Chamuyo

And chamuyo?  

Axel, an Argentinian tango dancer living in New York, gave his definition of chamuyo:  it was about trying to get someone to do something or buy something, but it would likely be a lousy deal and at your expense; something you would regret.  Yes, it was a kind of manipulation.  It had a connotation of length - a long lie. So was it a con?  Maybe not as much as a con but yes, a salesman would be a chamullero.  It could be funny he said, but in essence, chamuyo was a bad thing.  Yes, it was tied to seduction which can be good or bad.  In that way, and because it is a lunfardo word, it is connected to tango; lunfardo being old Buenos Aires slang associated with crime, with the underworld and with the origins of tango.

In a milonga I saw another  Argentine who I knew had lived in Europe for a long time.  I had chatted to him briefly about music in the past.  Excuse me... I said.  His dance brims with fun, his partners giggle, yet his answers to me were bland and straight.  Piropo was a compliment, chamuyo was small talk.  Was that it?  I persisted.  Was there no double meaning?  There can be, he conceded but giving nothing away.  Were there other words in castellano that had this double sense, I asked.  Many, he said, surprising me.  We like to play with words a lot.   But he said it briefly, factually and that was as much insight as I found with him.  It was an odd, disconcerting experience.  I guessed I was bothering him.  He was courteous though, patient with my questions and generous in helping me decipher parts of the tango about piropos: Simplemente.

I asked another Argentine in another milonga.  It's chat he said simply.  But it also has the connotation of a lie.

At the carwash in Edinburgh I chatted to a young guy, Francés.  He was from  Alicante but said his name was Catalan. 

- Chamuyo?  he said No.  

- Chamullar?   Chamullero?

- Chamullero?  No.

He called over to his colleague Victor but it was clear neither of them knew these words.  Chamuyo  isn't known in Spain. 

In Murcia my Catalan friend also claimed no knowledge of the word. Again, I thought he was joking. But it is lunfardo, not a Spanish word.  Still, his wife had heard of it.  Almost mirroring the dictionary definition she said:  It's inconsequential chat, to fill a silence. 

Let's ask more people! I said. I watched my friend introduce himself to others in our group.  We were all walking through the streets of Murica. He would catch up with someone and say in Spanish:  Excuse me, I'm J, this is Felicity, we want to know what 'chamuyo' is? He spoke with a charming sociability, a lightness of touch and good humour that reminded me of one or two Argentinians.  We asked Antonio who was from Salamanca where they apparently speak the best Spanish. It was comer la oreja: to eat your ear off.  That had some of Axel's sense of the word.

At the carwash, Francés started jumping up and down in the cold.  In my high-ceilinged, single-glazed house in the winter, despite five layers of clothing, I shiver - inside.  My husband came home this week to find me cooking in a coat and hat.  But I am British, half Scottish even. We are supposed to be used to it, accept it or at least tolerate it. I endure it but I felt sorry for these young Spanish men.    

- You guys from Spain working outside in Scotland in the winter....  I shook my head.  I don't know how you do it. 

- I feel the cold,  said Francés.  But Vicor is from León.  It's colder there than here.  They have snow just now.

Decidedly, it is not like much of Spain here just now.  There, in some part, the oranges are out and people, well wrapped out, sit outside in the sun at the cafes.

Murcia, Jan 2019, Teatro Romea (above)

So what finally, was chamuyo?  I had thought that chamuyo could be just chat.  Here, apparently, it can be that chit-chat that my friend's wife says fills a silence, precisely what happens between tracks in a milonga:

La palabra chamuyo es parte del argot lunfardo y se refiere a la conversacion que le hace un hombre a una mujer para llevarla a la cama, o la conversacion trivial que hacen las personas para llenar huecos de silencio.

Chamuyo is lunfardo slang, referring to the conversation that a man makes to a woman to take her to bed or to the small talk people make to fill a silence.

Wander Argentina says something similar:

Another word that sounds so pretty but can turn out ugly is chamuyo. This can be innocent sweet talk from a guy trying to score with a girl or out-right scheming and scamming. The verb for the word is chamuyar and a person who does it is called a chamuyero. A worker who talks about what a great job he’ll do while dollar signs are rolling in his eyes, or an acquaintance who swears they’ll do a favor and then evades phone calls or a guy who swears he’ll love a girl forever and then abandons her after she’s knocked up –- all fall within the chamuyero spectrum.

Not only does one meaning of chamuyo mean something dubious - a seduction that may or not exist,  that may or may not be a positive experience, but the very definition of the word is equivocal. It encompasses a whole range of possibility.

Assuredly, the milongas in Buenos Aires that I attended had that sense of ambiguity about them:  that a man could treat you well or not might depend on your responses, on what looked possible.  Like the Italians, the Argentine is a great improviser. The dance is famous, after all, for being improvised.  I have met Argentinian men who are personable, pleasant, intelligent, lovely to dance with.  Given half a chance those same men have taken my friends to bed.  And then the friends find out about the others he has on the go on other nights or in other countries. What is remarkable is those I have spoken to on this topic have either had this experience or have stories about other friends.  Some men behaved well, some did not.  Some would try it on, some would not.  Some would manage, some would not.  In a way that is just not the same here in Europe, especially in northern Europe, there was, never far away, that sense of an improvised game, a slightly dangerous or decidedly grown-up game, a sense of roles, of actions and consequences and you had to be alert to it.

Simplemente

Still on the topic of piropos, here are Majo Martirena and Rocio Lequio dancing to Maia Castro's modern tango, 'Simplemente'.  

I have long been "off" dancing "in a tango dance style" to non-tango, to new versions of classic tango recordings and even to modern tango. But after listening to this song many times I began to think not just that I liked it but to wonder if I might dance it, if I heard it in a milonga.   Best of all is the emerging sense of freedom that comes with that feeling.

Simplemente camino, por esta cuadra
No me importa que pensas
Sobre mi forma de andar
Si el jean me queda bien
O es muy corta la falda
Si yo no soy tu mama
porque ‘mamita’ me gritas

Yo no soy tu mina, ni tu nena, ni tu amante
Solo soy una mujer que camina por la calle

Si hace frio o calor
Si vas tapada hasta la frente
De bufanda, saco largo,
Pasamontanas escarbadientes
Igual se puede escuchar
‘Que divina que estas’
Yo no se si no ven bien
Pues que lo mismo le da

Ella no es tu mina, ni tu nena, ni tu amante
Solo es una mujer que camina por la calle

Yo te quiero preguntar
Que podria pasar
Si esto fuera al revez
Ponete a nuestro lugar

Ella no es tu mina, ni tu nena, ni tu amante
Solo es una mujer que camina por la calle

*

Simply

I am simply walking down this block
I don’t care what you think
About the way I walk
If the jeans I am wearing look good
Or the skirt is too short
I am not your mother
so why do you shout ‘mummy’

I am not your woman, nor your baby nor your lover
I am only a woman, who walks down the street

Whether it’s cold or hot
Whether you are covered up to the forehead
With a scarf or large coat
And with a balaclava
You can still hear
‘how divine you are’
I don't know if they don't see well
But it's all the same to her

She is not your woman, nor your baby nor your lover
She is only a woman, who walks down the street

I want to ask you
What would happen
If it was the other way around
Put yourself in our shoes

She is not your woman, nor your baby nor your lover
She is only a woman, who walks down the street

Many thanks to the friends and strangers for letting me know about the song, for the lyrics and the translations.

Piropos

I was puzzled about piropos - could something that was a compliment in the milongas really also be a catcall in the street? I had heard this from a Brit and decided to ask someone from Spain.  Olaya was matter of fact:  Yes, a piropo could be a compliment or a catcall she said. It depended on the context.  

But in Murcia it turned out to be not so clear after all.
- What is a piropo?
My friend looked shocked.
- It is an aggression.
- Seriously? I said.
I don't know him well except that he has a sense of fun, which is one of the main things.  I wondered if he was putting it on.
- Yes! It is an invasion of privacy. 
Apparently not, I thought, a little startled.  He is Catalan.  It wondered if perhaps that region is more modern, more PC, more serious. 

- Well, he conceded, making the same point about buildings sites and twenty years ago.

His wife added that there was a difference between a man saying you are looking so hot he feels like biting your neck (astonishingly she had thus been threatened) and May I say how nice you look today?  She was indubitable:  a man had to ask permission to compliment a woman otherwise it was an infringement.  This made sense to me because once coupled with a guy on the dance floor, he knows that, gross discomfort apart, he has you for the tanda.  Some, treading a fine or a coarser line, try to exploit that.   I asked her: did she still dance with the guy?  Yes, she said,  surprising me.  But - and then she demonstrated the careful, almost exaggerated politeness he now used when speaking with her.  I wondered why she still danced with him and supposed it was a victory of sorts but I wondered how fun it was.  

Later, in a milonga, a guy from another Latin American country, a long time resident in Scotland, would say that the guy thinks he's making a compliment, but that might not be the girl's view.  The woman should have the last word, he said.  We would say that was canny advice, coming from a Scot but I thought it was more like the Latin courtesy that Janis wrote about recently.

Another friend, Isabella, is from Spain but spent over twenty years in Latin America.  We are the same age.  She looks great, besides which she is tactile and has the warmth and sense of fun that I have found in some women from that continent.  Her tone and expressions say at least as much as her words.  We caught up at a milonga recently and chatting and dancing with her was the highlight of my evening.  Isabella said a piropo was a compliment.  She too mentioned building sites.  But, she said, the way you would react would be  - and here she set her face firmly, looking ahead, defiantly pretending not to hear anything at all.  In this, she echoed a British woman who had lived in Spain under Franco's rule.  She was adamant: if a woman responded to a street piropo it was taken as a come-on. She said:  The advice then in the late sixties was to ignore such attentions and keep staring straight ahead.

But inside, said, Isabella you would be...  and here she grinned hugely and wriggled in delight.  Pero, she said, her dark eyes suddenly serious; she lifted a finger and said with a warning tone:  My daughters  - who are about twenty - don't think piropos are compliments.  They say they are an invasion of privacy.  "Mama," they say, "I don't need a man to tell me I look good."  Their mother and I cast down our eyes and looked sideways at one another from under our eyelashes, reproved by youth.

Piropos and Chamuyo

What was the word for those sweet, casual things that José and other Argentinians in Buenos Aires sometimes said, in the pause between the three or four tracks we danced together?  Those compliments said by either partner are one of the lovely things about dancing tango.  In so many ways dancing in the milongas can reveal our better natures.  But when I dance in swapped roles with a man or a woman and we exchange compliments, it is entirely different to how it is when a guy in the guy's role compliments a woman in the woman's role. 

I enquired about this word in one of those forums that I had at first ignored and then been warned about long before, perhaps for the frivolity or the showiness.  If only our teachers, even the ones we make our teachers, especially those, knew the awful extent of their influence. If I weren't now so nervous of that word I might say the trick, there, is to limit one's chat.  It can be a trick of sorts I suppose if one merely uses the forums rather than participating in them more fully.  But questioning people's motives for doing entirely legal things is an unprofitable enquiry.

What was that word?  Piropo they reminded me, helpfully.  Piropos were compliments, made to the opposite sex.  But somebody said that in Spain a piropo was not a compliment, or not necessarily.  In Spain apparently, they could be street catcalls with connotations not wholly benign.  Was that because this urban 'tribute' to women is now not viewed the same way that it might have been in the past? The fact of the scare quotes suggests the problematic nature of the word.   Had language also evolved to reflect that change? Did piropo mean something different now? Or only in Spain? Only two decades ago being whistled at in the street could be a compliment of sorts, or vulgar, depending on age, temperament, upbringing.  Passing building sites in the UK wolf whistles used to be practically customary.   Did piropo today have two meanings on the  Spanish peninsula or just one? And where did that leave chamuyo? Could you sweet talk a woman with chamuyo?  The word had that feeling about it, in the sounds.  Or did it just mean chat? I was fairly sure that Janis's blog Tango Chamuyo, intended: chat.  I asked her.  She said:  It's a lunfardo word meaning "conversation" although the verb "chamuyar" means "to chat." A tango teacher in San Francisco used the word for her tango festival chat sessions, and I liked it so much that I used it for the blog. 

I wanted to find out more about the ambiguity surrounding piropo so I decided to wait until I went to Murcia for the weekend to get more of the Spanish perspective.

First I asked an Argentinian I know.  I have a question... I said, tentatively.  

- Yes?  he said, smiling.  And, attentively, Tell me!  I told him.
Oh, piropos.  His face melted.  They were nice. He liked them. He enjoyed giving them. Like many Argentines he is tactile.  I could just see him reaching for the girl's hand as he said his piropo.  Piropos were sweet. Yes, they were genuine - although I wasn't sure whether genuine meant entirely the same thing to an Argentine as to a Brit. 

- And chamuyo?  I said, mispronouncing it, probably in spanish and castellano.  

