Tango

by Mike Gonzalez

  Que lanzás al viento

  con cada suspiro

  el hondo lamento

  de tu sentimiento,

  y en cada respiro

  crece tu emoción . . .

  Cuando en la tristeza

  tu canción se abisma,

  ¡sos el alma misma

  de mi bandoneón! . . .

  Bandoneon / You cast to the wind / Through your hundred wounds / That eternal lament / And with each breath / You restore a hundred lives / To weep the better! / With the harmonies that bleed out from you / or the quiet tears / you are the faithful cure / for my own love!

  When your lungs expand / and issue a thousand songs / the soul of your harmony / your sad song feels / like my very own . . .

  And I squeeze you in my arms / to draw out the song little by little / in a long complaint / As if your sound / were the trembling of my own heart.

  My heart! . . . / You cast into the wind / with every sigh / the deep feelings / of sorrow / and the emotion grows more intense / with every breath . . . / and when your song / sinks into sadness / you are the very soul / of my bandoneon.

  (‘Bandoneón’ – José González Castillo, n.d.)

  The arrival of the bandoneon produced an immediate change in the dance. The guitar and flute had accompanied the fast, dramatic and erotic steps of the original dance – the ‘ruffian’s dance’ (the tango rufianesco).7 Its frankly sexual gestures and movements shocked and repelled the respectable middle clases, yet they were not immune to the impact of the music, nor to its seductions. The way in which the bandoneon was played added drama and passion to the sound of tango, but it was slower and more sensual, its undulations more melancholy and provocative. And its arrival coincided with tango’s first tentative steps towards the new elegant cafés and cabarets around the well-lit streets of the city centre, places like Lo de Hansen or El Velódromo, whose names would soon appear in tango lyrics and circulate among enthusiasts. The music itself began to become acceptable in the more elegant, if slightly more liberal salons, though dancing was still forbidden in most of them, and a new generation of performers found audiences (and wages) beyond the barrio when they gave exhibitions in the more adventurous venues. Rosendo Mendizábal was an accomplished pianist whose ‘El Entrerriano’ became one of the best known of the new tango concert pieces – music, in other words, to be listened rather than danced to. Only the most daring middle-class woman around 1900 would be prepared to venture into the areas near the docks in the afternoon to seek out the handsome young men who offered themselves as dance partners. But they could enthusiastically attend the exhibitions given by the new generation of professional dancers, chief among them Ovidio José Blanquet, known as ‘El Cachafaz’, ‘the Insolent Kid’.

  Tango was creeping across the border, or at least gaps had been opened that allowed some communication between the two worlds of the city. The marginal quarters remained, from a middle-class point of view, places of danger and forbidden pleasure. And the estimated 20–30,000 prostitutes in Buenos Aires confirmed both the availability and the variety of the erotic. Traffic was, of course, predominantly one-way. If the women of the middle class approached in the afternoon light, their husbands slipped into the port area under cover of darkness. But tango’s best known artists now made increasingly frequent incursions into the gleaming halls of the city centre. And in the theatres (attended by and large by the middle class) the world of tango began to be referred to in the comic operas (sainetes) and musicals (zarzuelas) that were popular at the time. It is true that the theatrical representation of the immigrant at the turn of the century was still largely comic, grotesque and caricatured – but tango music too was played in the same theatres. Though it might be publicly derided and reproved by the bourgeoisie, their fascinated response to its seductions made that rejection hypocritical at best.

  El Cachafaz.

  Tango was making its way into the bourgeois world, albeit slowly and hesitantly. The rite of passage was largely completed during the first decade of the twentieth century. But it was a process fraught with contradictions. The numbers of immigrants had leapt once again in the 1890s, fuelling the anxieties of the middle classes. The growing working class was beginning to organize and forge the early trade unions, radical in their predominantly anarchist ideology and increasingly militant in their actions. The discontent at living and working conditions was rising, reaching a critical point in the 1907 rent strike in the conventillos, when, for the first time, the human beings pressed into the overcrowded shacks and shanties of the dock districts took on their landlords. It was commemorated in the sainete ‘Los inquilinos’ (The Tenants), which included a tango with the same title:

  Señor intendente,

  los inquilinos

  se encuentran muy mal

  se encuentran muy mal

  pues los propietarios

  o los encargados

  nos quieren ahogar.

