At university, in the chilly north of England, for pocket money I worked for two Italian brothers who set up and ran restaurants. They were energetic, clever and furbo although you may recall I am not a fan of this trait to say the least. In Italy it seems to be somewhat admired, not unlike the way Spanish seem to regard picardía.
We were setting up in the restaurant one winter’s day when some young women walked past, clearly on their way out for the evening. They wore short dresses, high heels, no coats. The thing about this country, said the younger brother, who was clever, a Master of Wine who spoke English with almost no trace of an accent but whose Italian culture pulsated through him, ...is you can tell so much about someone by the way they dress, or if not, then as soon as they open their mouth.
Around the same period, when I was about twenty one, I waitressed at a basketball summer camp near Bologna that was run by some Italian friends. My friend and I were both six foot tall and slim. Alongside her Masters in Economics she modelled lingerie for Versace and the world famous Italian fashion companies. We turned heads wherever we went, especially as we were sometimes accompanied by tall, young, good-looking basketball players. My hair was very short, white blonde. Italian men would raucously call out “Eh, bionda!” making me blush and my friends laugh. Bionda was the second Italian word I learned. The first was binario - I arrived by train, although several stations passed before the penny dropped that BINARIO was not the name of an Italian town, but the word for "platform". At Bologna station, dazed by the heat, the language the general foreignness and the whirlwind of the previous week - I was supposed to be in France - I waited for my friend to pick me up. Some young men called Bionda! across the main hall. What does that mean? I asked my friend who was several years older and recently married. "Blonde" she said, looking at me with a mixture of amusement and concern. Discreet the men were not. It was part of a public game that is now roundly considered harassment.
Once, at a restaurant, the new Italian friends handed me a mobile phone, which in the early 1990s, were still not common. Italians, that culture of fa' vedere, of fare bella figura, of being seen, had them first, of course. Someone in on the joke, unseen, called the phone, making it vibrate. The shock made me drop it before it was caught by one of the dexterous basketball players. I was generally wholly naive and the friends thought it hilarious that any girl, especially one so gullible and ingenuous would be allowed to travel alone in Europe at all, never mind to a country so obviously full of "wolves". My parents wouldn't let me do that said a strapping twenty seven year old Sicilian who stood at least 6'2.
After work one day the camp staff were chatting together in Italian. They all had other jobs when not at camp. Playing on that same theme of unworldliness, suddenly someone asked me, Secondo te, che lavoro fa, lui? They were asking what I thought one of the coaches' day job was. Non ho la più pallida idea, I said in my new Italian. Not the foggiest.
He’s a dustman, they replied and everyone laughed, including the guy himself. The point being, no-one would have known and in that context it was irrelevant. I have long appreciated that sense of social anonymity.
In the milonga, there is usually at least an informal dress code at the bigger events so dress distinguishes people less frequently than at least it used to in society. And since the dance is usually wordless, accent need give nothing away either. In the milonga, it is how you dance that counts.
Many people come to get away from the rest of life, so the milonga is a refuge, a haven, where we don't ask too many questions and certainly not directly.
There is another, more obvious reason. Those who, in the milonga combine their love life with their public life, have to be at ease knowing that in that very visual, social environment, people may know about that life or guess it. Without due care and attention he may become known as a guy who at best enjoys women or at worst preys on them. She may become known either as a woman who enjoys men or as one who is gulled by them. When men and women spend a good part of their social lives in the milongas, in the embrace of the opposite sex, things can ensue. So it is also understandable that many want those arrangements kept extremely private. A country that makes no big deal of telos,
is bound to be pragmatic. Telos is a lunfardo word, Buenos Aires slang, the sound of “hotel”, reversed, meaning a “love hotel”. It is no surprise then that well understood behaviours have evolved in the bigger, busier, milongas of Buenos Aires around, for instance, not dancing more than one tanda enseguida, not holding on to her hands between tracks and around the discreet timings of separate departures by single men and women from the milonga. I learned early, first names only - and bear in mind that it may not be their actual first name. Years later I understood the person from whom I learned this, who I had known for years, had their own good reasons for liking this habit. In the traditional Buenos Aires milongas, many people are known better by their nicknames. That anonymity gives both freedom and a sense of belonging. It gives you whatever you want it to give you and that in itself is a freedom.
Why resurrect this piece now? Because recently I chatted with a guy I had seen and who had seen me several times. We had even, a few weeks prior, had a brief conversation about dancing. There were only a few of us in the room on this latest evening. After chatting with a friend I went over to see introduce myself properly. I was interested in the distant history of his country, about which I was reading at the time.
- "We've met before," I said.
- Oh, have we?
- Yes, I said, taken aback. With my height I am neither easily missable nor forgettable.
- I meet so many people...
Our local milonga scene is not so big.
Still, we chatted. Later, I asked him why he thought men from that country were sometimes considered macho but good dancers, not unlike what was sometimes said of Argentines. He denied this, saying there are many reasons people are good dancers, not least [that old chestnut] technique.
He invited me to dance to good music. I had heard the warning bells, but he was reckoned one of the better dancers and I was curious. We had danced one track, if that, when, on the dance floor, he asked bluntly, What is your job? The question catapulted me back to La Marshall, the gay club in Buenos Aires in 2016, to the question “And what do you do?”. But this guy was no gauche newbie. He had danced tango for years. I stared, in shock and disbelief and then, as the pause lengthened, because I had long ago prepared answers to questions like these, I weighed the options and gave him one of them. We regarded one another for several seconds more then began to dance the next track. I wondered if he was envisaging me in the uniform of my stated profession.
Later, I recounted the story to a friend.
I thought about saying "proctologist" but wasn't sure I'd be able to keep a straight face. Besides, when you're embracing a stranger in dance, it isn't necessarily the image you want to leave in their mind. So I said "traffic warden".
She looked at me. I have known this woman since 2012. And are you a traffic warden? she asked.
No, I replied,
She laughed and laughed.
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