- What are you? he said, with a grin.  A journalist?  I was relieved that the history we have on this topic seemed to flow peacefully under that bridge.  Chamuyo - he pronounced it with the soft 'j' sound in the last syllable. No, that is not so nice. It is like a lie.

- You can 'chamullar' about anything, added his wife, who had appeared.  

- Yes, he continued, if I wanted to sell you this phone, I might tell you it was an iPhone even if it wasn't.  That's chamullar.  But yes, you can 'chamullar' a woman too.  It's a seduction, but a bad one.

And what about piropo - did it mean something different in Spain?

- Well, he said, with a mischieveous glint. His wife was not there. There are lots of things that are not the same in Spain. Mercurial, he continued in a serious tone: You know what 'coger' is in Spanish?
- To take, I said, using the same, sensible tone.

- Exactly he said, as I played in to his hands. We say how lucky they are in Spanish, always taking a woman here, taking them there.

- Oh yes?

- We say how lucky they are because in Argentina 'coger' means... and here this born performer changed his tone to a mock stage whisper, "...the act of love", and he pulled a face that indicated it was high time I caught up.

Amused, I wondered what the Argentine word was for what had just happened.

Strangers

I want to get back to José, his hands, his piropos. 

First, though, I must eat very humble pie.  That is because of the help I received from strangers in one those chattering internet forums I so recently disparaged.   There, I had three offers of help to translate a song from Spanish and two translations.  Some of life's most poignant moments must be the generosity and kindnesses of strangers. 

One of the translations was from a Brit I met recently in Murcia.  Two days previously, finding ourselves both about to do, separately, a spot of tourism before the encuentro, we decided instead to visit two of the sights together.  We had orange juice in the sun in front of the cathedral and later on, a tapas lunch.  I discovered he likes his music dramatic and from the 50s and is not averse to executing that move where a woman is persuaded to sit on a man's knee on the dance floor.  He said it was to pre-empt the woman initiating it herself, of which he apparently had experience.  In the four milongas that followed I had not looked to him for dance although we had sometimes chatted at a communal meal-table.  Then on the last day, I fell ill, barely moving from the bed in which I sweated out a fever which left me shaky, my lips peeling.  Yet during that day this man regularly offered help.  For this I was and remain immeasurably grateful.  Knowing that someone was there if I needed it was a bit like going to a strange milonga with someone you know:  it is just reassuring that they are there.  This sense and it is no more than that, can entirely change the experience.   During our chats I found him to be a man of humour and kindness, who, while not entirely well himself, visits friends from the milongas in hospital and, annually, runs a milonga and raffle with extraordinarily good prizes for which 100% of the ticket price is donated to a charity for the homeless.

At the weekend, my friend Isabella described, with much humour, how the milonga is her fantasy world. My children often describe their fantasy worlds to me.   The fantasy world I would describe to them is one where, instead of money, what makes the world go round are acts of kindness and prayers of gratitude.

*

I wrote this piece in a poky, spartan, expensive, basement cafe with French soft rap, abrupt service,  uncovered cakes, leaky teapots, young people and tea with a taint of wee.  I walked out on to George Street, Edinburgh, a boulevard of expensive, boutique shops, upmarket chain stores and improbable pubs behind Greek porticos of tremendous size.  It was dark, nearing 6pm; the January temperatures were approaching freezing.  Immediately and outside one of these grand pubs, I passed two homeless people, a man and woman, sitting on the pavement in a mess of litter.  They were giggling, apparently high.  Bananas in fucking pyjamas shouted the man, with angry hilarity to the world at large.  My attention was removed from them by a gruff, grimy, well wrapped up guy with a sleeping bag under his arm who had just crossed the street and was approaching a male passerby, asking for change.  I walked on half a block.  Across the road I saw another homeless person kneeling down, talking to someone else on the street until I realised by the posture of the one kneeling that it was someone with a backpack possibly trying to help.

And then I passed a young man, asleep on the pavement, outside a shop, his back against the wall, his face towards the world.  I cursed fate, mostly for what it had brought him to and because he was asleep in the street on a cold winter evening in Scotland and I was passing him and felt implicated.

I went around the block looking for cash and passed a Starbucks.  I would wake him up, get him something hot in the cafe and give him some money.  A simple plan.  When I knelt down beside him, the man, to my great relief was breathing.  I could feel hot air from a vent rushing onto his body and the relief increased.  Less immediate danger, I thought.  But his coat was not even closed around him.   I realised I was scared and felt ashamed.  I spoke to him.  Nothing.  Poised to spring back, from a knife, from spit, a syringe, from god knows what, I put my hand on his leg to shake him.  He was deeply asleep, the abandoned sleep of young children or just, perhaps, the abandoned.  He needed somebody loud, confident and sure of themselves but he had me.  Now I didn't want to wake him up.  To bring him back to what?  I called Streetwork, advertised on the city's council pages and spoke to a slightly panicked-sounding young woman.  I described him, gave the address.  She said she would send a team out.  When I said I couldn't wake him up, she wanted me to call the police on 101.  This was a different story.  I doubted the guy would thank me for waking him up and confronting him with that.  What is Streetwork for then? I asked.  Now she said there wasn't necessarily a team nearby and if I couldn't wake him it was a question of getting him checked out.  Was he grey, pale, was anything coming from his mouth?  Yes he was pale.  Of course he's bloody pale I thought.  It's Scotland in winter, it's cold and he looks thin.   I felt uncomfortable and annoyed, as though the goalposts had moved.  Why don't you call the police? I asked.  Isn't that what you are there for?  I thought, but did not say, desperate now for someone else to take responsibility.  Could she pass on my number for a statement then, she asked?   No, I said.  And that was that.  I went on, feeling cross, guilty, confused and that I had in some way, failed.  That would be because I had, in the end, done exactly what I said I could not do.

I drove up Lothian Road.  There were people on the street on every block.  It is the same, worse even, in Glasgow and in Manchester.  Over the last couple of years, the numbers seem to have gone up and up.  Outside a convenience store near Tollcross I saw another body on the street.  Light spilling from the door silhouetted two young people kneeling down with a blue plastic carrier bag from which they seemed to be offering the body food.

After the milonga, I went to get bread for my son's packed lunch the next day.  It was nearly 11pm, with the nightime temperature about freezing.  Within days it was to fall well below zero.  A guy wrapped in a blanket sat outside the store cheerily asking for change.  I tried, distractedly, to enter by a closed door.  He called out:   Next on the left.   When I came out, I saw his cheeks were thin.  So many are like that.  I gave him a fiver which was the note I had on me.  I thought about the man from London and wondered what he would have done that evening.  Thank goodness for those few there are, that we know personally, who are moral compasses for the rest of us.