  Abajo la usura

  y abajo el abuso;

  arriba el derecho

  y arriba el derecho

  del pobre también.

  Mr Mayor / the tenants / are in a very bad way / in a very bad way / because the landlords / or their agents / are drowning us. / Down with usury / down with their abuses / long live justice / long live justice / and long live the rights / of poor people too.8

  The inclusion of these issues in the popular music of the day testifies to the way in which the newly emerging tango lyrics had moved from the simply provocative or plainly obscene to becoming a narrative of the life and experience of the barrios – its housing, its resistance, its desires and frustrations, and to a very limited extent, its experience of work. It remained the voice of the barrios, its streets and communal life. And it retained as its central character the isolated young man, living the life of the streets, whose strutting and preening in the dance conceals a deeper sense of continuing marginality and exclusion.

  As he protects himself with a facade of steps that demonstrate perfect control [the male tanguero] contemplates his absolute lack of control in the face of history and destiny.9

  Women are very rarely heard in tango’s early lyrics. There were some who made their name in this world despite their suppression – singers, dancers and madams. But it was always a dance led by men, danced with other men or women, but only very rarely by women with one another. The game of seduction it enshrined was not conducted between equals. When the first women tango singers emerged at the beginning of the Golden Age, they dressed in men’s clothing.

  But at this time, the majority of tango writers and musicians were part-time artists whose main source of income was elsewhere. Agustín Bardi worked in a shop, Vicente Greco sold newspapers, Juan Maglio was a mechanic – though they would later find an adequate living from tango. But first, tango would need to win the battle for acceptance.

  And for that to happen, it had first to wrestle with the suspicion that tango still aroused and the very different visions of the dance.

  The room fills with happy people; everywhere one hears phrases that could make a vigilante blush. In the background a group of petty criminals from the barrios with improvised disguises, in the theatre boxes handsome men and even more handsome girls. Suddenly the orchestra begins a tango and the couples begin to form. The china and compadre join together in a fraternal embrace, and then the dance begins, in which the dancers show such an art that it is impossible to describe the contortions, dodgings, impudent steps and clicking of the heels the tango causes.

  The couples glide energetically to the beat of the dance, voluptuously, as if all their desires are placed in the dance. In the background, the people form groups to see figures done by a girl from the suburbs, who is proclaimed the mistress without rival in this difficult art, and the crowd applauds these prodigious figures, drawing back scandalized when the dancer’s companion says ‘Give me the pleasure, my little “china”’.10

  The Scottish writer Robert Cunninghame Graham, however, seemed slightly
more shocked by what he saw.

  They were so close to each other that the leg of the carefully pressed trouser would disappear in the tight skirt, the man holding her in such a close embrace that the hand ended up by the woman’s face. They gyrated in a whirlwind, bending down to the floor, advancing the legs in front of each other while turning, all of this with a movement of the hips that seemed to fuse the impeccable trousers with the slitted skirt. The music continued more tumultuously, the musical times multiplied until, with a jump, the woman would throw herself into the arms of her partner, who would put her back on her feet.11

  Clearly such antics would horrify the ladies of Palermo and reinforce their resistance to the tango’s incursions into their lives. Conservative writers like Leopoldo Lugones and Manuel Galvez looked upon the tango with barely disguised racial arrogance: ‘the product of cosmopolitanism, hybrid and ugly music . . . a grotesque dance . . . the embodiment of our national disarray’.12 There were persistent attempts to close down the brothels, and eventually new ordinances to control the bordellos were passed in 1915. And the wealthy districts were becoming increasingly nervous about the rise of anarchist groups which they associated with prostitution and criminality.

  In the end, their resistance was to no avail. Tango won its right to exist, but only after Tangomania hit Paris.

