Hold Me Tight and Tango Me Home (16 page)

It was time to dress like a tango dancer. Racks of black clothing lined the walls in the dimly lit space in the Mimi Pinzón showroom, which was adorned only with a red crushed-velvet fainting couch. The designer, Viviana Laguzzi, had been a professional tango dancer before starting her business; her clothes had the stretch and sway dancers needed, and many had been created for stage performers. The saleswoman pulled out halter-top pant suits with slits from ankle to thigh and black, slinky
dresses woven with gold lamé. They were flashy and shameless and meant to be ogled, but I opted out of the outrageous and bought black harem pants, which were in fashion. The material tucked up at the ankles so your heels didn’t catch. I also got basic yet flattering black tops made of what felt like rayon and lycra fabrics, low cut and with some swing. I put on my dancing shoes, tried on a few black skirts, and decided on one that hung in jagged edges and another less opaque skirt with a serrated hem.

Many of these clothes were made with tourists in mind. The size large in Buenos Aires actually fits an American small or medium, and in a lot of clothing boutiques, trying on garments meant squeezing and zipper burns for the visitors and stifled giggles for the saleswomen. One of the great mysteries of Buenos Aires was how the women stayed so thin.
Portenos
, or residents of Buenos Aires, ate dinner at eleven o’clock at night. They disdained vegetables; if you could find a salad on a menu, it was usually uninspired — a pile of grated carrots dumped onto a plate, for example.

My friend Katherine and her Uruguayan fiancé, Marcus, had once invited me to a barbecue at their house in Brooklyn. Uruguayans are as carnivorous as the Argentineans. When I asked if I could bring something (I suggested a vegetable or salad), I was told not to bother. At the party it was as if a cow had exploded onto the grill — ribs and steaks and sausages; not a fresh, green piece of produce in sight. Marcus explained to me, “The chorizo is like the salad.”

Steaks were eaten at all times of the day and night in Argentina. I saw construction workers in downtown Buenos Aires grilling short ribs for lunch on their cement-mixing wheelbarrow. It seemed that every meal was fattening. Breakfast almost always consisted of
medialunas
(semisweet croissants) and
dulce de leche
(caramel). I asked my friends Nola and Siobhan, who were traveling to the wedding with me, to please stab my hand with a fork if they saw me reaching for the dulce de leche at breakfast. But I couldn’t resist and I worried my jeans would fit like sausage casings by the time I left. So what the hell did the local women eat to stay so thin?

I asked a few but they just shrugged, as if thinness were as effortless to them as speaking Spanish. I imagined they just didn’t eat . . . at least not often and not much. And if they did, they’d better learn how to sew their own clothes. But this isn’t natural or healthy, and an estimated one out of every ten women in Argentina had an eating disorder. This is the second-highest rate in the world, after Japan.

While I was there, the government was in the process of passing a law that required retail stores to stock clothing above a size eight. And as I observed, the Argentine equivalent to an eight is closer to an American size four or six. Apparently the law was meant to help stem the epidemic of anorexia and bulimia. The designers and store owners responded to the proposed law as if it were an act of colonialism — just because Americans are fat, why should we have to make our clothes bigger? While the spirit of the law was to help bigger-boned Argentineans,
the burgeoning tourism industry would benefit, as well, when nonanorexic visitors could go into a dressing room without facing total humiliation.

Whether it was the stretchy fabrics or business acumen taking precedence over national pride, the designers at Mimi Pinzón made clothes that fit tango tourists. The prices were at most a third of what they would have been in the States. My shopping bags rubbing against one another, I should have felt a little guilty for taking advantage of the economic crisis. But quite selfishly, as I hailed a taxicab, I was mostly thinking, Now that I’m going to look like a dancer, I need to know how to dance.

M
Y TEACHER
,
WHO
was from the Academy of Tango, lived in a small apartment bare of furnishings except for a lone chair in the living room, to which he ushered me so I could change my shoes. Augusto was also a performer, and I noticed that foot swipes ran across the walls and a few scuff marks even dotted the ceiling.

“I live with my partner,” he said. “We practice here.”

