Tango Lessons

by Meghan Flaherty

  Or worse, a favorite song would lead the set. Half the time, I think, I accepted less-than-stellar dances just so I wouldn’t have to sit out songs I couldn’t bear to miss. Like “Poema,” recorded by Canaro in 1935. It is a song of sweet goodbye, beginning with thirty seconds of the most delicate violin, tiptoeing across plucked strings and tinkling piano, before descending into a chorus of bandoneones. When Roberto Maida starts to sing, he does so quietly, as if he’s cradling an injured sparrow with his voice and helping it to fly. The beats are regular, almost elementary. This is tango at its most basic: the theme alternating with each variation, accumulating urgency until the darkness of one section starts to overlap with light. Things get jaunty when the bellows join, then rich and layered once the themes align. It’s brooding and bright, legato and staccato, like almost every other tango. And because it’s slow and lovely and the compases are clear, it’s played often for beginners—overplayed. But it’s one of those tangos, the ones that stick like woodsmoke in your hair, that bring the whole enterprise of dancing down to quiet sweetness. And every little flourish from the piano or the strings sounds like the twinkle of a cartoon star. The first two thousand times you hear it, it stays with you. Maybe you leave the studio whistling it. Maybe it conjures for you the thing that keeps you coming back. If it plays at a milonga while you’re sitting for a set, you feel cheated.

  I erred on the side of saying yes.

  When Edward, a Hong Kongese quantitative research analyst who was two inches too short for me, asked me to dance, I didn’t turn him down. Everyone in tango has their Tenzing Norgay, the friend they make at base camp who helps them up the peak. Edward was mine. He was agreeable, easy to follow, and comfortable in close embrace. When I made mistakes, he apologized for leading badly. When I followed well, he cooed about how good I was becoming—without any overtones of ownership. Men like Edward are invaluable to a new dancer’s self-esteem. Each time you think you’ve mastered something, some new teacher tells you it’s all wrong. Leaders like Edward keep you dancing because they’re happy to be patient. And despite our difference in height, he never made me feel ungraceful or too tall. He also never made me feel like a sex object—and I was careful not to give him reason to.

  Edward steered me safely through those first milongas; we went once or twice a week. We practiced a bit, then parted. With him there to chat with between tandas, I was emboldened to ignore the men I knew I should refuse. Without him, I avoided social dancing; it was too daunting to go alone. I was back to logging flight hours, and raving about tango to anyone who’d listen. “I can’t tonight; I’m going dancing” was my new refrain.

  He took me to see Robin Thomas, famous for teaching beginners, and widely respected as a tango triple threat: DJ, dancer, proselytizer. Robin was the unofficial crown prince of the New York tango scene, and the king of close embrace. Edward, as it turns out, was a Robin Thomas dancer.

  We took a class and stayed late for the practice session afterward. As Edward began swishing me around the room, Robin appeared out of nowhere. He was shorter still than Edward and looked a little like a lynx, with ginger hair clipped short around his balding patches. “Where have you been?” he asked Edward, a trace of Northern Irish accent on the “een.” Apparently, Edward had been absent from Robin’s milongas.

  Edward apologized, and introduced me. Robin placed his hands on both sides of my head and turned it so my forehead, not my right temple, was touching Edward’s cheek. He tugged my left arm farther down toward Edward’s kidney and, with that, disappeared. Gone as quickly as he came, working the floor to correct other bumblers in the line of couples practicing.

  “Oh, that’s very good,” breathed Edward, as he began again to heave me through the room. My spinal column shifted, a turning in the orientation of my ribs, as though my bones had changed the shape of my embrace. I felt like a heliotropic vine, tuned to the sunlight at the center of the close embrace. But as my neck adapted to the new and awkward angle, I was aware I looked more elegant that way.

  I’d learned more from Robin Thomas in five minutes than I had in months of group instruction. That’s why he specializes in beginners. According to him, tango needs “an army of them—yesterday,” and he is building one. He’s afraid tango will disappear. “It died once,” he says, referring to the dark decades of the dance after 1955, once the Golden Age had fizzled out. “Why can’t it die again?”

