It’s a place of faded grandeur, of the kind in which this city specialises. The incongruous nasal sound of bagpipes greets us in the lobby and mingles with the more familiar moans of bandoneons, so similar in timbre that I have problems identifying where the Basque instruments stop and the German ones begin. As we reach the landing, my companion Desirée (not her real name) is greeted by a flurry of cheek kisses. She walks with the very upright posture of an ageing ballet mistress: back straight, breasts pointing straight forward, pronounced horizontal mounds against the pewter fabric of her silky blouse. Her skirt, the colour of tarnished silver, has been carefully smoothed over a flat stomach. Her shoes glint a metallic grey.
Soon, we are seated at our table, with the grey reflections of a champagne bucket matching her outfit. Attendance is sparse on this bank holiday weekend and perhaps spirits are a little lower than usual. The walls are painted in subdued greyish-purple and yellow. Large, ugly black box speakers are suspended from the ceiling and, in one corner, a huge triangle of a ladder points upwards at a large hole in the plasterwork.
“This isn’t typical”, Desirée keeps telling me, “you must come back and experience it on a night with more people.” “Are you having fun?” she asks me anxiously, several times. My champagne glass is repeatedly refilled (“it’s on us”) and Desirée’s eyes flash around the room, solicitously searching for suitable partners for me. “I wouldn’t dance with that guy”, she warns, pointing out a gangly figure leaning slightly back from the torso, negotiating the floor with an expression of pained concentration on his face. Frowning slightly, she looks over towards one of the better leaders, who sits mopping his brow and staring resolutely out at the dance floor. “What’s he playing at? Why isn’t he asking you to dance?” In fact, everyone at our table is anxious to ensure that I enjoy myself. My neighbour taps me gently on the arm once or twice, directing my line of sight to men who are looking fixedly in my direction, whose cabeceos I might otherwise have missed, leaning in to give me discreet advice (“him — yes”; “him — er, no”).
As the playful little tripping bandoneon solos of the D’Agostino tanda begin to sound, her boyfriend Sonny smiles over at me, eyes glinting beneath a thatch of white hair. I nod and smile. “I’m going to show them how she dances and then they’ll ask her”, he says, glancing over at Desirée. Out on the floor, my dancing, too, is more subdued than usual. I want to blend in, to dance in the house style, to be respectful, observant of tradition. I place my arm over the top of Sonny‘s shoulders, as I have observed the other women position theirs, with my left hand resting lightly on his right shoulder, instead of in its habitual place spread over the left shoulder blade. In the paradas, I tap his foot or ankle lightly, instead of sweeping up his trouser leg in the dramatic caresses I usually favour. I keep most of my little flourishes, the tiny taps and rulos of my free leg, in my imagination alone, letting D’Agostino’s many little squirly semiquaver runs, tiny baroque bandoneon and piano solos, cadenzas in miniature, pass me by, like the meandering journeys of a fallen leaf on a breeze-rippled stream, watched with lazy fascination by someone stretched out on the grassy bank. I focus my attention almost exclusively on only the beats Sonny is leading me to step on, trying to compact the music, to squeeze all the strength and all the sweetness of this orchestra into my weight changes, to find the exact centre of the beat, to step with the exact degree of suddenness or smoothness that the moment demands, to walk in unison with Sonny, not add a harmony — like the lovely sound of a tenor and a soprano sharing a tune an octave apart.
Back at our table, the evening is measured in tandas and cool, bubbly sips of gold liquid. I try to observe Desirée and Sonny out on the floor, but there are chubby, dark-suited men at the table in front of us (“that guy is in the background to almost every single one of my Facebook photos”, Desirée says, pointing at one, with a small chuckle) and I can only see their feet for a few moments and soon only their faces are visible: her hay-coloured, slightly messy curls and his snowy mop; her nose pressed against his cheek and eyes shut. They look deep in concentration and then, suddenly, Sonny speeds up his pace and playfully, purposefully bumps a rotund little man in front of them, provoking him to half-turn with a smile at which they release their left hands from the embrace and grasp each other around the shoulders for a moment in a brief manly side hug.
It is impossible to forget that the milonga, as well as a place to dance, is a site of male bonding rituals. I watch Sonny flash gap-toothed smiles and slip winks at little suited men with monk’s tonsures. As one couple circles the floor, the man makes a quick detour over to our table with shuffling double time steps to clap Sonny on the back, drawing him into a clumsy three-way hug. Several men are brought over to our table as potential dance partners for me. “You must dance with him”, Sonny tells me, signalling vaguely into the distance. “Who? What does he look like?” “Just like me — but older and uglier”, he jokes. “There aren’t many pretty ones here”, Desirée laughs.
And, surprisingly soon, the evening is winding down. People are beginning to shrug quilted Barbour vests — overkill, surely, in this mild early spring weather — over their shoulders. My hosts are circling each other with arms uplifted and clicking fingers in a tanda of chacareras, Desirée flirtatiously swirling her skirts above her knees with both hands and shooting her boyfriend sexy, heavy-lidded glances, her posture tall and regal, her lips curling a little in a half-smile. And then I am on the floor for a Di Sarli tanda, the last one of the night, and I spot Sonny in my peripheral vision, between songs, standing, hovering, jacketed, shaking hands and clapping male backs. (“Don’t worry”, Desirée has reassured me, “he always takes ages to say goodbye to everyone.”) A full tanda and a half later we are finally abandoning the empty champagne flutes smeary-rimmed with lipstick, descending the broad square staircase and out past the lingering smokers into a dark porteño street beneath the light of a half moon.
They drop me at my door and, as they drive off and I am waving goodbye, I remember it, the white carnation I pinned in my hair to mark the first day of spring. I loosen my ponytail and pull it out. Its petals are soft and unruffled, its colour pure white, like the snowballs almost unknown at this latitude. Fresh, unwilted, beautiful, a symbol of our southern spring.
