Tango Lessons_A Memoir

by Meghan Flaherty

  Chapter Thirty

  when it became clear, three months later, that no amount of rest would make my back stop hurting, I decided to try dancing anyway. Barry took me to a quieter midtown milonga on a Friday night. I strapped on shoes, teetering a little in the ankles, like I had as a beginner, before my tendons learned stability. I took his hand. We danced—four tandas in twice as many weeks. We broke between them, rested at a table on the corner of the floor, and shared a drink. I’d brought a book, expecting him to start in on his cabeceo. “Dance?” he asked, and when I looked around the room to see which other followers he was passing up, he said, “I don’t need to dance with anybody else tonight,” and held me all the tighter. I woke up the next morning sore and knotted, but at peace.

  The chiropractors both agreed. “As long as you’re careful,” they said, unlatching my cage, “a little dancing should be fine.”

  I hobbled my way back to tango. Sometimes I’d get an hour, maybe two, before the pain set in. Sometimes I didn’t even try. I was rusty. I had fallen out of flow, and let my body lose its twist. I started favoring my spine, balking at boleos, cheating on my feet. I danced when I felt able, and then too carefully. One wrong leader, one bad sacada, and I worried I’d be benched again, for weeks.

  It would be years more before I realized my injury was minor, before I saw a better doctor who explained the pain was much more likely caused by my deep canyons of anxiety than any bulging disc, and required only therapy. Ever more therapy. But that year, every tanda became precious to me as an hour of borrowed time.

  Marty still grinned wide whenever we met eyes in cabeceo. If I stumbled and apologized, he only smiled. “There’s nobody like the Kid,” he said. He went to Buenos Aires and brought me back a pair of black-and-yellow four-inch Comme il Fauts that made me feel like a real tanguera, no matter how my skills had atrophied. I called them my Bumblebees and, when I couldn’t wear them, displayed them on my shelf as a reminder of the hole that tango filled. I took things one day at a time.

  I’d come to tango at the age of twenty-five, and couldn’t fathom just how very young I was. I couldn’t reckon with my past, or future, so I chose the dance that’s strangled in the desultory present. The dance of someday maybe and of I remember when that erases past and future both in its oblivion. I wandered, ill-equipped, into the wilderness of man and woman. I grew bold. I learned how to say yes, and to embrace the things that terrified me: uncertainty, male flesh, surrender. I danced myself into a few precarious situations until I learned that “no” was also a word I could wield. I said “no” to all the things I had been holding on to out of fear: Peter, theatre, the steady job.

  I let go of a life I thought I was supposed to like and went for one I thought that I could love. I turned my circles in the dark. I flew. And then I hit hard ground. I was at peace then, perhaps, with everything I couldn’t comprehend, but no less lost. In my pursuit, there wasn’t much I wouldn’t throw away. I was Agave at the height of her ekstasis. I wasn’t wandering because I’d lost the path, but because I’d come to love the losing and the being lost. Tango was old and it was new. It was movement and stagnation. I felt that anything could happen to me, and yet nothing ever would.

  Tango is also empathy. You try on someone else’s misery, strum someone else’s melody, sing someone else’s pain. It is not stealing; it’s homage. Everyone who dances tango finds something there, and leaves something behind. New dancers fall in love with tango every day, and, despite my own obsession, I often wonder why. There are other dances, after all. Samba, salsa, bachata, lambada, swing. Tango is not considered cool. It is a little staid. An acquired taste. People enact, to fullest expression, antiquated gender norms. They do their hair and dress up nice. They are polite. Maybe that’s what draws us to it, in this age of social media and false connection. It is a social dance. In Gustavo’s words, we are drawn to tango “porque aparta una solución para paliar la soledad”: because it offers a solution to alleviate the loneliness. It exists beyond language and culture, beyond the march of time. It offers a release from all the pressures of our modern lives.

  And so, at bottom, in the darkest chamber of my cuartito azul, I used the dance to fix the mess I’d made in it, that it had made in me. I figured out the kind of woman I wanted to be—in brain, body, and art—and then I fell in love. Dancing, for all of my mistakes, had taught me how.

