Taking the red pill*

How did I find myself here? Strange music is sounding, with a wailing falsetto singer and a powerful, thumping beat. In the semi-darkness, I can make out the shapes of bodies, moving in a way which seems somehow strangely familiar. Those jerky movements and sudden, vicious kicks; those teetering leans and wild, uncontrolled spins where both partners throw their body weight precariously backwards and cling onto each other’s forearms with desperate force — can those be the weird, misshapen offspring of what were once ganchos, boleos, volcadas and colgadas? Have I landed in the midst of a satanic ritual? My doubts begin to dissolve as the metallic tones of a familiar Malerba cut through the noisy murmur of conversation. This is tango, but not as I know it.

The couples hold each other stiffly off at arms’ length, staring down stolidly at the floor. Right from the opening bars of this lovely, heartsick ballad about a Russian gipsy, free legs are flying through the air, knees and ankles clashing as feet stretch out, searching for places to hook legs together in sudden ganchos, bone against bone. Leaders kick at their partners’ feet, legs rigid, and shove them roughly along the floor in painful-looking barridas. The contrast between the smooth, lyrical music and the rough, jerky movements makes me wince. Not one couple embraces tenderly. No one walks around the room together.

I watch as a man approaches a partner, hand outstretched in the casual insolence of assuming she will not refuse his offer of a dance. She is sitting sipping fizzy water. He pulls her firmly to her feet and the water slops a little in its glass as she places it hastily down. He immediately pulls her body forward into a dramatic 45° volcada and she paws the ground frantically with her free foot. Then, restoring her with difficulty to a vertical position, he steps deeply into her space and nudges her free leg out of his way with a thrust of one hip. They have been dancing for perhaps twenty seconds now and there has been no foreplay, no cuddling, no walking: it was straight to the rough stuff. I am trembling for her, but she seems happy, flicking up a leg now and again, seemingly at random, with obvious relish.

A small, rotund man is approaching my seat. I catch his eye and then look pointedly down at the floor. As he comes closer, I turn my head and, as he continues to loom over me, even incline my whole body slightly away from him. But he is undeterred, tapping me on the shoulder with a sharp finger. “Hey, you,” he says in clipped German, “time to dance, Missy.” Some perverse, self-destructive impulse has me on my feet and on the floor before I know it. The orchestra is now my beloved jazzy, syncopated Biagi, though no one but me seems to be aware of the change. “I love Biagi,” I confide. When he says nothing I add, “I think this is Biagi now, although there wasn’t a cortina.” He shrugs: “We’re not really big on that kind of stuff here, you know, tandas, cortinas and all that traditional shit.” He grabs me, pokes his fingers into my back, thrusts me hastily through several back steps and then proceeds to pull and prod me through a series of back ochos, ending with a sacada which sends my free leg crashing into a table leg. Deaf to my little startled squeal, he is off again, careering around the room at twice the speed of the musicians, shaking me at one point with seeming fury to try to force my leg up into a high back boleo. By this time, I am no longer listening to the Biagi, just trying to get through a polite three tracks without injury. But I cannot. After a second number, I call an end to the ordeal with a mumbled “Vielen Dank”.

He strides off to the bar, but quickly returns to hover over me menacingly. Bending down towards me, he hisses in my ear. “I am a tango teacher. Some of the dancers here are my students.” I try to disguise my horror. “You are a bad dancer, a very bad dancer.” I try not to look too pleased at what I interpret as a perverse kind of compliment.

We have changed back, seamlessly and without warning, to the strange pop music. This particular track has a very insistent bell-like repeated refrain: “Drrrring, drrrring, drrrring,” it goes.

DRRRING DRRRING DRRRING. I clutch at my alarm clock, fumbling for the off button. I am back in my own bed, in my own flat, with bright Buenos Aires sunshine streaming in from the balcony and, from my neighbour’s flat, the faint strains of the announcer on the 2×4 radio station: That was Rodolfo Biagi’s orchestra, with the voice of Jorge Ortiz, performing “Romantico Bulincito”. “Thank God,” I think, “It was just a nightmare. No such milonga exists, no such music to tango to, no such tango instructor.”

And then I spot them. The two little pills on my bedside table: one blue; one red. Take the blue pill, Terpsichoral, the blue pill, says a quiet voice in my head. I gulp it down with a swig of water and, with a shudder, open the rubbish chute and throw the red pill in.

*With thanks to the film The Matrix, which inspired this entry.

PS Here’s the kind of dancing I might have seen at the milonga, had I taken the blue pill instead: