Tango Lessons_A Memoir

by Meghan Flaherty

  I took a private lesson with a touring superstar from Buenos Aires. An Adonis with taut brown pectorals and a ponytail. His name was Cesar. It was just the two of us in the rented studio.

  “Let’s start,” he said, laying my right palm on his chest as he began to walk. I tried to slow my nerves, anticipate his steps—show just how pliant and responsive I had learned to be. “Do not be passive,” he corrected. “Never only follow.” Being pliant and responsive was not enough; he wanted presence. He wanted to feel my weight, resistance in my legs. We did not turn. He barely led an ocho. Instead, we walked. He coaxed me to elongate my steps. “Long, like a cat,” he said, “a panther.” He stopped me in the center of the room. He told me how he had been a dancer since the age of five, and how his father always told him, “Cesar, you must walk.” Not once, but “fifty thousand times.” “This we must do,” he said, to comprehend the dance. El caminito. He smiled at me as though I were his little sister, then offered me his arm.

  Cesar was equable, relaxed, striding the room in jeans and a sleeveless undershirt. He tucked his hair behind his ear. He sweated, but did not betray the strain. He was the sexiest man I’d ever been in a room with, alone or otherwise, yet there was nothing of seduction there. Beneath my palm, his chest was nothing but a well-made object, as though he were the bust of some forgotten warrior, his skin cool and made of bronze.

  He danced. I listened. The afternoon was late; this was his last lesson after hours of teaching. We left the lights off as the sun bled out of Chelsea from the bottom up. Dusk curtained the dusty windows of the studio. The hardwood floor faded gold to grey and shadows clouded in the corners of the mirror. A boom box played the same Di Sarli loop of slow and simple practice tunes.

  “It is a conversation,” he said, arranging us in practice elbows. This was dancing with a jungle river. My body next to his was soft and reedy; he was a flood I was not strong enough to stand against. I made an effort to remind myself to breathe, to engage my deepest muscles just to stay afloat. To keep my core and cattails strong.

  I thought back to dancing with the maestro, how giddy I’d felt being tossed around. It hadn’t taken much to topple me—a bit of current, the lascivious attentions of a goatish sixty-something man. How feebly I’d stood my ground. Cesar wanted none of that. He didn’t want to dance me. He wanted backtalk, sass. He wanted a response.

  “You must always have a secret,” he said, and I racked my brain for one—something better, deeper than the toe-sucking that haunted me. And less deep, perhaps, than buried childhood shame. None of my girlhood heartbreaks seemed appropriate. But I didn’t want my secret to be the mere fact that I didn’t have one—that, among all these three-minute love affairs, I was a fraud.

  “We both have things to say,” he said. “Our betrayals and our broken loves. We tell them to each other with our bodies, but I don’t know yours and you will not know mine.” We communicate purely what we cannot understand.

  He moved us into close embrace; I settled in his arms, where I felt young and sexless. Like a maiden witnessing a tumble in the hay, who stands there dumbly and transfixed, a milk pail in her hand. I bit my lip and danced with extra might. Perhaps my frustration with my skill and with myself would pass for lover’s rage. It got darker and we walked again. I stood, pushed back—rather than merely waiting to react.

  “Two steps,” he said. “And then you cross.” His strides were sprint length, superhuman. I labored to match his pace. Hypnotic. I perspired, working latent muscles in my legs—each time pushing harder through the toes, the thighs. My knees bent to keep me rooted to the ground. I did what he did, as they say, backwards and in heels. Got lost in it. We both were drenched in sweat. “Two steps, and cross.” The CD skittered to a stop, but we kept going. The room went properly dark.

  “Good,” he said. “Much better.”

  We sat in silence as we changed our shoes. It was late April; New York was heating up the oven of its summer sidewalks, but the nights were cool. In the elevator, Cesar told me I had tango in my soul. This was nonsense, but I took it as my missing benediction. More than my hundred dollars’ worth. Technique notwithstanding, I felt I’d been anointed. I had magic in me; I didn’t need to siphon from the maestro. I just needed to tease it out.