This week in my own town I passed on my bike a man with a loping gait heading down the street.  I realised that under his bright coat and sweat pants that he was thin but it was the unusual sound that had drawn my attention.  It was his laces, undone or broken, slapping on the street.  His thin tennis shoes were full of holes.

I see, often, a lack of pretension on my town's streets.  That could be because many shuffle about, lumpish, overweight, ill, on mobility scooters, or hang about the high street chatting in small groups, fag in one hand, pushchair in the other.  The population numbers under 50,000 and there are swathes of social and economic deprivation.  If they are not badly dressed, most people dress not for show or ostentation, but practically.  What I also notice is many people talk to those begging on the street, as though they know them, perhaps as equals, certainly as acquaintances do.  I wonder at it every time I see it.  Now it is no longer the beggars on one side of an invisible line and us on the other, it is the beggar with his non-begging friend on one side and I on the other.  I am separated from that easy communication by upbringing, accent, by how my nationality will be perceived, by a lack of understanding and empathy, by uncertainty and fear and it is a shameful feeling.

We connect with such facility with strangers in the milonga and yet great gulfs - chasms in the pavement which we step around, carefully, which seem so real yet are wholly imaginary - separate us from other strangers. 

Trick

I talked often with a friend who opened my eyes to the tricks and sleight of hand employed by teachers of tango dance class and performers to get people to pay for classes that the punters only think develop their dancing, despite the obvious lack of results.  

I had noticed in him and his partner a tendency to separate, distance themselves from others in some milongas to an extent that was marked and had sometimes struck me as extreme.  It nagged at me so about four years ago, eventually and although I had no business raising it, we were talking about that.   

F:  I think, especially in some women, in people without experience and people at the milonga alone, it can lead to them thinking:  "What have we done? What's wrong with us?" It doesn't take much to reassure people.  Smiling at them usually does the trick.

Friend:  Unfortunate choice of word there.

He was being understandably thorny but the lesson about being careful with that word was one that lasted.

Like porn

A: If you hadn't said it, I wouldn't have noticed the aggressive elbow in that show but I think it's true.

B: In truth, I can't watch those without getting that "what's wrong with this picture" feeling. I mean, why exactly has everyone else left the floor? If this couple is worth watching, isn't it sufficient to watch them in the ronda with everyone else? And why exactly is the audience applauding so vigorously? Did this couple do something particularly unusual?

A: There is something I liked about that couple, something about them together. But there is an element there I think is "for show" - but what is wrong with trying to look nice, to have good posture, to move sinuously and to be evidently enjoying the ride? 

B: No-one said there was anything wrong with that. What makes me queasy is that they are exhibiting it only for everyone to watch.

Like porn.

Elbow-whacking automata

Mechanical Pinocchio

That's enough of the Flash Harry(et) posts.  I am waiting for a few things to fall into place before getting back to the main thread.   So, by way of an interlude:

2014

A: PS - What do you think of this?

B: A show better than most shows. 

But if they dance like that in the milonga... :(

Actually I should say a show less bad than most shows.

I would not want to dance with her. Too much "playing with herself". Or near "him". Too much aggression in that stuck-out elbow.

Some three years ago the topic of 'aggressive elbows' was discussed in an online forum and re-surfaced recently.    Curiously,  some of those condemning it are some of the offenders.  One hopes this is guilt and the awakening of self-knowledge though, recall, many can change their minds on a topic and yet maintain that they have always held they have actually come to.  Being so rare, hearing someone admit to a change of heart is a marvel, one of the great pleasures of existence.  I have the sense, sometimes, of a gate opening, or of recognition, because it means it is a person with whom one might be friends.

At that time, internet forums had, for the most part, passed me by.  I was curious.  But it is surely late now to say that the kind of chat one finds on the internet, even the middle-class internet of British dancers discussing Argentine tango - actually, the internet of mainly middle-class southerners discussing Argentine tango  - is a bit like stumbling into one of the noisiest, most random rondas one could find.  

I mentioned that it was useful to see elbow-whackers at play because it was an expression of character and it helps one know before meeting them, whether one wants to know them better - or indeed at all.  To this, there was - at least - scepticism.  How could something as insignificant as an arm posture have "any reflection on them as people"?  But it says a lot about them.  There are at least two types of dancer who use the aggressive elbow:

Type A: "I am special.  I deserve lots of space because of my 'level'. I have earned it.  Let me be seen.  Give way you minions!"

These might be happier with a career in performance rather than in the social ronda.  Or in some job with status, power and control of others.  Since they are usually past the age for performance or lack the ability, or, more likely, they already have some more important job, they express their dynamic dance style for the 'benefit' of social dancers.  

There was a pleasant chap in this forum with the admirable quality of assuming the best in people. He thought that the stuck out elbow was not hostile because no-one deliberately danced aggressively.  If you have ever experienced the shock of a malevolent couple using the woman's heels or their combined elbows as a weapon, you will know this not to be the case.  Fortunately, encountering this evil on the dance floor is rare.  I have only experienced it, to my knowledge, once.  I heard that the protagonists are now in Antwerp, centre of the unhappy diamond industry, and also of exploitation, money, status and power.  The destination is fitting.  It was also where I had some of the most depressing practica, milonga, and tourism experiences of my travels.

Many though do perceive the stuck-out elbow as aggressive.  I notice the culprits tend to be teachers in places like London.  Such was the case reported here.  On that occasion, it was a teacher, one of the main organisers and DJs in central London.  He was dancing at the time, appropriately, with an oblivious ice queen of a teacher from the north.  They were one of the most arrogantly dancing couples I have ever seen - worse in fact than most real performers who, especially among the Argentinians, can be pleasant people.

Some of the offenders, interestingly, are DJs. That is unlikely to be a coincidence.  In Europe the DJ is often put on the stage, exalted.  DJ blurbs differentiate them from others, advertising their specialness.  DJs are applauded in Europe.  That doesn't happen in a traditional Buenos Aires milonga.  The DJ is important.  People know his or her name but, in a hidden booth or behind a curtain, they are rarely seen.  There, the DJ is at the service of the dancers.  He is not an ego, a 'personality' but a facilitator, like spoons. No surprise then when DJs in the UK and mainland Europe stick their elbows out.  It goes together with believing yourself to be a big shot.

No matter who they are, I think of Type A's as elbow-whacking automata because they don't tend to give a shit about anyone else. 

Type B elbow-whacker is the one who is silently conveying:  "Get back and give me some room, you arse."  This type sticks out the elbow in response to a, usually repetitive, dangerous, infringement of their probably compressed dancing space. The message is sent to the automaton, a tailgater or to some random, passing weaver.

