Hold Me Tight and Tango Me Home (14 page)

Peter said, “Have you ever wanted something so badly that you sabotage it?”

Of course, this broken heart of mine put me in that place; I craved a connection with another person like the one I’d lost, but at the same time I recoiled from it for fear of betrayal. It was worrying about dying of thirst and drowning simultaneously.

“How’s fund-raising going?” I asked.

“Oh, one rich man says he’ll throw a party to raise money,”
Peter said. “A friend knows a producer who wants to see the trailer and read the script. Same old story, but I have to follow every lead.”

“And in the meantime?” I asked.

“Credit cards,” he said. “And I’ve got my job back as a skating Santa for the holiday season.”

Peter danced with perturbed, almost staccato movements. He led me into abrupt ganchos, taking out his irritation with quick flicks of his heels.

“This has been a romantic evening all around,” I said to him.

“Why? What happened to you?” he asked.

“A gentleman licked my ear while we were dancing,” I said.

“What?” Peter stopped dancing. He made me point him out. “What did you do?”

“I was kind of stunned,” I said. “I just stopped dancing and walked away.”

Just then Martial Artist danced by with a striking woman who moved with otherworldly grace.

“I think I’m going to ask him to dance and lick his ear,” Peter said, nodding toward Martial Artist.

“Not if I beat you to it,” I answered.

Then the song “Les Jours Tristes,” from the soundtrack of the French film
Amélie
, came on, a favorite of Peter’s and mine.

We waltzed across the room, laughing like kids on a playground. Modern, or
Nuevo
, tango broke some of the strict rules of traditional tango and blurred the edges with other types of
dance, and thus created more opportunity for improvisation. Some dancers prefer classic standards from the belle époque with straightforward steps, and others like to dance nuevo and add new steps, such as volcadas and sacada chains.

It was actually Astor Piazzolla’s experimentation with jazz and classical music that triggered the contemporary nuevo tango movement. Nuevo groups fused Argentine tango with popular electronica, giving some classic songs faster, sexier rhythms that could be played either in nightclubs or in tango salons. DJs started mixing in songs by Middle Eastern performers, Delta blues, opera, and Gypsy ballads from Eastern Europe. During its heyday the tango had international influence. Now songs from around the world influenced the tango.

Peter was all nuevo tango; he stepped, scampered, ran, then turned me in a salsa-style spin, and we ended with a gancho. Next he led me into a volcada; then we dropped hands and we danced connected through only our sides. A Tom Waits tango song came and went, next a Nina Simone blues song, followed by the overture from the opera
Don Giovanni
.

Recently my friend Amy had gone to an early Verdi opera. She said that it seemed odd that while the characters were betraying each other, dying of heartbreak and wallowing in misery, the music was lively and upbeat. When she asked her boyfriend, Isaac, a cellist, about it, he explained that it wasn’t until Mozart that musical composition emotionally matched the drama taking place. In a way, Mozart was to classical music what Carlos Gardel was to tango. They made the sad tales sound sad.

Astor Piazzolla opened up the tango to jazz and classical influences. He played from the thirties through the fifties, when tango was waning in popularity in many places. In Argentina, though, the dance was revived around the time Juan Perón was first elected president, in 1946. He and his wife, Eva, championed the working class and nationalism, and they promoted tango and Argentine folk music, even restricting imported music. A military coup ousted Perón in 1955, and the new junta viewed with suspicion anything that Perón had encouraged. It imposed curfews and issued edicts banning three or more people from gathering in public, making milongas almost impossible to hold.

Piazzolla, who traveled between Argentina, Europe, and the United States philandering and trying to make a living, seemed unscathed by the political turmoil. Whereas many Argentinean musicians were Peronistas, he disliked the president and resented the expectation that he perform “patriotic” material. “Presidents come and go,” he said. “I shall go on playing my bandoneón.”

Juan Perón again served as leader of Argentina in 1973, with his new wife, Isabel, as vice president. When he died of a heart attack the following year, Isabel took over as president, but within two years, after a military coup d’état led by General Jorge Videla, the military junta took control of the country. The junta persecuted political dissidents, and thousands of people were kidnapped and executed without trial or record. The tango, which had continued to exist in small pockets throughout Argentina, now waned there as well as abroad.

