Tango Lessons_A Memoir Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chan Chan

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on My Research

  Notes

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2018 by Meghan Flaherty

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-0-544-98070-9

  Cover design by Strick & Williams

  Cover illustrations by Marta Pantaleo

  Author photograph © Kent Corley

  eISBN 978-0-544-98663-3

  v1.0518

  Lines from “the mockingbird” are from Mockingbird Wish Me Luck by Charles Bukowski. Copyright © 1972 by Charles Bukowski. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

  Excerpt from “I have not lain with beauty all my life . . .” (no. 10) by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, from A Coney Island of the Mind, copyright © 1958 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  For my dad,

  my first and dearest friend

  Prologue

  you’ve seen it danced, onstage or in the movies. A blind man leads the scent of a young woman around the bar in march tempo, to music saccharine with strings. A lady in a backless dress, her silky hair bunned low, cleaves to a suited man. You hear the da Dum dum Dum: the orchestra soars, the Dum thumps out the rhythm of four patent leather shoes across a marble floor. You see the glissandos and the ritardandos—with each silk-stockinged knee slid up a pinstriped thigh. Maybe a dozen half-naked courtesans in corsets take the stage for the finale. Spins and dips and final tableaus. Thunderous applause. Tango, the dance of passion, dance of love!

  But this is showman’s tango, staged fedora tango for the tourists. This is ballroom competition tango, the stuff of sequins, rigid choreography—the music secondary to the flashy moves. This is tango as the mating dance of prostitutes and pimps. It is pure seduction: a dramatic tussling across an empty stage, a bodice-ripping stare.

  Forget your fishnet fantasies and take the rose out of your teeth.

  Real tango is plainer, and more punishing, with a deep and tidal pull. It isn’t glamorous. It isn’t posed or planned. It happens when two people meet on one small patch of hardwood floor and take their place in a line of other dancers moving counterclockwise. It’s a quiet thing. The gentleman opens up his arms and takes the lady’s right hand in his left. They step toward each other, torso to torso, heart to heart, and they listen—they stand still—until the music tells them where to go.

  You might miss it if you aren’t looking close enough. There are no prescribed steps. Through subtle tensions, evanescent shifts of weight, two dancers converse. The music tells them how, and it will never be the same dance twice. Tango is the only partner dance in history to be wholly improvised. There is a leader and a follower and, between them, an intricate and wordless conversation. The best parts of the dance remain invisible, like the inner growth of trees.

  It is, above all, bittersweet. Enrique Santos Discépolo, beloved tango poet and composer, said it best: “El tango es un pensamiento triste que se baila.” Tango is a sad thought danced. But it is also pure and buoyant pleasure. A man and woman moving, half-possessed, to music. In their fusion, the sad thought is relieved.

  Chapter One

  the studio was in an ordinary office building, on the second floor. I had only just enrolled myself, by index card and golf pencil, and now I stood in one of several rooms walled off by dark pink curtains, strapping on a pair of grandmotherly pumps. The maestro entered, heels slapping as he thrust himself across the floor. He wore a suit over a black T-shirt, like an eighties stand-up comic, and a ridge of curls hugged his slightly horsey neck. Immediately, he started giving orders in a clipped and thinly eastern European accent. The dance yes is to walk. Okay, begin.

  We didn’t walk. We practiced standing—with all our weight on one foot then the other, watching our ankles wobble in the mirror. My classmates were a pair of forty-something Asian women and some shrinking, balding men in stripes. We didn’t speak. The ladies were asked to stretch up on the forefoot—balanced on the ball, heels elevated—a task that only made us wobble more. Then the maestro demonstrated foot trills, little flicks, one foot around the other. Your feet caress the floor, he said. You hear the difference. A dozen ears tuned to the tidy sweeping sound of leather sole against hardwood. Now the other. You try. And we stood there, one foot wobbling, the other undertaking little decorative missions. We tipped and steadied ourselves, like toddlers playing teapots, until we could approximate the maestro’s tight ellipses. Lápices. Spanish for “pencils”—the step named after circles drawn on the sketching paper of the floor.

  We lined up at the curtain blocking one class from the next. To walk. This meant transferring weight from foot to foot as we had practiced, and then slinking forward, hauling ourselves across the floor as if on ski machines, lugging one leg forth to meet the other. I will hear your feet, the maestro said, cupping a hand over one ear and listening for the swish of our soles across the boards. Always, the ball of the foot must caress the floor. The way he kept saying “caress” struck me as slightly lewd, but I ignored this. The practice of our toe-first trudge across the room required perfect concentration. We each grunted quietly as we tried to heave our weight around on tiptoe. I imagined my classmates as ailing jungle animals trying to relearn how to stalk their prey.

  One slow and somber instrumental played on endless loop, its beats as clear and heavy as the tides, its melody a wisp of seaweed between waves. “Bahía Blanca,” it was called. The white bay. I did not know that then. I only knew the awkwardness and effort of this tango class: the buckling of my ankles, the threat of sliding into accidental splits. The song plinked to a close and then repeated. I pursed my lips and shut my eyes to everything but the ocean rhythm of the strings, trying to will my body into grace, into the tango walk—and thinking, even as I stumbled, this is why I’m here.

