Tango Lessons

by Meghan Flaherty

  The maestro ended every class with foot drills. After an hour of infernal walking practice, we would all line up behind him. He did not call out his movements; he simply stabbed one foot this way or that, and drew his lápices, then switched and stepped and frilled. Our ragtag group stumbled behind him, struggling to keep up. We lost our footing, teetered, bit our lips in concentration. Then, with even less warning, he’d stop and cut the music. Class dismissed.

  The weeks advanced. The maestro changed the music. We were no longer subject to “Bahía Blanca” droning on repeat, as beautiful as it was. We had graduated to the great parade: Di Sarli, Fresedo, D’Arienzo, Pugliese, Biagi, Canaro, and Caló. Tango today is danced almost exclusively to staticky recordings from its golden age, roughly 1935–1952. There is other, newer music, but nothing since has ever equaled those great orchestras. The sound quality is often poor, but if you squint your eyes and try to shut out every other noise, you can hear the moment, decades in the past, when the magic synthesis occurred.

  Tango was always all about the music. The advent of the 2/4 milonga beat, which prefigured tango, was wrought from the bass line of the Afro-Cuban habanera, the speed of polka, and the poetry of the gaucho payador—a sung improvisation accompanied by guitar. Milonga steps spun from the Afro-Argentine candombe, a group dance to drum music (from the Ki-Kongo ka, “pertaining to,” and ndombe, “the blacks”). Lower-class porteños of every race toyed with these rhythms on whatever instruments they had. The first orchestras were portable: guitar and flute and violin, sometimes a clarinet or candombe drums. Occasionally, tunes were played on solo piano, for entertainment in the clubs and cabarets. The lyrics were still largely improvised, and the dance a mix of Afro-Cuban cortes and quebradas—moves that froze or “broke” the dance—and gauchesco embellishments: heel-stomping taconeos (of North African and Andalusian influence) and arrastres—percussive slurs and drags.

  The more newcomers surged into the capital, the more the music changed. Italian immigrants brought compositional and lyric prowess on the violin. And Germans brought the bandoneón, a polygonal bellows instrument, like a concertina, which is perversely difficult to play but gave the tango its distinctive, plaintive, almost human voice. Picture an accordion with seventy-one invisible buttons, played like musical Braille, and spanning 142 tones across five octaves. Then take away the keys.

  Tango music developed over decades, from bawdy romps and martial instrumental ditties to sweeping, lovesick orchestrations, driving labyrinths of beat. The result is visceral and sad and yet somehow relieves you of the very sorrow it inspires. Sebastián Arce, contemporary tango superstar, calls it a demonic mixture, says it feels “as if the violin and bandoneón met by chance and had this diabolical marriage.” The sound is unmistakable. “Tango starts rhythmically,” he says, “ends crying, and in the middle stabs you twice in the heart.”

  That’s how it felt to me. Even standing five feet from another human being, in a strange bright studio in SoHo, pacing the room and trying not to trip. The music pierced through the mundanity of our exertions, striking somewhere sharp and deep. We were each slumped in our private reverie, entranced. As our progress built, so did the aural education. We danced to music I had heard before, old songs I’d brought home from Buenos Aires, but which seemed to come unlocked when paired with movement. We kept walking. We learned the all-important ocho, a cross-system figure eight done mostly by the ladies, the trademark of the tango. It felt at first like figure skating on a very tiny rink, propped up by a leader’s elbows, gliding in a loop, forward or back. The leaders delighted themselves when they got us going on our little circuit, tracing infinity before their feet. To guide us out required the careful insertion of a foot to break our ocho flow—one careful step with all the timing and precision of a double-Dutcher. The leader halts the follower’s step, takes her through the cross and back to walking. This took another week or two to learn.

  Tango as a whole is made of loops. Two dancers turning, separately, together. A swirl of couples dancing in that counterclockwise circle we call, of course, the “line” of dance—in yet another echo of Ki-Kongo dance traditions and the sun’s path across the surface of the earth, nzila ya ntangu. Each couple shares the floor with dozens, often hundreds, following that path.