Melanistic jaguar

I would like to call type B the panther because while I don't condone this behaviour and occasionally, in defence, have done it myself, I have a soft spot for the ordinarily discreet dancer, especially those bullied by automata. 'Panther' is perhaps optimistic but let us at least hope that they are quiet, that they move well, taking up little space. Besides, it is the quiet ones I notice who can really go for the jugular.

Most of us could do with less lurching, with being rather more panther-like in our movements, more silk-like in our dancing. I was fortunate to meet some rare exceptions recently from the Paris queer tango scene, currently at my number one spot of where to go looking for good dancing; there or at the other queer tango watering holes in Europe where those dancers congregate. The people I danced with moved so smoothly it was hard to imagine it bettered.  During seven milongas I recall not one of the eighty or so attendees standing out as being an elbow-whacker.  Many people knew one another.  

No matter who does, unfortunately, stick out their elbow, that ugly protuberance is a statement to those watching or dancing nearby.   The focus is lost from the partner.  Once that happens you are not dancing entirely with and for the partner and with a courteous, but much less focused awareness of the people around.  

So what to do? If the panther reacts with a warning elbow to the random weaver that can be enough to get them to bugger off. But I am unconvinced the weaver even consciously notices and the dance, at least for that track, is often already screwed.  The focus on the partner has gone and the weaver will likely have been being irritating well before the elbow warning. But, if the automaton is dancing next to the panther, the elbow warning is pointless.  The former never changes. The only thing the panther can do without dancing with that loss of focus is to stop dancing or circle elsewhere in the ronda.   Once the focus is gone though, the interruption is so disturbing it is difficult to regain it.  Experience says that even if you manage to regain some composure and focus, the tanda is ruined.  To constantly invade a couple's privacy in that way is much graver to my mind than accidentally bumping into them and raising a quick apologetic hand.  

With luck, automaton and panther are unlikely to meet often. It is fair to say that the automaton will probably not notice the panther. Once set, he just keeps going, whirling obliviously in his little kingdom.  This sort of dancer tends to be wrapped up in how they look to themselves or to others who only exist as a sort of mirror. The panther will be at pains to stay out of automata milongas, for obvious reasons.

Hot air

In response to the non-British question And what do you do? I have tried saying: I'm just a mum.  While few will turn away, it invites being patronised or soothed by well-meaning people talking quickly about it being the hardest job and yet an unspoken awkwardness hangs in the air. Sooner or later I meet a single mother, perhaps a pathologist or a refugee from domestic abuse, with four kids who has worked ever since her first child was born.  No matter how much I rationalise my choices or that my children want me there for them, I twitch with an unconscious, gnawing guilt:  You are supposed to work for money.  

A variant of the question is: What did you used to do? as if giving one the opportunity to claw back validation.  To this, I can reply smugly, even though it is one of the most detestable traits, because my jobs and the confidence lent by the unspoken trappings sound good. I was a software consultant, European programme manager,I worked for American software companies, Apple... And behind all that, silent, implicit, in serried ranks: international travel, holidays, car allowance, health plan, life insurance, pension, stock options, housing allowance, moving allowance.  Fortunately, it matters little because no-one really cares about your choices. They are just yours, after all. 

For a short time, I tried saying Nothing as though this word, suggesting invisibility, might make the question and the questionee fade into that void. On the contrary - people find this response puzzling, even faintly aggressive.  It invites questions.  Recently I have tried: Taking each day as it comes, the edge to which is generally understood as: Back off.  Sometimes the determined type who might be overcurious or teutonically insistent will follow it up, dangerously with: But how do you spend your time? So I wriggle and squirm and burrow into the milongas where these things are rarely asked.

When we ask What do you do? do we really mean Who are you? What lucky few of us are what we do? And (when) does doing what you love as a job kill that enthusiasm?

I am agape when I read the back covers of books or adverts for events and see the lifetime accomplishments of others. Some of these people I know and have finally realised the glossy shimmer of those words is not necessarily much indicator of truth.  It can be mere veneer, a spin, a smoke and mirrors trick that would not look the same in a harsher light.  I wonder at the power of advertising, the relentless urge to be special, to be someone and the temptation to compare one's life with others.   

Listening to the Naxos Children's Classics series of Great Explorers, Great Inventors, Great Scientists etc. one realises that the skill of these people was in their adaptation to an environment or circumstance and that the truly gifted are very few.  Take the story of Louis Braille is just such a case.  While undoubtedly intelligent, inventive and persistent, were it not for a tragic accident who knows what would have happened to this son of a leather-worker who fully intended to follow his father in this trade. Furthermore, it was was only posthumously that his name became famous.  The fame of these men and women came, typically, not by striving for it but as an accident, an epiphenomenon of their focus on their work.  Happiness is the same - one does not, with success, search for it; it settles, like a gift, like grace, while you are occupied with something else.

My husband used to admire what he saw as a facility to sell myself into promotions and good pay rises each time I moved company.  It seemed a propitious time in which to do so, though perhaps that ease came just from being young and independent. This was the sort of success my parents' generation wrote to their friends about in Christmas card round robins.  

The enquiries at interview amounting to Who are you? What have you done? require the sorts of pat responses that are not hard to learn.  There being no need now for corporate legerdemain I decided it was time for an updated response to that question:  Thus:

She was brought up in Germany, Nigeria and the UK and later spent time in France. She studied English, French, information systems management and philosophy at three universities. She speaks four languages. She had moved home forty times before the age of thirty five. She started work young, at fourteen or fifteen in a Spanish bar. She flitted between waitressing and bar work in nightclubs, cafés, hostels, canteens and restaurants in Italy, Germany and the UK, was the chef for a while in a French bistrot.  She found a modern purgatory temping in shops, offices and teaching English; tried living in Paris and early days web design before slotting into multilingual technical support, moving on to become a software consultant and trainer across Europe and as European project and programme managers for well-known multinationals. 

The attentive reader realises, at this point, the spotlighting overemphasis in these sorts of blurbs, of the pronoun. 

Omission

That rise was mostly on hot air.  Once fully independent she made a series of staggeringly bad choices, in love, career and money.  The resulting harm to the soul was unsurprising but the resilience of youth wrested her into her thirties. There, the biological clock and a nest egg, soon blown, tumbled her into marriage, children, and a large, Georgian moneypit in Scotland, becoming by dint of repeated experience, an expert in dry rot.  The shock of the move from London took five years from which to recover.  She outstayed other English or English-sounding migrants unable to adapt to the harshness of the Scottish weather, the Puritan mediocrity of certain provincial towns and their incongruous, inflated sense of self, or the racism peculiar towards the English.  She wandered the subterranean caverns of largely solitary parenthood for many years, experimenting with the distraction of alternative personal and familial life-styles, before following the strains of Argentine tango into a different world. She might now be neurodivergent were it not that these days so many seem to be. 

