Chat / La charla

 

This piece is a follow up to a piece I used to call Ensnarement? / Atrapamiento / but which I think of as "Las Droseras" (The Sundews). That piece has recently been revised and republished. Note: while "charla" is used for "chat" in most Spanish speaking countries, "charlar" as a way of persuading people is used in Argentina, and in the piece in the link above.

The reason for the gap in posts since April is because I have revised and updated many of the texts from approximately the end of March onwards, mostly in the Spanish, but often with changes in the English too.

Dancing where you don't know people or when you are new and friendless can be lonely and difficult. 

When I started dancing. I noticed that when I was social, I felt relaxed and when I was relaxed, I danced more. I have always enjoyed chat anyway, found it easy.  Soon I was known as a social butterfly in our local milongas.  Teachers and milonga hosts would pass the new people to me to look after and I felt honoured at the time.

Years later, I more often wanted to avoid dancing with men than to seek out dances.  It's not that I don't like them - I do! It's just that few dance well, and more women dance better. Men were often puzzled at best, offended at worst, but the experienced understand that people have their own preferences adn you can't force that..  More years later I realised that one of the many arts of the milonga is to keep the talk but not necessarily the dances - as long as they agree!

*

Este texto es la continuación de uno que solía llamar Ensnarement? / Atrapamiento / pero que ahora considero como 'Las Droseras'. Nota: mientras que "charla" se utiliza como sinónimo de conversación informal en la mayoría de los países de habla hispana, charlar como forma de persuadir a la gente se utiliza en Argentina, y en y en el texto con enlace de arriba.

La razón del retraso en los textos desde abril se debe a que he revisado y actualizado muchos de los textos aproximadamente desde finales de marzo, sobre todo en español, pero a menudo también con cambios en inglés.

Bailar donde no conoces a la gente o cuando eres nuevo, desamparado, puede ser difícil y hasta desolador. 

Cuando empecé a bailar me di cuenta de que cuando era sociable, me sentía relajada y cuando estaba relajada, bailaba más. De todos modos, siempre me ha gustado charlar, me resultaba fácil.  Muy pronto fue conocida como una persona sociable en las milongas de aquí.  Los profesores y los anfitriones de las milongas me pasaban a la gente nueva para que la acogiera y yo me sentía honrada en ese momento.

Años más tarde,  quería evitar bailar con hombres más que bailar con ellos.  No es que no me gusten, ¡sí, que me gustan! Es sólo que pocos bailan bien, y más mujeres bailan mejor. A menudo, en el mejor de los casos, los hombres se mostraban desconcertados, ofendidos en el peor, pero los experimentados entienden que la gente tiene sus propias preferencias y no puedes forzarlas. Incluso mucho después, me di cuenta de que una de las muchas artes de la milonga es mantener la charla pero no necesariamente los bailes - ¡Si es que ellos están de acuerdo!. 

Estoy muy agradecida a Amelia por su ayuda con     la traducción. Cualquier error restante es sólo mío.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

The ultimate

Between tracks, in Spanish:

F:  I'm Felicity
P: Purificación
F: Sorry?
P: Purificación
F: Oh! Wow!
P: Your name comes from 'felicidad' [happiness], doesn't it?
F:  Well, yes, it does.
P: Felicidad y Purificación!
F: It doesn't get much better than that!

Kinky boots

Recently, my friend was telling me about the roaring fire at the Poema milonga in Liverpool that I have wanted to go to for ages, not least because she goes, Bill goes and I love to dance with him, Pablo DJs and I hear he is good, the venue looks nice and some people say Liverpool is the next big thing for tango in the north.

- Very 'hygge', I said

- Indeed...had to look that up You know how I live in a bubble.

- I don't! You are out there exploring all the time

Ramsbottom itself has history, walks and is a good place for food. When I sent that piece to the same friend who had been to that milonga weekend (review) she said with characteristic frankness and fun:

- You completely failed to mention this place... Do you recall the film "Kinky Boots'? I think it was based on this mill.

- See, what bubble?!

- I'm very clued up on certain aspects of life...

She can make me laugh before midday.

- And there was I thinking ought I to have mentioned Robert Peel.

"And your husband?"

The only frustrating thing I found about this way of doing thing is that it can be hard to get the guy’s perspective on things to do with the milongas - but maybe I was in the minority in wanting that. I spoke a lot to women about those things but I did not know the guys, sat separately from them, was not staying in a tango house where such things might have been easier to find out and I was there for a short time so I spoke comparatively little to the men.

