The Grinch

I feel I should be wishing you seasons greetings  - and I do! - or writing some festively relevant piece (and eventually I did) but the truth is my drafts are all about life in the milongas.

At Christmas as my enthusiasm for decorations flags, my interest in the milongas and in packing my suitcase rises.  This is because after Christmas, in short order, I go away to dance.  I have my reasons.   The year before last I cycled late at night and in bitter cold between the milongas of the Tango Train experience in Amsterdam.

Sol De Invierno

Last year I plumped, more sensibly, for Andalucia.  I spent a couple of days in Málaga exploring that city and trying its local milonga before going on to the Sol de Invierno dance weekend in its gorgeous setting just outside Salobreña on the Costa Tropical.  I did some walking tours in Málaga's winter sunshine and in Granada, a few days later, the snow on the Sierra Nevada glistening in the bright blue sky.

In mid-November just past I went to Marbella for the weekend to dance.  I walked along its lovely seafront promenade in the sunshine.  I had lunch on a friend's balcony facing the sea.  It was hard to imagine that a couple of weeks previously we had found ourselves shivering in a Scottish graveyard one evening on a Hallowe'en ghost tour.

        

This year, just before I was about to book a trip back to Spain I was invited elsewhere so I swapped winter sun for two milongas at a village near Slough a town near Heathrow airport....

(Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn't fit for humans now, 
There isn't grass to graze a cow. 
Swarm over, Death!

 - John Betjeman, 1936

According to someone in the engineering department of Stanford university Slough is much improved, since then but I used to live on the edge of it and if that is true god knows what it was like before)

....and a tango marathon in Sheffield, a town famous for steel and cutlery in the former industrial heartland of the cold, dark, north of England.

All this to say the memory of Spain in winter remained strong in the week before Christmas:

Friend: Watching The Grinch.......feel a certain camaraderie.......

F: Christmas decorations! You've reminded me! If it was up to me Christmas would be in southern Spain and Christmas dinner would be drinks and tapas on the seafront followed by a walk on the promenade. 

Grinch: Sounds idyllic!

F; Back in reality I'm veering between slaving over a hot sewing machine and its manual and trying all manner of strategies to get [son 1] to give his brother back his dressing gown and go to bed.

I asked friend Grinch if he wanted to spend Christmas with our large houseful and two toddlers and was not surprised when he graciously and with dignity declined, saying he preferred peace, perfect peace

F: My phone's auto reply was confused as to whether spending Christmas on your own like that is a good thing or not.

Grinch: The Grinch got the pouty blonde at the end so not all bad.

On Boxing day I hugged my children, knew that I would miss them, told them to call me whenever the liked, prayed against mishap, slammed the boot and drove away from my home.  Sheffield is not Andalucia but nonetheless, not long after departure I hoped to feel for a few moments the sheer, bubbling thrill of travel, adventure, expectation and freedom.  That feeling is as good as sunshine.

'Single' girls

A: I danced with a lovely dancer but he kept hold of my hands between tracks and conversation was personal questions not the music etc.

B: Single girls rarely allow that in a BA milonga

A was not single and B knew it.  It was no secret.  But if you arrive alone at a milonga in Buenos Aires, marital status doesn't necessarily count for much.  What matters when you arrive is how you appear.  

Perhaps my father guessed as much.  Maybe that is why he thought the milongas inappropriate for someone in your situation.  There were no hard feelings and the clarity was useful.

Much earlier:

B: I get a slight shock when you ID a dancer with full name. I don't expect people to know the second name of a dancer from a milonga. Where I come from :) it would be very rude to ask a partner's second name. Often old accounts of the milongas say people never knew anything about a guy except his given name, nickname and dancing. They did not know where he lived, what he did for a job (if he had one), whether he was married. All stuff gets left outside -- by agreement of all.

I guess nowadays, you know someone's name from his advertising. Or Facebook. Or is that the same thing? :)

At the time I found the warning over-egged - until I was asked just those sorts of questions.

Possibly disreputable

A:  I danced with a lovely dancer but he kept hold of my hands between tracks and conversation was personal questions not the music etc.

B:  Single girls rarely allow that in a BA milonga

A:  I know that! I'm just obviously very bad at or out of practice (or both) at extricating myself when guys don't play by the rules.

B:  Rules??? :) You're a long way from classes :)

A:  I'm sorry but it's wrong for a guy to do that.

B:  I don't doubt it. But that's different.

A:  It's not just wrong, it's wrong and in public where everyone can see. A respectable guy doesn't do it.

B:  Very few Argentine guys are respectable.

A:  Why make it the girl's job not to allow it?

B:  Because he's not respectable! :)

A:  God I'm an idiot. It's not that I don't understand it,  I find the exercise of it so difficult. I don't know why. I should be cross. But I am cross. When he's hanging on to my hands I feel half rabbit in the headlights & half  just terribly uncomfortable.  Something in me wants to save him, us - me, actually - face yet while I may just be trying to pretend it's all fine really, my tolerating it means I lose face publicly with every second.

In any case, possibly disreputable guys can be very nice to dance with I find.

B:  There's the problem...

A:  I thought you didn't believe in dancing with disrespectful guys.

But there was no answer to that. It was much later I realised that that might be because disrespectful and not respectable and disreputable are not all the same thing and 'B' will only point things out so far.

A:  I was confused. I thought maybe I was mistaken about the cultural differences. Besides, when guys don't behave appropriately sometimes I freeze and am just terribly embarrassed. I just wanted to get back in to the dance where things were different.   I will try to be a bit less mortified British. All my clear convictions seem to have abandoned me here. 

I would never have let this happen in the UK.

B:  There you go. I suspect all you need to overcome now is a language barrier.

Sense of a woman

In 1960, before Dodge motorhomes were mass produced, John Steinbeck had a vehicle built made for a road trip around America. He had eight years left to live. At the start of the resulting book, Travels with Charley he wrote:  "I wanted a three-quarter-ton pick-up truck, capable of going anywhere under possibly rigorous conditions, and on this truck I wanted a little house built like the cabin of a small boat." He named it Rocinante after Don Quixote's horse. Thinking he might do some writing, he filled it with the requisite paraphernalia. He writes:

I suppose our capacity for self-delusion is boundless. I knew very well that I rarely make notes, and if I do I either lose them or can't read them. I also knew from thirty years of my profession that I cannot write hot on an event. It has to ferment. I must do what a friend calls 'mule it over' for a time before it goes down. And in spite of this self-knowledge I equipped Rocinante with enough writing material to take care of ten volumes

Likewise, after a trip I can never find the right notebook or finding it, cannot read it. On largely that basis proceeds the story of meeting a man I will call José though it is not his real name.  

DescriptJosé 

DescriptioJosé .