  Summer cracked its egg against the city. Heat and sunlight spilled into the valley built by skyscrapers, warming the pavement, bringing out the sewer smells. But the prospect of the season left me cold. Barry was leaving, for Berlin.

  “Why is he going to Berlin?” my mother asked.

  “For work,” I explained. Nearly all his colleagues fled there in the summers. The rent and beer were cheap, the weather mild. It made for an idyllic place to finish dissertations over currywurst and Küchen, to go from drinking coffee on the sidewalk to drinking liter-bottled beer up and down the U-Bahn. Plus, the tango there was good—almost as good as in Buenos Aires.

  “Yes, but what is he going to do there?” she asked, and I tried to paint a picture for her of how philosophers spent their workdays—which was to say, hunched over books and laptops, batting arguments around, writing, pacing, thinking.

  “So he’s going to Berlin to think?”

  “Basically.”

  “For two months?”

  She had all of southern Florida guffawing over that one. When I visited later that summer, her friends were trained to say, when stumped, Well, geez, I don’t know, I guess I’d better go to Berlin and think about that.

  I didn’t mind. My wild gamble had worked. The spring post had brought the fat acceptance envelope. I was starting school in the fall. I’d paid my deposit, signed my natural life away to loans, and sworn a private oath not to look back. I’d left my mother down there, basking on her plastic chaise longue by the pool, but it was right. I felt more at home in Barry’s world of laptops than I ever could in hers. I’d leapt, finally, in the right direction.

  I’d waited hours to tell Barry in person, at Tango Café. I’d turned up with the Bumblebees and found him dancing. I waited for his cabeceo, sauntered over, took his arm. “I got in,” I whispered in his ear, nonchalant.

  “You did what?” he said, and pulled us from the line of dance just as the song began. “You wee devil!” he exclaimed, and scooped me up and spun me round and round in circles, black-and-yellow heels flashing behind me. I smiled until my face hurt, then we danced. I pressed my forehead to his cheek and squeezed his hand. He gave my bottom a tender smack and we took off around the room. We danced so hard and happily that I forgot to wince through turns.

  The night before he flew, I tried to make my peace with the impermanence of him. Of everything, of us. I tried to see myself as he saw me, he who’d taught me how to love, and who believed in my ability to rise. If the two months and the distance of the summer were to sink us, at least there had been this.

  Despite my default state of doubt, I didn’t lose him. I spent two months, solitary in the city swelter, shoring up. From the sidelines, I had a lot of time to think. Tango was, in many ways, a happy accident—in my life and in the world. Rodolfo Dinzel once called it an “ansiosa búsqueda de la libertad”—an anxious quest for freedom. A dance for the nomadic and the trapped. Immigrants seeking freedom. Gauchos, free by nature, pushed into the grid behind the wire fence. Descendants of slaves who were not free, but became so, and would shape the culture of a continent. Even women, breaking free of gendered confines of propriety. It was the product of a particular place and age, which happened to be Buenos Aires but could just as easily have been somewhere else, had circumstances changed. Another cruel port city, another cruel time. Even here, now—where not so much has changed.

  Tango was born a partner dance of pure improvisation. There were clear roles and rigid structures, but within them, total freedom. A dancer claimed that freedom—in that movement, in that music—to move without orders and without constra
ints. A dancer was even free to not move. Stillness—not dancing—is, after all, the subtle undersoul of tango. The essence in the pause. And freedom in la pausa represents nothing less than “the faculty of free men [and women] to simply say no.” These democratic structures seem so obvious to us now, but “in those days . . . such a dance was inconceivable.” Tango was, as Rodolfo Dinzel wrote, “the last great breakthrough in dance in the history of humanity.” Horacio Ferrer, poet and scholar, wrote that “tango—previamente de ser arte—es una actitud.” Before it was an art, it was an attitude. No matter who or where you are, you’re free to define yourself inside it, as it continues to define itself. For Argentines, it is a living history, written in them root and blood and earth. For everybody else, it is a many-layered labyrinth. From the cheesy tourist tours of Recoleta to the sainted memory of Osvaldo Pugliese with the red carnation placed on his piano every night he wasn’t there. Without at least a tip of the fedora to tradition, tango ceases to be tango. Otherwise, the line of dance is wide and you are welcome. You could be eight feet tall, pink-haired, and pierced from stem to stern; you could dance in sneakers; you could be blind, or mute, or strange. Any gender, no gender. Anyone. Even the severest member of the milonguero orthodoxy will not disparage a new convert if shown adequate respect.