  3 TANGO GOES TO PARIS

  PLACES OF PLEASURE

  At the Universal Exhibition of 1900, when Paris gathered the products of the new and exciting modern world, from automobiles to electricity, John Philip Sousa’s band played ragtime music for the middle class of Paris. Two years later, in 1902, ‘Les Joyeux Nègres’ (The Cheerful Negroes), a show featuring The Little Walkers at the Nouveau Cirque, caused a sensation when it introduced the cakewalk to its audiences. In 1906, Debussy composed his (unfortunately named) ‘Gollywog’s Cakewalk’, while in the following year Picasso and Matisse both produced iconic paintings (Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon and Blue Nude respectively) which celebrated the art of Africa, which they had seen at the famous exhibition of African Art in Paris.

  Earlier, as the Belle Époque reached its climax in 1900, a younger Picasso was hurriedly sketching the clients and prostitutes dancing at the clubs of Montmartre, just as Toulouse-Lautrec’s ‘Jane Avril’ was appearing on advertising columns around the city, thanks to the new techniques in colour printing. It was somehow symbolic that the Moulin Rouge, built in 1885 as a windmill, should be converted to a dance hall in 1900, when the famous red sails came to signify not an advancing technology but a different aspect of the new century – hedonism, sexuality and the pursuit of pleasure. These places of entertainment advertised themselves as refuges from the modern and the technological, as places where the primitive and instinctual could find free and uncensored expression. Paris, which Benjamin called ‘the capital of the nineteenth century’,1 was a place of exemplary order and impressive social control. Yet part of that order was the permitted existence of lieux de plaisir – ‘places of pleasure’ – on the margins of the city, behind the Wall in Montmartre and later in Montparnasse.

  From time immemorial, the rich society of Paris adopted a neutral space where all classes could rub shoulders, see each other, talk to each other, without making any more contact than the pursuit of pleasure demanded.2

  And apart from talking and seeing, the bourgeois and the shopgirl or the demi-mondaine could dance the sensuous dances of this new age together. Dance manuals provided diagrams for urban Europeans on how to dance the cakewalk, just as, before the decade ended, classes and manuals would allow them to learn the tango.

  While in Buenos Aires the contact between the outer, marginal areas and the modern city was limited to clandestine trips in the darkness, Paris was more liberal and perhaps less hypocritical in its pursuits of pleasure. Transgression lay across the boulevard, and the artists of the underworld, like Toulouse-Lautrec, were uninhibited in their representations of the diverse crowds of men gathering in the brothels and nightclubs. His portraits of the women, waiting for their customers and chatting desultorily, evoke people much like the 20–30,000 prostitutes gathered by then in Buenos Aires. In Buenos Aires, the first decade of the century saw the first cracks in the social barriers that had kept the Buenos Aires that saw itself as Paris apart from the marginal barrios and immigrant communities. But the full breakthrough would be made in the French capital itself.

  There was a bizarre conjunction between a Paris that stood for the gamut of technological progress, as represented in the Great Universal Exhibition of 1900, and its fascination with the primitive and the exotic. The exhibition itself erected circuses and performance spaces replete with symbols and images of the other distant world.3 Paris was as fascinated by the machinery and technology, whose most glorious expression was the Métro, as it was by the colonial world, with its dark-skinned people and its echoes of the primitive. The Arab world concealed all that was mysterious and dangerous: Africa was the home of an uninhibited sexuality, the Far East was impenetrably (inscrutably) ‘other’. And though Latin America remained more remote perhaps from France, the vision of the transatlantic world was equally distant from the civilized society of Paris, and equally exhilarating. The seduction of the primitive and the exotic was not exclusive to France, of course – but it was intensified there in social and sexual mores.4