On that third night in Buenos Aires, José was also at the Obelisco club.  I was glad I had finally got my dance virginity in that city out of the way before we danced.  It is nice when, for various reasons, people set up dances with someone you have noticed but how much better it is when you do it for yourself.  These things can take time and they need the right conditions: the right mood, the right music, the right moment.  But there is nothing better than to dance when the desire to do so is mutually discovered, desired and agreed silently, by look and at a distance.

He did not, I thought initially, look Argentinian. When, later, between tracks, I glanced briefly into his face, his eyes were very Argentinian.  How strange that we can dance so close, feel every movement of the partner's body, know that there is nowhere to hide and, when embracing the partner, embrace that too and yet it can be so hard to simply look into their face.  It is not like that in the man's role though, or at least it is so different as to bear little comparison.

Dancing with him was better than I had hoped.  We were compatible.  But being so out of practice in the woman's role, and now also so keyed up, as before my hips were tight and would not respond easily to the tiny swivels he proposed. At the prospect that my dancing days in Argentina, so soon begun must be over almost as quickly, my heart sank.  But he was gentle and from that trust grows.  Then he proposed the same small movement again.  What - had I misjudged, been too hasty?  Was this yet another man deaf to what the woman likes and can do?  Yet to my great surprise he moved his hand to support my lower back and hips and somehow eased me through the movement.  Curiously, it was not now unpleasant.  In fact I was relieved to know that those movements peculiar to the woman's role were still possible and I was grateful.  Mostly, I was surprised because there are guys who are accommodating, which is lovely, but to find a dancer so competent that he can help you in a way unanticipated, that is vanishingly rare.  Those tiny, hip-swivelling movements were nice with him and discreet, the way I feel they are supposed to be with guys, not those grotesque gate-opening pivots taught in class, which, were they not so noticeable in some guys as to be easily avoidable, I might otherwise dread.  This happened a few times until I got used to and relaxed with the movement again.  It was lovely when he sensed I could respond without help.  It all happened not by language but by sense.  Among the thousands who dance the good dancers seem extraordinarily few and José was the rarest of these. He had a deep sensitivity to,  understanding of and responsiveness to women that I have not found present in most other men who dance.

I like dancing tango in many different ways, with men, with women, in both roles, just as I like the many different styles of the different orchestras. But José elicited femininity in women,  not by provoking some false exhibition of it, he simply elicited the feeling.  A very few men can do this in ways that don't really lend themselves to description.  That ability in turn enhances that male-female charge which powers the ineffable something that is at the heart of the kind of dancing I most enjoy.  

We danced twice that evening. Thereafter, we danced at least once in many of the milongas where we met.  Even among the sceptics in Buenos Aires he was regarded as a good dancer.  The sceptics seemed to be more among some of the ex-pats.  Perhaps that has to do with the Anglo-American analytic tradition of thought.  The Latin countries put more emphasis on feeling.  Dancing with him was like being rocked to sleep in a boat under stars were it not so simultaneously enlivening.  It was a kind of surrender, to what I am not sure - to the man, to the universe, to the universe through the man, I still don't know.  You don't think about these things at the time and afterwards, looking back it feels rather dream-like.

It was not all straightforward. After our first dance, he held on to my hands and said those flattering, attentive things, that some Argentinean men do say between dances and that so many Argentine women - dancers and non dancers - stranded in Europe, seem to miss.  That, I can understand as a cultural difference but this hand-holding I didn't think was normal.  I wanted my hands back.  Yet, perhaps it was normal in Buenos Aires where everything is so different.  I was dubious but, with all that novelty, not so clear thinking to see that, being dubious, I should perhaps do something.  After the second or third track I did and we seemed to reach an understanding.

More than anyone else it was José I saw, or noticed in the milongas I went to especially in Gricel on Tuesdays and Thursdays or at Milonga de los Consagrados on Saturday in Salon Leonesa. One evening we were exchanging a few words between tracks before the ronda got moving.  In Buenos Aires this can easily take up a whole minute of your  - roughly - three minute track   I don't recall exactly what I asked, perhaps whether he preferred dancing with local women or tourists but I remember his oblique answer.  He said:  women who dance well give you their heart. Some dance well but don’t give their heart and that means nothing. 

I even saw José way out of town at the Caricias milonga. That night he only danced with the same two or three women. He did not acknowledge me which was strange because the venue is small. I put it down to his characteristic absorption in the dance but there seemed more to it than that.  I didn't consider he had 'dumped' me in dance because we seemed to dance too well and because in the busy, central milongas he continued to invite me.  Once, I left Gricel early, not liking the music.  It wasn't the night for Daniel's milonga in that venue, where the music was better.  At the next milonga at which we met, he came over and asked why I had left.  He had missed me there and had wanted to dance.

One day during my last week we met at Milonga de Los Consagrados. It was mid-evening, the end of that afternoon milonga;  It was probably around 11pm, mid-evening if you are running on milonga-time, which for me meant finishing increasingly often at 3AM.  I was thinking of going on to watch the scene at Cachirulo, a milonga for the jet set of the tango scene which at that time was in nearby Obelisco club on the brightly lit main drag of Avenida Entre Rios. But I had to walk three and a half blocks down Humberto Primo to get there. I had walked between milongas all over the centre of Buenos Aires and well after midnight, often alone, but those few blocks and the people who hung out on them felt distinctly menacing and I was scared. But in Buenos Aires you cannot leave certain milongas - and that included nearly all the milongas I went to - with a man you did not arrive with. Or if you do, it sends a clear message to him and to everyone watching about your subsequent plans. In the language (so they say) of the codes you have 'accepted going for a coffee' a 'coffee' you are going to have at one of the telos, the albergues transitorios or love hotels.  In conversation with José I mentioned I was going on to Cachirulo. So am I, he said. My heart leapt. Perhaps, I thought but didn't say, I could meet him outside and he would walk me down the street with all face saved.  But I'll be working he continued, casually. Sorry? I said. I couldn't imagine José as a waiter or the guy who seats people.  Seeing my puzzlement, he explained:  he would be taxi dancing.  I was dumbfounded.  My disbelief must have been evident because he showed me his card not at all in the way of 'come and do classes with me' but simply to prove it.  But we've just danced here I gasped, my mind unable to accommodate the idea that I had been dancing with a taxi dancer - and not known it.  I have seen you dancing socially in lots of places.  José was always quite inscrutable. Yes, he said.  calmly, possibly amused. I don't always work.  I was too shocked to register, properly, the compliment.  Things fell into place. The nights where I had seen him with women, tourists, when he did not acknowledge me, he was working. The nights he was alone when he danced socially and when we danced, he was not.

One night I saw him in a milonga in the centre, again with the two or three American women I had seen him with in Caricias.  I never saw him teach her but the young girl learnt fast with him. It was clear she was in heaven and it was a pleasure to see that enjoyment. When José was absent, I said hello to them and exchanged a few pleasantries. Before this family trio left the milonga with him I saw him introduce them to  Flaco Dany, the famous milonguero - part of the experience I guessed. 

