My toes are throbbing quietly as though I had a beating heart in each foot. I am perching on the stage in this upstairs theatre, willing my tender tootsies to please stop hurting, even while I relish the sweet pain that is the wages of my lovely sin, the result of many hours of tango bliss. I was born under the speedy planet Mercury, patron of travel and communication. Give me feet of quicksilver, I pray, feet that dart, flick, circle and tap in a thousand decorations. Give me wings on my ankles to carry me, floating effortlessly through the long rainy Oregon night. I am considering resting for one single tanda, letting the painful pulse in my feet slow down a little. And then I spot him, one of my favourite leaders, a handsome slender figure with hazelnut eyes twinkling gleefully, a lilty-voiced Argentine in voluntary exile. My focus sharpens, I open my eyelids wide, I stare in his direction, silently willing him to turn around, to grant me the sweet cock-headed nod. But his smile is for a friend, a bearded twin, his body double, identical in height, figure and posture.
I rarely take a chance on an unknown dancer, but there is something about the way they bearhug, chests slotting together like edge pieces of a jigsaw, something in the looks of acknowledgement they give each other, which suggests to me the complicity of two initiates in a mystery, equals in the freemasonry of tango. The friend catches my eye, mid-embrace, and I shoot him a look which tries to say, I am an adept too. Recognise one of your own. Taste and see.
My instincts have not failed me. His right arm is wrapped confidently around my back, our torsos firmly touching. I can feel the breastbone through his shirt, the lungs filling with air inside, the muscles of his back moving beneath my fingers, the sweat pearling on his cheekbone. Our arms form a magic chalk circle, by which the spirits are enforc’d to rise, the Mephistophelean musicians, resurrected for our voluptuous pleasure, for our midnight rites. And, suddenly, this skinny angular boy is all circles, spheres upon spheres: curling fingers; swiveling, pivoting feet; torso twisting back and forth in constant arcs and curves, taking my back with him to the limits of its rotation. I feel my upper body revolving around my spine, as though I contained a Ptolemaic microcosm or were ringed inside like a tree. Tanturi’s plangent bandoneons and the light, sweet, airy notes of Campos’s voice are like pebbles skimming a lake, like tiny nudges setting us twisting and spinning, and we respond with the rippling circles of giros and ochos.
His stride thrills me. He hovers above the beginning of the beats like a hawk waiting for its moment to swoop. We are pausing together, ready to seize our chance — and now! we slice the air, we drive through the softly-lit space, accelerating like twin Felixes in free fall, landing confidently upright on soft feet on the next strong beat. My free feet take little alternate darting flights like low-flying sparrows, snatching small incidental notes, tiny, tasty morsels. My feet are small fish riding along beside a shark, seizing on the prey too small for his appetite.
And now the hateful cortina is sounding, the alarm clock that wakes me rudely from my tango trance, and I am brutally separated from him, torn from the tit, waiting with awkward expectation. Don’t let our revels be ended yet. We exchange bashful glances and shift from foot to foot. And then he says the blessed words “Shall we see what he plays next?” “I’d love to,” I tell him. I glance down at my feet, Dorothy-like in their sparkly red heels. In the arms of this stranger from deep in the Republican heartland of this strange country, my feet have magic powers. They will transport me, take me back in spirit to my local milongas in the noisy, filthy, trafficky, litter-strewn and dogshit-smeared city I have claimed as mine. There’s no place like home.
