Rules, shoes and milonguero style

As I was leaving the milonga in Edinburgh a little before 10pm on Sunday I saw a guy walking, head down, casually along the street towards me, smoking a cigarette.  I looked to him to nod an acknowledgement, but he didn't look up.  I wasn't surprised.  I hadn't dressed up for the milonga. I was fed up with that and besides I had been to a lunchtime barbecue and had had things to do in Edinburgh, an hours drive from where I live.  I had freshened up but again, I hadn't even intended to dance.  Still, I had seen a few friends and ended up dancing a little.

From the street light I saw he had black hair and olive skin. He was smartly dressed in trousers, a jacket, a shirt and, if not a swagger, then a certain, confident, easy style. He looked quite different to people one crosses on the street in Edinburgh and yet he looked almost at home there, strolling along, smoking. I had the strangest sense of seeing something very foreign and yet familiar. It was Buenos Aires. It was like a little patch of Buenos Aires, walking down the street. He was just like a guy one might come across in one of the younger milongas there. I realised it was a visitor, a guy with much presence, whom I had noticed, with his partner, in the milonga that evening. I had assumed, from his looks and style he was Argentinian, a view strengthened when I heard him speaking castellano to another visitor, a friend who lives in Buenos Aires. She had seen him around in the milongas there. Apparently, he now lives in the north of England. I didn't ask but I expect he teaches there. 

Many guys in the traditional Buenos Aires milongas have what Janis describes in number one of her Ten Commandments, a certain style. Don't misunderstand me, I can't bear commandments, "thou shalt not's", rules, anything that smacks of people trying to control others but that is not to say that I disagree with these. For one thing, nobody wrote out the milonga codes and said this is how it is. They evolved. They are essentially unwritten and the usefulness of writing them down is offset by the danger of people thinking of them as rules. When they start to be seen almost as legislation, that idea of controlling others in class or even in milongas has an 'in'. It is there in some of UK milongas where people talk about 'lanes' of dance instead of a ronda, or in milongas like one (now defunct) famous for its floorwalkers inspecting the dancing. But the 'commandments' on Janis's blog are trying to convey ideas and number one says that milongueros - Argentinian ones at least - have a certain style. Ironically, style is of course, individual, and nothing to do with rules. The men dress up perhaps to impress but respect is also part of it. Self respect and respect for the women they hope to dance with. This style of the guy I passed in the street was different from that of the older milongueros I met in Buenos Aires but he was decades younger. 

I remember in Salon Leonesa, on Humberto Primo in Buenos Aires, seeing a tourist dancer, a Brit I think, scrabbling about in the foyer.  In front of everyone he was changing his street shoes to the expensive dance shoes he brought in a drawstring shoe bag, the name of the shop emblazoned on it like a justification. If you absorb the essence of those commandments that Janis wrote, it is hard to imagine one of those older Argentinians doing that. I never saw them change their shoes. I don't think they did. Janis confirms it here. Nobody with any dignity or style changed their shoes in front of others. Not women flashing their knickers or cleavage to the other side of the room and certainly not the Argentinian men. Any respect you may have for those guys would drain away like water down a plughole were you to see them doing that in the salon or even the foyer.  I use the conditional because such a thing just wouldn't happen. It would be a contradiction in terms. There is a certain kind of guy, an Argentinian guy, maybe an Italian too, or a Spaniard who dresses smartly, not ostentatiously, years from lessons, if he ever did them, who it is impossible to imagine changing his shoes like that in front of everyone. It would contradict something fundamental about his dignity and the respect accorded by others to that. 

I can think of a very Argentinian guy I have seen change his shoes in the salon. Except perhaps he has an insouciance which I associate more with entertainers than Argentinians. He teaches which goes towards explaining things. And he wriggles into his shoes somehow, like a shape-shifting seal might wriggle into its skin. His humour, his insouciance is like a slick coat around him, protecting him, letting him get away with things others might not. He is warm and welcoming to all. It goes with his job. And yet, that dignity, that reserve, perhaps machismo even, that many Argentinians - at least those who dance - have, is still there underneath, or perhaps it is a cape he pulls on. One never knows with actors. He somehow pulls of both. The exceptions are always interesting.

Janis, in an unforgettable, sharp, concise, remark on her blog which I can no longer find, said, years ago, that the only thing worse than seeing a guy changing his shoes in the milonga was seeing him change his socks. When I think of the guys in Edinburgh who might, in a different way, be described as milonguero, what is common to them? None of them in fact, do dress up.  They wear casual, ordinary, nondescript clothes.  It is a different kind of milonguero, but this Argentinian was the same.  They have all been fixtures in the milonga for years, people you almost expect to see there and wonder where they are when they are not. They are guys who are popular for dance with women whether or not they dance much.  They have an uncontrived reserve, an aloofness, a dignity. Perhaps they did, but I don't ever remember seeing them changing their shoes in public.

Earlier in the evening I had gone to say hello to that friend who now lives in Buenos Aires. She used to host a milonga in the north of England where she is well known for that milonga, her voice, her strongmindedness, generosity and most of all her indefinable style.  On trips to the north I had asked after her and over the last year or two had heard the news of her move.  She sat now in this unfamiliar milonga, many years past retirement, diminutive, well dressed, as ever, hands clasped in her lap, looking at the world from under her trademark false eyelashes with much quiet dignity. As she told me her news in her inimitable voice like smoke from northern chimneys, she kept an astute eye on her young taxi dancer, one of three she uses when she goes out to dance every night back in her new home. And why not? It costs a fortune but I don't have children, she said. Don't justify yourself! I replied. It's your money. Do what you like. Enjoy it!  Why were they here?   The young man had been curious apparently.  Despite some health issues, every night in Buenos Aires she dresses up and dances. I hope I can move like that at her age. She may not be typical of women in the milonga.  But she is atypical in life, too.  She has style.  And she has something else, hard to define, that is connected to living for the milongas and to that reserved, dignity. For me, that's a milonguera.