  We parted. He went west and I went east, letting the chill air dry my forehead sweat. I pulled on my denim jacket and scribbled scraps of dialogue into my notebook. What Cesar Coelho had said. I wanted to remember how it felt: not being so acquiescent. For the first time in my life, I felt like I could be a woman, not just someone who pretended she could move like one. I contained mysteries, secrets, and unsatiated lusts, though no idea what to do with them.

  Chapter Seven

  peter assumed it was a phase. Watching, as I continued to venture out, toting my ever rattier pair of shoes, the suede rubbed thin and lusterless. Sometimes he’d ask me not to go. I asked, again, for him to come with me—just one lesson, forty-five minutes of his life—to see my secret world, but he refused. He wrinkled his face and shook his head with more fervor than he’d ever felt for me. Likewise I had more desire to trip away to tango class than I would ever feel for him.

  For the next two months, I started frequenting the weekend prácticas: Saturday mornings and Sunday afternoons. Saturday mornings were hosted by Mariela in a big, bright midtown studio. There were baskets full of chopped-up bodega croissants, and coffee fresh on everybody’s breath. People were dressed for dog walks, shopping, lunch dates, or the gym. Everyone moved a little sleepily, sometimes with the bruise of last night’s makeup visible around the eyes. I went as a stranger, paid my ten dollars at the door, and waited, as I’d been instructed, to be asked. I danced with older men, aware now of the privilege of my youth. I noticed the row of chairs along the wall, and the line of older women sitting there in flowing pastel skirts and strappy shoes, waiting for dances. I smiled with contrition as I took the hand of an approaching upright gentleman who clutched my waist and drew me to his bony chest. He hoisted us into the walk. This turned out to be dismal. His strides were too upright, mincing, short. Instead of leading a molinete, he simply eased me a few inches out of the embrace, cocked his head, and cleared his throat. I took the hint and grapevine-turned my way around him, and then he pulled me back in with a bump of breastplates. I muscled through three songs, then plopped myself down on the bench whence he had plucked me. This was going to require more patience and determination than I’d thought. The bench ladies seemed to smirk in unison in my direction.

  Sundays down in SoHo were the same, though I knew a few more people, and got a few more dances that felt worthy of the name. Mariela wasn’t shouting from the sidelines to remind me to use my heel. It was friendly. Wholesome, day-lit tango. Tango without the risk of sexual misunderstanding. Spring sun streamed in, warm and drowsy, through the open windows; tango strains spilled out onto the street. This was not a phase. It was devotional. A project to which I’d pledged myself whose scope, I knew, exceeded every limit I could see from where I stood. So I went, alone, to prácticas, and took my licks. I did my drills, biding my time.

  I took a breath and signed up for an Intermediate class cycle with Enzo. There weren’t as many ballerinas as I’d thought. He nodded to me as he entered, skulking in with half a smile. He spoke softly, with nothing of Mariela’s husky admonitions, or the self-important bluster of Svengali.

  “When you take a woman’s weight, you have to care for her,” he said, describing the embrace. “If you take her off her axis, even for a second,” he continued, “do not make her stop before you put her back.”

  A follower’s axis in tango is her line of balance, the single beam of gravity down through her feet. When the leader shifts her weight from one foot to another, her trunk, her axis, comes along. When walking, turning, standing still, she stays on it, held up only by herself. But there are moves and figures that will take her off: volcadas, colgadas, and certain other moments wherein two bodies make la carpa, a tent, and shar
e a single center. Apilado style, which translates to “stacked” or “piled up,” is built on this. The partners plant their feet, then lean toward each other, touching torsos, sharing that one point of balance in between them as they dance. That center, whether for a single move or an entire song, requires trust. In tango, it is considered gauche to make a woman lose her balance. Insofar as it is her job to maintain herself, with her core and cattails, so to speak, you mustn’t mess with her. You must restore her to her axis if and when you pull her off. These are the negotiations at the heart of the embrace. Afterward, in real life, a follower may be treated like she doesn’t matter; but on the tango floor, she does. She must. Without her, close embrace is just a lone man leaning forward into nothing, like a windblown tree.

  “El abrazo. It’s a hug.” Enzo demonstrated with a ballerina in the center of the floor. “You hold her well,” he told us. “Like you mean it.”

