighting to see who is there — and to make sure they see me. There are lots of the bearhugs and smacking kisses favoured by drama loveys and professional tango dancers (two groups with a lot in common), many of the men leaving threads of saliva at the very edge of my lips, most of the women air kissing me. And cries of “What a pleasure to see you here”. The guys have the advantage of not having to remember my exotic impossible-to-pronounce name as they just call me some variation on Bonita, Linda, Diosa, etc. The million-dollar question is, is it such a pleasure to see me that they might deign to dance with me? Or just enough of a pleasure to ignore my existence for the rest of the evening? I´ve come here to dance with the professionals and they haven´t come primarily to dance. They have come to drink beer, hang out with their friends or just stand around pouting and looking beautiful and icily unattainable, like lovely but prohibitively expensive rent boys. Or almost unattainable — that´s the tease. People here talk about the “histeriqueo” of the male dancers and I would say tease is a pretty close translation. It doesn´t help my odds that, apart from a very light smattering of older people, most of whom aren´t serious contenders, I am basically the oldest woman here. Most of the men I want to dance with are ten or more years younger than me and I could have given birth to many of them. Of course, that doesn´t stop most of them from being immensely condescending and treating me like a little girl.

I´m in luck. I spot Teeny-Tiny (not his real name), a very sweet guy who looks about fifteen. How is he able to be still upright at La Viru, after working for twelve hours’ straight at a real job? We smile at each other, we hug, we hit the dance floor. Like many men I dance with he is maybe 1.65m at the outside and probably weighs 55kg soaking wet, but I feel like I´m in the arms of a master. I shut my eyes and feel happy that he, not I, is the one who has to negotiate the extremely crowded floor. Gliding along the wonderfully smooth surface of La Viruta´s dancefloor feels beautiful and effortless. After a while, we exchange thanks, hug and kiss again and then I am off in search of my next fix.

I position myself at a strategic distance from Music Geek, a favourite partner of mine, and look fixedly in his direction. He shakes his head, but at the same time beckons me over and asks me to sit at his table. He confesses that he is very tired (he also works long hours) and that the slow music is making him feel sleepy (the DJ is spinning some beautiful, heartbreaking ballads rasped out by a famous elderly singer). “I need something fast and rhythmic to get my heart rate up,” he tells me. So I sit talking to him, feeling impressed by his encyclopedic knowledge of tango music and films, through the slow numbers. Then D’Arienzo, the most rhythmic, testosterone-fuelled tango orchestra in the repertoire, strikes up. MG leaps up, and so do I, like a happy little terrier, but then he turns his back on me, grabs another woman and goes out onto the dance floor with her. Ouch.

Cherub has one of those unmistakable lilting accents that even I can recognise as Colombian right from the opening “Hola”. He´s one of my favourite people to dance with, with an exceptionally fluid style and soft, relaxed body, so I´m feeling quietly hopeful when he comes over to hug me and exchange pleasantries. We wait until the beginning of the next tanda, a beautiful D’Agostino, and then, just as I think he is going to propose dancing, he spots a young Japanese woman and rushes over to ask her to dance. Sigh. I wish these exquisitely beautiful women at least had the courtesy to be bad dancers. But no.

I see Mr Pre-Columbus, with the Indian looks of someone from what the Argentines call “el interior”. He basically lives at La Viruta. He is one of those guys that I have never been to La Viruta without seeing there. I think they address his post to Armenia 1366. I look over and we get up to dance. His moves are fast and exciting, and beautifully executed. This is what I came for. It´s a thrill.

Now I feel like I have had a good night at La Viruta, even if the rest of it goes badly, but it’s still going my way. Here is my Sweet Friend. As usual, his best friend, a well-known dancer, whom I am not-so-secretly dying to dance with, just gives me the fish-eye. But the dances with SF are surprisingly lovely. The dance floor is very crowded, there is barely room to move — but there is room to embrace each other. SF is one of the few guys here whom I have a genuine soft spot for. He holds me very close to him, so we take up less space on the packed dance floor. We move slowly (another set of ballads is playing). I feel the play of the muscles in his back as he twists and corkscrews in the typical tango way, feel the breath entering and leaving his lungs, and try to copy its rhythm, and I can feel his heartbeat, very clearly, as if it were beating in my own chest. It´s a beautiful feeling.

A couple of side notes: a friend of mine told me that the reason the closed side of the tango embrace is on the man´s right-hand side and the woman´s left is so that he can feel her heartbeat. The leader, of course, in tango, has to keep his eyes open and a cool head. He needs to negotiate the floor and pay at least as much attention to the other men as to his partner, sometimes. Following is a totally different experience: your focus is divided between only two things, the music and your partner. And if he is musical those two things merge into one in the most magical way. So it´s the woman´s heart which is most likely to be going like the clappers.

After SF, I spend a while as a wallflower, receiving lots of smiles and kisses but no offers to dance and a good many blank, disparaging stares. One guy smiles manically and waves at me when I look in his direction — a signal which I interpret as “Don´t look this way again, I am seriously out of your league”. He is one of the more famous dancers, what the Argentines call an “estrellita”, a giant carp in this tiny fishbowl, so maybe he´s right, he is out of my league.

Then I see Slimeball. I swallow my pride, ignore his track record of behaving like a wanker at every possible opportunity and position myself carefully, leaning against the wall, looking what I hope is seductively in his direction. I feel like a hooker, except that if any money were to change hands he would definitely expect me to pay him. He makes an elaborate pantomime of pointing to himself, looking surprised and mouthing “Moi?” I nod and am rewarded with approximately thirty minutes of pure, unadulterated bliss. He is definitely my favourite dancer at this milonga. The only problem is that I dislike showing my obvious ecstasies, since his ego is already the size of a small planet. No, correction, make that Jupiter. In between dances, we stare at each other awkwardly. He is not the world´s most scintillating conversationalist and I know from experience that he is incredibly easily offended and liable to take everything the wrong way, which makes me afraid to open my mouth. But from the neck down he is my dream partner.

And finally, my last dances of the evening, with Mr Tanguero. How can he possibly wear a three-piece suit and tie in the heat at La Viruta — and, indeed, everywhere? So young, and yet so buttoned-up! With his slicked-back hair and carefully tended moustache, he always looks as if he has just stepped off the stage of a tango show. And he probably has actually. His dancing is really lovely. However, I could live without what they call the “chamuyo” or his tendency to “tirar onda”. Many guys flirt with me, but none with quite so many sexual references or quite so persistently as Mr T. I am convinced, as usual, that it is pure theatre. Argentine guys chat women up to prove their masculinity, to keep their hands in, just out of pure habit, or to convince you that they´re not gay (if they are). His dancing, at least, is pure dancing. Whatever he says, his body is focused on technicalities, not on sexual harassment. Thank God.

The night ends. I extricate myself from Mr T´s clutches and leave as the lights go up, revealing the shabby reality of empty beer bottles, haggard faces and grotty plastic chairs and tables. The coach has turned back into a pumpkin. I avoid the crowds of people lingering outside the entrance, smoking and saying long drawn-out goodbyes, and get on the 168 bus. As I travel on the bus, it´s beginning to get light and as we get further away from La Viruta the passengers change from weary milongueros to equally weary people on their way to work. As I approach the front door of my building, my neighbour appears, to take his giant black dog for her early morning walk. “Buenos dias,” he says.