Tango Lessons_A Memoir

by Meghan Flaherty

  “The elliptical machine?” I ask.

  “Hmmm, no.”

  “How about running?”

  “Definitely not.”

  I pay yet another co-pay.

  “Have a nice weekend,” we each say. He rummages through his supply closet and tosses me a blow-up lumbar pillow—royal blue—which I dutifully inflate whenever I am seated.

  Weeks blur. I walk slowly, carry nothing. I lie on my back, my side. I cramp and twist, futilely rub whatever’s sore. I am poked and plied.

  “Can I do Pilates?” I ask, hopeful.

  “No.”

  “Gyrotonics?”

  “Maybe next month.”

  “Rowing?”

  “Are you insane?”

  Having a back injury means spending a lot of time flat out on hardwood floors, tears slipping from your cheekbones, as everyone who passes asks you why you’re crying. It means not lifting anything, not even my new rolly backpack up the subway stairs. It means not buying juice or gallon milk without a chaperone to carry groceries. But, worse still, it means nights spent knees-up in your bed, lying with your laptop open, ice against your lumbars, while your boyfriend goes to the milonga. It isn’t egotism; that world does quite literally turn without you.

  Oh lead me to a quiet cell, Ms. Parker said. The silence fell with velvet heft. The lonely melancholy next. At first I was missed. Where have you been? Why aren’t you dancing? And then nothing. No water cooler. No community. Just me inside my head.

  I offered to work the door at RoKo, taking cash and names while perching on a swivel chair, just to be around the music, and to avoid staying at home. At some point, during one joyous romp of a milonga tanda, the little neurons started flaring up my back with greater force. I had to bite my lip to stop the sobs.

  The worst part was the rush of insecurity. Barry both was and wasn’t just another tango man. We both had and hadn’t courted in the ballroom, on those polished floors. Tango both was and wasn’t part of who we were. Before, we’d danced together, danced apart. It was fine then for him to dance with other women, when I was in that world with him. Now, suddenly, his nights seemed full of feral evening minxes in their up-slit skirts and strappy blouses—claws clinging to his shirt back, tongues lapping for his ears. A jealous Gorgon started weaving snakes into my hair. The corners of the room grew dark, acquiring the humidity of sex; I heard my mother’s voice on loop again. I lashed out with the fury of a woman prematurely scorned.

  Tango was the only thing we ever fought about. I picked fights and pouted. I was sour, angry, and impatient, but mostly I was afraid of losing him. Not you too, cried out my child’s voice—but who could blame him if he left? In the act of making ugly faces, wincing walking up the stairs, I snapped at him. I was in pain. As if that justified my churlishness.

  What was I afraid of? That he would really leave? Or that I had fooled myself into another dancing fantasy, turning daisy-plucking circles in the dark? He loved me not. He loved me. Surely he could not love me now.

  “You’ll chuck me to the curb with all the other useless junk and ugly lamps,” I finally said, eyes dewing with embarrassment.

  “Of course I won’t,” he told me. “Don’t be daft.” He objected to my lack of faith in him. “Honestly, Meghan. It’s insulting.”

  He was right, of course. But doubt was my default. And without the daily yoga and the dancing, nothing could stop the rodents running through my head. Tango was the place where all the parts of me converged, and that place had been barred. Tango had sewn me back into my body, then taught me to live in it. Now I had been fettered there, strangled by its infuriating limits. Where before there was the bandoneón, now there was only silence. A refrigerator hum. There were no new asanas to reach for, nowhere I could move until my mind went blank. I missed the way I had once pretzeled into bliss. How I’d spiraled into meditation in a pair of practice shoes. Where before I’d found my stillness only in the movement, I now was faced with finding movement in my stillness.

  Because I couldn’t dance, I started listening differently. I tagged along with Barry to milongas once a week or so and sat there watching. There, but not there. As though stuck inside some closed bud that refused to bloom, where tangos echoed wet and tinny, played from the outside in.