  He was circling the room now. It was warm, and he’d removed his sweater vest. When he reached me, his cheeks were damp. He smelled like aftershave. With my left hand, I cupped his tricep; with my right, I held his left. His hands were big, calloused, and one horny thumbnail bore a rash. He squeezed my hand, gently, gradually—as you would a plum to test its ripeness. I became aware of him as adult man—the Old World swarthiness, the hulk of him, and his enormous hands. He was young Humphrey Bogart or the memory of some Sicilian grandfather I’d never had. I became aware of myself as adult woman in a way I hadn’t dancing with Svengali (disembodied) or with Cesar (statuesque).

  He placed his right palm on the hollow of my back to show me how it ought to feel. He nudged me into close embrace. It no longer felt like handling meat. My arm slipped around his shoulders; my temple came to hover and then rest beside his. We rocked in place, weaving on our separate axes. He shifted my weight from foot to foot.

  “Waiting for the train,” he whispered. “Waiting for the bus.”

  Right, left. Left, right. I missed the moment when we started moving: A side step first, and then we walked and paused. Walk. Pause. The wisdom of El Gran Gavito, sage tango maestro of the 1990s, came to me: La esencia del tango no está en los pasos, sino en las pausas. The essence of tango isn’t in the steps, but in the pauses.

  My eyes rolled shut. Just when he had my weight responding, when our walks had synchronized, he took a backwards step that I did not know to expect. I didn’t need to know to follow him. I was deep in la ignorancia sagrada. My weight was on my right foot, stretched into the floor; it stayed in place. My torso went with Enzo as he stepped back, and my free left leg flew with me, forward into nothing, swept across the space between our feet. Like a face-first trust fall I might have done in acting class, only much less rigid. His chest, which wasn’t concave in the slightest, held me up with brute stability, supporting me as he pushed us back upright.

  Volcada comes from the verb “to overturn,” or capsize. But it feels like weightlessness. I landed softly on my axis and returned to earth.

  If there was indeed a moment, this was it. My precisely when. Five months into tango classes. For a moment, all the air was taken from me and I couldn’t breathe: I felt like a sandbag thrown from heavy shoulders. This was all I wanted—for what I now knew to call my axis to be honored, finally. To not be made to lose my balance. To be protected, kept from falling forward into empty space. To be held like someone meant it.

  I must have blushed, though not from shame or titillation; this was something pure. The danger of falling forward, the surprise of being steady in my motion, stretched along my spine. The new pleasure of being held. My body hummed and did as it was told. No flinching, no retreating boyfriend, no recoil.

  “Nice,” Enzo murmured. He squeezed my plum hand gently, one last time, then moved to the next follower. The rest of class could not compare. I didn’t mind. I held that information in my body—how close embrace was meant to feel, willing the warm sun radiating through the windows to set it in my cells.

  Every time you dance with somebody above your level, you feel this ache. How tango ought to, and might one day, feel. You can follow the unfamiliar when you’re led by someone who knows how. And then you’ve felt it; then it’s yours. You’re humbled by your own ineptitude, but galvanized. That one dance becomes a talisman. It’s what will keep you going—despite the tedium, despite the loneliness, despite the endless list of skills to master. You catch a far-off glint of that glass bridge.

  Tango highs are soaring, if sporadic: One good dance, or one good class. One moment when you shut your eyes and fly. Movement matches music and the combination makes your muscles slack. Your mind goes blissfully blank. Was it worth it? you will ask yourself, remembering the lows. All that anguish for three minutes’ worth of joy? Yes, the answer floods up through your limbs. Yes.

  Chapter Eight

  all the lessons in the world can’t make a tango dancer. Only social dancing can. I’d been lying low in group classes and prácticas, afraid to show myself in public or make a spectacle of myself at the milongas.

  “What’s a milonga?” my mother asked, though she somehow never managed to pronounce it, adding an extra “r,” as she often did with words ending in “a.”

  I explained that a milonga was a tango social, the event of dancing. Venues vary, but the hour is late, the lights are dim, the dancers get all gussied up. It’s like a monthly, weekly, or—in some cases—nightly tango prom.

  “So this is the social part,” she said, hopeful.

