Tango

by Mike Gonzalez

  Yet if sexual commerce became less visible and less tolerated, its most fervid expression simply stepped across the lines of class and the physical frontiers between urban barrios and made its way into the wider world. It was helped by Glücksmann’s energetic support for the genre, of course, as well as by the advent of radio, though sheet music continued to be sold in large quantities well into the 1930s too.

  But perhaps the most active guarantee of tango’s survival was the emergence of a new form – tango-song and its particular poetry. Although there were already recognized lyricists in the tango world, most notably Ángel Villoldo, tango remained a music for dancing. Yet by 1917–18, the lyrics were beginning to become as well known and as enthusiastically received as its music. Tango had found a voice.

  THE SINGERS AND THE SONGS

  Pascual Contursi’s ‘Mi noche triste’ (My sad night), written in 1917, was not the first tango with words. ‘Dame la lata’ was written in the 1880s and by the following decade verses proliferated – but they were, like the early blues, largely invitations to sex couched in not very subtle metaphors: ‘Touch me the way I like it’, ‘Shake my curtains’, and many others like them. The early twentieth century produced the first lyricists, particularly Ángel Villoldo, who injected some social comment into these early songs, as in his ‘El carrero y el cochero’ (The carter and the coachman) and the emblematic ‘El porteñito’ of 1903. But his most famous tango, ‘El Choclo’ only acquired lyrics some two decades after its first publication in 1910.

  ‘Mi noche triste’ is universally acknowledged as the first of a new genre, the tango-canción or tango-song. Its accompaniment was the music of the Vieja Guardia of Roberto Firpo and Vicente Greco whose expanded ensembles still played for dancing. But by 1917, tango was becoming familiar and ubiquitous in Buenos Aires, as the sounds emerging from the elegant cabarets echoed the music of the street organs that had taken tango to the pavements of the city.

  Al paso tardo de un pobre viejo

  Puebla de notas el arrabal,

  Con un concepto de vidrios rotos

  El organito crepuscular.

  Dándole vueltas a la manija

  Un hombre rengo marcha detrás,

  Mientras la dura pata de palo

  Marca del tango el compás.

  En las notas de esa musiquita

  Hay no sé qué vaga sensación,

  Que el barrio parece

  Impregnarse todo de emoción.

  Y es porque son tantos los recuerdos

  Que a su paso despertando va,

  Que llena las almas

  Con un gran deseo de llorar.

  To the slow gait of a poor old man / Music fills the street / With a sound like broken glass / It is the street organ at dusk. / Turning the handle / a one-legged man walks along / his wooden leg / beating time to the music.

  There is in that music / a strange vague feeling / an emotion / that pervades the barrio. / Because, as he passes, he awakens / So many memories / filling the hearts of those who hear his music with a desire to weep.

  (‘Organito de la tarde’, Street organ in the evening

  – Cátulo andJosé González Castillo, 1924)

  The nascent film industry was also discovering tango – its dramatic choreography on the silent screen was accompanied by the tango musicians in the pit. In the musical theatre of the day, called the sainete, tango had won its permanent place. And Glücksmann’s work had expanded the audience for tango. But if all of this had won tango its legitimate place in the new Argentina, just as the communities from which it emerged had won recognition by dint of struggle and organization as citizens of the country, the tango was changing in this new reality.

  Its words were no longer mere accompaniment to the dance, or cheerful interludes. Contursi and the outstanding lyricists of his generation, above all Enrique Santos Discépolo but also Celedonio Flores, Cátulo Castillo, Eduardo Arolas and others, were creating a new poetry of urban experience, a symbolic universe that would bind together the disparate elements of the new city. Contursi’s lyrics, to Samuel Castriota’s music, would soon be sung at the Teatro Maipo by Carlos Gardel, who became the embodiment of tango, its first superstar and its first martyr.

  Gardel’s own transformation, from the singer with the folk duo Gardel–Razzano presenting traditional rural music and dressed in the gaucho costumes of the Argentine pampa, to the suave streetwise figure in suit and homburg, mirrored the metamorphosis of tango itself. And with that change came a new cast of characters.