Still, I mentioned my surprise a day or two later to an older, cynical ex-pat who, I realised later, scared me. Ha! she said, harshly.  They just see you as a big dollar sign she added, scornfully, suggesting I was naive, that he was only dancing with me because he had been trying me for a sop.  

I never contacted José after I left.  I don't know what happened to him or if he is still dancing.  Once or twice I enquired after him. Janis told me last year that he was 67. I couldn't believe it. He danced so smoothly. I have never knowingly danced with a man that age and had such a feeling of a much younger man. Janis said that they all had that, that dancing keeps them young. 

His card said Profesor:  José. I didn't understand. How could you 'teach' someone to dance the way he does?  How could you teach that attitude towards women?  But I am not sure that he teaches men.  The card says :

Renta de departamentos temporarios. 

 Pista de baile - Clases de tango en [a building which seems to be closed now]

Profesor:  José  - Prácticas el el lugar 

acompañante para bailar en las milongas

So, what it mostly says about José himself is that he will practice with you and take you to dance in the milongas. In short, he will dance with you.  When women dance with more experienced men, that is how they really learn.

I am happy that my dances with him were social.  I am grateful that I met him and that he never so much as hinted that I should do a private, paying milonga tour with him which would have ruined everything.  The other taxi dancers I saw in Buenos Aires danced exceptionally well.  It was not always easy to tell who they were.  Even the regulars and the hosts did not always know.  I can't think of a time when anyone I asked was entirely sure if a guy I asked about was a taxi dancer.  I saw some in Confiteria Ideal.  That gorgeous tourist trap was the ideal venue for it.  I asked the waiter / DJ if those young men were taxi dancers.  But he too was hesitant:  "I'm not sure, I think so, probably'.  For all that I imagine taxi dancing is the mere simulation of a feeling, that was hard to tell too.

Even with Janis there, my initiation in to the milongas in Buenos Aires was not quite stratightforward, in as much as walking into a venue, sitting down, ordering a drink and waiting for an invitation to dance can be thought tricky.  Still, I am not altogether sure that I would have swapped exploring the milongas alone, when later I did that, to be taken round by a taxi dancer for a few days.  But that is a personal choice made with hindsight which can never be trusted.  Dancing with José was so good, perhaps I would have.  Had anyone I did trust suggested it I might well have tried it.   Yet, despite the reservations I have about taxi dancing, seeing those dancers in Buenos Aires improved my view of it.  And if you were alone in Buenos Aires and nervous or new to that city's milongas or new to dance, I wouldn't hesitate to say, get in touch with José and ask him to introduce you to the milongas.  I have his details.

Discomposure

Found among my photos from Buenos Aires

I travelled alone to Buenos Aires for three weeks in February and March of 2016, to dance and discover.  By day two I was a wreck: thrilled, scared, exhausted and overwhelmed.  It was not unlike, in a lesser way, having a child. You are excited, nervous, focused on the birth, not the realities thereafter despite having 'prepared' for that by spending half your life savings on baby gear.  Why we seem to think throwing money at things will make them easier is one of the mysteries of modern existence.

The trip to Buenos Aires began not dissimilarly. I asked sensible questions, read books, got generally informed, made what I thought were as good plans as I felt able and arrived in the city with reasonable confidence. After two days of that reality I felt jetlagged, disoriented, nervous about dance, scared in the city and generally unsettled. I had never embarked on a trip so far from my family nor for so long. I was not used to being in a country where I cannot get by in the language.  I find Europe more than big and interesting enough for travel.  I had never been on such a far-flung adventure alone.  

Some days after we met I remember Janis, guide extraordinaire to that city, remarking wryly that I obviously wasn't going to be happy with something or other unless I had found out for myself and not just been told.  Finding out for yourself is a way of feeling safer. and increasing one's sense of things being reliable   I was never sure whether she was amused or frustrated but she had trumped me on perception.  My plan was to stay in three different places over the three weeks in case I didn't like one of them. I didn't want to ruin a trip with prolonged bad accommodation but in the event I was lucky.  Janis had lived in Buenos Aires for twenty years and I was fortunate to meet her.   When I first sent Janis the address of my first accommodation she couldn't believe it.  It was virtually across the street from her place.  We were ideally situated - easy walking distance from all the central milongas.

Forget paying with your card or phone.  Argentina runs on cash.  On day two Janis took me to find the money pick up point.  At the address where the shop should have been we eventually noticed a piece of paper stuck on the wall among other posters,  It indicated that the store might have moved.  This struck me as so chaotic it all felt, in the stifling heat, slightly surreal but Janis took it in her stride.  With her knowledge of the city, a subway ride and a descent into a shopping centre we found it.  I felt fortunate and grateful.  Still, on noisy, dusty (Avenida) Corrientes I had dissolved, surprised and helpless, into homesick tears when the alarm on my phone rang to remind me that my children were out of school and I could call them. Janis was kind and showed me shops and milonga venues on our walk but with her repeated warnings about traffic and crime my sense of instability and fear increased. My emotional state swung wildly between curiosity about the new world around me and alarm.  Over the next few days I walked the streets for hours, thinking familiarity and the calming rhythm of walking might make these feelings pass.  Even so, I felt safest inside the house on Chile.  

Every night I went to a milonga but did not immediately feel at ease there either.  Everything was different from how it was in Europe, but wasn't that why I was here?  In Lo de Celia the previous night, my first milonga in the city, I had not danced. The men were small. Their dress, their manner, their language, were all slightly different than those of Europeans, their gaze more serious and more intent, their eyes seemed darker and deeper. I was not sure about things yet and did not seek invitations.  At the time I had felt merely curious, interested, largely untroubled by not dancing, but as Steinbeck says indeed, how well we practice self-delusion.  Looking back, I was just off the plane and my nerves were strung out.

Even so, there was one, taller man. Across the floor we had exchanged that mysterious silent crackle of intuitive understanding that tells each that there is dance interest, that an invitation is probably wanted and will likely be accepted. But Janis had said I was not to dance until at least two hours were up - the bare minimum of time necessary for me to accommodate myself to the new environment.  I had initially not planned to dance at all that first night and had felt happy with that - until this man appeared. I felt him try to invite across the busy floor but my agreement with Janis  meant I could not look.  He approached not our table but the bar- close enough to try again, unmistakeably. Still, I couldn't accept and he went away, puzzled. I regretted not listening to my instincts.

The pressure to dance grew. The second night we went to club Gricel. This is where I first saw Juan. I knew right away and pointed him out to Janis: That is the guy I want to dance with.  She shrugged, she didn't know him. She wasn't enjoying the milonga.  Women at our table were talking too much and too loudly. The music volume was overloud she said. But I watched. He was tall, at least 1.85 and had white curls, Dutch curls I call them.  He danced close to his partner, very smoothly, musically and with such a focus on his partner that he looked as though he was elsewhere than in the room in which he was. Roberto had that same focus.

