"And what do you do?"

In Buenos Aires, 2016, if I wanted, inexplicably, to dance in non-traditional roles which is to say “lead” as a woman I was told dismissively, and as if I had revealed, in extremely poor taste, an STD,  to go to  La Marshall. It's where all the gays go.

But… 

But there was no debate. In the intensely traditional milonga culture in which I had indeed chosen to move while in the Argentinian capital, where most people were 10 if not 20, 30 or forty years older than me, it was inexplicable that women would lead unless they were gay. It followed that there was only one place for “us”. If your life was rather more complicated, no one wanted to know. It was enough that you liked to lead so off to the gay club with you and however you presented yourself there was somebody else's problem. 

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 the corporate world's natural piranhas was more important than earning money and artificially pumping up my ego with a well-padded monthly pay cheque 

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 the 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. At 3AM, with a sick child's temperature insistently nudging 40 degrees,  there is no You take him to A&E, I'll watch the other one. And one of us did always seem to be ill.  The next morning, sleepless  you're doing it all again, added to which the constant, sole responsibility, for thought, planning, decisions, actions. By the time I went to Buenos Aires, with hindsight, it is no surprise I was suffering from a yet to be diagnosed, chronic autoimmune disease.

It might be as exhausting and thankless as it sounds were it not for those trusting little fingers, that sweet breath, those giggly voices asking gentle, innocent questions, the smiles with tiny white teeth, the soft and flawless skin. 

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 it never really felt like a choice - for being there for the children. We did have a lot of fun in the short window between five, when they start to remember and thirteen when you become somewhere between embarrassing and annoying, often both.

I seem to have managed the load when they were little and I was younger - autoimmune disease aside. Still, home-schooling my two boys aged 8 and 10 for a year in 2017-2018, despite loving the adventure of all the things we did, 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. It is as well to write these things down at the time. Years later I had forgotten this reason. The story became, or perhaps it was also true that they missed their friends. Besides, age 11 maths was my limit. 

I think in fact those earlier years were not dissimilar in the level of fatigue, 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.  It wasn't until I had children that I learnt the true meaning of both “bone tired” and, one terrible night, “blind drunk”. But I look back and think:  How did I do eight years solo until both were in school?   “Only just”, I think, is perhaps the answer. 

By the time I went to Buenos Aires I'd been doing it for nine. It was my first big trip away. On day two I had collapsed in helpless tears when my alarm rang to tell me that my 7-year-old was out of 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; or out of it for that matter. 

One can of course ask direct personal questions, the way a surgeon slips in a scalpel as though slicing into somebody’s innards, metaphorically or not is perfectly workaday.

There is a pause, among the discomfitted at these times. “The sound of someone else's ego licking their chops” said a new friend with whom I had enjoyed learning who he was more than what he did.  Still, with an ability to pull lines like that out of thin air, I hoped he wrote. So while  some might, on the strength of no acquaintance at all demand answers to personal questions with all the sensitivity of a charging rhino, I prefer the nuanced art of tactful conversation, the revelation of personality slowly, through stories offered and received. 

In La Marshall I braced myself again to the incongruous acceptability of that intrusive demand and tried to think about dancing. But the couple had been pleasant, friendly, enthusiastic about tango, a little brittle perhaps but then they were brand new to the milongas. Predictably I was both too polite and too honest. 

I'm just a mum. 

And so, being so devastatingly dull and certainly so self-deprecatingly English, perhaps I completely deserved,

Oh, is that all?  She said it with a directness which, even with much experience of hearing answers to this statement, surprised me; though not quite as much as when she thereupon turned away as if on a daggered, corporate, insouciant heel and began chatting to someone more worthwhile.

I tried not to put it down to her sexual orientation, 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 and suggested she come out.  She was brand new that week to dancing tango and to the milongas.  When I met her a year later in Barcelona, I was delighted she was still dancing tango now in her new home. You dance very well, said an experienced dancer as I was leaving.  Such compliments glow in environments of better dancing, which is usually the case among queer dancers dancing both roles. Thanking them, I could feel my ego reinflate on the outbreath.

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. 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.

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.

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.

'Single' girls

A: I danced with a lovely dancer but he kept hold of my hands between tracks and conversation was personal questions not the music etc.

B: Single girls rarely allow that in a BA milonga

A was not single and B knew it.  It was no secret.  But if you arrive alone at a milonga in Buenos Aires, marital status doesn't necessarily count for much.  What matters when you arrive is how you appear.  

Perhaps my father guessed as much.  Maybe that is why he thought the milongas inappropriate for someone in your situation.  There were no hard feelings and the clarity was useful.

Much earlier:

B: I get a slight shock when you ID a dancer with full name. I don't expect people to know the second name of a dancer from a milonga. Where I come from :) it would be very rude to ask a partner's second name. Often old accounts of the milongas say people never knew anything about a guy except his given name, nickname and dancing. They did not know where he lived, what he did for a job (if he had one), whether he was married. All stuff gets left outside -- by agreement of all.

I guess nowadays, you know someone's name from his advertising. Or Facebook. Or is that the same thing? :)

At the time I found the warning over-egged - until I was asked just those sorts of questions.

Possibly disreputable

A:  I danced with a lovely dancer but he kept hold of my hands between tracks and conversation was personal questions not the music etc.

B:  Single girls rarely allow that in a BA milonga

A:  I know that! I'm just obviously very bad at or out of practice (or both) at extricating myself when guys don't play by the rules.

B:  Rules??? :) You're a long way from classes :)

A:  I'm sorry but it's wrong for a guy to do that.

B:  I don't doubt it. But that's different.

A:  It's not just wrong, it's wrong and in public where everyone can see. A respectable guy doesn't do it.

B:  Very few Argentine guys are respectable.

A:  Why make it the girl's job not to allow it?

B:  Because he's not respectable! :)

A:  God I'm an idiot. It's not that I don't understand it,  I find the exercise of it so difficult. I don't know why. I should be cross. But I am cross. When he's hanging on to my hands I feel half rabbit in the headlights & half  just terribly uncomfortable.  Something in me wants to save him, us - me, actually - face yet while I may just be trying to pretend it's all fine really, my tolerating it means I lose face publicly with every second.

In any case, possibly disreputable guys can be very nice to dance with I find.

B:  There's the problem...

A:  I thought you didn't believe in dancing with disrespectful guys.

But there was no answer to that. It was much later I realised that that might be because disrespectful and not respectable and disreputable are not all the same thing and 'B' will only point things out so far.

A:  I was confused. I thought maybe I was mistaken about the cultural differences. Besides, when guys don't behave appropriately sometimes I freeze and am just terribly embarrassed. I just wanted to get back in to the dance where things were different.   I will try to be a bit less mortified British. All my clear convictions seem to have abandoned me here. 

I would never have let this happen in the UK.

B:  There you go. I suspect all you need to overcome now is a language barrier.