A fiction.
He stands a little awkwardly, chest puffed out just a tiny bit, like a pigeon half-hearted about its courtship. I can feel his weight shifting around. “Oops!” he apologises. “I´m not used to standing like this.” His right arm reaches forward, rounding his shoulder, till his fingers are barely brushing against my upper back, at bra strap level, close to where my breast begins to round out beneath my elbow, where a tiny roll of flesh is squeezed into a hillock by my too tightly fastened band. A back hamster, my sister would call it, a sweet little rodent longing to bury itself back down beneath the polycotton and elastic. His left hand is frozen open in the air in claw-like shape, like an angry mudra. When I curl my fingers around it it turns into a slippery fish. The fingers carefully hovering over my mine, without touching. “Hold my hand,” I instruct him. “No more. Like this.” His fingers stick up stubbornly. This is the church, this is the steeple. “I´m afraid of squeezing your hand,” he says, gingerly. “Let´s try walking,” I tell him. His chest is sloping away from me. I resist the temptation to pull him closer and try to balance my body against him, feeling a bit like a plate of fried eggs in a tilted Teflon pan, ready to slip straight off and onto a plate. His head is tipped to one side, cocked at an angle, seeking mine in a touchingly intuitive gesture of care, of tenderness. I can feel the prickly scratchiness of stubble against my forehead and tiny hairs cling to my damp cheek, fuzzy and sticky with static. “Come towards me just a little more, from here.” I place my hands on his teddy-soft T-shirt and try to lift and pull his upper body forward from beneath his shoulder blades — and instantly feel his whole body tipping towards me. “Aaah!” he exclaims. “Sorry, sorry.” His arm tightens around my back. “OK,” I say. “Take your time and walk.” I feel a foot sliding forward cautiously and then a lurch as his weight follows it. A little clumsily, a little hesitantly, we are off. At first, he takes large strides with his left leg and little ones with his right. We are moving like contestants in a three-legged race.
I suppress my natural bossiness, my urge to correct everything, to gently roll his left shoulder back, to root his hips downwards, settle them in the oval bowl of his pelvis, curl his fingers around mine, softening them from square to rounded brackets, lift his fluffy head which is drooping sideways towards me, like a wilting dandelion clock. I seal my lips, let him try to find his own pace, his rhythm, his stride. As if I were riding a skittish horse. “Transport all your weight at once, that´s it,” I say, in a trainer´s soothing voice. For two perfect steps he gets it and I feel him moving through the space, clearly, confidently. I stroke his back for a moment, in just the tiniest caress. And then I giggle, smirking like an apologetic Japanese man, to try to remove a little of the meaningfulness from the gesture. I´m a doctor, I tell myself. I´m a physiotherapist. I´m a coach. There are so many professional ways to touch a body, so many impersonal, objective, investigative, disinterested ways. My gaze is diagnostic — I can see him sitting heavily into a jutting trochanter as he changes weight — and my hands are like a lecturer´s, operating a laser pointer. I touch the side of my own hip, press it gently upright, gesture to him to do the same. “Relax here.” I gently press down a hiked-up shoulder, feeling like a potter carefully moulding a wobbling tower of clay. He is an assemblage of parts, like a old junk drawer full of forgotten Allen keys, mysterious IKEA components, rubber bands and petrified sticks of chewing gum. And we are arranging it with OCD-ish precision: paper clips here, receipts there, tossing old bus tickets into the wastepaper backet like amateur basketball players.
“Let´s try the walking again,” I suggest. I am fumbling a little, conscious of him watching, waiting, as I search my iTunes library, crouching awkwardly by the table, pencil-thin heels jutting out behind me. His head is tipped upwards, looking out of the high window at the expanse of gray skyscrapers beyond. I choose an early song with a simple predictable pulse. it doesn´t matter what meanderings happen in between, what circuitous routes De Caro traverses with his monstruous strident violin. His legs feel trembly and his hand is shaking just the tiniest bit. “I´m sorry,” he says. “I always feel a bit nervous when I´m dancing with a teacher.” Verri´s voice is defiantly carefree. I´m a dancer, through and through. It´s the typical song of the commitment-phobic eternal bachelor, Peter Pan with brillcream. While they are sighing in my arms, I´m only thinking about my steps. “Relax,” I tell him, again, helplessly. But I am concentrating hard myself, on calming the wobbly feeling in my stomach, the slightest teeter in my heels. My body seems to want to insist that this isn´t just work. Something in the faint, salty scent of his neck, a few centimetres from my nose, in the big paw so awkwardly floppy in my hand, in the reassuring flatness of his chest, in his very masculine clumsiness and unawareness of his own body, his sheer undancerly lumbering maleness, something is suggestive of a more basic meaning, of my proximity to the source of life.
“You need to turn towards your partner here,” I tell him. “Focus on me. Communicate with me, be aware of where I am at all times.” It sounds suddenly needy. I feel a bit like the classic older seductress, initiating the deliciously nervous, stammering, acne-scarred geek boy, the whore in the room above the saloon, unhooking my bodice in the dim curtained light, Humbert Humbert jiggling the redhead on his knee, let´s play horsey, underpants sticky with secret secretions. In any relationship of unequal ages, surely the older person is always the weaker, the more desperate, the one with the deeper, hungrier needs. Is this what I have become? The teacher of embraces, a cunning prostitute-in-reverse, preparing young men for the real thing, for the freely-sought dances with women thirty years younger, women with nose rings and flocks of tiny stick-figure birds inked in black over their shoulders, with shiny eyes and glossy ponytails and naked waxed vulvas, plucked bare like chickens. In my fifties, instead of babysitting my own son´s children, I´m here. In Buenos Aires. Exchanging touches for money, but, in the topsy-turvey world of tango, at least they pay me. For now.
