Tango
Page 1
TANGO
The Reverb series looks at the connections between music, artists and performers, musical cultures and places. It explores how our cultural and historical understanding of times and places may help us to appreciate a wide variety of music, and vice versa.
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Already published
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Ian Inglis
Van Halen: Exuberant California, Zen Rock’n’Roll
John Scanlan
Brazilian Jive: From Samba to Bossa and Rap
David Treece
Tango: Sex and Rhythm of the City
Mike Gonzales and Marianella Yanes
TANGO
SEX AND RHYTHM OF THE CITY
MIKE GONZALEZ AND
MARIANELLA YANES
REAKTION BOOKS
With thanks to Antonio, my father, who loved Gardel; Elena and Candelario for the tangos that you sang; Benito Velasco, for his tango club in Caracas.
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
33 Great Sutton Street
London EC1V 0DX, UK
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2013
Copyright © Mike Gonzalez and Marianella Yanes 2013
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements and
Index match the printed edition of this book.
Printed and bound in Great Britain
by Bell & Bain, Glasgow
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
eISBN: 9781780231457
CONTENTS
PROLOGUES
1 STRANGERS IN THE CITY
2 A CITY DIVIDED
3 TANGO GOES TO PARIS
4 TANGO FINDS ITS VOICE
5 GARDEL AND THE GOLDEN AGE
6 THE DYING OF THE LIGHT
7 ASTOR PIAZZOLA AND TANGO NUEVO
8 THE LONG ROAD HOME
Chronology
References
Select Bibliography
Discography and Filmography
Acknowledgements
Copyright Acknowledgements
Index
PROLOGUES
TANGO MINE: MARIANELLA’S STORY
My home in Caracas was a place of peace at a turbulent political time, perhaps because it was a temple of women, to which men were invited at weekends. My sisters and I, the spoiled children of my nine aunts who shared our weekends and its endless meals, mimicked in our small way the steps and the lyrics that emerged from the vinyl records spinning on the record player. The music was a mix of popular ballads, rancheras, son and mambos – all very useful when the time came to polish the floor in preparation for an evening’s dancing. In those days the floors were polished with hot wax dissolved in paraffin, a process so dangerous that the children had to be kept out of the room until the concrete floor tiles were covered. Then we were allowed in to help with the polishing by dancing on spongy rags tied to our feet – floor polishers were an unimaginable luxury. The job was done only when those coloured floors were glassy enough to reflect our faces in them. And we all sang while we danced. We could guess the mood of my mother, my grandmother, our neighbours and our wonderful aunts who accompanied us throughout our childhood, from the rhythm of the music. Disappointment in love, betrayal and rejection found some consolation only in the tango, the rancheras and the popular ballads. And that became even more intense and interesting when the television was turned on to watch the Dark Skinned Boy From Abasto, dear Carlos Gardel, in those melodramatic performances with which he graced Argentine cinema in the early Thirties. My aunts wept, my mother sighed – she was never one for tears, like my grandmother, whose hard exterior softened only with that seductive suffering look that Gardel wore when he sang ‘Her eyes closed’. And my grandmother would say, ‘How sad, the poor man, alone without his mother – and men without mothers always suffer!’ It was a hint directed at my mother because she couldn’t cook and had divorced and because her second marriage, from which my sisters were born, had not been blessed in church. My grandmother’s criticisms were merciless, even though the situation was common to most working-class Latin American families. In general, couples got together without the approval of the Church or the civil registry; my grandmother herself was an example, with her three couplings, each of which had produced a child. Still, she did not expect her children to repeat her life story and the tango songs offered faithful portraits of her world.
But the big event of the weekend began after lunch, when the lovers appeared with their guitars to sing their passionate serenades, just like the lovers in Mexican films who sang beneath the balconies of their beloveds. The songs – tangos, boleros and rancheras – sounded authentic in their mouths, turning their dramatic lyrics into declarations of love that in that feminine space fertilized the unions and the separations of the future. There were the sisters in love with the same man, the men seducing several of the sisters, the bedroom secrets, the unexpected pregnancies, the jealousies, flirtations and rejections that only alcohol or new secret passions could assuage.
There, surrounded by the seductive dances and the melodious strumming of guitars, I learned the melodramatic visions that each tango contained. I absorbed them so well that their tragic vision of the world became words in the dialogues between the actors in the soap operas that I wrote for Venezuelan television.
Tango is more than a tuneful entertainment: it is a portrait of poor men and women, it is a sharp prick of hunger and thirst, it is a desolate road to homes overwhelmed by need. But at the same time, it is the undefined pleasure of the forbidden. The solitude of a prostitute’s empty room, the absence of love, the warmth of a Sunday family dinner, the things you left behind and the things you never achieved. The loss of a mother – that miraculous woman who would embrace you and expect only a brief kiss in return. The hardest thing was that the tango left us with a feeling of the loss of a country, of rootlessness, of the absence of that sense of belonging that tango reflected. And it expressed the need to construct and create a new life out of nothing. Hence lunfardo, the special language of tango. I reinvent language in order to belong, but I base this new language on what I have forgotten in order to become what I am. It is a language of immediate reference; it speaks of the immigrant’s life in poverty.