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  ‘Mi noche triste’ is more than the first tango-song; it is also in many ways the sourcebook for thousands of tangos that follow. The inhabitants of the tango world were prostitutes, pimps and tricksters, and the immigrants who shared their limited space in the newly populated barrios like La Boca and Nueva Pompeya, the crowded arrabales of the city outskirts and the conventillos wedged among the old mansions in the city centre. The scenario of the tango drama was the street, the cafés, the dance halls (academias and cafés), and the brothels. The props were streetlamps, trams, bottles of champagne or cheap liquor, and bar stools aplenty.

  The scenario and its protagonists will reappear countless times, amid the nostalgic evocations and endless expressions of regret and yearning that echo through the tango. And it will establish too the ambiguous and contradictory relationships around which the words and the music dance. This is a poetry born of a masculinity fearful of its loss, in a world where men outnumber women, yet where sexual desire and the search for love give women the power to inflict pain, albeit they too are without social or collective power.

  The singer on this sad night is a man abandoned looking back to a time of happiness now lost. His weakness and confusion are the consequences of the actions of a woman who has left him, a milonguera who has probably been tempted, as so many are in the world of tango, by rich men who have money but few illusions, and who are willing to pay for her company (the bacán). Yet the picture is more complex still. In this world of immigrants and prostitutes sharing the small pool of light from the streetlamp, surrounded by shadows, all are powerless.

  El conventillo luce su traje de etiqueta;

  las paicas van llegando, dispuestas a mostrar

  que hay pilchas domingueras, que hay porte y hay silueta,

  a los garabos reos deseosos de tanguear.

  La orquesta mistonguera musita un tango fulo,

  los reos se desgranan buscando, entre el montón,

  la princesita rosa de ensortijado rulo

  que espera a su Romeo como una bendición.

  El dueño de la casa

  atiende a las visitas

  los pibes del convento

  gritan en derredor

  jugando a la rayuela,

  al salto, a las bolitas,

  mientras un gringo curda

  maldice al Redentor.

  El fuelle melodioso termina un tango papa.

  Una pebeta hermosa saca del corazón

  un ramo de violetas, que pone en la solapa

  del garabito guapo, dueño de su ilusión.

  Termina la milonga. Las minas retrecheras

  salen con sus bacanes, henchidas de emoción,

  llevando de esperanzas un cielo en sus ojeras

  y un mundo de cariño dentro del corazón.

  The slum is in its Sunday best / the girls arrive all ready to show off / Their best clothes, their figure and their style / and the lads all ready to dance a tango / The dance band plays a simple tango / the lads rush to find among the crowd / the pink princess with curls in her hair / waiting to be blessed by her Romeo.

  The owner of the house / attends to his visitors / the kids from the slum / Rush about shouting / playing hopscotch / jumping, rolling marbles / While a drunken foreigner / berates the Redeemer.

  The tuneful bandoneon ends a fine tango / a lovely girl pulls from her breast / a bunch of violets which she pins to the lapel / of the handsome boy who is the object of her
dreams / The dance ends, the girls / leave with their rich boys, swelling with emotion / their eyes full of hope / and their hearts full of love.

  (‘Oro muerto’, Dead gold – Juan Raggi, 1926)

  The innocence of the street party is as brief as the tango itself. The girls leaving joyfully with their rich boyfriends (their bacanes) may well be leaving the conventillo for a brothel like the one at 348 Corrientes Street, commemorated in Carlos César Lenzi’s emblematic tango ‘A media luz’ (In the half light) of 1926. Here, in the shadowy places of transition between the city and the barrios by the port, men could come for tea or cocktails, comfort, a dance or sex, in the discreet second-floor flat furnished tastefully and expensively from Harrod’s store on Florida Street. It offers discretion (there is no concierge), comfort, drugs and love – at a price. Even here the joy is short-lived, the ecstasy a three-minute dance, the roles played out by each partner the aspiration of people without roots. The pining voice that sings ‘Mi noche triste’ is almost certainly the pimp, the smart compadrito who will have watched with satisfaction as his woman danced and made love with others. His love was also his hope of redemption and survival in a world with very little morality.