She lives an entirely ordinary, somewhat privileged and largely reclusive life, being a wayward daughter, unsuitable wife, and dubious mother to a tolerant family in Perthshire. Her fallen-into form of marriage suits the town in which she lives. In many ways neither have moved on much from the 1950s. She wonders with a creeping doubt, a quiet and stealthy alarm, whether all this is what some famous writer called "a life slipped into the negative" but decides on better days that having time to chat with your kids and time to oneself could never be so called.  She has an appetite for solitude, writes, cycles, makes soup, occasionally dances in Europe. She feels she camps in her house, excusing her housekeeping by telling herself that the search for truth, bikes lanes and better dancing don't lend themselves well to home-making.  She invariably upsets various authorities, appreciates the lack of constraints and consequential freedom that let her do so and tries to be good, or, failing that, honest, until the pricking of conscience reminds her that these should be the other way around and that this dyad may account for much existential angst. 

"And what do you do?"

In La Marshall, the gay tango club in Buenos Aires, I was introduced to a married couple: successful, globetrotting, career women, both, as I had been until I decided that, for me, being there for my children and not being controlled by one of those who thrives in a dystopian, political, corporate world was more important than earning money.

Besides, I never trusted anyone or any organisation enough to happily hand my children over to strangers, for care. I did try.  One nursery put my son in A&E despite knowing about his allergy.  Before that I had asked a woman from there who babysat for me on the one night I have ever used someone outside the family:  Why does the nursery leave that chubby baby in its car seat for so long?  She is always sitting squashed into it when I drop off my son.  The reply:  Oh, she doesn't arrive in the carseat.  The staff put her in the car seat.  It's just easier.

 After the A&E incident I tried, a year or so later, a different place.  My younger son, at two and a half, two years younger than his brother, used to beg to stay with his brother and play with the trains, which were practically an obsession.  He would protest when he was taken away.  So the nursery, which was in a large church hall, found them both a few morning slots.  But alhtough I had had to drag him out of the door before, it seemed now that I had somehow overestimated his desire to stay.  Despite the advantages of meeting other children, different toys and activities and my own hunger for a couple of hours on my own, I was never comfortable with leaving him.  I stood outside the hall, listening, by the door, knowing the staff thought it was not good for me to hear his sobs.  It wasn't.  They told me each time that he soon got over being left.  Later, someone who worked there told me it hadn't been true.  The only thing worse than abandoning a crying child at nursery is finding that out.  So, apart from disliking my attention being divided, I was never cut out to be a working mum.   The younger one still comes to talk to me every morning in my bed.  I asked him what he remembered about that nursery.  He said, it was OK but he didn't like being left.  So they remember.  He stayed a few months before I moved him, for again a few mornings, to a smaller, cosier, purpose built nursery in the grounds of his brother's school where he settled with relative ease.

As a family, we were fortunate, and, forfeiting some things, we could get by without both of us working.  There was no option of both of us doing so part-time.  My husband was employed away for at least days but often weeks and sometimes months at a time.    So I stayed home with my children, or rather, took them out, adventuring.  I was grateful not to have that struggle between trust in childcare and not, work and sick children, work and school events, and most of all work and time together.

Adorable, magical, charming creatures though small children are, raising them in that moneypit on my own, year after year even with money coming in was often a thankless, sleepless, relentless grind.  When they were about one and three, I discovered that if I drove them into the gorgeous Scottish countryside after lunch they would both fall asleep for an hour or so.  I would pull over immediately, wherever I was and drink in the peace.  When their father was home, he was not much interested in them.   It was not until years later once the drudgery of toddlerhood was well over that both his weekday and his weekend life stopped being virtually independent of us.  On my elder son's second birthday he took him to the park just across the road from our house, for the first time.  I was worried.  He didn't know anything about children.  We live in a house on four levels with sixty interior stairs but the children's father had not been involved with teaching them to negotiate these.  Outside, at the front we have about ten, sharp, steep stone steps. Make sure you hold his hand when you go down the steps I said, failing to suppress my fear.  He holds the bannister with one hand.  You hold the other.  Hold his hand by the road.  But listening is not my husband's forte.  If he was British he might favour the cold baths and open windows tone of learning.  At supper he confessed that, by accident or by design, he had not held his son's hand.  But the little, trusting one had indeed fallen down the steps top to bottom, miraculously coming away apparently physically unharmed.

When one raises children largely alone, everything has to be done sequentially.  There is no You take the bags, I'll take the kids; or even You take the toddler, I'll take the baby; no You get an ice cream, I'll do the sun cream; no You get the supper on, I'll do the baths; no I'll clear up, you do bedtime; no, at 3AM, with a sick child's temperature insistently nudging 40 degrees,  You take him to A&E, I'll watch the other one. There is too the intangible weight of constant, sole responsibility, for thought, decisions and actions. I didn't feel coherent enough to put together a job application never mind work and juggle the logistics of childcare, though, ironically, if trust in strangers had been less of an issue, had I done so I might have retrieved some of that coherence.  The result of that experience is that there is no-one I respect more than the single working mother.  The same mother who gets none of the: Wow! You do it on your own? that the odd, single working dad might hear.

So I opted  - though to me it never really felt like a choice - for time with the children before I realised that too much of that can turn you into a burnt-out fiend.  I seem to have managed when they were little and I was younger, but home-schooling my two boys aged 8/9 and 10/11 for a year in 2017-2018 left me with a  - fortunately temporary - quasimodal twitch in one eye and so collapsing from exhaustion that, by the summer, pushing the pedals of my bike was an inordinate effort.  I think in fact those earlier years were not dissimilar, one just doesn't like to dwell on what the years of five hours sleep or less were like and the many happy photos fortunately distort the perspective.  But I look back and think:  how did I do eight years until both were in school?   

And what do you do? one of the gay women asked.  She was new to dancing tango and evidently unfamiliar with the etiquette about personal questions in the milonga.  I braced myself and tried to think about dancing. But they had been pleasant, friendly, very enthusiastic about tango, a little brittle but then they were brand new to the milongas.  

I'm just a mum. 