  That said, there are those who’ll find the wormhole into the porteño soul and tangüedad, and those who never will. There are those who’ll never see beyond the stage—the hobbyists and the exoticizers—but they are welcome too. I would not take away their fishnets. May they find solace also, in red wine and Caló.

  Tango was once the dance of former slaves and strangers coming to a foreign place. Now it is an oracle, an antidote for almost anything: For loneliness, connection. For nostalgia, future hope. For insecurity and wistfulness, the bawdy brag of ego. For surrender, self-possession. For braggadocio, submission. And for heartbreak, the warming memory of pleasure yet to come. It is a dance that moves in perfect circles. Mourning celebration, celebrating mourning. The music is often tragic, as if it means to say: “But beyond all that, I hope. And I dance. I hope, and I keep hoping.”

  Silvina told me once that tango is culture and culture is suffering. A mother feeds her crippled infant. A young man is abandoned by his lover, a gaucho driven from his land. Carlos Gardel dies young, too young, in an airplane crash. “Tango is talking about unfairness,” Silvina said, the cruelty of life. Tango deals in sadness. It salutes it. “And if I dance that,” she asked me, “will we say tango is sad? No. Life is sad.” Our combined experience is reflected in the way we move. In one side step, one simple salida, with two partners in perfect concert, “you will see if it is tango or not.” Tango is a way of dancing, not limited to quantifiables. “A ritual,” Silvina says. “A way of life.”

  The dizziest freedom to be found within the narrowest of frames. Maybe anything can be “tangoed.” Maybe any song, from waltz to schottische to mazurka, can be played or danced with tangüedad. You could walk down the street with tangüedad. You could love that way.

  My failures didn’t lead to bigger failures but to better ones. Tango was my chosen implement for good and ill—the fusion of my worse and better natures. With it, I could face chaos unfettered. As a dancer, as a lover, as myself. And when I couldn’t dance, I had to find a way to keep it with me. To stand sturdy even off the dance floor, balanced on both feet.

  Peter may have said it best. We were having dinner at a bar a few weeks after Barry left, and I was hacking back the doubts. He was newly in love too, with the woman he would later marry. He was nervous he would lose her, almost nauseated. I laughed and told him what my mother had told me. Which is to say, I told him to relax, then said, “You idiot, that’s how it’s supposed to feel.” We clinked our glasses to that fragile happiness. I was nervous too—about graduate school, money, yet another new beginning. I told him I felt I had been wasting time. That tango had taken up too much.

  “But without tango, Biscuit . . . ,” he said, trailing off. “Just look how far you’ve come.”

  The summer melted past. I made practice dates and was able to keep most of them. I swam. I cleaned. I wrote. I danced outside, and then met friends for picnics on the Christopher Street pier, as the diehards spun around the dock until the sun went down. I raised a paper cup to toast them from my blanket on the grass a hundred yards away. I went home to my closet bedroom, turned up the window air conditioner, and slept.

  One Saturday I went to Nocturne and accepted a once familiar cabeceo. I was still a little rusty, and self-conscious, but I didn’t care. I wanted to show him just how little his opinion weighed. No hard feelings, I thought, as I fit my chest against his chest. He still had that equine smell, though soured by the tang of half-skunked DanceSport red. I laid my arm across his sweat-damp shoulders. We danced one tanda, and it was just a dance. Music played; we moved. Enzo was just another body to me now, his touch devoid of memory, or heat. I danced with him as I would have danced with any other stranger. He didn’t matter anymore. But somewhere near the end, he breathed into my ear. “I’m jealous,” he said, “of whoever made you this good.”