Furiously, helplessly, I tried to resist the sense that I ought to be dancing.  People wouldn't start to think I couldn't or wouldn't dance - would they?  I wouldn't care what anyone judging me thought - would I?  This tumultuous new environment threatened my inner compass but the overriding feeling was that I only wanted to dance at the right time, when I was sure as I could be of my guy.  Embarrassed by their breaking of the codes, I refused men who walked up to the table to invite.  Again I struggled to identify individuals in the packed room.  Tense and stressed, again I did not dance. Even Janis, who is discriminating about partners, was starting to get worried.  "Have you travelled so far only to sit?"  Before my trip she had said: I will point out the better dancers to you in Lo de Celia, but I will not ask any man for favors. You have to jump right into making eye contact and surrendering yourself to the dance. I had been silently horrified that she might think I expected her to set up dances for me.  Still, by the third evening, I began to have a sense that she might have done just that.  At least, she dropped hints that a milonguero friend wanted to dance with me.

That night we were in La milonga de Buenos Aires in the Obelisco club. The entrada was 80 pesos. The DJ was Dany, Buenos Aires's best. The host, with a huge smile, was welcoming. The same guy from the last two milongas in different venues seated us in the mixed section but by the bar and right at the back. I thought I would never dance from here. Still, the atmosphere was heady. The older, famous milongueros, none of them under sixty and many much older, were out in force.  They wore blazers with shiny buttons like a uniform of yesteryear.  They sat together in the front row of the mixed section with, before them, an ice bucket containing a bottle of seemingly bottomless champagne. Ten years previously they would have been smoking.  All eyes were drawn to them, like theatre.  It was less their dancing, more the way they sat and chatted together, knowing they were the show.  It was simply the way they were. It was nothing like the reserved VIP table at European tango festivals at which visiting maestros and hangers-on pose with contrived, bored, casual ease.  These men were not an attachment to the milonga, they were the very heart of it.  El Flaco Dany, Skinny Danny, the famous milonga dancer, tanned skin, huge grin, white teeth, chatting to everyone, was at the centre of it all.  He was eighty then, and as full of energy as a coiled spring. Seeing these famous dancers not on tour, just being themselves in as much as anyone is just themselves in the visual, public world of the milonga, felt not quite real.  We could have been in that room behind that red velvet curtain, floating somewhere in the darkness. If you spent long enough in them the milongas could have that sense of being disconnected from the world, a microcosm.  Late at night after a few glasses of champagne, there was sometimes a sense that busy Avenida Entre Rios, where the smokers went, was not entirely certain, if you were to look through that red curtain, to be outside.

Some of the milongueros were gregarious, some chatted quietly, some just watched. They didn't dance much and when they did it was often with young women or women whose clothing left little to the imagination. At least some of them did not pay the entrada.  They behaved like careless royalty.  Despite their advanced ages, there was something youthful about them.  It was not how they looked but something decadent, riotous even about these characters with so much history,  hanging out together in this faintly louche underworld.  In Buenos Aires dancing tango was still not that respectable.  Many who danced there, especially older people were working class, had ordinary jobs: plumbers, shopkeepers, garage owners, or, one Argentine woman told me, the men might live on women or on the rent of inherited property - a very milonguero 'occupation'.  In Europe, middle class people dance and in the cities, many are young and foreign.   These men were aged in years but "elderly" is not the right epithet because of all the life sparkling in them.  If they were honoured and to some extent revered it was not because they were someone important outside the milonga it was because of who they were inside the milonga.  It was not despite their age, but because of their age, their experience and their lives lived closer to the Golden Age of tango in the 1930s, 40s and 50s that they were treated thus royally. 

My friend's friend, a famous milonguero featured in the Practimilonguero series knew very well where we were sitting.  Taxi driver by day, tango king by night, he had decades of experience.  That night, he invited me to dance with an almost imperceptible, entirely commanding look and a faint movement of his head.  Refusing would have been out of the question, besides, I had travelled, I thought, for this.  But curiosity still battled fear. I was not ready for the experience.  We did dance, or rather he danced with me til my bones shook.  I felt unsuitable, stiff, incompetent.  Tears brimmed as he escorted me, the way the men do there, off the floor.  He was kind though and said we'd dance later and we did.  It was nothing if not cathartic.  Soon after, recovering some kind of equilibrium, I danced with a tall, safe ex-pat who had watched and seen an opportunity.   I saw 'El Oso' again, other milongas.  We went for empanadas late one night.  Two years later he was dead.  

Beginner on beginner

A: I started reading a book by Christine Denniston which was really interesting on how tango never used to have classes.

B: Shame she taught so many classes :)

A: Guys learnt in practicas dancing with better dancers than themselves. And so of course they became better much more quickly. And the practica is partly social too.

B: True. The English idea of people who can't dance trying to learn by dancing with others that can't dance is utterly baffling to the Argentines.

Seeming and Being

Thurlow: Your Majesty seems more yourself.

George III:  Do I? Yes, I do. I've always been myself, even when I was ill. Only now I seem myself.  And that's the important thing. I have remembered how to seem.

- The Madness of George III, by Alan Bennett

The ultimate

Between tracks, in Spanish:

F:  I'm Felicity
P: Purificación
F: Sorry?
P: Purificación
F: Oh! Wow!
P: Your name comes from 'felicidad' [happiness], doesn't it?
F:  Well, yes, it does.
P: Felicidad y Purificación!
F: It doesn't get much better than that!

Codes

I love the costumes at Halloween. Enlivened by gore-spattered limbs and ghastly faces the tat drops away, giving place to other-worldliness, creativity and transformation. Dropping off my son at the school Halloween disco I was awed by the artistry of the delicate Dia de los Muertos design on a beautiful clown in a wig of multicoloured curls.

For the children, the main event of Halloween is trick-or-treating. Their enthusiasm never wanes. No matter his confidence and desire for independence I don’t care to leave my now nine-year-old, of still unpredictable road sense, wandering about, in a dark costume, his mind on treats, with heedless drivers blitzing down residential streets. So for years I too have trudged these hilly streets in the dark, the cold, the dreich and once in an icy downpour. Nothing though deters the children. Next to Christmas, Halloween is best. It is the dressing up, the friends, the promise of sweets with the delicious uncertainty of what and when and where and how much and what kind of reception from these strangers we visit.