Oh, is that all? she said, with a directness which, even with much experience of hearing answers to this statement, surprised me. She turned away and started chatting to someone else, a caricature of crassness.   I breathed in and went to dance with a German girl in her first ever milonga tanda.  I had met her at the house I was staying in.  She was brand new that week to dancing tango and to the milongas.  When I met her a year later, she still attended the milongas, now in Barcelona.

Those two women were very different from other Argentinians I met. They were executive types. They were not like people I met in the traditional milongas and I did not feel it was necessarily to do with their sexual orientation.

At a milonga in Edinburgh before Christmas, a dark-haired, dark-eyed, chipper young man with an American accent struck up frank and friendly conversation.  He had studied philosophy, was studying psychology, had travelled and came from an interesting family.  In five minutes he had covered Victor Frankl, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Schopenhauer and corrected me on both the dates and the politics of Hegel and Heidegger.  I never studied the continental tradition in philosophy but even so, general knowledge ought to have preserved me from those basic mistakes.  Politics came up.  I asked him where he 'stood' on Trump, cringing, feeling old, thinking I should get out more to save my dancing and my small talk.
- On my own two feet, he shot back.
I shrank, deservedly even as I was delighted for him.  Thanks for the conversation he said ambiguously over his shoulder and with youth's insouciance as he went off to dance.

Let that be a lesson to those who ask unsuitable questions.

Overcurious

Today it is starting to hit me:  the effects of seven days of dancing, over a thousand miles on the road, regular alcohol, lack of sleep and living on the nerves produced by unfamiliar environments.  I am good now for little but words yet good dancing is so rejuvenating.  The problem is, it has taken all those miles to find it.

On the theme of personal questions, I have rarely been asked what I do in the milongas.

During the four days I spent at the Sheffield queer tango marathon not once was I asked what I do.  At the beginning of the first evening, another lady was sitting near me. I struck up conversation, asking her, after a while -  partly because I have the subject in mind for writing - what makes you get up in the morning?  Although I did not intend it, she, understandably, took this to be a British version of that forward question: And what do you do?  She laughed nervously to cover her embarrassment on my behalf.  She was not the sort of whom one asks such things.  She was, I was surprised to learn, retired.  But, with exquisite politeness, she took pains to tell me what she used to do.  I, having appeared wanting in manners, did not want to compound the problem by correcting her as to my intentions:  I really had wanted to know what interested her, generally. So I tried, with equally British embarrassment, to clarify what I had meant whilst trying not to imply that she had misunderstood.  Thus, we stumbled on through this very British dance.  It was not an auspicious start.

During the nearly seven years that I have danced tango, I realise that many of us still have no idea what our friends and dance partners do in life.  We don't tend to ask.  Of those whose occupations I know, I could not, in general, say how I learned these facts.  They tend to be absorbed, like the music, like much in the milonga, like water by slow-growing trees.  I suppose other people mention it.  It strikes me how little relevance this knowledge has and how surprising it can be to learn or recall that someone is Really? A professor? A plumber? A musician?  A tree surgeon?   

This question, when it cropped up in wider society, was fine when I was "doing well" by the general judgement: money, career, flat, meals out, international travel.  But in the milongas now, I am pleased this question is so little asked.  

Recently, a much younger mum I had only just met through school was sitting on the sheepskins in the large chair in my kitchen with a cup of tea.  We chatted as I cooked or washed up and our sons played together.  Curious, perhaps, about this mother in a big house who apparently did not work she must have asked what I did because I remember thinking So I suppose I can ask her now, ignoring the flags that said Don't and Wait and Be patient.  

- I clean, she said. 

- Oh, I said, thinking vaguely of another mum in that part of town who had set up her own business in care or cleaning.  You have your own business? 

- No, she said, quietly. I just clean.

- Oh. I said.  

- For people near me.  For some of the mums she said. And I immediately realised she meant:  at the very middle-class school where my kids recently started, whose parent-organised Hallowe'en party isn't a patch on that of the school that we used to go to, notwithstanding that someone at a posh tennis club called it: 'The one in the 'projects?'  

She continued: My husband is a chef.  He was diagnosed very young with Parkinson's.
- Oh. I'm so sorry.
- So I can do the hours that work for us.
- Yes. Of course,  I said.
- Yes, I like cleaning, she said, quiet and possibly unconscious victor in this exchange.

Sitting with a strange man

Apologies! Happy New Year! I did say I get a bit distracted by dance.  After Christmas between going away, writing about dance and actually dancing I am afraid I forgot about the greeting.  I celebrated the New Year at the Sheffield Queer Tango Marathon and continued dancing immediately after midnight.  What a way to start 2019.   If my dances this year continue anything like the way they began, it augurs well.  May yours be as delightful.

To resume - how you arrive at a Buenos Aires milonga, alone or accompanied, determines whether you will be treated as single or not. 

Most immediately being treated as single means, as a woman, you will be seated in the women's section if there is one. Usually you share a small table with another woman or a slightly larger table with three or four women.  By being given a table with others you are already, in a sense, looked after, explicitly by the host and implicitly, sometimes, by those at your table.  The women's section always faces the men's except in El Beso, where I remember, in at least two of the milongas or practicas, the women's area filled both longer sides of the room, because there were so many of us. The advantages of this arrangement are that you have a seat which you keep, there are no visual barriers between the parties making the agreement to dance and everyone knows where to find you.  In a busy milonga, this is invaluable, especially where you are a stranger. 

One of the maddening things in many European milongas is not being able to see some partners because you are both sitting on the same side of the room and those sitting between inadvertently block your view of one another. Men can move to a better position to invite but not everyone likes to go on the prowl for dances.

The disadvantage of the Argentinian system is that if you are finding the milonga trying there is nowhere to break out to, nowhere  - bar the loos, or outside with the smokers - to go to regain your composure.  That said, if you are finding the milonga difficult it is no mean feat to, in that same environment, change a state of mind so you might as well leave.  But, because you sit, almost in solidarity, with other women there is a sense of mutual support.  In my nerve-wracking first week in Buenos Aires I remember being gently encouraged by kind, perceptive, understanding Argentinian women to smile, to look at the men.

In Britain and in Europe women and men can move around more easily.  Some milongas have areas that are more conducive to chat between men and women who arrive alone than in the traditional Buenos Aires milongas where this is virtually impossible. But those areas where you make your own way, socially, are useful given there is, currently, no substitute for the Argentine system which accommodates newcomers well.  Recently, I attended a busy English milonga in a church.  Finding the atmosphere oppressive, I moved between four different spots trying to find peace and composure, eventually discovering it next to a behemoth of a stone pillar from where I neither invited nor was invited but I suspect that was the subliminal point of that choice.  But when one has warm, Latin women at the table and for the evening, women with whom to share recommendations, successes and failures, composure comes more easily, with no need for perch and flight around the room.  

