A fiction
It felt like entering a cinema. I slipped inside and handed my forty pesos to a young man whose body was obscured by a box office-like booth. The downstairs room was a long dark rectangle alive with the cheerful bouncy beats of an alien dance, with a crowded mass of bodies, hips swinging, arms lifting for underarm turns, mini skirts swirling. A hell of writhing dervishes in the gloom.
In the upstairs room, Javier and Geraldine were circling each other in black and white, her legs bending neatly at the knee in whip-like angular ganchos and boleos, crisscrossing at the ankles in tiny Vs. And, below and in front of them, the floor was like a giant clockwork device: a dozen cog wheels turning, almost intersecting here and there, miraculously not touching. It was a whirligig, a kaleidoscope of circles within circles, female legs whisking through the air in high arches. A fluffy-haired blonde, curvaceous blonde displayed luscious Marilyn-Monroe buttocks in jeans shorts cut high on the leg, her arm reaching deep over the shoulder of a chubby guy in head to toe black, fingers spread wide against his shoulder blade. At a fill in the music, she took a dozen tiny, fussy little side steps and changed weight many times with the pianist’s semiquavers. A tall beautiful brunette kept her eyes scrunched shut, eyebrows sexily furrowed and lips pursed. Another, head turned completely towards the free side of the embrace, kept her gaze on her own legs, balletically poised, weight forward on the toes, eyes shiny and mouth curving in a mischievous smile. Some of the leaders caught my gaze for a second as they passed, letting it slide over me unseeing as uninterested as if I were one more of the plastic chairs, another of the condensation-dotted litre bottles of Stella Artois.
But most people were sitting and my feeling of having entered a kind of Cirque du Soleil grew. The frenetic activity on the floor contrasted strangely with the quiet passivity of the watchers. A few were turned to each other exchanging a few words of conversation. But most sat quietly – side on to the floor, turned slightly awkwardly in their plastic chairs, one elbow resting on the table; upright but leaning back against the plush black banquettes that lined one wall, like an old-fashioned diner’s; perching on the bar stools; uncomfortably squatting on the wooden platform below the slide projector screen. In the far corner, next to the DJ’s booth, which was screened with glass like a bank teller’s window, there was just one large round table of dancers whose raucousness set them apart, who sat, some of them, with their backs to the brightly-lit theatre-in-the-round of the dance floor, whose conversation was loud and their laughter louder. Suddenly, they burst out in an off-key rendition of Happy Birthday followed by slow handclapping and cheering, out of time with the opening bars of the Di Sarli that were sounding. I felt a prickly annoyance: they were turning this milonga into their own private party, ensconced comfortably in their VIP corner like drug dealers surveying a club scene from a roped-off booth. Taking up the entire floor space with their big fancy pants giros and dangerous C-curve boleos, their acrobatic flashy dance for show; forming their own little impenetrable clique in the corner there. Prosperos cackling at the storm. Self-satisfied starlets of a tiny, self-contained world.
. . . . . .
One hour later, I had still not danced. Even in my jacket, I was chilly in the fierce blasts of the air conditioner. They might have good dancers here, but how could they not get the simplest things right – the most basic things like temperature? Earlier this evening, I had been clammy with sweat, Bikram-dancing under a fan that sluggishly stirred the humid air around and now my arms were goose pimpled. I’m not an aggressive guy. I don’t like to put the lady under pressure. But cabeceo was impossible. Most female eyes looked passively out at the dance floor, their expressions somewhere between absorption, boredom and annoyance – it was hard to tell which. I scanned the room, but each time eyes met mine, they looked blankly at me before sliding away. One woman maintained my eye contact with an intense stare. I cocked my head towards the dance floor and raised one eyebrow, but she remained impassive. I smiled and raised both eyebrows, gesturing vigorously, at which she cocked her own head to one side, craning her neck in an exaggerated manner. Was this some kind of unorthodox way of accepting my invitation? I slid my forward in my seat and began to stand and then a sudden hunch made me turn round and I saw a pretty olive-skinned boy with a dark ponytail, diagonally behind me at the next table, directly in her line of sight. Of course. I should have known.
And then I spotted her, my partner from that afternoon’s class. She was sitting in a row of women at one edge of the miniature stage, looking out, like everyone else, at the dancing. At last, here was someone I could dance with. Her elbows were on her knees and her body inclined forward at 45-degree angle, a shawl wrapped securely around her shoulders. Her glazed expression and her slightly rounded back suggested that she had been sitting for quite a while. She wasn’t the greatest follower. She had an annoying tendency of pouncing on every little detail in the music with little flicks, curls and taps of her free foot. I had to stop leading paradas, because she would see them as opportunities to play solo, to planeo around and rub her free foot irritatingly up my freshly dry-cleaned trouser leg and then down her own standing leg along with the long bow strokes of the violin in a manner clearly intended to be sensual but which I found irritating. What was I supposed to do while she took her time mimicking the musicians with her decorations? Go down the pint for a pub and come back later? I frowned a little as I remembered her trying to correct my posture in the giro we practised “you need to dissociate more here”, she told me. Look, babe, I wanted to tell her, I’ve been dancing for five years and I teach tango back home. I know how to bloody dissociate. But if I kept it simple, kept it moving we might have a nice dance. She did have good balance and a soft embrace. . . well, I didn’t have too many options here anyway. I needed to get out there on the floor, to show these snooty, aloof women who kept avoiding my eye exactly what they were missing.
For the better part of a tanda, I tried, unsuccessfully, I really tried, to catch her eye. She was sitting in shadow and I couldn’t even tell if she was looking in my direction or not. Finally, I took a decision. As the opening bars of the new tanda were sounding – the familiar lovely calm romanticism of Canaro with the promise of Maida’s honeyed voice – I crossed the room quickly and, bending down slightly to her level, I asked, “would you like to dance?” She looked startled and quickly shook her head “no, thanks”. I was surprised, too. Had I misinterpreted her posture and expression that so strongly suggested a frustrated longing to dance? “I suppose you must be tired”, I said. “Er…” she hesitated a beat too long and then added, very quietly, “yes.” Trying to look indifferent, I strode quickly across the dance floor, still filling with couples, to my seat, conscious of a bevy of female eyes on me, witnesses to my rejection. And then, as I was about to sit back down in my chair, I watched with disbelief as she got up and, in her eagerness, tossed her shawl at the stage and then indifferently let it slither to the ground to be trodden on. She was embracing him with undignified abandon, breasts pressed against his skinny rib cage, an arm around his shoulders, eyes shut and a repellent fake-orgasm look of tango bliss on her face. Mr Fucking Ponytail. As he took a side step with her, her lips curled in a tiny smile that even through closed eyes seemed to mock me. Of course, she preferred him: she wanted to look good out on that floor, to appear to be an initiate, to look like she could get herself a tanda with one of the locals. Humiliating me was just an added bonus.
. . . . . .
Out on the muggy avenue, my unused shoes dangling over one shoulder, I reflected on the perversity of tangueras. They complain about the gender imbalance, they sit for hours pouting and looking sulky, moaning about not getting dances. And then they take a perverse pleasure in turning me down. If she’s not willing to settle for a decent dancer like me, who is she waiting for? Chicho certainly isn’t going to ask her. Well, she’s not getting any younger, that’s for sure. If she’s holding out for The Enrosque Emperor – good luck to her!