  “Sort of,” I said. I still felt like that poor neophyte, peeping from his upstairs window. Undressed and unready for the spectacle of the milonga. But as intimidating as the prospect of real social dancing was, it would bring me that much closer to the tango I had seen in Buenos Aires, in the cloistered cavern of that wood-paneled club.

  There was a pageantry in tango, a decorum I found oddly reassuring. There were dozens of unwritten rules, most of which I’d learned only by breaking. A gentleman, for example, asks a lady to dance—preferably by the covert gesture of the cabeceo: eye contact plus arch of eyebrows nets consenting nod—and their dance is freshly made between them for that music, for approximately nine to fourteen minutes, which equates to three or four songs, or a tanda. Tanda translates to “group” or “turn” or “series.” Between each tanda, the curtain, la cortina, falls—a shot of non-tango music signaling the dancers to change partner. You may or may not make polite conversation. My name is. What do you do? Insert awkward jokes about the weather, or the DJ, or the news.

  Dancing with anyone as long as I had with Svengali, even at the práctica, probably screamed affair! to anybody keeping score. You’re meant to dance only a set or two with any given partner, maximum. Unless you’re practice partners or romantically entwined. One party ends the tête-à-tête with “thank you,” and you go your separate ways. A gentleman will sometimes reorient the lady by escorting her to her chair, though this gentility is rare outside Buenos Aires. A woman who is unengaged must sit or stand somewhere and wait until a prospect meets her gaze.

  “Well, that hardly seems fair,” Mum said, but I wasn’t after fairness. The more rules there were for me to follow, the harder it would be to fall astray. My bigger concern was ginning up the nerve. Despite the potentially oppressive gender roles, Mum was the one to dare me to my first milonga. She was my champion for taking risks, even those of which she didn’t quite approve—and the more I told her about tango, the less she did approve. “Wow,” she said, “to be a man in tango. Must be nice.”

  “Mum.”

  “No, really. I just sit there and pick someone and then they do everything I ask them, inch by inch, and then they’re supposed to thank me for the pleasure?”

  “Mum, I swear it isn’t like that,” I said. Though sometimes, I realize, it was. Everywhere else, I was a strident feminist. In tango, I seemed willing to forgive—and far too eager to apologize. As though dancing had no bearing on the real world in which I lived and worked for eighty cents on every dollar and visite
d the gynecologist. Perhaps I forgave it precisely because it was so easy to condemn. So simply—often cartoonishly—gendered.

  “Look,” she said. “If you’re not going to these mahgondalers, then what’s the point?”

  I went, very timidly, to the lowest-stakes milonga I could find. It happened every Tuesday night at a shabby bar and grill called Lafayette, tucked behind construction on a torn-up Tribeca street. It was frequented by fellow studio-goers, mostly mouth-breathing, arm-squeezing elderly gents, who sat eating lamb kebabs and empanadas, sipping bargain basement wine while waiting for the crowd to coalesce. It started late. I had hours to kill after work, and very nearly about-faced at the door.

  I sat at a double-wide row of tables pushed together. Strangers crammed in with me, shoving belongings underneath. Waiters came, encouraging us to start a bar tab. Water wasn’t free.

  I was still only a few months into dancing, and too nice to reject prospective partners. If an unsavory fellow caught my eye, I’d look down at my feet, go fishing in my purse—anything to derail him. If all men used only the cabeceo, a feint down to my ankle strap would work. But beginner leaders often ignored warning signs and sidled up as close as they could get. Sometimes they’d even tap me on the shoulder to ensure they had my full attention before asking the obvious: Would you like to dance? Sometimes these men were matter-of-fact and therefore easier to refuse. Other times, high on violins and ceremony, they would almost croon. May I have the honor of this dance? I covered my frown to spare their feelings, racking my brain for excuses to say no: I’d already promised the tanda to someone else. I was tired. Resting my feet. Waiting for the ladies’ room. Or just plain “No, thank you,” which should always be enough, though some men took it personally. Half the time I just said yes. I’d learned the hard way at the prácticas that if I declined an invitation for one tanda, it would be untoward to accept another offer until the next. That tanda, however beautiful the music, was a penalty box. And if El Gran Gavito himself materialized suddenly on the heels of some old plonker, my refusal, however laden with regret, would be required.