For Marcelo “El Chino” Gutierrez and my Cobra Sisters
This is my favourite part. After all the exercises. After climbing one-legged onto stacks of books, tensing our buttock muscles to rise up straight and tall and stable like free-standing mood lighting lamps in a student bedroom. After standing, legs apart, like sumo wrestlers, receiving pushes and shoves and trying to discharge the energy down into the floor rather than push back (I am always tempted to grunt during that game). After lying on our backs — my eyes wide open to prevent the tug of sleepiness, the hard-core tanguera’s constant enemy — lifting from the centre, bringing our belly buttons up a few centimetres from the floor.
Now we are here at last. I crouch quickly to scratch a mosquito bite at my ankle. I straighten up gradually, conjuring up my personal visualisation. I don’t want to puff out my chest, like a tango Incredible Hulk, growing bulky pecs with alarming speed, turning green-grey in the evening light, swelling till the buttons rip erotically from my shirt. There will be no hulking out, I tell myself. “Terpsi,” The Snake Charmer cautions me, “remember, keep your torso relaxed.” So instead I let The Sorting Hat send me to Slytherin. I channel him, my cobra. Instead of a bamboo flute, I have the sweet scrapings of Di Sarli’s fiddles; instead of a cross-legged, turbaned fakir, I have a chubby-cheeked, fuzzy-haired young Argentine in an eye-wateringly bright orange Nike T-shirt and ugly white Crocs. But this is the tune which will entice me out of my basket, up, up and then out, widening from my upper back, separating my shoulder-blades, letting my torso curl around like a hood. “Less, less, less!” The Snake Charmer cries in mock-alarm, “It’s subtle!” I tone it down gradually and, at the point at which it seems barely perceptible, at which it is just 1Å past the threshold between nothing and something, he nods his approval – “yes, that’s it!”
It’s strange, I reflect, how different the embrace feels from this side. I stand and open my arms and let her choose where and how to place her body. For a moment, I feel her hair tickling my right cheek, then she tucks it behind one ear. Her skin is smooth against the side of my face. Her body is pleasantly solid, heavy of hip and light of torso but I somehow feel its presence far less with my left arm raised than when I am the one carefully positioning myself against her. When I am following, I am very aware of the soft cushioning of her left breast, the curvy topography of her body, the surprising angularity of her shoulder-blade, the jasmine smell of the perfume on her neck. But now, as I start to move, left arm raised, her physicality seems to — well, not vanish, but fade and blur. I seem to be looking at the room, too, through a soft-focus filter. Instead of the sharp, individualised detail of the square-cushioned sofa, piled with sweaters and shoe bags, of the exposed pale ribs of the radiator, I am looking at spaces and obstacles, at geometric shapes, taking everything in passively, but not gazing at anything in particular. My eyes are directed straight ahead, but my focus is on other senses: on hearing and proprioception. What is important is happening within me, not outside.
I imagine myself moving from my belly button, my navel following hers, as though we were joined by an invisible umbilical cord. The floor is my ally. I imagine my trailing foot pushing it gently, gradually away and I try to roll through softly onto my leading foot. My face is puckered with concentration, I can tell. I check my left arm and try to soften and relax it, to point my elbow straight down. I want to glide, to be as smooth as possible, as level, as even. I imagine my body as one of the stacks of books that we used as a prop for our technique exercises. I don’t want the lower books to bulge out or the top ones to slide off. I need to create a perfectly balanced column. I think less about her body’s mass or its presence than about its gaps, its spaces. There, right beneath her shoulder, is the perfect spot for my leading foot to fit and I feel the satisfaction of filling in a crossword clue, of slotting two jigsaw pieces together, the quiet but deep thrill of the child sliding the round peg finally into the round hole. It is an engineer’s pleasure. I aim straight for the centre of her body and, as I get there, she is gone and I take her place, my body slipping into the space she has left. I walk in her warm footsteps, she my King Wenceslas, I her page. We form one single Woozle, circling an imaginary oak tree in the soft snow.
It’s so simple and yet so beautiful, like a moving meditation: a microcosm of tango, a sand-grain world with infinity in an embrace and eternity in three and a half minutes. I love the sparseness, the cleanness of walking. It makes me want to do nothing else ever. It’s a magical sensation — walking forwards with complete freedom, as if she weren’t there — but, yet, she is there and that is what gives it its paradoxical charm. Together, but unrestricted. Free, but joined. Like dancing with my own shadow.
When I follow, I love to let my free leg meander and play. I stipple and tap and circle and flick and stroke my way over all the lovely details of the tangos, a baroque musician adding trills and tremulos and grace notes to the tune. But, with my left arm raised, I feel different. I want to be not a painter but an anatomist. I want to see the bones, the lovely skeleton so ingeniously constructed. I am attracted to the structure, to the basics. And when it works — this bottom-heavy, precise, soft, level, even, feline walk — it makes me feel that I want to walk like that through a thousand tangos.