  This was the last piece of Basic Tango—how to dance among the other dancers. How to rock in place to turn and navigate the corners. We began to practice all these building blocks in sequences—the walk, the cross, the ochos, and the turn—in rhythm. Until we could list convincingly around the room for the duration of a song.

  Our boom box fought another boom box, just behind the curtain separating our class from the other classes in the studio. Thumps of syncopation, wafts of melodies and strings from different songs competed for our ears. The maestro gently nudged the volume for us so that we could hear. Listen, he urged, with your feet. The music, when brought above the swallowed warble of the stereo, had weight and a delicious pull. I filled my lungs with it.

  Deep in the strangled wails of the bandoneón were fated loves and sainted mothers, satire and subversion, continents forgotten. Music full of yearning, boasting, and berating. Preening, promising, and despair. It was both alien and familiar. We walked through the fog of it. My legs felt heavy, trudging, reaching each beat as if through floodwater. Listening, I moved, and began to understand the architecture of the instruments: the basement of the thwapping beat, the main floors of the melody. There are no percussion instruments, as such, in tango. The piano, the bass, the bandoneón, even the strings all share the rhythm and the tune. It is music made of ocean currents churning, building to a crest only to slink away, defeated. The dancers are the shore.

  Only then, submerging myself in the music, did I begin to disappear. I flickered, felt my edges blur, however briefly. I left class each Tuesday night a little changed. It didn’t matter whether I was going back to Peter, takeout, television, or the tedium of fund-raising at work. I had this private thing. I could listen to the music on the subway, at my desk. I had dead men crooning in my ears, a constant serenade. Osvaldo Pugliese, secular saint and king among composers, hero to the working class. Osvaldo Fresedo, author of elegance, as full of joie de vivre as a Parisian stroll. Juan d’Arienzo, “El Rey del Compás,” king of the beat, who saved tango’s staccato foot-pulse for the people. And Carlos di Sarli, tango’s Cyrano, whom they called “El Señor.”

  Di Sarli, the gentleman writer of besotted melodies, was the last piece of the tango puzzle, uniting warring trends within the music by composing tangos worthy of both listening and dancing. There is a rich refinement to his orchestrations, almost cinematic, but his compases are clean, dependable—ideal for novice dancers.

  “Bahía Blanca,” with its surf-like sway, was one of his—a love song to the city of his birth. I understood now why our maestro chose it for those first few Basic classes: to teach our ears to walk against the swimming syncopation in the instruments, to find the gentle plodding meter underneath. To walk, simply, charting our course across the downbeats.

  This was the soundtrack of our tedious beginning, this homesick melody with its defiant beat. Often, in those first few weeks, we had to strain our ears against the wide sweep of the song in order to internalize the structure underneath. This taught us patience, which is tantamount to talent in beginning tango class. No matter how we yearned to charge full tilt into the fray, we had to walk straight lines where our hearts were turning circles, ebbing and flowing with the strings. I understood: We had to keep our hopes in check. We had to learn to walk before we danced.

  Chapter Four

  but this was solitary work, and lonely-making. No matter how I begged Peter to join me, he refused. Friends who were more dance-inclined also refused; tango, for all the sex that shrouds it, is an acquired taste. Like power walking, it does not appeal to everyone—and to some it looks more than a little strange. Not everyone can be prevailed upon to spend their evenings speechless, sipping water out of paper cone
s and occasionally touching elbows with a middle-aged divorcee.

  “It’s like you’re living out my fifties for me,” my mother joked, “and I’m living your twenties!” She went for dockside happy hours. I sat on grimy city benches as the evening drained, my purse loaded with books, a toothbrush, shoes, waiting for class to start. I throbbed with solitude—my body shrunken, senses dulled, my fingers curled in.