In the Buenos Aires milongas I went to most, chat between men and women sitting separately was on the floor, between tracks. Chat at this time is not my default tendency. If the music is great and my partner can dance then after a pause to breathe and go back into myself for a moment, all I want to do is dance and soon, to make the most of the music. Chat between tracks can continue quite a while.  Even so (very traditional) convention is to talk only about music.  Given the way guys can be over there, this I knew to be a wholly safe topic, one I was comfortable with.  

Otherwise things might start with the (relatively) innocuous:  What do you do? although even that when it happened to me felt fairly personal compared to the things most guys say.  And no sooner that then:  And your husband - what does he do?  Within seconds you are on wholly different ground.  That guy was clearly wise to those of us who, though married, do not wear a ring.  But then some of the guys there believe - or perhaps they know - that once they know they have you in dance they may have more success in pressing an advantage.

But the opening question is nearly always De dondé sos?  In the great cacophony of chat that erupts in the room and if you are softly spoken it could easily take until into the next track for your partner to understand where you are from.   The standard questions which follow are:  Hablas castellano?  Pero entiendes castellano?  Te gusta Buenos Aires? And after that, though you may not have had the conversation you might have liked you have at least survived the basic small talk. They could well ask Es la primera vez acá? - whereupon you realise they sussed you long ago...

No chat?

The question of how you can chat when when your seat in the milonga is fixed preoccupied me before I went to Buenos Aires. 

It is true there are milongas where there is no fixed seating and in theory if you knew people you could I suppose chat to them. I tended not to go to places without fixed seating. 

I worried whether I would chat at all, anywhere. But no, even with my wretched Spanish I did not for a moment find chat a problem in Buenos Aires inside nor outside the milongas. I chatted for hours to hosts or travellers in my accommodation, to other dancers, people who owned or worked in accommodation for dancers, to locals, expats, tourists, milonga hosts, bar staff, Ladies room attendants, DJs, tour guides, people on tours, people in shops and kiosks, bus drivers, taxi drivers, subway attendants, even passengers on public transport - or rather they occasionally said things to me. In fact, all the things I worried about (and what did I worry about beforehand - how to pay for drinks?) were not the problem. Things I had not anticipated were more difficult but overall problems were relatively few. 

Still, before I went I worried: what if no one chooses me? What if I sat conspicuously not dancing for hours?  In those circumstances, how would I, who loves to chat, who loves to meet people, who loves the random conversation had by chance, how would I sit all night next to women I might not like and probably couldn’t talk to in Spanish even so? And who knew if they would want to chat? But these were not generally problems either:

Even if you do not chat, there is a lot to observe and listen to in the milongas.  The Buenos Aires milongas besides are so very different to the European milongas I have been to that there is even more to observe than is usually the case. Many women do not chat, choose not to chat, maybe because there is so much to see and hear.

When you are given a seat at a table or even when you enter the Ladies I found it normal to acknowledge everyone and say hello. And that might be all the interaction there is, especially if there is already a group at the table. Women may not necessarily start talking to you. Perhaps they are a bit put off by these closed northern types coming to their milongas and interacting so nervously and differently to the way they do. Yet the default position of most, possibly all local women I found to be kindly. I often started conversations with a question, made friends and discovered many interesting things. People seemed to appreciate my lamentable efforts in Spanish - and sometimes switched to English.

Still, it does happen that you are sitting with people you cannot talk to or do not want to talk to and you are not dancing either and you have perhaps watched for a while already.  At these times, even well before this point it is normal that you may want to chat.  Occasionally I saw a woman, generally a tourist I did not know but had maybe seen before and was curious to meet. Or, more likely, I saw someone I knew - often a local or an expat, or they saw me. You can talk to people not at your table as you pass theirs when you arrive, when you leave, when you go outside for air or to and from the bathroom.  I saw relaxed local couples greet friends on the way to or from the floor or between tracks as they happened to part from the embrace beside people they knew.  Or you can perch. 