These were the lyrics, the music and the violent and seductive steps of the tango. It is a temptation to dance tango, but not the kind of temptation that drags you to the dance floor to try it and see. Every movement, every gesture, every encounter demands preparation. Like lunfardo, the tango has to be learned over time. Its syncopated notes draw you in, absorb you, but learning its rhythm is the vital condition for the encounter. It is like an adolescent’s initiation into adult life. First you listen to the music and let it seduce you. Before you dance, you learn how to dress for the milonga – the dance. For women: silk stockings, a garter belt, a skirt split on one side or in the middle. A low neckline. A flower in the hair and finally, high-heeled shoes. That is what seduces; it is a kind of fetish, with the long heel stroking the partner’s leg. It is the smallest of gestures, a momentary touch, barely a caress to inspire those three minutes called ‘Tango’. The man has his ritual too. The hat, the suit, the penetrating smell of lavender and perfume, the carnation or the violet in the lapel, the two-toned shoes with a small heel pointing forward. All these components gathered on the dance floor, in a ritual of pain, death, and the anguish of love and rejection, all in a ritual of despair tha
t ends in that final embrace – the meeting and the farewell called ‘tango’.
THE DANCERS
It is an elegant shoe: high-heeled, and in gleaming patent leather crowned by a spat that holds the smooth black trouser leg. It lifts slightly, points forward and down, then slides along the floor, brushing against her fine black stocking. Her foot, resting back on spiked heels, arched and naked, lifts and responds in kind. Later, left foot follows right, now twisting, now engaging, now trapping her legs between his. The split skirt lets her respond, entwine and unravel, pirouette, a stroking capture of leg and thigh, hers open and suggestive, his dark and constrained by the tight-fitting suit.
The music is dramatic, fast, punctuated by sudden accents and shrill curls of violin and bandoneon. The narrative is a rhythm of lunge and counter, invitation and rejection. From the waist down, these restless bodies seek each other out in a ceaseless pursuit. Yet the upper body tells a different story. He leans over her at a constant angle, pushing and demanding, his back taut and unyielding; she bends slightly back, in an attitude of surrender. It does not seem to fit the sensuous encounter of legs and feet, so intimate, so full of desire.
Most perplexing are the eyes – the look, or rather its absence. There is neither challenge nor defiance, no dare and counter-dare. The engagement of the bodies is matched by a disengagement of the face. The dancers look at each other yet also beyond and into the distance; all that is here is indifference, a refusal to connect as resolute as the endless brushing of legs and thighs.
This is the paradox of tango.
1 STRANGERS IN THE CITY
Behind the grand domes and palaces of Genoa, I could see the mountains still. Apricale wasn’t far away, just there, behind that second hill, where that tree is bending slightly in the wind. I grew up there, in dark cobbled streets with hundreds of corners and crannies where we could hide and play, along with the cats. There must have been a million cats in the village. You looked up and it seemed as if God had opened his hands and dropped the houses onto the hilltop and that they had tumbled down and stopped at crazy angles. We had our fields, my dad and I, up above the village, looking down. Some mornings you could hardly breathe when you got up there, particularly on winter mornings, when the wind was cold and the sun froze you in its light. But when my dad died, things changed.
The ship is moving now. I can hardly see. There are so many of us on deck watching, weeping, blinking so that the image of those mountains stays printed on the inside of our eyelids and we can take it with us to where we’re going. Wherever that is. That man on the foredeck with the captain, the one in the frock coat and the top hat with a blue and white sash, he knows. He’s the one who found us, who told us that on the other side of the world was a country waiting for us. There was land there. There were empty farms with houses that we could live in – the keys were above the door, ready for us. It was so vast, this place, that we would have to board a train and travel a day and a night. But first they would give us a room in a hotel, and food. And they would welcome us.
I can hardly see my hills now. I can see Genoa, disappearing into the mist. Everyone is crying now, waving – but who to? Who knows how long it will be before we come back here, to Liguria. Perhaps we will come back with new families, and perhaps we will travel in the cabins, with the gentlemen. Perhaps?
IMMIGRANTS
In 1869, Buenos Aires had 223,000 inhabitants. A single generation later, in 1914, it was the largest city in the hemisphere after New York, with a population of just over 2 million. Most dramatically, nearly 48 per cent of the city’s inhabitants were foreign born. Buenos Aires had been transformed in these few years ‘from a riverside town to a modern metropolis’.1
The city had not only changed in size in those years; it had become profoundly cosmopolitan, diverse, home to a variety of languages and cultures. And at the same time, a yawning gulf had opened up between the old city centre and the wealthy suburbs, with their elegant, well-heeled residents, and the districts around the expanding port. Here was the melting pot in which the new city was being forged.
