Tango Lessons_A Memoir

by Meghan Flaherty

  And yet the full origins of tango in both Buenos Aires and nearby Montevideo went largely unrecorded, history at that time being loath to speak for those beneath its writers’ notice. The sex myth of tango is the genesis that sticks.

  The dance is often called a “three-minute love affair.” You cuddle into a stranger’s chest and take his hand in yours; you wrap your arms around his shoulders. He puts his arm around your waist. You are close enough to feel his breath, and smell his skin and sweat. Your legs will stretch with his. You’ll push the full length of you against him, to receive him, and together you will move to music. Rarely would you get so close to someone you did not intend to sleep with. It is fantasy. Every stage of eros, from flirtation through intention to discovery, all the way to consummation, resolution, disappointment. This affair, for better or for worse, expires with the song. The partners part, and everyone goes home unscathed.

  Most people find this terribly romantic. I, however, had no idea what an affair was supposed to feel like. I had no idea how I was meant to act. All I had were muscle memories of men who didn’t seem to want me, men whom I had chosen, as my mum suspected, because of my own deep ambivalence toward sex.

  The close embrace for me was but the means to another, less suggestive end. It was not romance; it was a skill to learn, or plural skills: Balance. Patience. Acquiescence. How to lose myself in music—not how to make love standing up. I tried on a leader’s body like prosthesis, like a prop. I did as Alfredo had instructed me, and closed my eyes—ignoring their cologne, their hummus breath, their Velcro cheeks. If we each did it right, we ceased to be.

  The more I told my mother, the more suspicious she became, as if tango were some sect of forty-something good-for-nothings out to bed her daughter. I opted not to tell her about the time I’d felt a rise in someone’s pant leg during class. A fluke—and over before I’d even comprehended what was brushing up against my thigh. I’d ignored it; so could she. I’d send her videos instead, as if to say, “Look, Ma, how beautiful this is!” And she would tell me that it looked like ninjas trying to trip each other.

  “I just don’t see it,” she replied. She was under the impression, bless her heart, that tango was just another distraction thwarting my inevitable path to greatness. When I visited, I played the music for her, the Di Sarli, the Canaro, early Pugliese, the irregular rhythms like a heart under duress.

  “Just listen to that, Ma,” I said. “The bittersweet, the pain.” She shrugged.

  “It’s kind of creepy,” she repeated, in the tone that meant her words contained a lesson. My tendency for reinvention had her perpetually ill at ease. She’d watched me try to parrot normal for too long, and fail. She’d watched me accept deep weirdnesses in others and internalize the blame. She’d watched me disembody, shrink. You can’t just ignore what happened to you, Meghan, she would say. It’s part of who you are. It did not seem healthy to her that I allowed myself a body on the dance floor but nowhere else. Then again, she also knew that tango, to me, was all wrapped up in youth and far-off Buenos Aires, and that it made me feel bold and brave. These were perhaps her best ideals, worth nurturing at whatever cost. She, more than anyone, wanted me to find a way out of the valley of my quarter life. “Just be careful, Meg,” was all she said.

  There wasn’t time to dwell on who or what I touched; there was ever more to do. We’d built up to the proper turns: the molinete grapevine circle (stepping front, side, back, side) that constitutes a giro. The molinete takes its name from windmills, children’s pinwheels, turnstiles, and you see each in the turn. Either partner does it, sometimes both. Turning around a leader, you feel like the center closing in. When he turns with you—the pair of you like interlocking cogs—it feels centrifugal, as though you’re held together only by the fact of turning constantly away.

  We moved back to the practice elbows as we learned to turn, then tried again in close embrace. Switch partners, the maestro would command, and each follower would make her merry way along to the next body. The close embrace became a constant tactile game. Learning surfaces and textures as they moved, together and apart. Such concentration on my body that I hardly had one anymore. And on these other bodies: no longer strangers, but not yet fully whole. A shirt, with sleeves rolled up. A disembodied forearm. A familiar collar, or the strange plane of a sternum. The vaguest sense of each before the maestro interrupted. Switch.