  I listened to the lovers who lamented. About the woman who’d just left, the woman who was never theirs, the woman who threw away her girlish innocence to become a creature of the seedy streets and cabarets downtown. In “Milonguita,” I was little Ester, girl-next-door, grown up to be a flower of the night, wasted on the men who took her home; if she cried they’d say it was because she drank too much champagne. In “Remembranza,” I was shipwrecked, knowing I would lose myself in the horizon, but not yet willing to resign myself to being lost.

  I listened to Pugliese’s steady pulse of bandoneón, the nails-across-a-chalkboard strings, the singer wailing in the tenorsphere about the flor of his illusion. The strings thump like a drumroll, and the singer curls his lips over his teeth, almost sneering the line: Aaah! . . . olvida mi desden, forget my scorn. He begs his lover to return so that their love can bloom again. He sings about his withered hydrangeas of pain. I’d danced that song a hundred times, in the last, show-stopping tanda of the night, with leaders I knew and some I didn’t. I’d tightened my arm around their shoulders to the stretched-out keen of “deeeeeeeeesden,” playing the milonguita as I clutched their kidneys, raised my shoulders, pressed my face into their cheeks, and dragged my foot around theirs in one toe-curling arc of coquetry. I’d danced that song a hundred times, and now I heard it.

  I listened to songs that mourned the plowed-over barrios of yesteryear, tangos of the old country, or the vanishing arrabal. “San José de Flores,” about a man returning to the neighborhood where he grew up, only to find it changed. Like so many other tangos, it memorializes la esquina, the all-important corner where childhood games were played and innocence idealized. The barrio was witness to the singer’s sum of loves, his dreams of triumph. Returning, he is poor and beaten, sorrow-laden, tired from so much wandering. Más vale que nunca pensara el regreso, si al verte de nuevo me puse a llorar, or, better to never imagine returning if seeing you again made me weep. If everything is lost, even the dream of home, no other wound will hurt.

  “San José de Flores” begins with a quick little tag, four notes on piano, a flourish of strings dissolving into little trills, and then the singer does the first two lines mostly legato, like a dirge. He marches off from there, speeding and slowing at his whim, between the fluid and the guttural vibrato, between lament and recitative. It’s a fairly schizophrenic song, not really danceable. It is a piece of theatre, a monologue set to music, urgent, grating, almost shouting toward the end. In both refrains the singer backs off to warble the final syllable, as if he were massaging it, holding it in a little globe of sound, an echo of vibrating vocal cords. As if he were saying poor, poor me.

  And poor, poor me was how I felt.

  I took refuge in all the poor, poor me that I could find in tango music. I’d spent two years learning the dance and all that came with it: history, tradition, music, códigos, the close embrace. I’d let it slink up my limbs and through my organs, until it had embedded green and leafy vines inside my chest. Now it was stuck inside me, threatening to wither. I didn’t want to let it die.

  The melancholy in tango is part of what had drawn me to it, carried me through countless hours of studios and drills, and forced the dance into my sluggish limbs. Dancing was communion, but also isolation. Every tango danced, while shared between the couple, had this private aspect: you, alone inside the music. The three-minute love affair is maybe less about your partner or your lover than about all you’ve lost and all you’ve never had. Loves, lives, places left, and former versions of yourself. Oscar Wilde would write—and Borges quote—that certain music made him feel that he’d been weeping over sins that he had not committed, mourning tragedies that were not his to mourn. “It creates for one a pa
st of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears.”

  It is el poema de ayer, the poem of yesterday. The cuartito azul, the blue little room inside your heart. Where the hero keeps his youthful love, his primera pasión. It is the door that no longer opens, the balcony he never sits on to reflect. There are a million songs as sad as this. Tangos mostly of goodbye. Most dancers ignore or never learn the lyrics, and songs are open to misinterpretation. I so often danced “Invierno” with a smile. But smiles are also grimaces in tango; there is always aching underneath.

  I thought of how much of my own aching I’d uncovered. What I had not allowed myself to mourn: my splintered family, the poisoned stranger who gave birth to me, my buried shames. And then the silly stuff: banalities of growing up and learning to be lonely, the locusts, boils, and the relinquished dreams.