  Tango had once before required the enthusiasm of the world to thrive. Back in the days of tangomania, when it looked nothing like the dance I knew. Back when the Argentine oligarchy had denounced it. The dance born of the unclean arrabales was a threat. Still, tangomania prevailed abroad. Though it was more or less abandoned by the end of World War I, Paris had given the world a considerable gift in her early appetite for tango—forcing the Argentine elites, by virtue of their own exquisite snobbery, to embrace the dance. Without that first prodigious popularity and the nonstop fervor of the bourgeoisie, tango might never have been recognized as anything but a vulgar dance of lesser castes, and might never have made it past the borders of the outer barrios. Instead, it made a brief but global splash—and stuck, until it was an Argentine obsession. It morphed—out of the styles of the poor, canyengue, orillero—into the straighter-backed and smoother style. The music pulled tango poetry out of the realm of impudence and swagger and into wistful sadness—from bawdy humor into heartbreak. By the time Carlos Gardel first sang his soul into “Mi noche triste” in 1917, tango had become the song and dance of pleasure and of pain, of human drama, tragic love. And by the full swing of the Golden Age, it didn’t matter whether Europe and the wider world had since moved on; the whole of Buenos Aires danced.

  That changed in 1955. The year a military coup unseated Argentine president Juan Perón, outspoken friend of tango and the working classes. We might call his ouster the beginning of the end, though the dance’s popular appeal had already begun to wane. Folklore, with its simple virtues and pastoral themes, was gaining ground, piped in from the provinces, or brought by migrants coming to the capital for work. Those who benefited from the relative prosperity of the Perón years wished not to linger in the social protest that infused so many tango lyrics. Those who resented Peronism led a middle-class backlash against the poor and brown in favor of all things “white” and “decent,” which was to say: not tango. Despite its popular dominance, tango’s subversive legacy, and the “dangerous ethnic and racial mixing” it inspired, had always given the oligarchy pause. After all, even the love songs about bad women doing good men wrong could be interpreted as outlets for lyricists to voice their swallowed grievances against the state. When in doubt, blame women for your pain. Folk music was held up as a moralizing antidote to public sin. Tango cafés and dancehalls closed; orquestas were whittled down to octets, sextets, trios. Though listening tango flourished, the dance as popular phenomenon fell out of fashion—kept alive only by the older diehards of the working class. In 1960, RCA destroyed an entire warehouse of its recordings from the fading Golden Age. The music was too maudlin for porteño youths, a backward-facing embrace of ancient pain.

  Perón won reelection in 1973 and ran a volatile administration until his death the following year. The military junta that took power next, from 1976 to 1983, did so with the aim of scrubbing Argentina clean of all dissident elements, including what was left of tango. Artists were blacklisted and imprisoned, lyrics censored. Meetings of more than three were declared illegal, making social dances dangerous to organize. And radio broadcasters were forced to replace tango with imported rock music on the air. This last military junta, sometimes known as el Proceso, or the National Reorganization Process, did far more damage than merely banishing tango from the civic stage. The regime “disappeared” dissenters by the thousands. It was a time of terror and suspicion—neighbors informing on their neighbors, generals ordering civilian deaths, children and adults gone missing, never to be found. The Guerra Sucia, or Dirty War, might have eclipsed tango as Argentina�
�s major legacy to the world, had democracy not been reinstated in 1983.

  Meanwhile, from safe refuge abroad, Osvaldo Pugliese recorded instrumental tangos that, in contra-rhythm, counterpoint, and complexity, would prefigure the tango music avant-garde. And Astor Piazzolla, disbanding his orchestra and laying aside the bandoneón, went off in search of other influences. He drifted in and out of exile, eventually bringing home Nuevo Tango, which won him (and tango music as a genre) credibility and international acclaim, though these compositions, however masterful, were almost prohibitively difficult to dance.

