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.