  There are others in the theatre of tango; the Mother, remembered and evoked as a woman incapable of deceit, loyal and loving, is located in some other, previous world, in which the order of things was uncorrupted. The Barman who listens endlessly in silence to drunken laments from young men for whom this is almost always the ‘last binge’ before dying. There is the rival, or the Rival, another pimp fighting for the milonguera, or the rich man slumming in the barrio who tempts and tantalizes her with promises of wealth and stability. And the Madam, herself once a dancer or a prostitute, who now shares her wisdom with the young girls she gathers round her at establishments like the one on Corrientes Street.

  There is a supporting cast too, to watch and sometimes to sympathize, sometimes to gloat. The Friend, who is loyal and concerned, but unable to alter a destiny that he sees unfolding before him. There is the Gambler, whose most famous song is Gardel and Le Pera’s ‘Por una cabeza’ (On the nose), the embodiment of the yearning for a quick fortune that is the key to another world. And there is the Dying Lover, the Lady of the Camelias, so familiar from late-nineteenth-century literature.

  Man is the victim, though his innocence is certainly open to question. The tango interweaves all these stories, in an elegant ballet of shifting fortunes and moving powers.

  Contursi certainly established an idiom, an atmosphere and a universe of feeling for tango with ‘Mi noche triste’. The lament for lost love, the sense of betrayal, the impotence of the song’s protagonist will endlessly recur in one form or another.

  ‘You left me with my soul in tatters . . .’, he sings. For the tango ‘is the complaints book of the arrabal’.6 Woman (with the exception of the Mother of course) is the betrayer here – the one who buys and sells love. Contursi had introduced us earlier to the cynical woman in his ‘Champagne tango’ (1914).

  Se acabaron esas minas

  Que siempre se conformaban

  Con lo que el bacán les daba

  Si era bacán de verdad.

  Hoy sólo quieren vestidos

  Y riquísimas alhajas,

  Coches de capota baja

  Pa’ pasear por la ciudad.

  Nadie quiere conventillo

  Ni ser pobre costurera,

  Ni tampoco andar fulera . . .

  Sólo quieren aparentar

  Ser amigo de fulano

  Que tenga mucho vento

  Que alquile departamento

  Que la lleve al Pigalle.

  Those girls don’t exist any more / the ones that just accepted things / took whatever the rich man gave them / if he really was so rich. / Now they just want dresses / and fancy jewels / convertibles to ride in / around the city.

  No one wants to live in conventillos / nor be a poor seamstress / or be less than well dressed. / They just want to put on airs / be best friends with so-and-so / who’s got plenty of money / rents them a flat / and takes them to the Pigalle.

  (‘Champagne Tango – Pascual Contursi, 1914)

  How very far this all seems from the world of the dance, where the man controls, manipulates and drives his woman, expresses his domination of her, and she twists and turns to the touch of his hand – sensual, seductive yes, but never leading. Yet here, in the tango-canción, the tango-song, the woman is cynical and manipulative, and the man, the compadrito, who lived from her earnings in the past, now presents himself as the victim. The transgressive, amoral universe of the underworld provides the new tango-song with its dramatis personae, but its moral universe seems to have turned upside down. Now the tangos are ‘male confessions that talk overwhelmingly about women’.7

  As he protects himself with a facade of steps that demonstrates perfect control [the male tanguero] contemplates his absolute lack of control in the face of history and destiny.8

  This is one interpretation – that tango is an expression of a general sense of alienation and powerlessness, an echo of the marginality of the immigrant. But there is another text at work in these sometimes melodramatic pieces. The man laments his impotence before the wiles of women, women who, as Contursi notes, are unwilling to accept the life of decent poverty, sacrifice and self-abnegation that awaits them in the slums and clapboard houses of the conventillos and the arrabales.