Who were these new arrivals, these builders of the new Buenos Aires? And why had they been encouraged to come?
By the mid-1860s, the conflict that had divided Argentina since it declared independence from Spain in 1816 had been resolved. The debate about the future of the newly independent republic centred on one question. Would the country develop through its trade with the rest of Latin America, diversifying its economy as it went; or would it throw in its lot with the foreign traders (particularly the British) and grow by exporting its meat and agricultural products, exchanging them for consumer goods and manufactures imported from Europe? Each alternative carried its own political programme and its own ideology. In one case, the logic pointed in the direction of Latin American cooperation and unity, a kind of continental nationalism. In the other, Argentina would continue to be dependent on European colonial powers, and prosper as a result of that relationship.2
The then President of Argentina, Bartolome Mitre, a member of the wealthy landowning aristocracy whose large estates produced the goods to be exported, threw open the doors of the Argentine economy and invited foreign, but especially British investors, to put their money into the expanding meat and cereal production of his country. They took up the opportunity enthusiastically and the country moved into a new chapter in its history. The market for Argentine mutton and lamb, and its wheat, grew dramatically.
Had the plan to connect with Latin America borne fruit, the centre of the country might have been established elsewhere, in the wealthy area of Corrientes, for example. But the focus on European trade carried with it one inevitable consequence: Buenos Aires would become the heart of an independent Argentina, its port the crossroads through which all commerce passed.
And there was another expression of the triumph of the European connection; a dominant idea that progress would only be possible with the adoption of European ideas, values and behaviours – in a word, European ‘civilization’. In the 1840s, two writers had given form to this view. Alberdi’s slogan ‘To civilize is to populate’ became a kind of watchword. And the literary representation of that idea came in the form of a book, part novel part sociological treatise, written by a vigorous advocate of the European connection: Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. Facundo (1845) recounted the life of one of the more notorious local chieftains on the vast Argentine prairies, the pampas.3 He was represented as a kind of primitive, driven solely by instinct and expressing the realities of a violent world without moral or social values. Oh, they were fine horsemen, these cowboys or gauchos, who followed their horses and cattle back and forth across the Argentine pampas. And they were free, in the way that wild animals are free. But theirs was a natural instinct that had to be tamed, if Argentina was to become the civilized nation Sarmiento and his circle imagined. Natural man must be replaced by civilized man. In another sense, Latin American man – so close to the world of instinct and so far from the social skills indispensable for the new Argentina – had to be re-educated, forcibly if necessary. And it was not only a matter of dealing with particular individuals and their characteristics, but of eliminating the way of life which, in Sarmiento’s view, inevitably produced and reproduced the Facundos of Argentine history.
In practice, this connected perfectly with the enclosure of the pampas, which until then were common lands grazed freely by the independent gauchos who moved with their herds. With their disappearance, the pampas could be fenced and divided into the great estates (or estancias) which would increasingly be devoted to producing the rich red beef for which Argentina would become justly renowned.4
The necessity for immigrant labour had already been anticipated in the 1852 Constitution, that set out a surprisingly liberal policy on immigration to the new Argentina:
The Federal Government will encourage European immigration, and it will not restrict, limit or burden with any taxes the entrance into Argentine territory of foreigners who come with
the goal of working the land, improving the industries and teach the sciences and the arts.
But the fact that this was more than a question of expanding the labour market is signalled in the second part of this clause. For these were immigrants who would come ‘to improve and to teach’. In other words, they were already seen as the physical embodiment, the bearers of that European civilization which would transform and modernize Argentina in a single generation.
A gaucho cartoon.
Mitre had already invited European investors to collaborate in national development in the 1850s. Now, in the late 1860s, the invitation was extended, actively, to Europe’s peasant farmers and workers. And the city that would receive them, the riverside town that was fast becoming a capital city and a major port – Buenos Aires – made ready to receive them.
It is unclear whether the governments of the day had thought through how the immigrant population would live, especially given the scale of the process. Perhaps they envisaged an effortless absorption. In any event, the self-confidence of Argentina’s wealthy classes was at its height as the immigrant ships arrived in numbers in the early 1870s. The reason? The outcome of the war with Paraguay, known as the War of the Triple Alliance.5
Paraguay in 1865 was an isolated but expanding economy under the absolute control of the dictator López. Landlocked as it was, in the upper reaches of the Paraná River, the compelling need for a direct outlet to the sea for its exports led to a confrontation with Brazil and Argentina, its far larger and more powerful neighbours (Uruguay was the third and much smaller partner in the alliance). Despite its well-prepared and larger military forces, Paraguay’s defeat was devastating. Some 60 per cent of its population (predominantly the men) died in the five years of the conflict! For Brazil and Argentina, the considerable spoils of war were the newly conquered lands, fertile but sparsely populated, of the Gran Chaco, where yerba mate – once Paraguay’s main export – grew in abundance.