The Salon of Sleaze

It´s Monday night and I am heading for one of the best-known, most touristy milongas in Buenos Aires. It´s in the heart of the posh neighbourhood of Palermo. There is a shop selling the kind of red-and-black polyester and fake lace pencil skirts with thigh-high slits that remind me of slutty lingerie which some people associate with tango, though I´ve yet to see anyone actually wearing those clothes to dance in. There are postcards for sale, including many of my teacher and guru, with her ex-partner, posing in front of a range of Buenos Aires locations. There are huge black-and-white photos of a couple dancing in the rainy streets of Paris, appropriately enough since Paris is the place of clichéd Argentine romantic longing in a thousand tangos, while a thousand others describe the sad fates of lonely, ageing French women in garrets, deserted by Argentine cads and homesick for their beloved Paree. The sprung wooden floor was once the best in Buenos Aires, but, like everything else about this place, it has seen better days and now has its own topography, most notably a molehill-like swelling that everyone calls “la montañita”, the little mountain. It’s a place I know very well. I greet the waitresses by name (edgy Sandra, with the spiky nose piercing, is my favourite).

Dancing at Salón Canning is like having supper in the most touristy part of a major city. It’s a lucky dip. I’ve had some great nights here, by chance, but there is no quality control. Actually, I’m hoping to dance with a specific man whom I had tanda after wonderful, fun tanda with last Monday. Always a risky strategy. His friend informs me he is on his way, but my tango prince doesn´t make an appearance, leaving me feeling a bit like a girl who had sex on a first date and then never received a follow-up phone call.

The atmosphere at Canning is such that from now on I will always think of it by the alternative moniker that forms the title of this entry. There are a few couples, sitting well back from the dance floor, drinking a lot of red wine and dancing very little. I spot some friends among them: a beautiful, professional French couple I will call Grenouille and La Biche. There are also quite a few single women, mostly slightly older foreigners (a category which includes yours truly and my lovely table neighbour, a dignified Canadian woman who speaks French with me between tandas with a pretty Québecois accent) and half a dozen tables stuffed with male professional dancers, drinking steadily and leering at the foreigners. It´s a bit like being in a room with multiple stag parties. The very next table from ours is a case in point.

Almost every man I dance with is infected by the atmosphere and nuzzles me a little too much, leaves sweat stains on my top and holds me in the final pose of the dance just a beat too long, breathing stentoriously into my ear. And I don´t dance with anyone new. These are all regular partners of mine who usually behave themselves. Of course, it’s normal for tango to have a sensual – even occasionally erotic – element to it, but it’s easy to sense the difference between dancing for its own sake and for the sake of rubbing up against someone. As always, with physical contact, intention is everything. “After this tanda, we will go back to my flat and make love,” one guy announces in a matter-of-fact manner. Another comes up behind me at my table, puts his arms round my neck and tells me breathily “You are mine.” These guys are experts at wishful thinking.

Then I make the disastrous mistake of accepting a dance from one of the professionals’ cronies. He has just been outside for a fag break and the combined smells of cigarette smoke and cheap whisky on his breath and a cologne so strong it could double as a general anaesthetic are making me gag. He presses my face way too close to his and makes the bones of my forehead hurt. I suffer through two tangos and then can take no more and rush off the floor with a hurried, mumbled “muchas gracias”. It is the ultimate insult to not finish a tanda with a guy and something I rarely do. But, suddenly, I have reached my limit. He comes over to my table and harangues me for a full twenty minutes on what a horrific trauma I have just subjected him to. The worst thing, clearly, is the humiliation I put him through in front of his friends which will obviously require years of therapy to heal. Well, he is in the right city if he’s looking for a shrink. “I will never, ever, ever, dance with you again,” he keeps repeating, as though this were some kind of terrible punishment. “And I will never, ever, ever, go to Canning again on my own on a Monday night,” I am silently vowing.

Well, people always claim that the tango’s roots lie in the bordello. In which case, I must say, Salón Canning is the closest you can probably get to historical accuracy, rather like playing early music on period instruments. But afterwards you need to take a long shower.

PS For the sake of fairness, I should mention that a female friend of mine recently went to this same milonga, Parakultural, and encountered no sleaze at all. The character of the individual milongas in Buenos Aires changes regularly. This blog is a reflection of my personal experiences, but is not meant as an official review site.