  I had taken tango classes once before, when I was sixteen, on a term abroad in Argentina. I was a lonely, oddball kid, and thus spent half my time there by myself, on park benches, furiously scribbling impressions into a composition book: the taste of diesel fumes and city grit baked into empanadas, the feeling of having fallen to the bottom of the world map in the picture frame, of being under glass and in plain sight. The other half I
’ll call my teenage education: hitchhiking, staying out past seven in the morning dancing cumbia, and drinking daintily from liter bottles of cerveza on unlit dirt roads.

  South of the equator, vast and varied, Argentina was unseasonable and unreasonable. I loved every thorny inch of her. The weather and the months ran backwards. The provinces—sandy, grassy, frozen under feet of salt or ice—were systematically ignored, and poor. They stretched a geographic patchwork quilt across the lap and shoes and shoulders of the country, while Buenos Aires, squatting on the Rio de la Plata delta, got all of the attention. I’d been devastated to leave the foothills of the Andes for the capital, but she was the distrito federal, the port, the Paris of South America, and, by happy accident, she created tango, with which I fell in love.

  On Tuesday afternoons, I took the subte from my homestay in the Buenos Aires outskirts to meet my tenth-grade Honors Spanish II teacher in the basement café of a discount bookstore on la Avenida Corrientes. He called himself José Barretto, his alter ego, the mask behind which Joe Barrett buried every trace of his midwestern self. He’d spent ten years in the Dominican Republic and been reborn as an adopted member of his host family. Señor Barretto was robust where Joe was ordinary, open where Joe was closed, and an unmitigated dork. He devoured Argentina every bit as hungrily as I did. In Buenos Aires, at least, that required an appetite for tango. He’d found the class by chance, during his afternoon perambulations. There was no sign, no neon stiletto blinking outside on the sidewalk. Just a handful of businessmen and blue-collar workers spending their lunch break clumped around a boom box, learning how to dance.

  Our instructor was a gentleman named Alfredo, with a bristly mustache and a salt-and-pepper pompadour. José took notes on scraps of paper stuffed into his breast pocket and, every few minutes, fished out a handkerchief to mop his brow. José didn’t quite have what it took for tango; there was something missing that I noticed even then—some heat, perhaps, or some dark depth of pessimism. He held me gingerly, with all the anodyne sterility that his position as my septuagenarian chaperone required. He smiled every so often, as if embarrassed by his forehead sweat. Or as if waiting for tango to become more jubilant, waiting for the sound of upbeat drums.

  I, however, was enchanted by the mournful music—as by any other antique treasure, intricate, threadbare. It sounded like old lace draped across the table of a century. Beautiful, but thinned from age. You had to turn the volume up to hear the old songs underneath the static and the dust. But there the tango surged—keening and crooning, darkly beckoning, and sad.

  The class moved by mathematic increments, painfully precise. One, the first step, backwards for the leader, forward for the follower. Two, a side step, opening out together. Three, Four, the couple walking—him in forward, her reverse. Five, he leads a cross, left over right. Six, the exit. Seven, another side step to resolve, then back to one, the feet together, Eight. Lo básico, Alfredo called it. The basic eight. All steps were accessed from this grid, wrought from the cross and meant to lead back into it. Forward to a side step, or salida; backwards to the cross; then resolution.

  After four weeks of lunchtime lessons, Alfredo took my hand to test my comprehension. “Entonces,” he said, and asked in Spanish, “So, you have the basic?” He steered me from the fray. His knees were almost as sharply pointed as his sleek black polished shoes. He was all angles, but moved supplely, as if by master puppeteer. “Show me,” he said.

  He led me through eight steps, the box. Years later, I would learn this pattern was an arbitrary one. There are no steps in tango. But back then, as long as there were things to master, I would master them. He led. I followed.

  “Good,” he said. “Now close your eyes.”

  The old tangueros often spoke of leading this way, a transitive verb. “La bailo,” they would say. “I dance her.” Swallowing my nascent feminist dismay, I disregarded that paternalism and embraced, instead, the thrill of dancing without steering. The blind leap. Alfredo moved through me like a prow parting water, and the lead made sense. The follower was supposed to cultivate something called la ignorancia sagrada, her sacred ignorance, which felt a bit like flying in the dark. A leader, he told me, should give her room only to do the thing he wants. There could be no second-guessing if the lead was clear; his chest, his arms, the shapes he made would show a lady where to step, by magic alchemy. A follower must close her eyes and trust. And that’s what I was doing then—sixteen and newly in the honking, vivid world: learning to trust.