  Their unwillingness to accept a wretched fate perhaps reflected the atmosphere of emancipation spreading among the middle-class women of Buenos Aires. Their attendance at the afternoon thés dansants was more combative and challenging than their thoroughly respectable equivalents in New York. It was said that the women of Buenos Aires snorted cocaine and drank enthusiastically with their part-time afternoon gigolos, just as their husbands did in the evenings with the milongueras. The symbolic universe of the new Argentina, with its emphasis on family and decency, was in some sense enshrined in the Radical Party, which increasingly came to represent these values. Yet women seemed increasingly unwilling to passively accept their role in this new arrangement, be they middle-class women or the working-class girls whose route out of the barrio passed through the dance halls and cabarets. It is a curious contradiction that the growing number of women employed in factories, shops and increasingly in offices expressed fewer concerns with independence and liberation, despite the level of organization and militancy in the working class in general.9 For even the anarchists saw the role of women in similar ways to social organizations – as mothers and supporters of male activity.

  Rosita Quiroga, one of the early group of women tango singers, described the trajectory of a typical milonguera, responding to the criticism implicit in so many of these early tangos.

  Yo de mi barrio era la piba más bonita

  En un colegio de monjas me eduqué

  Y aunque mis viejos no tenían mucha guita

  Con familias bacanas me traté.

  Y por culpa de este trato abacanado,

  Ser niña bien fue mi única ilusión

  Y olvidando por completo mi pasado,

  A un magnate le entregué mi corazón.

  Por su porte y su trato distinguido,

  Por las cosas que me mintió al oído,

  No creí que pudiera ser malvado

  Un muchacho tan correcto y educado.

  Sin embargo me indujo el mal hombre,

  Con promesas de darme su nombre,

  A dejar mi hogar abandonado

  Para ir a vivir a su lado.

  Y por eso que me vida se desliza

  Entre el tango y el champán del cabaret;

  Mi dolor se confunde en mi risa

  Porque a reír mi dolor me acostumbré.

  Y si encuentro algún otario que pretenda

  Por el oro mis amores conseguir,

  Yo lo dejo sin un cobre pa que aprenda

  Y me pague lo que aquel me hizo sufrir.

  Hoy bailo el tango, soy molinera

&nbs
p; Me llaman loca y no sé qué;

  Soy flor de fango, una cualquiera,

  Culpa del hombre que me engañó.

  Y entre las luces de mil colores

  Y la alegría del cabaret,

  Vendo caricias y vendo amores

  Para olvidar a aquel que se fue.

  I was the prettiest girl in my district / I went to a convent school / And though my parents didn’t have much money / I spent time with rich families. / And because of that contact with wealthy people / all I wanted was to be well off / and forgetting my past completely / I gave my heart to a wealthy magnate. / His manner and the way he treated me / and the lies he whispered in my ear / Made me think he could do nothing wrong / he was too well brought up.

  Yet that bad man / promised to give me his name / persuaded me to abandon my home / and live with him. That’s why now I live my life / between the tango and champagne cabaret / my pain flows into my laughter / and I’ve got used to laughing off the pain.

  And if I ever meet a man / who tries to win my heart with gold / I’ll leave him without a penny to his name to teach him a lesson / and to get back at him for what the other put me through. I dance the tango now, I am a cancan girl / they call me crazy and other things; / I come from the lower depths, / just another victim of the man who took her for a ride. And among the coloured lights / and the joy of the cabaret, / I sell my kisses and I sell my love / to forget the man who left me.

  (De mi barrio, In my district – Roberto Goyheneche, 1920–25)

  Enter the Milonguita, herself a victim of the men who have abused her, on whom she takes her revenge. The tango lyricists warn her that all pleasure is fleeting, and that this dissolute public life will soon end when youth and beauty fade. But there is no road back from the life she has chosen, or the carpe diem it implies – living for the day like ‘La Mina del Ford’ – the girl in the Ford.

  The man who suffers an unrequited love for this fallen girl, so easily seduced by wealth and glamour, is for the most part alone and abandoned, suffering in eloquent images the consequences of his loyalty and authentic love. Yet surely this is the same compadrito who just shortly before had boasted of his prowess with the knife and his ability to cheat and con vulnerable visitors to the lower depths. His background, as we have seen, was rural in most cases. He too was an immigrant, an exile from the changing countryside cast into the world of the arrabal, where survival was a matter of skill and ruthlessness. The arts he learned transformed him into a pimp – isolated, individualistic, using his women to feather his own nest. He never worked, yet found the resources to dress in self-conscious imitation of the upper classes.