  There were meeting points between those two worlds, crossroads where the primitive and the modern met and co-existed uneasily for the briefest of moments. In France the archetypal place of encounter was in Marseilles, where ships brought Africa, Asia and the Americas to the very threshold of the most advanced modern world. It was the underworld of the port that was the birthplace of the Apache Dance,5 which became a craze as the twentieth century began. One or two men, usually dressed in the sailor’s striped maillot, danced with a woman in a brothel or a café – the clear implication was that one was a pimp and the other a customer, or perhaps a lover, and she a prostitute. The dance was dramatic, violent and acrobatic – a representation of the violence of men against women. When two men were shown battling over the woman, she was thrown between them, hurled across the floor, spun in the air. The new craze spread rapidly to Paris, where it was given its name by a newspaper reporter who, after watching a gang fight outside the Sacre Cœur cathedral, likened them to warring Apache Indians. It had little to do with any knowledge or understanding of this particular group – rather he was using the word ‘Apache’ as a symbol of the primitive and the uncivilized. The gangs of Paris seized the definition and appropriated it for themselves.

  It was brutal and acrobatic, yet it was also a couple dance imbued with a kind of violent eroticism. It was the theme of a short 1902 silent film called A Tough Dance, with Kid Foley and Sailor Lil, and two years later Joseph Smith took the dance to New York. It emerged very quickly from the shadows into mainstream Parisian life, albeit on the other side of the boulevard. The famous and influential dance teacher Maurice Mouvet created his own version of the dance at the Café de Paris in 1907, and two years later Mistinguett, who dominated the world of dance in France for many years, danced this first ‘tough couple dance’ at the iconic Moulin Rouge.

  Others came through Marseilles too. Manuel Pizarro, a musician, landed there in 1900 and made his way to Paris, where he found a room at the Hôtel Pigalle in Montmartre. Meeting a friend there, he joined the musicians at the Princesse. Meanwhile, when the frigate Sarmiento docked at the southern port,6 the crew took to the local taverns and cafés the sheet music for some of the tangos popular in the port of Buenos Aires. They played Ángel Villoldo’s ‘El Choclo’ and ‘La Morocha’, both popular pieces in La Boca and Nueva Pompeya, from which many of the sailors would have come.

  But by this time, tango was not entirely new. Pizarro and his friends were already playing at the Princesse, tango had been seen on film for the first time in 1900, and Giraudet, a much respected dance teacher in Paris, had begun to teach it. Erotic dance was nothing new, of course; the Moulin Rouge was
renowned for its cancan, a much bawdier overtly sexual version than the one most of us have become familiar with. The Apache dance itself, behind its dramatic violent content, was a dance charged with eroticism. And the excitement around tango had as much to do with its origins in the Argentinian underworld and its suggestive gestures as with a confused notion of a primitive world of cowboys and open prairies.

  In 1907, Alfredo Gobbi and Flora Rodríguez, already famous in Buenos Aires, arrived in Paris, where they remained for seven years, feeding the tango frenzy. The popular fascination with the dance was inadvertently inflamed by the visit of the Argentine president Julio Roca in that same year, and by the comments of his ambassador in France, Enrique Rodríguez Larreta.

  In Buenos Aires, tango is found only in whorehouses and filthy taverns. It is never danced in the respectable lounges, nor between civilized men and women, for tango is crude to the ear of any Argentine worthy of his nation.7

  If Larreta’s intention was to shock or frighten off the Parisian middle class, he failed signally. Tango was exciting precisely because of its exotic foreign origin!

  For the public of Paris or London, tango is no more than a vaguely sinful, exotic dance and they dance it because of its sensual, perverse elements and because it is somewhat barbaric.8

  Tango rapidly took the place of the Apache in the nightclubs of Montmartre, or Montparnasse, which was rapidly becoming de rigueur for lovers of nightlife. Picasso, Matisse and all the young artists congregated there and shared with the liberal bourgeois public a love of things sensual and primitive. The collections of erotic photos of the era show naked women in classical poses against backgrounds of Roman vases and painted landscape; but they also contain a high proportion of photographs of nubile young African and Arab women in pornographic poses.

  The Exhibition of African Art caused a sensation in the Paris of 1905, and inspired a wide range of artworks, among them Picasso’s Desmoiselles d’Avignon. And Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes reflected the new fashion in its scenography, its costumes and its choreography.