  Compared to the embrace, the music required very little of me. I closed my eyes and listened to Di Sarli, sweet Di Sarli, who still dominated class. His music was gallant, chillingly romantic, and patient where so many other tangos seemed to rush. It was steady enough to learn to. A kind of siren song to us beginners. His strings aspired to heights of glory and attained them. If I was having a three-minute love affair with anyone, it was with those strings. They sang together in one sweetly wistful voice. The effect was both heavy and buoyant, like a weighted bunch of flowers.

  Tango sometimes felt like that—a mix of sadness and exhilaration. Inflating the balloon of me, then pulling deeper down. High and low. I was lonely going in, then even lonelier. And when I changed my shoes and stumbled back out onto city streets, I felt both that I was exiting an underworld, and that I had flown.

  We learned the sacada next, a movement that cannot be mastered without complete commitment to the concept of the weight transfer. Learning the sacada is partly a diagnostic test to determine whether you are ready for the gancho and the other cutesy stuff that follows. The leader leads a step and, as you move with one leg, he interrupts your trailing, weightless leg, displacing it. He has taken your place and you’ve continued on your path, propelled by the extra energy of his intrusion. If you do it right—if you commit—that free leg starts to fly. You’re moved before you have the chance to overthink the movement.

  The sacada seemed to tie it all together. As though tango, like a heavy-booted force, had stepped into my life, displacing something, filling empty spaces left behind. Knocking through each other’s legs, my classmates and I were on the verge of something powerful. It felt as though we’d finally disturbed the sleeping cobra at the core of tango; she was not awake yet, but she stirred.

  That night I came home thrilled. “I did my first sacada!” I crowed, trying to demonstrate with the refrigerator door as I made myself a sandwich.

  “That’s great, Biscuit,” Peter said, stuffing his hand into a box of cereal. He was not uncaring—just indifferent.

  I had, by then, stopped asking him to join me. I didn’t need or want him there. Tango class became a wedge between us—this thing we couldn’t share. I don’t think he felt left behind. My absence was louder, more conspicuous to me. I felt like we were schoolchildren; I was the pal whose family had moved away and, every time I returned for a visit, found that we’d grown imperceptibly apart. But I kept going. Tango was publicly private, like performing. It scratched that same itch: To be myself as someone else. To feel both acknowledged and anonymous. And even though it wasn’t glamorous, even though I wasn’t very good, it seemed to promise answers to unspoken questions, like an oracle on heels.

  I still felt small and harried in the awkward interval after work. I still looked at the eighty-dollar monthly charge and thought it should be saved, or spent more wisely in the name of gender parity. But every week, I forced myself to go. I spent two months of Tuesday evenings in the studio, closing my eyes whenever possible to listen to the hiss and crackle of the old recordings, to let myself be driven forward by the bandoneón. Perhaps my fellow acolytes and I had nothing in common but our shared clumsiness, and the simple act of showing up. For fifty minutes, tango held us captive. Maybe our motives differed. Or maybe everybody there was every bit as lost as I was. Maybe the music, in its incurable loneliness, made us all feel less alone.

  Chapter Five

  some weeks in, the maestro noticed me waiting outside class doing the Sunday crossword and struck up a conversation. Flattered me. Offered me private lessons in exchange for copyediting his soon-to-
be-self-published book. I said yes before I learned the lessons would take place in his living room, which had been converted to a dance studio. “Horas de vuelo,” he said, “is all you need. Just flying time.”

  The first email he sent included an invitation to keep warm with him over the weekend. Smiley face. I responded that my boyfriend wouldn’t take too kindly to my keeping warm with someone else, smiley face, and thought the subject closed. We continued like that—him perversely, me naïvely—for three months. My mother had warned me young. “People tell you who they are,” she said, “within the first five minutes. It’s up to you whether to take them at their word.”

