The setting is perfect: a spacious first-floor room in a converted industrial building — all lovely exposed pipes and brickwork and inviting views of the high street of one of this city’s most attractive neighbourhoods. The lighting is intimate and the leather sofas comfortable. The young people are slender and attractive in their skinny jeans (denim is definitely the dress code of choice here). The organizer is a genial ex-pat Argentine who happily takes me out for a quick, single tango before duty calls. The DJ is spinning one beautiful selection of numbers after another. But one thing is missing: there is rather a shortage of skilled dancers at the milonga The Light this evening. I hover at the edges, watching as the four most graceful leaders dance tanda after tanda with the same partners, leaving the floor only to cool off and sip water before diving back into the music, still cosily ensconced in their couples. The women lucky enough to have good dance partners don’t relinquish them easily. They stay on the dance floor during the cortinas (“Back to Black”) and stay close to their men at the bar during water breaks, keeping a hand on the man’s waist or shoulder, while Amy Winehouse repeatedly tells us that “life is like a pie” and she’s “a tiny penny rolling up the sides, inside.” In my awkward position as a wallflower, I am beginning to identify with this description.
I am itching to dance. Listening to these beautiful orchestras without having anyone to dance with is an exquisite torture. I look pointedly away as one tall, clumsy beginner after another tries to catch my eye. Since I have nothing to lose, I position myself strategically and go up to one or two of the better dancers and — with thumping heart — ask them to dance. They all politely refuse and I can’t blame them. For them, I am overwhelmingly likely to be a beginner, and a shameless one at that. I spend most of the night sipping my glass of lemon-infused tap water, trying hard not to pout, and wishing myself seven thousand miles away at El Beso. I recognise, of course, how spoilt I am. One night without much tango won’t kill me. At the end of the evening, I dance two consecutive tandas as the result of the gallantry of another visiting dancer. “I know how it feels to try to get good dances in a new place,” he tells me, sympathetically, between numbers of a lovely De Mare tanda, “and it’s worse, much worse, for the women.”
