Discomposure

Found among my photos from Buenos Aires

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, another Dany 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 this vantage point. 

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, not in the men's section but 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 that just being themselves, they were the show. 

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, in Europe, just as they were, as much as anyone is just themselves in the visual, public world of the milonga, felt not quite real.  

That room behind that red velvet curtain, might have been, was in fact, a separate microcosm.  What I mean to say is that room could almost have been floating somewhere in space. If you spent long enough in them the milongas could have that sense of being disconnected from the world or rather, a world unto itself.  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. Coming downstairs from a milonga onto the street always felt rather unreal, or perhaps one wasn't sure which experience was real, which only pointed to how extraordinarily different those two realities were.

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. Some if not all of them did not pay the entrada. I don't know if the owners did that from respect or from the knowledge that these men would  bring in the rest of us.  Maybe it was both.  The milongueros 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.  

It is a sense found in the lyrics of many tangos.  Como se pianta la vidaa, is packed with words evoking the life of young raffish milongueros of a past era: berretines locos de muchacho rana...milongas, timbas y otras macanas...mi copa bohemia de rubia champaña....mi vida fue un barco cargado de hazañas....muchacho calavera... aquellas ranadas.  In the Rodriguez 1940 recording with Moreno the sung version is "en timbas, milongas y en farras lejanas”, timba being a gambling den and farras being an old lunfardo word for wild parties.

"Garufa" means - a noun meaning something like pleasure seeking, carousing refers to the bacanal which etymology remembers the Greek god of excess, the bandidos and imagining oneself a rana fenomenal.  The tango was sung in 1968 by Tita Merello in her famous arrabalera persona - la más rea del tango. Champagne Tango again references farras - gigolós and again champagne.  Rodríguez has some of the darkest lyrics where excess meets ruin.  "No te quiero más" has me dedico a la garufa.  There are many of these tangos, most of them remembering an era now past or youth.  It's this sense of disrepute that these men had. Curiously, they did not have this sense of it all being in the past.  They were right there, going for every opportunity they still had - and they had plenty.  

In Buenos Aires dancing tango was still not that respectable.  Many who danced there, especially older people were working class, had ordinary jobs.  They were 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 the milonguero again, other milongas.  He was nothing if not disreputable.  While I was still British-naive in that foreign city and he at least thirty years older, he managed to clear it with Janis that he would take me out from the milonga very late, for empanadas, which I had not yet tried, and drop me home. Janis was going home early.  It'll be fine, she said, encouragingly, telling me that they were my Buenos Aires "parents". This somehow did not feel particularly reassuring and I was far from happy about leaving the milonga with someone I had only just met.  But it was all being organised for me, in Spanish so I told myself: be grateful.  Before I knew what was happening I was in a car going elsewhere. It's food, not "coffee", I told myself, the lecture belying my lack of reassurance.  He walked into the place like a king and I felt like a queen of the formica.  He had an aura then, lent him by the milonga.  He talked to me earnestly in his thick porteño accent.  I didn't understand a word.  Two years later he was dead.