Worldwide, tango was on the verge of becoming a dusty old relic, when the stage show
Tango Argentina
premiered in Paris in 1983, the year Argentina’s military dictatorship fell. Once again the Parisians fell in love with the tango, and a revival was quickly under way as the show toured Europe to sold-out audiences. Another show,
Forever Tango
, opened in San Francisco in 1996, then hit Broadway to great enthusiasm.

When the tanda with Peter ended, my feet hurt, so I went to change out of my heels to flat jazz slippers. Just then a man who spoke with a hint of an Argentine accent appeared and addressed me. “Please put your heels back on. I am a tall man and I want to dance with you.”

He was tall indeed, standing at least a foot taller than I. He had a slightly idiosyncratic way of dancing, which, no doubt, he believed to be the best, most authentic way to tango. I concentrated on interpreting his leads until he asked me what I did for a living.

“I’m a writer.”

“Oh, very good,” he said. “I have a special respect for writers. Do you like it?”

“Most aspects,” I said. “It’s tough financially.”

“Well, in Argentina, women find, how do you say it here, ‘sugar daddies’ to help them out,” he said. “Have you considered that?”

“Not really,” I said. “Wouldn’t that make me a little too dependent?”

“It would have to be someone you like,” he said.

I didn’t know if I was being propositioned or if he was just making conversation. He wasn’t a bad-looking man. He had a kind face and a full head of dark hair and an average physique. I guessed him to be in his early sixties. I found the idea of being a kept woman humorous, and I had to admit that I was just a little flattered that in my late thirties somebody thought I would make a good mistress.

Later, my potential sugar daddy asked me to dance again and whispered into my ear, “How much would it take? What if he had half a million dollars? Or three quarters of a million. And owned townhouses in Harlem. Would that be enough?”

I laughed and brushed him off but then paused at the mention of that much money. The thought of an ATM receipt that showed a balance with more than three numbers in a row was pretty enticing.

A traditional waltz, or
vals
, came on, so we switched partners and I danced with the Russian man who had rejected Peter earlier. On the first song I was stiff and nervous. By the second, I took deep breaths and let myself relax until he led a sacada. I missed it, then panicked, tried to make it up — which you can’t do — and I then started missing his leads.

From the corner of my eye, I saw Irish Guy, almost reclined on a bench, with one leg up, his head resting on his hand. He saw my mistakes. He was right — I sucked.

“Don’t think,” the Russian man scolded me. “Clear your mind and don’t think.”

Between songs, I asked him how long he had been dancing.

“Maybe five or six years,” he said.

“Did you start here or in Russia?”

“I started lessons here,” he answered. “But a lot of Russians dance tango. We are not afraid of sadness.”

Some time ago I read an article about Gypsies in Russia who traveled on the trains and, for a fee, predicted the futures of the characters in Mexican soap operas, which were wildly popular in Russia. These
telenovelas
are a shameless form of entertainment: switched-at-birth babies, Oedipal surprises, twins with amnesia, rich young men taking advantage of poor and innocent women, and lots and lots of women cat fighting and men dueling. Tango, like soap operas, connects our universally shared pain and drama. Tango not only is woven throughout Argentine history but threads through unexpected cultures around the world.

The king of Russian tango, Pyotr Leshchenko, was best known for his song “Serdtse” (Heart), which he sang in Russian but arranged as an Argentine tango. In the 1930s the Soviet Union considered the tango counterrevolutionary and banned his work, though fans still smuggled it into the country. He eventually died in a Romanian prison. Those present at his deathbed claimed his last words were lyrics from his famous song: “Friends, I am happy, for I will return to my fatherland! I am going away, but I leave you my heart.”