  Tango has always been the underdog of social dances—subtle and serious where others are more frivolous and fun. Five hundred miles to the northeast of Buenos Aires is Porto Alegre in Rio Grande do Sul, a jolly port city in Brazil, the samba capital of the world. Ask a porteño why Brazil got the lime greens and shocking yellows of the samba and Argentina ended up with tango, and the answer will be melancholy. The deep current of drifters’ sadness in the culture of that “grey” and “incoherent” nation and the means by which it claimed a national identity, how immigrants and Afro-Argentines, poor creoles and gauchos—the so-called “fraternity of the condemned”—all came together in a perfect circle of nostalgia. Mourning the paved-over places where pampa once met barrio and flowers grew. Missing the old world even as it disappeared. Out of oppression, poverty, and impotence in the face of the unjust: an art. Something beautiful from so much pain.

  The world has changed since those days of boats and men and wooden instruments. The dance has ranged so very far and wide from where it started. Much has been lost, destroyed, forgotten. But we are linked to them and then. To the minas and the milonguitas, to the compadres and compadritos, to the gauchos and the milongueros of the Golden Age. We want to belong to something. They wanted to belong to something. The something we belong to is the same.

  There is a word for it now, for the old men and milongueros who sit in worn wood-walled cafés in San Telmo, buried in a bottle of red wine, or staring at the sludgy dregs of strong espresso. The clouded mirror above the back banquette. The word is mufa, a black and bitter funk. A mood vital to the tango, to any man or woman dancing it, and to the soul of Argentina. An aesthetics of self-pity. A lineage of artful gloom. You won’t find it in most Spanish dictionaries, though the closely related mofa translates as “mockery” or “derision.” Mufa comes from the reflexive verb mufarse, which is a Lunfardo slang term encompassing a range of sentiments: moodiness, annoyance, crushed spirit, rotten luck, depression, boredom, neurasthenia, misfortune, listlessness, and pain. In short, “to mope.” Mufa means depression with a healthy dose of cynicism, moping for the sake of moping, wallowing in melancholy because it feels so good to feel so bad.

  I moped. I sat in street shoes at the edge of the milonga and boohooed about my lot. I drank plenty of Malbec—for effect. There was no threshold-of-drunkenness to thwart my dancing, so I swirled the sediment at the bottom of my plastic cup and muttered poor, poor me. For a while I fancied myself some sort of mascot, the giant animated squirrel of New York tango, galumphing in and sliding to the center of the dance floor on my matted faux wool paws, then slumping on the bench, my head hung low. I’d smile big and wave whenever called upon, but everybody knew that I just wanted on the team.

  The turning circles stopped and I was stuck in stasis, longing for what had passed, for what was irretrievable, for some simpler time and way of life. The old and very simplest sadness. In “San José de Flores,” it was called el ansia bendita, the holy longing.

  But mine were champagne problems; I raised a toast instead to all my blessings. To Barry, to my little room in Brooklyn. To Peter, and his family. To friends and parents who had suffered my indulgent tears. And to COBRA, however extortionate the monthly charge.

  I tried another non-force chiropractor, Dr. B, who did not concern herself with rubbing knots and hardness out of tissue. Her patron deity was alignment. She would lay me face down on her leather table, send piano finger flourishes up my ribcage, and check my leg lengths with her thumb and finger at the heel. This was a very different kind of being touched. I’d lie faceup as she wedged leather blocks beneath my hips, settling my pelvis into place. As if two hands had reached up through machinery to levitate me and set straight my bones. Her adjustments lasted about a day before the muscles clenched and pulled the bones around.

  Dr. B was brunette and petite, with birdish feet. Calmness was her criterion. She could tell in seconds that I wasn’t calm. I’d come to her after months of lumbar pillows, butt-cheek kneading, ibuprofen, feeling breakable, and sitting up too straight to compensate for years of slouching. And after hours spent in awkward places stretching on whatever patch of floor I could find, doing my “exercises” three times daily because some doctor or other told me it might help.

  I’d walk a lap around the table, sit, and then she’d scrutinize. I’d point my toes and flex my feet, open and close my mouth. I’d breathe: that seemed important. It felt as though I’d held my breath for months. Finally, she’d tap me two times on the ankle and, in her Upper West Side twang, dismiss me.

  “Goodbye, bubbe. Come back tomorrow.”