  This lesson, a decade later, was not at all like that, and I was not that dewy-hearted girl. This lesson and I both were disappointing. For a few futile moments, I pretended I was not in SoHo, New York City, but in Palermo Soho, Buenos Aires, lost inside that old framed photo of the world. But I was not. I was twenty-five years old and flailing. A failed actress and the daughter of a doubly broken home. By day, I languished in a cubicle; by night, beside a man who didn’t want me. I knew I needed to do something, however bold or blind. This class, Basic Argentine Tango, Section A, was it.

  I’d built it up. Stockpiled my nerve. Checked the website every day for months, vowing to sign up for the next cycle and then the next, until here I finally was: in ugly shoes on an ordinary Tuesday, teetering around an unassuming studio not six blocks from my office with a bunch of strangers. And all because I wanted to be different than I was. I wanted to be the kind of woman who took tango lessons.

  I stood in line behind the maestro, trying to do what he did with my feet. Trying to feel something, anything, that wasn’t lost. But then the hour struck. The maestro killed the music. Class was over. There had been no chivalry, no sacred ignorance. We hadn’t so much as partnered up.

  I left the studio that first Tuesday evening and met a man for dinner. My boyfriend. The third in a line of men who wouldn’t touch me. The first I’d called the Hobbit, a baker and fellow Chili’s server in our former Massachusetts college town who had refused to kiss me out of sheer politeness. He was five foot six to my five foot seven, pathologically respectful, and emotionally stalled. I was attracted to his gentle kindness, though I misread each of his signs. The second was a theatre designer with a Homer Simpson alarm clock—a consummate lost cause. I called him Non-Date. We’d spend hours bantering over rounds and rounds of hoppy beers at baseball bars, and wandering laps around Manhattan. I was sure that it was destiny. The merest idea of him made my insides spin. I walked beside him with my hand loose, dangling at my side. It took him three years to reach for it, and once he did, he spooked and changed his mind.

  Number three was accidental. My best friend. Our lack of chemistry was not his fault. But once we’d tried to call ourselves a couple, we couldn’t untry; we were stuck. He loved me like a sister, and his folks were family to me when I really needed one, after mine had come apart. He was a failed actor too; we understood each other’s unfulfilled ambition. We both wanted to be better than we were. He came from money; I did not. I worked meaningless jobs that left me drained while he stayed home and filled his days with weightlifting and errands. There was a deep and inborn sadness in him that I cradled, a chaos in me he steadied. There wasn’t passion. We took care of each other. He paid for groceries, I found his socks. We were fiercely codependent, two lost kids skipping through the adult woods. He called me Biscuit. I called him Peter Pan. We cared for each other very deeply, but we were not in love.

  We should have pushed each other off the nursery sill, but we were both too frightened of the world, and I was desperate not to be alone. My life was better with him in it. Perhaps the solace we took together made up for the sacrifice. Perhaps, I thought, the sloppy lusts of teenage lip-lock were meant to be outgrown. I knew just enough about desire to understand I wasn’t very good at giving rise to it. By the time I came to tango, I had forgotten what it felt like to be touched.

  The pivot back was partly Peter’s fault. He’d sent me on a second trip to Buenos Aires some months earlier, to accompany and translate for his mother on a one-we
ek tour. Her treat. The fool idea had come to me while she and I sat sipping Malbec somewhere in San Telmo, watching two porteños twirl and kick their legs around each other in a tango show. I watched the way the dancers moved together—making geometry or making love, and dragging silent steps across the floor like cat burglars. Tango had never looked like sex to me, more like an elaborate stage battle between exhausted nemeses. Their smiles bent in anguish, their wan cheeks aflame.

  “You and Peter ought to do this,” she whispered.

  I watched his long and rippling dress pants, her midriff flexing into every turn. My arches ached from effort, watching theirs. Fond memories of modest tango steps evaporated in the heat of their sweating and spinning. Their strong legs anchored, loose legs letting go. The whole effect was breathlessly and wordlessly alive. Peter would never want to do this—with me or without. I found myself wishing he might want to, and wanting to myself. My toes tensed under the table. I felt my ribcage swell.

  In the taxi back to our hotel, night wind thrashed my hair through open windows. The driver swerved along the pothole gauntlet up 9 de Julio, the widest street on earth, zooming from lane to lane toward the Obelisco. The city had fallen apart a bit since last I’d seen her, but the radio still blasted tango, and the night still sparkled with the chill of reverse spring.

  That was the April a smoke cloud invaded Buenos Aires from brush-burn fires set by ranchers forty miles upwind, and my lungs were full with it. Talking, even breathing, stung. That night, lying on my twin guesthouse bunk beneath the open window, I drank it in—more than a little tipsy from the Malbec, more than a little melancholy, charmed.

  I lay there remembering the night when, ten years earlier, I’d snuck into a tango club deep in the bowels of the city. From a folding chair on the outer edge, I watched the dancers, like a flock of aging birds, as they swirled together in one stately counterclockwise loop. There were centuries contained in all their steps, lifetimes of agony and joy traced in their shared path around the floor. I stayed for one drink only, one glass of inky wine—but that had been enough.