He asked me what I wanted to work on.

“I want my hips to pivot like well-oiled hinges,” I said.

“
Que?
” he asked.

“Okay, how about the
molinete
,” I answered.

Molinete
means “wheel” or “windmill.” The woman steps in a grapevine pattern, crossing herself side, back, and forth around the man while he pivots in circles; he continues to pivot on his axis, and she moves in a tight triangle around him. She must follow his chest, not his legs, keeping her chest aligned with his.

“You are knotting yourself up with your partner,” Augusto said. “It is how do you say, a paradox. You’re twisting together. Think of it as two snakes fighting.”

Though I prepared myself for serpentine knots, Augusto insisted that we start with
los elementales
(the basics), so we began with the embrace.

“I’m not your great-aunt, hold me like you mean it,” he instructed. He pulled me closer and secured an arm around my waist. “Now when I turn my chest, you have to follow that. Keep your axis, twist more at your waist, sink into the floor, and now push off it to step away.”

It wasn’t quite as brutal as my first private lesson in New York. Augusto lived the tango and treated his talent as a gift to share. His optimism was infectious, and I took to his tango wisdom like a groupie.

“Remember, the tango is a conversation, never an argument,” he told me. “It always flows smoothly.” He spun on his axis, and I worked to catch up with him, chest to chest, stepping around him, orbiting a center of gravity. I twisted at the waist, separating my upper and lower body. I tried to not put weight on him so he was free to turn, and we circled around each other in centrifugal motion until we grew dizzy, then stopped and spun the other way.

Toward the end of the lesson he ceased his instruction and just danced with me.

“Close your eyes,” he said.

He felt sublime. The confidence that he transferred to me
made me feel safe and cared-for and valued. By just simply walking and turning, stopping and starting, he led me to places I hadn’t been before. There’s an expression in tango, “
La lleva como dormida
,” which means “He leads her as asleep.” This is when the follower trusts her leader so completely that she relaxes fully, closes her eyes, and reaches a slightly somnambulant dreamlike state.

While dancing this way with Augusto, I became acutely aware of the scent of his neck, the soothing energy radiating from his chest, his breath occasionally brushing my face. I remembered how good it felt to fall asleep with a man. To feel his skin against the length of my body, the weight of his arms around me, and to hear his breathing change, slow down and then deepen, as he fell asleep. I felt myself start to want that in a way that punctured my protective bubble, my resolution that tango would be enough.

In that bare, stark room with the ceiling and walls marked and scratched with practice steps, in a place where only tango mattered, I realized the paradox of the molinete: that it was possible to experience the lingering sadness of past heartbreak and the tingle of future romance at the same time.

“Have you been to a milonga yet?” he asked.

“I’m going to one tonight,” I told him. “In San Telmo.”

“Perfect,” he said.

San Telmo is in the southern section of the city, and at times the scents of the port — rusted anchors, diesel fumes, exposed mud, and murky waters — wafted by. The cobblestone streets and the buildings with their ornate ironwork had an Old World
charm. Many of the areas, though, were run down, and the streetlights illuminated the shabbiness of the well-worn community. I wondered about being dropped here by myself at 11:00
P.M.
but went ahead and stepped out of the cab. Milonga Gay was on the second floor of a dark building. Peter had told me that this was the best milonga in town — although his opinion was, of course, biased. (I also wanted to include gay tourism as another angle for the article I was writing.)

Before going in I made a quick detour and bought some gum in the event I danced that night. Just as I returned to the door and pressed the buzzer, I noticed a man who also had arrived for the milonga. We smiled at each other. He was about my height and had dark, curly hair and brown eyes that turned down slightly at the corners.

“
¿Hablas inglés?
” he asked.

“
Claro que sí
,” I said. “Rather, most certainly.”

“This is kind of an out-of-the-way place,” he said. “Do you dance tango?”

“I’ve been learning,” I said.