Each lit house has its own message. One has gone to town: the whole front festooned with spider web and danger cordon, bugs, rats, goo and gore. Another transforms its lawn into a graveyard through which the children pick their way, past a skeleton with arms and legs protruding from the ground. Some will have only a jack-a-lantern outside. Another just a milk bottle with a tealight balanced on a gatepost. But this part of the game - spotting the signal, finding the one welcoming house in an otherwise darkened street. Later, walking back we remember the best one: the man with the neat house and garden, the decorations and the welcoming stained glass around the door. But it was the man himself who made it memorable: how, after the knock at the door and the werewolf howl, a clawed hand poked itself alarmingly outwards through the letterbox towards the five poised children. The man groaned loudly at the dreadful jokes, and despite the late hour on a weeknight, play-acted his way into the spirit of it all.

This year I enjoyed the silent codes around Halloween, of what to do and what not, codes figured out, passed around, passed on, tried out, explained to little ones or people who have never been before. Mistakes were made, laughed at in company and learned from. It was so natural, so human, such an antidote to our often overly-analytical, political, defensive, hide-bound, society.

It started before we went out. Social codes start in the home. My boy’s friend and his mother came for tea. These codes are even in the way we set the table, how we wait for each other to be ready to eat, the way our young visitor brought a gift and said, so politely, how good the simple food smelled, enquired what it was and where I had found the idea, said how much he was looking forward to it and offered his compliments at the table. The delightful manners of this child, and his straightforward, open, honest face means he will always be welcome. These are a sort of code; partly taught, shown, demonstrated by example to children by parents and family and partly just understood. They are the codes by which we identify others with whom we will or will not likely be socially compatible. To learn them and make them one's own requires awareness and confidence and trust. Equipping ourselves with them shows our development. To compliment a host is a time-hounoured way of showing appreciation of the effort to welcome a guest in the home. It demonstrates awareness and gratitude, social skills of a high order. It is a sort of ritual around which we hang our conversation, a trellis upon which our friendships grow.

Sometimes there may not quite be parity in our codes. Thirty years ago I learnt in France that hot chocolate may be drunk from bowls in the morning, that young friends even accompanied by parents and family may go topless at each other's swimming pools and that many homes will not use side plates for bread. If, in youth, one imports a foreign custom and make it one’s own one may, later in life, unthinkingly faze guests. There may follow silent clamour to calm our host or guest’s embarrassment, restore the momentarily broken ritual. More simply there may just be quiet adaptation and a memory, carefully filed. Such moments test our resourcefulness and grace.

So the children put on their costumes and try out their jokes on one another. The notion of trying to trick or treat without a joke to share is so obviously unsuitable it doesn't even arise. It is part of the very definition of the activity. This apart, the main code is so simple even pre-schoolers pick it up: only knock at decorated houses. What then does it mean if a house is decorated but dark? Or lit and decorated but doesn’t reply? Must we adapt our reasoning if a rival group tells us they have been cruelly sabotaging lanterns? If we are too late the hosts may be having their tea or have gone to bed, or had enough or run out of sweets.

“How often do we knock?” asks one.

“Once of course, only ever once” replies another.

“How many sweets can we take?”

“One unless offered more”.

“But Henry took three and the rest of us only got one”.

“She offered me three so it was OK!” says the straggler.

“No we can’t knock now. It’s too late” urges a ghost of pre-teen height.

Through the unwritten rules we learn we enjoy free interaction between stranger child and stranger adult, a concept otherwise almost unheard-of today. We learn that different rules apply in different contexts, the constraints here: symbols, company, costume, exchange and timing. Thus through fun, pleasure, enjoyment and reward and while hardly realising it, we learn implicitly social lessons of independence, observation, confidence, safety, mechanisms of exchange, negotiation, respect, gratitude. Social learning: long may it live.

Honesty vs. mere stylism

Charles Rennie Mackintosh's motto. Original words: J.D. Sedding (nineteenth century architect).

Colin

Buenos Aires, March 2016

When trying to decide what to do next, one solution is to consider what you would do if you only had one more chance, one last opportunity.   Here, I realised it would be the post that most often comes to mind. 

"One night I danced with my last Airbnb host in La Catedral in BA. A 29 year old Californian, my height, brand new to dance. We were there between about 2100 and 0230 and he started dancing as the girl. By the end of the night he danced two hot Di Sarli tracks so persuasively well and nicely as the guy that I began to seriously think he could actually dance beforehand and had been kidding me he couldn't until I realised how absurd that idea was. What was all the more surprising was that he didn't know the music, yet danced it sensitively, respecting the phrases. Not the QP [Quinteto Pirincho] tangos exceptionally, because I figure you really have to know those, but many others." 

- Correspondence, March, 2016

Colin was a lovely guy. He was young, gentle, quiet, friendly, reserved. He was vegetarian or maybe vegan. He loved animals. He went running in the city every day.  He was slim, fairly tall, about my height, mid-complexioned and had eyes of a striking colour, maybe green. In the street I might have taken him for a local.  In person he had a laid-back way about him which was familiar.  He was from California where I had worked on several occasions.  His voice was west-coast American with sometimes a faint foreign intonation or at least his words could have an unusual distinctness.  He was smart, well-read, spoke fluent Spanish, had travelled long and widely in South America.  He was softly-spoken and had opinions.  

Later, he quoted the novelist Julio Cortázar. I asked:  "So what are you? A tourist? An exile? A visitor? " He said:

"I think I ask myself all the time. I don't know I would define myself as a tourist, exile, or visitor." He said, wisely, "In general, I try not to define myself at all :)" He said he felt more at home in Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay, had even a sense of loyalty, "but at the same time, the fact that I wasn't born/didn't grow up here frees me from some of the criticism/frustration/responsibility I could feel with society here [Argentina], or in Ecuador". Finally, he said, "Let's go with "privileged migrant."

He was refreshingly open and easy to talk to.  There was something independent about him and something if not defensive then slightly vulnerable.  I first met him when, a week or two before I came to stay, I went to see the apartment where I had already booked a room.  He was easy, casual, polite, almost business-like.  It was, after all, business.  The apartment was in Buenos Aires.  He was looking after it for a family friend.  I rented a simple, en-suite room there through Airbnb for my third week in the city. It was a large place, elegant in spite of the peeling high ceilings.  It felt like an apartment peculiar to that city. It had a sizeable patio where I looked out over the rooftops and soaked up the March sun into my cold British bones. Like all the places I stayed, it was in the city centre.  This apartment was on Moreno in the low 2000s, a street that had a bus route but was quiet.

Colin was interested in dancing tango. He had started to take private dance lessons not long before I arrived. From his perspective it seemed to have gone so-so. From mine, it sounded as though he was already 'thinking dance', as in thinking, not feeling.  Other problems with teaching this dance aside, paying someone to dance tango with you tends to take the real feeling out it.  Before leaving the city I introduced him to a slim, attractive female dancer from Europe.  She was about his age and worked in a tango guest house around the corner.  She wanted to be a performer but I thought it might be good if he knew someone nearby who danced and indeed whose job was to guide visitors towards their dancing experiences in the city.

