I spoke to Geraldo the following week about an article on the Córdoban piropeador Don Jardín Florido. Then weeks passed, maybe months before I returned to that milonga and only because I was in the city that day. I seldom go to dance now, though I still like to listen and watch. In any case there was almost no-one there. The music was superb - classic track after classic track. It is often the way early on, before DJs start to get ideas. I looked up the lyrics as the tracks turned over. Tango after tango mentioned ansia, or las ansias or related ideas - yearning, longing, craving, anxiety.
Seeing my new habit, a friend remarked on some parallel between life and what often happens in tango lyrics: tritely summarised as 'guy cannot get girl' or 'guy has lost girl'. It is mostly about what he does, not she. The friend elaborated "....and so [because of whatever happened] he wants to kill her".
"Only," I said "It is often not like that. Isn't the protagonist often stuck in some stasis, like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner trapped in some "life in death" or rather "death in life"? So many tangos are about ansia, desengaño, rabia, or loss and death or a sort of living death as the (inevitably male) protagonist cannot reach the woman of their dreams or of their past. They speak to the woman as through a glass, darkly. Often he sees her but she does not see or even hear him.
Sometimes, as in Enrique Rodriguez' La Gayola, he does come to her, in this case apparently literally, in his rags, after prison and the soup queue not to pledge his undying love because how could he be worthy of her love his present condition. But of course that is all past. What he still has is his pride and his anger at how he was treated. How can he transform himself from sap into someone with power? By forgiving her!
solamente vine a verte
pa' dejarte mi perdón.
And of course it wasn't his fault that he killed someone, it was hers! "Pero me jugaste sucio" (you played me dirty) - the betrayal which drove him to murder.
As I sat listening in the milonga, reading the lyrics on El Recodo there, suddenly, it was, in a tango that was all about tango - the genre personified in song: Yo soy el tango'. We know it best from the 1941 Troilo / Fiorentino version although I think I heard it in the Caló version, recorded in the same year with the inestimable Alberto Podestá. Where better to find out the essence of tango?
The compás drives on the track, as is typical of so many tracks with the Troilo / Fiorentitno combination and even more so in the in strumentals. And there it all there, right down to the dagger, the murky suburbs, the recurring motifs of pride and betrayal. In this song, here are the tropes so common they have become cliches. I shivered to read, in this song all Geraldo had described:
Hoy,
que tengo que callar,
que sufro el desengaño,
la moda y los años.
Voy, costumbre de gotán,
mordiendo en mis adentros
la rabia que siento.
I could see him again, pulling that downward fist turned towards him, the set of his jaw that no Brit could pull off, as he described the pride and suppressed anger, suffering and desire from long ago.
And then those last lines:
Pa' qué creer,
pa' qué mentir
que estoy muriendo,
si yo jamás moriré.
Why believe, why lie that I am dying if I will never die?
And that is as hopeful as many tangos get...
Translation of Yo soy el tango.
Translation of La gayola by Tango Decoder.
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