  His book was an adult fairy tale, starring himself as king—part political screed, part romance, part spiritual manifesto. I wanted as much flying time as I could earn, so I spent good portions of my workday rearranging punctuation for him. He said he saw “enormous promise” in me, and would often ask to meet me at the práctica, a once-a-week evening practice session at the studio where students not yet ready for the social dance floor cut their social dancing teeth among the more advanced. The vibe was casual, though still intimidating, and the lighting dim. I’d been once, and spent the entire two hours slinking along the wainscoting, waiting, terrified of being asked to dance. With the maestro, I could dance for hours. His leading was coercive, clear. He danced me—like the old tangueros, albeit more aggressively. As a teacher, he was good enough to compensate for my mistakes. This made me look much better than I was. For the first time, I felt that I was dancing. Isolated movements started making sense: the triangles formed and re-formed by the feet, the mechanics of the partnered cat walk, the way the turn should flow. I began even to sweat. A rush of air kissed my temples as we stalked the room in long and tiger-muscled strides.

  We danced above my level. Because the maestro was ostentatious, he yanked me through advanced sequences as the music moved him. He loved Piazzolla, late Troilo, all the really heavy-handed stuff. When he started holding on too tightly, bystanders began to notice. Suddenly he’d whip my leg to hook behind his and we’d assume that sexy pose you’ve seen on tango postcards. I hated him for that. I was a beginner and I knew my place. I didn’t want my fellow students thinking I was too big for my britches. Or that I was cuckolding my inattentive boyfriend with my tango teacher.

  I said nothing. I felt I couldn’t—not without upsetting the equilibrium of our exchange. Free lessons, flying time. I took what I was given. Once a week, I’d race to his apartment out in somewhere-between-the-airports Queens for training sessions. He taught me everything he could, including moves I hadn’t earned: hooked ganchos, stage-worthy lifts and dips. Afterward, he made pierogi.

  We became close over the course of our three-month exchange. It started innocently enough. I gave him panting, adulatory thanks; he gave me uncomfortable praise. He called me his guru, his best student, and—in a twist of fatherly awkwardness that confused me deeply—his princesa. He told me he felt blessed to have me. I told him, and meant it, that I felt the same. He didn’t understand my meaning; he called me a tease. And so began the second of many stages of negotiation. My answer to his offers was still no. Did I want to go away together for the weekend? No. Did I want him to take me on an all-expenses-paid vacation somewhere halfway around the world? Well, yes, but firmly: no.

  He began referring to his book as “the Baby,” which made our interactions even stranger. He said a man had to be very careful not to fall in love with a midwife such as me. He called me gorgeous. He called me kind, intelligent, and good. He alternated between suggestive parlay and sucking what he could from me to help his book. Could I compare him to Orwell, or The Alchemist, or Dante Alighieri, perhaps, in an effusive blurb? Would my mother like to write him an online review? Would I, perhaps, like to launch my own publicity campaign? He was a little like the kid you play with who wants to script your make-believe, and is forever trying to mash the plastic of your dolls together in some caricature of sex. You think the storyline is moving one way, and then—bam—the clap of doll on doll, cavorting madly in his hands.

  I didn’t notice this, of course. I saw only a learned man who appeared for all the world to worship me. He spoke six languages—and wrote to me in three. Expansive emails about destiny, both mine and his, preying on my frantic need for fate to unveil something still in store for me that I had not foreseen. Sometimes he wrote about me in third person, his princesa. “How beautiful she is,” he wrote. “How excited she gets that she is in the Tango, like in a dream.” Oh, how beautiful she is. The words drowned out my better judgment. It didn’t matter to me that he was not the one I wanted saying them. I couldn’t understand what I felt then, oscillating between icky and elated; I had no context for it. I wanted his attentions to be innocent—and when they weren’t, I tried to sand them down or laugh them off until they were. I wanted to feel desirable, without the fight to fend off his desire. But he was intuitive, excessive, slick. And when it came to Peter, the maestro smelled a rat. Perhaps some part of him did not believe me when I told him I was spoken for. Perhaps I knew I wasn’t, really. Perhaps part of me wanted to run my fingers through that idea of fire, to see if it would hurt.