  Back at home, the dance had all but died. For nearly thirty years, a country plagued by military coups and miserable economics quelled its feet. Tango never disappeared, though it became all but impossible for new converts or young people to learn. Any social dancing happened underground, on perpetual alert for infiltrators out to shut covert milongas down. The steadfast milongueros who kept the flame alive consider themselves the “lost” tango generation, heroes and resisters of the working class, the outer barrios—guardians of a gilded past.

  But then, when tango was but a faded rumor of its former self—diffuse, and more fiction than fact—it was resurrected. The new democratic government of 1984 created the Programa Cultural en Barrios, to encourage war-weary porteños to reclaim their public spaces. Then came the big-ticket stage spectaculars. The tango glory days writ large, with dignity and faithfulness, by middle-aged Argentine professionals abroad. Tango Argentino and its spin-offs were an astonishing popular success in Paris (yet again) and on Broadway, and the dance came back to roost in Buenos Aires, cradle of the art.

  Now, tens of thousands of people dance traditional Argentine tango socially in at least a hundred countries. We are living in the global renaissance of tango. UNESCO-inscribed since 2009, the dance is now a national product, exported like beef. Its commodification encourages traditionalism by way of counterpoint, but also entrepreneurship. A boon to a sluggish economy since the economic crisis of the aughts. Argentina remains the prime source of the dance, and markets tango tourism to foreign pilgrims seeking authenticity. Argentine dancers with limited prospects at home are given a passport out. They tour and teach abroad, and the revival spreads.

  But it’s a quiet renaissance, and Robin isn’t wrong; it did die once. So he works to keep it living—building the army, arming his students with an arsenal of fundamental moves, then sending them out onto the floor. They go forth, unpretentious, briskly musical, and fiercely loyal. In the process, he’s won international respect. Within a few months, I would learn to recognize a Robin Thomas leader just by body language: His deftness with the simple turns, his tidy rocking steps in place. His prodigious use of the ocho cortado, which neatly puts the couple back together at the cross to segue into other movements—and his careful, comfortable pace.

  Then, however, I was just as green, and hoped only to spare myself humiliation. One’s first hometown milongas are like a first cotillion; you want to make a promising debut. But whatever milestones you have mastered in your group classes—the ability to do an ocho, mid-floor, unsupported, on your own, your first volcada—become irrelevant in this human eddy of stiletto heels and sweat. The lights are low; the stakes are high. A hundred eyes assess your skills. Leaders wonder whether they will take you for a test spin. Followers watch with malice in their hearts until they determine you aren’t competition. You have few friends in this new world, save the good-natured men that you were weaned upon—yet if you dance with those, the better leaders almost certainly will freeze you out. I was beginning to miss the days of exponential learning, the breakneck pace at which I had accumulated my meager string of skills. This new pace was humbler, perhaps, and certainly more thorough. But every time I went out dancing, I found I chafed against the bit.

  The weather warmed with summer. Edward and I met at the Seaport Sunday nights to dance. I’d hear the music long before I spotted the milonga, just after crossing into the massive square. In the shadow of the tall ship Peking, beside a fish shack/cocktail bar, a stretch of dock was cordoned off for tango. I wore flat shoes so my heels would not get stuck between the boards. Dancing there was difficult, and I felt conspicuous in front of the assembled crowd. But there was something old and sweet about that outdoor dancing, those humid July nights that smelled of river, boat exhaust, and calamari. I spent half the time apologizing for my form—the floor is slippery, my shoes won’t pivot when I tell them to, it’s crowded here, I haven’t danced all week, I’m just not on my game—but Edward didn’t care. Not even when my sole slipped and my full heft fell upon him. “Wooh! Sorry!” I squealed; this became a tic of mine.

  A milonga tanda started. Milonga was not merely the place-name for where one went to dance; it was one of two musical variants to tango, like tango music’s boisterous uncle—cheerier, and played in cut time. The other variant is cheeky waltz-time tango vals. Both require a different approach to dance than eight-beat tango but remain part of its purview. Same instruments, same basic structure, same crisp end. All three song types are played for social dancing. You dance a milonga to a milonga, a vals to a vals, a tango to a tango—all, of course, at a milonga. Like most beginners, I was clumsy at adapting tango steps to fit half-time milonga, with its habanera hop, but Edward, patient as ever, was too busy worrying over his own missteps to judge me for mine.