  Dr. B had joined the line of healers I had sought to grant my only wish: to fix my back so I could dance. The team included chiropractors (two), an overpriced masseur, one acupuncturist and then another (cheaper), an orthopedist, a D.O. with a sweating problem, a Korean ballerino/bodyworker, and a physiatrist who referred me to his number one—a man named Dariusz, who was a physical therapy bodhisattva. For twenty minutes he would move my bones in place, gently, using my limbs as giant joysticks, listening as a safecracker might for movement in my discs. When he was done, he’d cover me with electronic muscle stimulators and a weighted heating pad.

  I had to let myself be touched in such a different way, medically, unmusically, as if all the doctors and the bodyworkers were leading me, but I could not respond. Whole afternoons evaporated in doctors’ offices and waiting rooms. I had no money left for anything that wasn’t spine-related. My body was a lemon; I fed it parts and oil. I poured money in like gasoline and watched it slowly power down.

  It did get easier. One afternoon, when I was facedown on the leather torture table with Dr. K’s elbow tenderizing my hamstring meat, I asked him, “Could I swim?”

  He was silent for a second, then said, “Yes. I guess you could.”

  That very afternoon, I marched into a midtown T.J.Maxx and bought myself the only size 6 suit they had, plus a pair of goggles. I bought a combination lock, and queued up at the West Side YMCA to add myself to my father’s membership for thirty bucks a month. I tiptoed down the steps from locker room to pool. I chose the slowest lane and lowered myself into the water, which was cold and tart with chlorine. I sank with a quiet plop and started treading water, sending little ripples out across the surface stillness of the all but empty pool.

  I pushed off gently from the wall, not wanting to disturb the sleeping ogres of my lumbars. I pulled myself along by crawl stroke, barely kicking, gliding without swiveling my hips. To move was everything. It wasn’t dancing; neither was it a naked cove in the South of France. But I felt the water on my body, the silken ripples as I swam. I found a quiet rhythm, an oh-so-gentle motion of the feet, just fluttering, not making waves. I felt like an old-time riverboat, bumbling along by paddle wheel. I tried to smile, serenely grateful, in the hypnotic push and swish. The little echoes made against the tile walls. I pushed my face into the water, as if it were a meditative cavern, or a yoga mat. It would have to be enough. I swam five hundred meters, then rejoined the hordes of nudists in the shower room.

  There I confronted every nipple God
had ever made, and every tufty patch of lady bramble—some mohawked with age, others diligently waxed. The ladies of the West Side Y were all about au naturel, so I acclimatized. Just like the plage des naturistes—only dark and windowless and moldering at the edges of the carpet. I went naked in the shower, naked to the lockers, and naked to the swimsuit-wringing-out machine. Women plodded up and down the aisles around me, their sagging once-pink flesh yellowed with age. Some stood naked even underneath the hair dryers. Others stood naked with towels on their heads. I could be naked there, without it being sexual or seen. My body was just another body, whatever imperfections ailed it. Whatever hidden sores and hidden pain.

  The Y became my refuge and the ladies’ locker room my new community: a coterie of naked and imperfect women—droopy, wrinkled, or robust—all moving through alone, all favoring their limps and aches in the unanimity of the infirm. My body became loud to me, and almost ugly. As if I’d been a hologram in tango, a glittering ideal projected into leaders’ arms. Here, I inhabited the real thing—the flesh without the fantasy. Without forgiving flowing skirts or harem pants that moved when I moved, the kinds of fabrics that once had made me feel like a string of prayer flags in wind. There was just nakedness—mine and everybody else’s. I looked down in the shower at my skin and saw myself: pale flesh and vertebrae and discs and fingernails and hair and blemishes beneath fluorescent lights.

  If this was all I had, then I would honor it. Tend it with gentle exercise, clean it, rinse the shame and chlorine down the drain. Slow. Crawl. Pause. In the pool, I didn’t wait for impulses. I simply moved. The minutes passed in steady lengths. There wasn’t any music. My thoughts washed with the tedium, and in that underwater stillness, I felt better. My skin would reek of pool water for hours afterward, which felt like victory. Even that small bit of moving, that fettered loop of exercise, was better than not moving at all.