  Thrice he tried to kiss me. Thrice he was rebuked. Each time, he stormed away, then sent apologetic missives about how we finally understood each other, and how refreshing it was, for a change, to find a woman who said “no” when she meant “no.” For that alone, I should have spat straight in his face. Instead, each time he asked forgiveness, I complied—as I did every time he battered boundaries I had asserted. I accepted his apologies and assumed—at last!—we understood each other.

  I rode the E train for an hour each way, to test our truce. He met me at the door in sweatpants and insisted that we dance in socks. He muscled me around him like a lasso, turning, front, side, back, side. I squeezed shut my eyes and spun, and felt the old blind thrill of Buenos Aires, only faster, more acute. Dancing, the treaties held. The worst he ever did was hold a pose one extra beat to admire the figure we made in the mirror.

  We danced to the Essential Leonard Cohen songbook as much as to anything from the Golden Age, and though the lyrics didn’t fit, I began to feel as though the maestro and his studio existed only ’cross the borders of my secret life. Mum called him my Svengali. He took it as a compliment. Our Grand Friendship, he said. The perfect team. He accused me later of harboring an archetypal father complex. He was right. “This is something you might want to start working on,” he wrote, and warned me against predaceous tango men.

  He held my hand once, driving me home. It felt almost paternal, the way he’d laid his palm on mine over the console. He was jabbering about love and Aztec gods and semiology, shouting over the highway din, and driving like a madman into midtown. My limbs were singing from the dancing we’d just done, and the trucks and limos whizzing by were just warm wind blown through the open window. I felt sixteen again, hitchhiking through the north of Argentina on the back bed of a camión. I let him hold my hand. Despite the road rage and the unsolicited advances, I told myself that he was harmless, just brutish enough to make me feel alive, but not at risk. If I stopped speaking to him every time he made a trifling pass, I’d lose that. I wanted the channel open, believing we could indeed forge that gran amistad without sex or interference that I’d read about in books from bygone days. “It’s better this way,” I wrote him later, with my dress-up wisdom, “and infinitely less trite.” I turned a blind eye from the covert and overt threats of him because he made me feel like I mattered. He made me feel seen.

  He had me in the perfect trap—grateful for every crumb of tango he bestowed, constantly apologizing to him for his lechery, and guiltier every day for driving him to it. I told him things I shouldn’t have, unintentionally misleading things, like: there was nothing I would rather do than dance with him. Which had the benefit of being true. Tango nights were now the highlight of my week, and he had named himself the gatekeeper. He was the only person I could talk to about tang
o; he seemed both to know this and exploit it. He was the first person I told when I acquired my red suede shoes. “Good,” he’d said. “Shoes mean you’re serious.” His tone was often professorial, as if to maintain dominance, his mastery of me. Half of me bristled at the implied paternalism, the other reveled in having one more teacher to impress. One more good report card. Proof of my progress, however small.

  There is a song, a tango, to explain those first few months of dancing. The secrecy of my double life, and the fragility. “Tu íntimo secreto,” another by Di Sarli, became my song. “La dicha es un castillo con un puente de cristal,” sings Jorge Durán, amidst a sweet cascade of glory strings. Bliss is a castle with a glass bridge—and of the thousands of us who cross, only two or three will ever make it there. The song asks for surrender: “entrégate al amor,” it begs, and I was eager to, having always found my bearings best inside the prettiness of other people’s words. The song also cautions, “tu íntimo secreto a nadie le confíes”: trust no one with your secret. Dancing was my íntimo secreto, rather than some great, clandestine love. I was going to cross that crystal drawbridge into bliss. Svengali was my toll.

  After my Basic cycle was complete, he encouraged me to register for his Choreography and Performance class, which would devise and present a routine for tango’s rotation in the studio’s monthly showcase. When my assigned partner, obdurate and aggressive, quit the workshop after only one rehearsal—a rehearsal at which he’d misjudged the placement of my feet and accidentally sucker-kicked me to the floor—the maestro swooped in to take his place. Should I have been surprised?