I assumed that Josh was gay, so without hesitation I invited myself to join him. He offered to buy me a drink. I asked for a glass of red wine, and he ordered a sparkling water for himself. The walls had been painted dark red, and strings of white lights reflecting off small mirrors gave the room a shabby-chic glamour. The music switched from classic heartbreak tango to jazzy and upbeat nuevo tango. The couples varied: There were women with women and a few mixed-gender couples, but mostly men
danced with men — and they were excellent dancers. They turned and ganchoed and boleoed, whipping, kicking, executing their steps with precision and clarity of intent. They followed the line of dance, or the circular flow of the couples around the dance floor, five-o’clock-shadowed cheek to cheek.

“My tango teacher told me I had to be here tonight. It was nonnegotiable” Josh explained to me. “She should be here soon. So you want to dance?”

I accepted, though I approached the floor with a little apprehension, as the dancers were so advanced. I followed Josh as he made his way to the floor, where he stopped and faced me. We embraced — not close, but open. I looked into his chiseled face, his kind brown eyes, and smiled. He started stepping the basic and I knew right away that this was going to be exceptionally bad. He not only didn’t maneuver the basic steps securely, but he also didn’t hold his arms in a way that made a connection possible. Where our hands joined, he pumped his arm up and down and swung it all over the place. The floor was crowded, and he just stood there, motionless, waiting for a place for us to fit on the dance floor, then he sort of run-dragged me to that spot and started the hand pumping once again.

“Have you learned the rock step yet?” I asked him.

“The what?” he yelled over the music.

“It’s if you get stuck and can’t move, you sort of rock back and forth from front foot to back foot, so you keep dancing, then when you see an opening, you dance toward it and join the line of dance again.”

“Oh, like this?” he asked.

We practiced it, and I noticed members of the crowd watching us with bemused curiosity. When the song ended, I hurried back to my seat and Josh followed. I hoped he hadn’t yet learned that you normally dance for three songs. While we sat together, I found out a piece of his story. He had an MBA and had worked in San Diego, investigating foreclosures. He had recently quit his job and taken off for South America to spend a year traveling. He was staying at a youth hostel in the center of town — if he was going to have the experience of backpacking, he was going to go all the way. I invited him to have dinner with me at a tango show I was writing about for my article. Later in our conversation, it came out that he was straight.

When I was leaving he walked me out and opened the taxi door for me. On the way to my hotel, I realized that I had just asked a man out on a date.

I waited for Josh in the hotel restaurant, at a table at the edge of the parquet floor where the dancers would perform. He arrived carrying a large bouquet of yellow flowers. I was a little embarrassed but appreciated the gesture. The waiter took the flowers for us, and Josh ordered a carbonated water. Almost immediately, he told me, “I’m in AA and don’t drink.”

Coming from a large, Irish Catholic family that’s part of a larger Irish Catholic community, I was very familiar with the program. When I was a child, “on the wagon” or “off the wagon” had been two of the most common explanations for sudden changes in adult behavior.

“When did you quit?” I asked. “Was it because of your divorce?”

“No, I divorced three years after I quit drinking,” he said. “My wife found a new guy with a drug problem. I thought my life was horrible at that point and really felt sorry for myself . . . because of my divorce and knowing that I couldn’t drink. But they were the best possible things for me. Here I am.”

“Why South America?” I asked.

“I was always obsessed with money,” he said. “I got a sense of power from it — just knowing I had it. But I realized, or actually my sponsor asked me one day, who I was living my life for. I didn’t know. I had always wanted to come to South America, so I’m spending a year down here.”

When I worked seasonal jobs in Alaska, I escaped the long winters by going to Latin America. I hiked the Inca Trail and climbed a mountain in the Cordilleras Blancas. I visited a jungle along the Amazon, worked in an orphanage in the swampy rain forest of Guatemala, hitchhiked through Mexico, and danced in Cuba.

“I need to quit my life of travel and adventure and find a steady job and make some money,” I told him. “As a freelancer, I live hand to mouth and on the brink of financial disaster all the time. But it’s hard to change. Just knowing you have this year ahead of you makes me so envious.”

“You can be my adventure adviser and I’ll be your financial adviser,” he said. “Before I went into that milonga, I circled the block because I was so nervous. It’s strange we arrived at the exact same time. It makes me think we met for a reason.”