  If I caught one fast footwork sequence out of a proffered ten, a smile would crack across my face in triumph. Beads of sweat dotted my hairline. The thump of my heart synced to the rhythm. My doubts were fading, one tanda at a time. I stayed an hour, maybe two, and left the Seaport humming to myself, skipping along the cobblestones to the contagious beat. Dum bah dum bum. Dum bah dum bum.

  I went home to Peter passed out on the couch. Between work and dancing, I hardly saw him anymore. Sundays, which had previously been reserved for overloaded bagel brunches and movie marathons, were cut short. Weekday evenings, too, had gone. I went to work each morning and sat in my grey cubbyhole, tweaking amateurish graphics for direct mail campaigns, and listening to tango albums on repeat. The nights when I had class, a práctica, or a milonga, I arrived home after midnight, dropped my purse and clothes into a puddle on the floor, put on pajamas, brushed my teeth, and slipped into bed beside him. Often, we did not touch or speak, and within mere minutes of coming home, I’d have set my alarm and gone to sleep.

  I thought about the tango women of the 1940s, who had rebelled against the iron-fisted marca, the lead of certain early milongueros. Back then, according to Maria Nieves, “the man stood still while the woman pirouetted,” bossed around by domineering hand gestures. After their insurrection, the standard of the couple sharing action fifty-fifty first came into fashion. Partners began to dance together, with followers complicit, decisive in the act of improvising. I thought about Nieves as a girl in the forties, barely in her teens, transfixed. She had no teacher, so she danced alone, partnering her broom across the kitchen floor into the small hours of the night.

  Part of me was furious at Peter—for never coming with me, for making me do all of this alone. Part of me was grateful for the privacy; I was beginning to think the loneliness would do me good. And part of me felt guilty leaving him behind. As if I knew that every night I danced, the clock wound forward on us, and I outgrew him slowly, tick by tick.

  Chapter Nine

  tango, with all its codes, was like a funhouse hall of mirrors, which split into a million other halls of mirrors in infinite disorienting directions. Social dancing scared me, but I had to learn to be surprised—and to surprise myself. Milongas were where technique became expression, and all the things that I’d been taught turned into tango. Where I could let perfectionism go, and improvise.

  When Edward got stuck at work one night, I went to Lafayette alone, and sat off in a corner, paging through a magazine to ward off unwanted invitations. Peter and I were leaving for vacation the next morning, but I had to dance. I was getting better by degrees, but ever frustrated by th
e slowing speed of my improvement. There simply weren’t enough hours, enough money, for the kind of learning curve I craved. I was desperate for dances. I wanted my pilot’s wings.

  Instead, I sat nursing bog water Malbec, probably bottled in Pennsylvania, feeling silly, clumsy, sorry for myself, and watching as my fingerprints clouded the glass.

  “Whatcha readin’?”

  The voice was low and slow like late-night radio. My senses registered him before I could, maroon merino wool, broad chest, a stubbled cheek, and hints of the same bad Malbec on his breath. Enzo. I flipped shut that week’s New Yorker.

  “Never seen a lady read at a milonga.”

  Oh no, I thought. I’d missed another rule. Then I noticed, with a pang of warm relief, a creased copy of Anna Karenina tucked beneath his arm.

  “How’s that?” I gestured to the book.

  “In-fucking-credible,” he answered. “Have you read?” He had a way of omitting the last words of his sentences.

  I confessed I hadn’t. He recommended that I rectify. We made small talk about Tolstoy and the Russians for a few moments as the tanda ended. His voice dropped decibels and octaves to a rakish, interrogatory tone.

  “Would you like to dance?”

  I fought my impulse to ask Who, me? or Are you sure? and stuffed my magazine into my bag. He picked his way around the tables, steered us to the floor.