For the record, perching is not a term I ever heard. But perching happens after the tanda starts when it is looking likely that the majority of invitations are over.  If you then see your friend or they see you and, say, you are both alone, one of you can go and talk to the other for a track or even the rest of the tanda "perching" while the chair next to them or next to you is free if the person who occupied it is dancing. I think this is female nature among many of us, but perhaps not all.   Perhaps too it is a complete faux pas but I saw this happening and did it too. This applies I guess more to the women. Men move around more - to the bar, some lounge about or stand but I think women are more focused and specific in where they go, in how they move around the milonga because in the traditional milongas women do not move randomly about and certainly they don't just (apparently) casually hang out around the salon the way people can do in Europe. But when the tanda ends you have to leave whoever’s chair you are perching on before they get back to it.  You cannot just swap seats in the milonga - not even at your table. When you are given a seat at a table you are given a fixed position at that table. Having said that, there are exceptions. I gave up my seat once to stay chatting to a friend well after midnight in Gricel but at that time there were more seats empty than taken.  

After people have sat down and are looking for their next dance, their neighbours do not talk to them to give them opportunity and focus to do this. This is surely just good manners and it mystifies me that it is only partially observed and only in some milongas here because after all the cortina and the start of the next track only lasts a short time.

Catharsis

A guy came to sit on a chair to my left. Like me he was visiting for a few days from I think Wroclaw. While we watched he cracked jokes. I had been feeling the strain the last couple of days, his humour was cathartic and I was grateful for the easy banter.  

He had seen my friend was new in the milongas.  In a stage whisper he said Ask your friend to ask that girl to dance with me. He indicated the girl to the right of my friend.  He leaned across me - Ask her for me he hissed again. I knew my friend was safe but looked at the visitor askance at this attempt to play a newbie joke and we all laughed.  He didn’t get the dance he was hoping for. You dance with me again! he said. 

No! I said in mock outrage. Besides, I will dance the rest of the tanda with my friend in a moment. 

Ah, he said feigning injury. What do you call it when a girl says you know, no, to a man? I gave him a “Don’t come that” look and was annoyed to feel my heartstrings tugged even though I knew he had contrived the situation and just for fun.  But I could not bring myself to tell him the word I was sure he knew.

I wouldn’t be a second choice anyway, I said, avoiding it.

Third, actually, he said evenly in his apparently artless English that I knew to be anything but without guile, yet the very brazenness was part of a game. I looked at him, predictably speechless at the affront yet knowing it was in jest.  He looked.  The tension sung in the air a moment then we broke down into laughter that continued quite a while. 

Eventually, he said: You will change, you will come back and dance with me.

Really? 

Ah yes, he said.  Women always do. I gave him another look between scepticism and pretence at being impressed.  At least, my last resort, I can tell myself this he said and again we laughed. 

I met a local girl in the Ladies. We both wore pink dresses.  She had long blonde hair that reminded me of another woman from Stuttgart with whom I had danced at the 2015 Edinburgh International Tango Festival, though that women had been as tall as me.  I had seen her in the regular milonga that week and though she had looked I had not been brave enough to invite her. At the festival she was sitting at the end of a row with no chairs at right angles and no bar or obvious place from which to invite anyone sitting there.  Because of the seating that year in the South side venue she was in a very difficult position for invitation. She did not appear to have danced much yet I knew she could dance. I wished now I had invited her in the milonga instead. The only way to invite was to prowl round and loiter by the entrance. I hated the idea that I would try to invite, she might refuse and in that exposed position I would suffer.  This was before I for the most part stopped moving from my seat to invite women because I feel that indiscretion too much.  I persuaded a guy friend to come and pretend to chat to me by the entrance and to tell me if she was looking.  Do guys do this?  Do guys suffer such anxiety for us? I wondered thinking the situation absurd but finding no other way.  She did look, we danced and she was a dream to dance with.  I have been wanting to dance with you she said to my relief.  I looked for her when I travelled but did not see her.

The girl with similarly long blonde hair wore a dress that was very pretty and I said so.  She returned the compliment.  She wore specs.  Later I saw her dancing and thought her beautiful, happy, slim and a good dancer. Later still, shortly before I left we fell into chat. She said she had been at Tango Loft on Friday then to a milonga in Darmstadt on the Saturday which she said was lovely. It turned out to be Sascha Weinberger’s milonga  though he was away that weekend. I have wanted to hear Sascha DJ for a long time along with other German DJs Thorsten Zoerner of the Dusseldorf TangoAtelier  and Christian Walker of Freiburg (does anyone know if he has a regular DJ slot?). Her weekend - Friday at Tango Loft, Saturday in Darmstadt, Sunday at El Amateur seemed like a good idea. Before I left she embraced me.  Because I had liked her straightaway I was only half-surprised at her warmth and openness.  I felt happy too.  With the relaxed chat that evening I started to feel myself again in the milongas and for the first time that weekend.  I was sorry it was just before leaving.