  I looked forward to class, but every week I found it was a struggle not to skip. Every week, Peter would forget, and ask when I’d be home for dinner and our routine television. “I have tango,” I would say. “Oh, right,” he’d pout. “So you’re still doing that?” At first he’d meet me afterward, for dinner; then he lost interest. I told myself tango was worth the time that I spent sitting, waiting, second-guessing. And worth the money—funds I could not have hoped to muster had Peter not handled most of our expenses, everything beyond my rent and bills and clothes. Still, I didn’t have much extra, and what I had I spent in part on monthly dues. Every week, I pushed through the door into the crush of dancers coming, going. I signed my name at registration, walked through a blast of sweat and hustle tunes, and hid out in the changing closet, where I buckled on my dancing shoes.

  Not speaking was a mercy. Not being spoken to. Communicating in a series of shy smiles. Occasionally we mumbled “thank you” to each other as we changed partners and the followers rotated one leader to the right along the room. Otherwise, I learned the tango fundamentals mute, obedient, self-punishing. I soldered the soles of my feet to the floor and skied and skated, turned, skated and skied. And when class was over, rode the empty subway back to Peter’s place. The irony of this—learning the world’s most intimate partner dance in almost perfect isolation—was not lost on me.

  I wasn’t lonely just on Tuesdays. I was lonely all the time. Peter and I had reached a sibling-level shorthand with each other; we hardly spoke. There was no need. To stand beside each other was enough. We didn’t really want to be together, but we didn’t want to be apart. I remembered our first week as a couple, when we’d been so exhilarated by our ingenuity—by the idea of becoming “us”—that we stood beaming at each other in the subway car, and kissed because we couldn’t think of what to say. He was so handsome that I sometimes stared at the biceps underneath his shirt, and blushed. We looked right together, like adults—and our fondness, our intensity of friendship, read like romantic love. We played pretend.

  We didn’t hold each other, but my sororal presence next to him in bed was vital to him—even when he fell asleep facedown and clothed after several martinis. I crawled into his queen-sized bed and lay there, schoolmarm-still, reading my book. And as my mother boffed her way through southern Florida in an effort to regain lost time, I clicked off my bedside lamp and went to sleep. Comforted by his breathing, there beside me in the dark.

  We were hardly ever intimate. When we did have sex, our lack of chemistry made both of us a little sad. We tried, that whole first week, and found the motions almost comical. We gave up trying; I felt immense relief. It was an ideal situation for a girl afraid of men—to go everywhere with this picture of a man, this Ken doll in the flesh, and call him mine, knowing that he would not touch me. That I didn’t need to guard my body anymore.

  But after months of this, and years of flinching, keeping myself to myself, I’d gone a little cold inside. I was no longer physical; I’d lost my animal response. When touched, however casually, I recoiled.

  Group instruction, once we graduated from practice hold to close embrace, was therefore quite discomfiting. Elbows were one thing. Now I had to put my arms around a stranger, feel another cheek against my own, that person’s bone and skin beneath my hands. I had almost forgotten how it felt to hold someone, and I was startled by the feel of fat and veins.

  It felt like touching just-plucked chicken, or chops beneath a barrier of butcher’s paper. Then there was crisp cotton, moistened silk, the feel of someone else’s clothes across my skin. It wasn’t sexy or transgressive, being held. I found it terrifying, though I did my best to hide my squeamishness, to separate that animal closeness from everything it threatened to inspire me to feel. The music helped. I closed my eyes and listened, trying to align the complicated motions with the sound. The music made the movement otherworldly, as though I were safely in some magic Elsewhere and had ceased to be. I was not a vulnerable girl-body in the arms of a strange man; I was an archetype who meets another archetype, on a dance floor out of time.

  Some say the very name of tango comes from touch, from the Latin tangere. It is the quintessential partner dance—the first in history to push the couple close enough together that their heartbeats matched. Waltz and polka were the first to put a man and woman face-to-face, but tango brought them even closer, chest-to-chest and breath-to-breath.

  In 1913, during the height of tangomania—the dance’s heyday in Paris, Buenos Aires, London, and New York—“civilized” folk were ripe for the audacious closeness of the tango, what a prominent American evangelist had deemed “intolerable for a decent society.” Conservatives the whole world over tried to ban it—from legislators to boards of governors to Pope Pius X—though tangomaniacs would swear the dance was not obscene.