Colin and I chatted every day in the small kitchen, often as we prepared our food.  Sometimes we talked at length, about politics or books or travel. Then we went about our own affairs. We had talked about dancing together or about going out dancing.  It was tricky - the guy initiates things in the milongas and there was the host/guest dynamic, yet I was older, more experienced in that dance.  For whatever reason, nothing happened.

My time in the city was short.  I went to the milongas often til 3AM. Colin met friends and went out with them.  We were not the same age.  Sometimes I went to afternoon dances and continued on to evening milongas elsewhere, usually with 'champagne'.  Towards the end of my stay I sometimes went to three milongas a day:  in the afternoon, in the evening and lastly from about midnight to 3AM.  I probably overdid things, feeling unwell and collapsing on one of the three legs of the plane journey home.  I came round, surprised at the feet of remarkably placid passengers, whereupon concerned staff administered oxygen.  During the day I explored the city some - not enough - and went on walking tours. I shopped in the neighbourhood for stationery, food and saw the local costurera.  Janis showed me around, as did Alejandro, my second host. I bumped into my first host Juan on the street and went for coffee, then I met his wife Josefina for coffee in one of the grand cafes. Thus, time passed. My departure date loomed. 

Colin taught Spanish.  He was interested in different ways to teach the language. We had talked about video interviews with native speakers about local topics specific to Latin American cultures. I said that many milongueros did not speak much English.  From a language learning point of view I thought it would be interesting and motivating to hear, in their own words, their thoughts about how they had learned to dance and what they knew or had heard about what milongas were like in the Golden Age of tango decades before.  Or indeed just to hear from them about dancing, the milongas, the codes, tango and Buenos Aires.  The Practimilonguero interviews do something similar but are not edited specifically for language learners. To pitch any such idea, first Colin would have to meet the milongueros and where else but in a milonga, sitting with the guys. Such became the plan. That day we danced a little in the apartment before going out. It was fine, a bit awkward, naturally. It wasn't going to be enough to dance together in a traditional milonga.  The main aim was for Colin to experience, while in Buenos Aires, what that was and to meet some of the men. 

We went to Salon Canning on my last Wednesday in the city, three days before I left.  This was where I first met Roberto. There were far fewer people attending than on the Sunday edition. Colin didn't seem to be doing much chatting.  He was the youngest person in the room, several decades younger than many there. I danced some and thought we should leave.  Colin said he wanted to go to La Catedral. I was surprised.  It was known to be touristic, for young people, definitely not for people who wanted the traditional milonga experience in Buenos Aires. But Colin was young and he had just had the traditional version.  Though he didn't say so and was unfailingly polite I had seen Colin had not had the experience we had hoped for at Canning. This now was what he wanted to do and it was only fair.

I was relieved when Colin took charge of the buses, which, with my inadequate Spanish I had only recently plucked up the courage to use and certainly could not have done so ad-hoc, but I was dreading going to this venue.  It had been on my 'Avoid' list. Before going to Buenos Aires I contacted Janis. She said: "You haven't told me how old you are. It makes a difference in where to dance." To give an idea of what I liked and didn't, my reply included that "I would find this degree of darkness depressing. I don't know how a milonga can work like that."  That is a video of Salon Catedral. Janis replied that it was an 'underground' milonga. It was clear she never went there.

It turned out that one of my most memorable dance experiences in Buenos Aires and ever was with one of the most unlikely people - my young, practically non-dancing Airbnb host -  in one of the most unlikely places. It was also nothing like the traditional Buenos Aires dance experience for which I had made the trip.  It was this very unlikeliness, its randomness together with its success that might lead me to consider the existence of a governing power whose traits would include an interest in the learning experience, an antipathy towards fixed mindsets and a well-developed sense of the absurd. 

We arrived early. The place was dark, cavernous, hippy, vegetarian, empty and none too clean.

There is a better photo here And in daylight. 

The music was barely audible. Nobody seemed to know how to turn up the volume. There was no-one to ask besides a shadowy figure in the cafe who didn't know, so we started dancing under the speakers. I was enthusiastic because if nothing else the music was good and the partner willing. In unpromising places, experience says: grab the good tracks before the music slides, so we danced, in swapped roles. The tracks were not necessarily in tandas, especially at the start.  There was initially a disproportionate number of tracks by Enrique Rodriguez but I like his orchestra and had found him under-represented in the traditional milongas.  The tracks were nearly all good and gave way to more good variety from other orchestras. We stayed a long time, ate, danced, watched an excruciating lesson led by a prancing, haranguing guy in a white string vest who I might have seen in  La Marshall, a well known gay tango club. We watched the disastrous social dance fallout that came from the class. We danced again, watched some musicians in a performance that had, refreshingly, nothing to do with tango and danced some more. 

The night was warm. We paused, cooled down and kept dancing. Occasionally we swapped to traditional roles then swapped back. During those hours I realised Colin's dancing was evolving. Perhaps that is why we continued so long.  And it was fun. 

There came a point, late in the night when I realised that dancing in traditional roles with Colin had become a pleasure.  But how could a beginner guy be pleasant to dance with?  I knew I was choosy and hard-to-please.  I realised Colin was following the music yet he didn't know the music.  I asked him if he was sure he didn't know it, perhaps from living in the city where you hear tango in all sorts of places. He said no.  Besides, it couldn't be true for so many tracks.  Yet he was indisputably dancing the phrases with musical attentiveness.

I had seen this once before in a child. I had taken my son and his friend to a tea-dance the previous winter.  They were about eight at the time.  I had danced in 'train' fashion with the little girl behind me for only perhaps a track. When we swapped and she led our 'train' I noticed immediately that although she had never heard the music, although she 'only' walked, and although nothing had been said she was intuitively dancing the music: moving and pausing, as she had seen me do, at the end of the phrase.  If only more beginner men were as attentive.

Colin had come so far, so fast my mind couldn't keep up with what the body felt.  The mind had no experience with which to make sense of the situation.  It warped, tried hard, bizarrely, as it will, to make sense of things.  Perhaps this was some elaborate trick.  Colin could always dance. He was just seeing what I would do if he pretended he couldn't.  More rationally I thought back to the awkward start in the apartment and realised either Colin was a virtuoso actor or that something else must be the case.

To explain the musical understanding that Colin, as a beginner, seemed to have, some people would say he had 'natural talent'. That may be true but I suspect this experience is within the reach of many . I think like the little girl in the tea dance, he picked up the cadence from me - just an experienced dancer who knew the music. This, the entire focus on the partner, the music, the sensations, and none of the harmful distractions of thought or dance 'moves' meant that he naturally absorbed the music into his body and transmitted it to me. And he was young, which helps. 

