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| 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.
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.
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.
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.
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