  We thanked each other. I went back to my seat to stretch. More than any other benediction, here was proof that tango changed me. It was me, Enzo, I thought. I made me that good. My technique, my tango, it was mine alone. “Good” or not, I’d built it by and for myself, and no injury could take that work away.

  I got home that night to a humble bunch of roses and white daisies waiting on my dresser, and a card that read: “Until soon! Barry.” If I’d been asked just one year earlier to imagine life like this: living in a six-by-eight-foot room, and writing, living on tomato sandwiches, I could not. Where good days had once been judged by how much fun I’d had, or whether things had gone my way, now any day in which my spine felt strong enough to dance was good enough. Days without panic. Nights without catastrophic dreams. And Barry. In two weeks, I was getting on a plane to meet him in Berlin. We had grown our vines across the ocean from each other, knit together somehow midair in the wide Atlantic. We had made it. We were just about to bloom.

  Chan Chan

  every night I do not dance, I miss it more. First the missing is immediate, like hunger or the spread of sunburn, then it fades to something softer. This too is a quiet thing. A love I’ve given up. Or one that’s cooled suddenly, unrequited.

  I have never truly danced in Buenos Aires, or walked the streets of Boedo, Flores, or San Cristóbal. I’ve never taken taxis from milonga to milonga, or danced the checkered floors of Club Sin Rumbo, the basketball courts of Sunderland, or the pink lights of La Viruta, hours after dawn.

  Then again, the Bumblebees and I have graced the floorboards of New York, Boston, Glasgow, Paris, Berlin, New Haven, Princeton, Los Angeles, Charlotte, and Washington, D.C. I sit and listen more than I used to; I dance five tandas now instead of fifty. But then I go outside, and see the world.

  I continue grappling with my body, a body that, while dancing, allowed me to forget that we are made of fragile stuff indeed. Fat and veins and bones and organs. What thin shields we are given—and yet how astounding all that we are able to contain. Our flesh is home to shame and pleasure both, to pain and to the memory of pain. We are made of everything we’ve ever touched. It’s like Silvina says: “When you touch a human being, you are in the presence of a miracle.” And sometimes one touch has the power to erase a legacy of others.

  As Cátullo Castillo wrote, and Roberto Goyeneche sang, “La vida es una herida absurda.” Life is an absurd wound. Even if my muscles have lost most of their tango sureness, the good work of dancing sparkles in them still. I put on the Bumblebees and remember I was once a woman who danced tango—hard and long and late. Maybe someday I might be again.

  The music stabs you in the heart. It is sad, but life is sad. Tango is life. The bandoneón expands; the bandoneón contracts. The old magic is never far away. Barry and I can still kill it to “La cumparsita,” and our bodies own the bitter swee
tness of each other, our secrets, all the songs we’ve ever danced. I move my embracing arm up past his shoulder, cupping fingers gently at his neck. This is a move reserved only for him.

  I’d like to say that Barry and I were a tango love story. That we came together by the dance and for the dance. But I believe we would have come together otherwise. If you’d put us in a room together, any other room, we would have found each other, like two migratory birds. The milonga for us was just another room. Our blue little room. The place where we first moved together to the music. Maybe there’s a yesterday built in to our tomorrow, but these are risks I no longer fear to take.

  My mother told me once that tango could not be all I had. In the end, it wasn’t. There was school, new aspirations, the act of putting words on paper. There was love. Real god-honest grown-up love. Love that asked for leading and for following. Those things should be good enough; they almost always are. Tango carried me—awake, asleep—to a place where I no longer needed it. Where I can glue all of the ripped-up pages of abandoned journals back together into one unapologetic self. Where I can show up, listen to my partner, and dance back. One and one are one, but two make three—and that is tango.

  We move to the Carolinas, where the community is small and the milongas are infrequent. A neuroma in my left foot consigns me to ugly practice sneakers, which make my feet feel like outsized hot dog buns. We practice our colgadas in the grocery aisles, which, being suburban, are plenty wide. We play Fresedo while doing the dishes, and Barry croons the occasional tango lyric in the shower, startling the dog. We’ve learned not to take ourselves so seriously now that a tanda is a semimonthly gift and not a nightly given.