I said to Colin: "You are nice to dance with.  Why not invite that girl to dance?" She was closer to his age.  He seemed stuck between desire and reluctance. Perhaps he was a little shy and who could blame him.   It was all so new.  He found a girl himself, then, "No", he said.  She had a boyfriend.  I watched on tenterhooks as girl after girl passed by and Colin looked, seemed interested but didn't invite. I understood, but I was leaving soon and thought he should dance with others before then.

Perhaps I was now thinking of the evening as the start for Colin's milonga life.  He danced so well I assumed he would continue.  Now I think I need not have been so ambitious for him.  Perhaps I should have just enjoyed the present time we were sharing.  But I felt something like a guide at the time and a guide who was about to leave.  If he was to go on to dance  - and I don't know if he did - I think what happened next was ultimately to the good because dancing tango with another man is probably the most useful thing a guy can do.  It gives such insight and these guys always make better dancers.

There was a dreadful dancer who had been in the class that had now finished. But he was hanging around, dancing as much as he could. "Look", I said, "Ask him. He's got no-one to dance with, he wants to dance. It will be good for you."  Beware, though, people who know what is good for you.  "Tell him you both need the practice."  So he did and the guy agreed. It was, as I had expected, grim. Colin took the woman's part.  The guy was rough. Horribly rough. Colin came away, reeling. Through my guilt, I said,  "But you learned something about what guys can be like, no?"  I think he was too shocked to say.  Perhaps he also learned it can, for the woman, feel worse than it looks.

It seems obvious now that if you share a good experience with someone there is perhaps no need to point them in the direction of a bad one. They are bound to find out the best way:  for themselves.  But I still hoped he would dance with another woman.  If he was going to have a bad experience I wanted to be there for the first one to help make sense of it and so that the beginner does not, as is so common, blame themselves unnecessarily.  I had seen in myself and many times in others how hard it could be to make sense of bad experiences alone.

The night spun on. Finally, I set up a dance with an Italian woman, not a beginner, though no-one in that place danced well.  I asked her if she would give my new-dancing friend the chance to dance with someone else. She agreed. It was difficult for Colin.  I knew it probably would be. He danced well with me because we had understood and adapted to one another over the time we had been dancing.  But there wasn't much time and this was his chance to dance with another woman while he had some support.  He didn't know anyone in the milongas, or anyone to go with.  As when I took my children to Carmen, recently, I felt at the time the point was not necessarily to enjoy every moment, it was to have the whole experience.  At the opera it was the experience of that music, of being in a concert hall with others, of conducting with your finger, jouncing up and down in your seat to the March of the Toreadors, of ice cream at the interval, of, in a good example of conflicted parenting, being stuffed quietly in the darkness with pacifying sweets, of running around madly with your friends afterwards on the ensuing sugar-rush.  In Colin's case, the experience included seeing how different people can be. I tried to get video but it was too dark.

Colin did blame himself soon after but I had been there too and could say something about it.  Shortly afterwards, by email:

C: I gave that Italian woman a horrible dance as we waited

F: Actually, no. It's true the guy feels the responsibility to give the chica a good time. I think that's the natural way of the world. But it's a two-way thing. I set the dance up, [she agreed] and if she didn't really want to dance with you, which is to say embrace and connect with you for any of the many unguessable reasons that people don't want to dance with each other - then it would never have worked no matter what you'd done. The fact is, in the right circumstances, with the right person, you can dance and really nicely. It's still valuable to dance with all sorts of people - guys and girls in either role. It's worth it for the ones who are great to dance with and the less fun ones are still good - for the insight.

Surprisingly, La Catedral, that environment I had been so keen to avoid was a large part of why I think Colin was able to learn to dance that evening. It was dim, spacious, there wasn't there the same sense of observation you feel in the traditional milongas. You could feel anonymous, almost invisible. I have danced with enough people, in enough places and enough ways to not be particularly self-conscious in either role which is necessary to be able to help someone else let go of that sense.  Maybe these things are why Colin could let things go in the way that you need to to be able to dance. That is why I enjoyed dancing with him in both roles after just a few hours. 

Two and a half years on Colin remains the best example I know of a guy who has learned to dance well, in a very short space of time. I have danced with many other beginner guys but never for so long, never with the commitment I had to Colin and never so successfully.  That came about because of the unusual circumstances of that evening.  The fact that we went out spontaneously together for the evening had something to do with it.  He wasn't just some random beginner I came across in the milonga.  Then there was the environment of La Catedral, the music, that he put his trust in me and that because he was light, young, embraceable, a nice guy and the desire to dance together a lot was mutual. That isn't usually the case. Beginner men  - actually a lot of men - are often middle-aged, heavy, lumbering, controlling, forceful, with varying degrees of deafness to the music and the partner or some combination thereof.  They have also usually been in class before you meet them.  I can only remember one other beginner guy who had Colin's unimpeded sense of the music and the partner. He was also young - years younger than Colin -  practically a boy.  He was tall, embraceable and, now I think of it, had a similar sense of independence and vulnerability. But I could never help but think of his mother - who sounded great - when I danced with him.

There was one other guy whose dancing transformed in an evening, in practically one dance, who was not young, but more of him perhaps another time.

So that is why that evening was special - because of Colin himself, because it was all so unexpected, and because I have not since found a beginner guy in the right environment, with the right conditions where it has been so clearly demonstrated that a man can learn in an evening to be musical and lovely to dance with. 

Colin did a wonderful thing which made all the difference to the dynamics that evening. I am not sure that I am generally the trusting type, not least in not wanting to expose my execrable milonga Spanish to people I need not.  I am happy to ask for necessaries, even chat as best I can to polite, half-comprehending, non-English speaking locals, which is, after all, the best way to learn a language.  But compared to reading and listening I am a hesitant speaker.  I have always found it odd when I have encountered people with the same native language speaking together in a different one and have shied away from foreign language conversation clubs between native English speakers.

Perhaps Colin sensed these things because, over drinks and food in La Catedral, somehow, with remarkable patience, he coaxed me into trying out my conversational Spanish.  It started awkwardly, like the dancing, but now his sureness and quiet encouragement led me on.  But I blindly led myself into the unknown past tense.  He didn't send me back to stick with the more familiar present tense because life isn't like that and he wasn't a conventional teacher.  Without so saying he encouraged me not to give up and helped me through.  Like the best teachers, he let me cast about myself first, looking for different ways to say what I meant, only intervening, subtly, unobtrusively when he judged I really needed help, never giving too much, just a word here, a phrase there so I could use them myself.  It is a very light touch that is needed to help someone find their way.  A guiding touch, a deftness.  Colin had that.

There was a genuine desire to help on his part and on mine to learn.  Yet as I agonised unnecessarily, helplessly over my mistakes, my beginnerishness, I had a sense of things being not just about learning Spanish.  Even if I couldn't have quite articulated it, I knew then it was as much about showing and learning and trusting, swapping roles. As guide, as learner, he did it with grace.