Men arriving alone at a traditional Buenos Aires milonga will be seated in the men's section unless they indicate they will join a mixed group of friends for, say, a birthday party.  If you arrive with a man, you will be seated at a table with him, in the couple's section if there is one, which in many milongas is a 'couples and friends', mixed area. 

The men do not face the women in all the milongas.  In this case there are tables for men and tables for women which may be adjacent to that of the opposite sex.  It is not as easy to invite or be invited but it still works.  A woman would not be seated with a strange man nor vice versa.  Only, that did happen to me once in Gricel. I was put at a large table with a youngish male tourist and felt most uncomfortable - thus do we quickly adapt to other ways of doing things.  Perhaps he felt awkward too.  I do not remember an acknowledgement.  To sit at a table with someone and not even recognise their existence - inevitably we only act thus towards people we care not one jot about or whom we actively dislike.  Only those with the toughest hides will congregate in such watering holes.  Wanting to change the dynamic I asked him some casual question about the environment, probably the kind of thing that I guessed a man might like to be thought to know.  His reply betrayed his own gaucheness. No surprise that this was the milonga with the shoddy music which I left early to José's confessed chagrin.  I have a vague memory of flowers that I do not have with any other milonga so there may have been a  tanda de la rosa.  If so, that is likely when I escaped.

At another, less traditional place: Milonga de los Zucca in Salon Leonesa, I arrived late. Much later still, perhaps because of the hour, a young man with whom I had danced but who turned out to have other designs, came to sit at my table. He tried to engage me in conversation that was not to him evidently unwanted and to eventually make his proposals for the short remainder of the evening about going on elsewhere.  Again, I felt uncomfortable as much just by the fact that he had come to sit at my table as anything else.

Those Europeans who don't like to be seated by a host in a milonga say much about the freedom they demand: to choose their seat, to sit where they wish and with whom. I found and still find this sort of 'freedom' overrated, in fact often detrimental. When you are new, to dance, to a new environment, a new milonga, a new city, it can be useful to be taken in hand, especially when alone.  It can be useful, helpful, less lonely and simply less nerve-wracking to be seated with people who are local and experienced but who have also come alone.  The way they do it in Buenos Aires is a way of being brought into an established community.  It is so different from the tough sink or swim approach with which newcomers and visitors are 'welcomed' in some UK milongas:  walk in alone, sit alone, find your level alone.  No wonder many people, especially beginners, think the milongas can be very tough.  The answer is not, as some do, to create 'beginner milongas'.  And beware adverts for milongas that call themselves 'warm and welcoming'.  Usually, that insistence belies the opposite.

So, supposed constraints regarding the way people are welcomed and seated in a Buenos Aires milonga can be usefully defining. Those who find that that long and naturally evolved system works well, fit into it, They see advantages of women sitting with women, of men with men, of couples together and friends together and the disadvantages of not so doing.

Personal questions

Back on 'Single girls' I said I found that warning about personal questions in the milonga over-egged, until it happened to me.

Whether married or single, as far as attendance at some Buenos Aires milongas goes, if you turn up alone you will be treated as single by organisers and by other dancers.  Your marital status is, as far as I could tell, completely irrelevant. 

Being treated according to whether you arrive accompanied or not is one of the great things about the milonga.  People go to the milongas for all sorts of reason but not asking personal questions means the focus is on dancing; whether someone can dance becomes, sometimes ostensibly, often genuinely, the most important thing.  If someone does ask personal questions it is easy to recognise that dancing may not be their main focus.  This I found more of an issue in Buenos Aires than in Europe.

There, the usual first question, between tracks, was that staple of humanity: Where are you from?  No matter how often it is proven not to be the case there is a persistent sense that, whether it is asked of someone from a neighbouring town or from across the world the answer will make everything clear or that crucial information will be imparted that is more vital than ever it is.  In those milongas people remain chatting well into the beginning of a track so the noise and the fact that I am softly spoken meant that the answer to this question could last and last.  I gave up trying to explain I was half English, half Scottish.  Partners already half-assumed I was Dutch, German, Swiss or Scandinavian - why complicate things?  To say you are 'British' has for several years felt increasingly loaded. So I simply said:

-  De Escocia 

- De Suecia?  

- No, Escocia.  

- Suiza? 

- Escocia! 

- Ah, Escocia! 

And by then, usually, mercifully, we could dance.

This was a personal question, but a normal one and it did not mean anything past simple curiosity and politeness.  Nearly all the men asked this.  But not infrequently I was asked, even without a wedding ring, about my husband. Where was he?, meaning, Was he? 

Occasionally I was asked Was I visiting the city alone? which could again have been mere curiosity or, in that context, by those keen-eyed men, with their decades of experience, out dancing as often as they could, slightly creepy.  If you are dancing cheek to cheek, heart to heart with a guy there is a degree of trust but you are always in a public room with everyone watching.  This, for the woman, is the safety net.  Even so, being a relatively vulnerable newcomer to a city rife with crime, travelling, indeed, alone and speaking little of the language I never did feel comfortable with that question. The very last thing I was seeking was any off-piste offer from a guy from the milongas. I was there to dance with them.   As everywhere, there are some apparently lovely guys from the milongas in Buenos Aires but I had also heard enough stories, felt the atmosphere, seen how some of the men's eyes follow women around the room and met enough of those men to feel that, on the strength of a few weeks visit I would not in general trust an Argentine male dancer.  I was given that same advice by Argentinian men and women themselves, sometimes with perhaps a touch of pride, sometimes with regret, sometimes as a fact of life.  The men I met at some of the milongas for younger people  - which is to say men closer to my own age and much younger - felt in comparison, relatively harmless  but that could just be because I did not meet enough of them.  Still, the younger guys I danced with, also had that particular sense of the woman that is more peculiar to some cultures than others.  I have felt it most in Argentinians and Italians but also in guys from Latin American, from some Spaniards and guys from Turkey.  Notably they are all cultures famous for machismo.

So the latter type of questions, viz. Are you visiting Buenos Aires alone? are of an altogether different sort to ¿De dónde sos?, depending on the tone, countenance and demeanour of the man enquiring.  But some Argentines are as changeable as the British weather and receiving say, a cool reply, when they were expecting a confused or guileless kitten of a tourist lacking points de repères, can turn on innocence or injured pride when it might be expedient and possibly even believe he feels it.  It is all rather like interactive theatre, or simply, a game.