However, it was Russia’s next-door neighbor, Finland, where the tango really took hold. Finland had been part of Sweden until 1809, when the Russian empire claimed it until 1917. After
Finland gained independence, the Finns searched for a national identity and declared their country a minor-key nation. With this edict, Finns were able to differentiate themselves from Swedes — a major-key nation — and officially aligned themselves with music in the key of sadness. The tango allowed stoic, taciturn Finns to express their emotions and communicate with members of the opposite sex. And it offered them a social life during the long winters. Finland remade tango in its own image of music and dance, incorporating a polka-type beat. The Finnish and Argentine tangos are related somewhat the way second cousins are. This style wasn’t exported, but it spread and entrenched itself inside the Nordic nation.

Another country where tango has long been a cultural phenomenon is Turkey. A friend had made me a CD of Old World tangos that I played over and over, as I tend to do with new CDs. I was particularly drawn to the songs of Turkish singer Seyyan Hanim. She had a high, haunting voice, and while the tango rhythm in her music was clear, the sensibility was pure Middle Eastern. I later learned that Turkey’s first encounter with Western music was through the tango. The music, so fashionable in European capitals, was being played in nightclubs throughout Istanbul by the late 1920s, which showed the Turks’ openness to Western culture.

The leader of the Turkish National Liberation movement, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, ended the Ottoman dynasty and created the Republic of Turkey in 1923. Atatürk established a secular government and tried to steer the Turkish people toward
influences from the West and Europe rather than from Muslim countries. Prior to this, no Turkish Muslim woman had been allowed on stage. Seyyan Hanim was a protégée of Kemal Atatürk, and he believed that her career could be symbolic of a new, more liberal nation. With his support, she became a popular singer and a symbol for emancipation of women. These days, Turkish politics still vacillates between secularists and Muslims: Culturally, whether to look to the East or the West is a constant argument. I suspect that dancing tango will be one of the true tests of secularism in Turkey.

After the set ended, I left the Russian and partnered with Allen. We noticed that one of the regular dancers was here without his regular partner. Like Domanitrix and her partner, they turned heads on the floor, but for different reasons. They were both tall and thin and excellent dancers. With their long legs complementing each other’s perfectly, stepping in complicated patterns that seemed preternaturally graceful, they reminded me of compasses used in geometry classes, their legs swinging in arcs and circles around their bodies.

“Isn’t he with a new partner?” I whispered to Allen.

“Yeah, I saw him with his original partner at a milonga earlier this week,” Allen said. “They seemed to be having problems. Maybe even arguing.”

“How did he find another tall, beautiful, excellent dancer so soon?” I asked.

“Maybe there’s a number you can call,” Allen said.

“Oh, look, he’s training her,” I said.

We watched as he spoke into the woman’s ear and she nodded. They repeated the step he had just attempted.

“He’s the Tango Whisperer,” Allen said.

We both giggled and then I took the opportunity to ask Allen about the woman he had been dating.

“Not going so well,” he said.

“What happened?”

“Well, I started to notice that she was a little crazy,” he said. “So I started to back out, and she got crazier.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“She sent me thirty-three text messages today,” he said. “She says she wants resolution.”

He said it with a straight face, but I couldn’t fight my smile.

“As Dario’s prodigy, you should know all about resolution,” I said.

When the tanda ended we went to the snack area. An elderly gentleman opened a magnum of red wine and started pouring the contents into people’s cups. Claire and Peter joined us, and we all watched people dance — the professionals, the obsessive amateurs, the beginners and intermediates; the clutching and sliding, the legs wrapping, axes being taken and new ones found.

We spotted one young couple who had no idea how to tango and were slow dancing in the center of the floor.

“They must have read a listing for this somewhere and decided it would be a fun date,” Allen said.

“Yeah, they have no idea what’s going on here,” said Claire.

They moved off, sat on a bench, and started necking in a passionate clutch. We laughed.

“You know, those two are the normal ones,” I said. “They’re on a date. Look at us.”

“I met someone interesting the other night,” Claire said. “I went to see a friend perform. Afterward a group of us went out for dinner. I was sitting next to a guy who had been out west, traveling on his motorcycle. He seemed kind of sweet but not wimpy. You know what I mean?”

“So what happened?” I asked.