Laura

Laura with Henk at her Tuinhuis milonga, October 2016

I met Laura in January 2014 at the Saturday afternoon practica in Glasgow. We connected right away.  Then we danced.  She was one of the first women I remember dancing in swapped roles.  I was just starting to swap and among women, it was Laura more than anyone who showed me how that could be confident, fluid and gentle. She gave confidence.  At that time she had already been dancing in both roles for many years. I wrote to her once saying she was "all musical and flexible and responsive".

After the practica she came with us to 'Smile' cafe  - what an apt name. At that time some dancers in Glasgow went there regularly for the thick Italian hot chocolate and the chat.  Laura chatted, smiled and laughed. Then, suddenly, surprisingly, wonderfully she sang tango songs for us.  She touched everyone who was there that afternoon.  Several of us continued to spend time together in a Persian restaurant that evening.  Afterwards she wrote "Special to be amongst people i don't know and still feel so at ease with".

I wrote: "It was such a pleasure to meet you. Everyone said so!  And we loved your impromptu show in the cafe!  You sing with such heart and feeling! "  That was Laura: a light in the room, all heart and feeling.

I asked Laura about a good dancer and nice guy I had met at the Duif milonga in Amsterdam the year before.  I tried to describe him.  A few days after we met she wrote to say she had met Franc Duking at a milonga in Utrecht: "how fun it was i could bring you both in contact!".  She liked to do that sort of thing for others.  I'm so glad she did because three years later I made it to Franc's Oranjerie milonga in Arnhem after New Year. Along with Laura's own milonga these were my two favourite milongas in the Netherlands.  If I hadn't asked and she hadn't remembered and told me Franc's name I might never have found that milonga. Thus do the small things in life, the small kindnesses open us to other experiences.  I closed down my blogs about 18 months ago after some casual remarks by a friend at the time.   It is today that I re-open Milonga Review.   I find again, Laura is the catalyst.  She was to me all about openness, acceptance, being who you are, not just not apologising for it but celebrating your own life and those of others.  That was the example she set.

I saw Laura a couple of months later in Glasgow.  She brought Dutch waffle biscuits for my children when we met one chilly day in the botanical gardens. My elder son still adores waffles.  She was so polite about my then five year old who that day was the very spirit of rebellion. More than that - someone who was just polite could have left one with a sense of inadequate parenting.  But Laura said "What a special time of sharing! Thank you! And what a challenge to parent two active boys! And did well in the milonga, of course the cookies were a help ;-)". She was kind.  She wrote other kind, complimentary things because she knew how strengthening that is. Like my mother, like a good mother, like a good friend she taught me without actually teaching:  "Raising two great kids and at the same time demanding and see what great job you do! I hope you are proud of what you acomplish!!"  I learnt a lot from Laura but only realise this particular lesson when I read her words again now.  At the time I thanked her not for that lesson but for sending me a picture of a 'green wall' in Madrid, because she knew I liked them.  How easily we can miss what is most important.

When something she had worked hard for didn't work out she felt the disappointment, accepted it and said "Well, letting go seems to be the solution!".  And what other, what better way is there?

Perceptively, Laura noticed something unusual and asked about my domestic circumstances. I told her. Unlike many she simply accepted the unusual and went on to talk about the glycaemic index in sugar. That was Laura. She was curious, understanding, accepting. I think it was not mere idle curiosity because Laura was too sensitive for that but curiosity so as to better understand.

I danced increasingly less after 2014 and we were less in touch after that.  We met briefly in Edinburgh at the tango festival but I was tired. If I think of it as Laura might, I was "not with the right energy for the situation".  While I was still hamstrung by notions of duty and obligation Laura was very aware of energy in general and of energy as a finite resource that needs rest for renewal. I am still learning from her that obligation counts for nothing without energy and that a sense of duty counts for little compared to true willingness.

The next time I saw Laura was two years ago. I feel privileged that I went to her Tuinhuis milonga in Utrecht in 2016. She ran it even though she was just back that day from a trans-continental flight. We had a lovely, healthy meal, shared, at home with friends such as I had not had in a long time.  There was Henk with whom she sang and Astrid who had DJd for her for many years.  The milonga, just through the garden from her house was one of my favourites in the Netherlands, for the atmosphere. It is hard to describe how that was: warm, cosy, a place of light in the dark garden, of music, dance and conviviality.  There was a donation bowl for the DJ but otherwise Laura said it was free. People brought things to share. It was a place of sharing.  That was Laura, she shared. 

 There was a broader mix of people than I remember from other milongas in the Netherlands. The hours seemed to pass so quickly as they will in good times.  The photos I have of this milonga, kindly shared by Ojo-oscuro, are my favourites of any milonga I have been to. There is a warmth in them.  People seem relaxed and happy. I always wanted to return to that milonga because what she made was so special.  I took for granted that I would.  To run a milonga the way Laura did with her friends, to leave the legacy of those memories is a special thing.

 

Laura had invited me to stay that night in her flat. She was kind. She was liberal. "Do as you feel", she always said. She was understanding. She lived healthily. She told me how she loved to cycle to a lake near her house to swim. But despite singing as passionately as ever at the milonga she was overall more subdued. It concerned me but Laura was older than me, more experienced,  further ahead. I was unsure and didn't know how to ask.  I think she saw the query.  With the openness I remember her for and the clear-sightedness I admired she mentioned what troubled her, but remained optimistic. She "looked for the good" as my mum would say.

I remember another example of that. Years before she had had a bad dance with a guy who clearly had not engaged in a shared dance [my words] and had instructed her.  She said "I was confused but at the end i thanked him and shared my confusion and he said the right thing that to enjoy was the most important".  She was honest, open, clear with a compass set true.

While she travelled all over the world Laura lived simply.  She was grateful for all she had in life, especially her family, also friends, colleagues, music, dance. She spoke of them all warmly.

She left us too soon and I wish now we had stayed more in touch.  Like others I was shocked to hear of her passing.  When her mother died she said "we surround her with love so what more to wish for!?".  I read from those closest to her that that is what happened for Laura.

I have always thought that if you want to say something about someone, say it to them while they are alive.  I find myself doing the opposite, so I still learn from Laura.  I imagine her shrugging lightly, accepting, understanding because that is who she was.  But the lesson for me that, while well-known most us nevertheless seem to need to learn through experience, is: "don't leave it too late".  Be aware of the joy in the moment as Laura was, of that good fortune of experiencing something and especially knowing someone that we so often take for granted. Savour, celebrate and share it.  Perhaps that is why she loved to dance.   Some people are particularly special to us.  I learn from Laura that it is important to recognise those people and let them know.

Laura leaves wonderful memories. What I remember is that huge smile, the open arms, the warm eyes, the ardour for life expressed in song, the way she made people happy. 

April 2014, Botanics, Glasgow