  Vernon and Irene Castle, ballroom sweethearts of the American stage and silent screen, made their living selling social dance as good clean fun, bowdlerizing jazz rhythms and ragtime for a wider (whiter) audience. Even they tried to neuter tango enough to fit within their program. They (falsely) claimed it was an “old gipsy dance” from Spain—thought formerly “too sensuous”—but corrected and perfected by the Parisians until it “bloomed forth a polished and extremely fascinating dance, which has not had its equal in rhythmical allurement since the days of the Minuet.” Done “correctly,” tango was “the essence of the modern soul of dancing,” commanding “grace, and especially repose.” The Castles smoothed away whatever so-called improprieties they could—separating bodies, sterilizing movements—but even their vanilla version of the dance just plain suggested sex.

  For my part, I was doing everything I could to willfully ignore whatever sexiness was to be found in Basic tango. My friends and colleagues whistle-hooted every time I mentioned my new avocation. They’d seen the movie version of the dance and spliced me into it, slit skirt and all; or perhaps they’d bought the line from Borges naming it “that reptile from the brothels.” But tango has always been more than its prurient reputation. It contains genres, movements, cultures, continents. It is both African and European, yet uniquely Argentine—and carries within it the early story of that nation. A nation built upon a heritage it would rather see obscured.

  The first roots of tango, in both name and rhythm, were of Bantu origin; and the creole word tangó predates the dance itself, describing drum music, dance motions, and the place where people danced. There was also the Ki-Kongo word tanga, for an end-of-mourning celebration, and tangana, meaning “to walk that walk.” Even tangere, from the Latin, would have come to Argentina only indirectly from the Portuguese and Spanish slavers. So either way, the name of tango—whether the moniker direct or root derived—came to Buenos Aires via slave ship. As did its most basic moves.

  It was only later, with the influx of European immigration, that these first roots were concealed. Today, the population of Argentina is 97 percent white—or claims to be. The ugly legacy of slavery—and the rich mix of the country’s cultural foundation—is glossed over, ignored. If Sarmiento’s dream of a white European fatherland succeeded, it is because of all the country has forgotten: The blend of blood and bodies in the outer barrios that made a creole art. The rosters of black dancers, lyricists, composers, poets, payadores, and musicians. The guitarists who gave tango its now iconic rhythm. The people we leave out when we call the capital the “Paris of South America” and speak of Argentina as predominantly white. But the Afro-Argentines who gave the world tango ought not be forgotten, nor their continued presence in the art be overlooked.

  The hybrid
tango danced in those first decades was canyengue, a word that doesn’t translate into English. Literally, in Ki-Kongo it means “melt”—to melt into the music, or your partner, or the dance itself. In canyengue, couples danced in Euro-style cheek-to-cheek embrace, but with knees bent and rear ends protruding, projecting stony African “coolness,” or cara fea, “ugly face,” typical of Bantu dances of the time. It was the perfect fusion of Continental intimacy and Bakongo control, the conflagration of candombe—danced apart—and couples dancing, plus that contagious milonga beat. Canyengue became synonymous with both style and state of mind, a bit like “swing” in jazz; if you had to ask, you wouldn’t understand. Ironically, it was the European impulse to smooth out tango’s African origins that straightened the dancers’ backs and brought their pelvises into such scandalous proximity. Canyengue gave way to the “fine posture” of tango liso, “smoothed-out” tango, and the salon tango of today.

  As with jazz, the idea that tango originated in brothels was an exaggeration of the racist upper classes and the media, who did not approve. Tango was found in brothels, sure, but only by coincidence. The millions of men who came by boat to Buenos Aires in the early 1900s—for work, for land—were poor and lonely. Their unslakable thirsts were not for some newfangled partner dance, at least not at first. They queued up for one thing only: to embrace a woman—preferably while lying down. Though, just like jazz in old New Orleans, music was sometimes played to keep the waiting patrons entertained. Men who might not share a language bantered back and forth in tango, sharing their common poverty, their stories, their nostalgia, and their lusts. Men danced with each other because they had no better option. Until, of course, they got upstairs.