The tango was simultaneously a ritual and a spectacle of traumatic encounters between people who should never have come together.12
These dramas of challenge and transgression had their own very particular cast of characters. The theatre was the street – the ill-lit, unpaved streets of the dockland districts, or the lanes around the slaughterhouses, where the cattlemen came and went in their squeaking carts. The dance, at this first moment of its birth, was a wary meeting, its signs mute at first, though it would soon develop a language of its own, both a language of gesture and a new speech – lunfardo – which was itself a meeting, a fusion of languages and codes that were both inclusive (of this new riverside population) and exclusive (of the other Buenos Aires growing up in the centre and the north of the city). Lunfardo was a secret language shared by a new community whose members were linked only by their marginality and their vulnerability. It is hard at this distance to know to what extent it was a spoken language, an authentic argot spoken to conceal and challenge the Spanish (or French or English) of bourgeois city folk. What we know of it is its second life, as the expression of an authentic experience viewed retrospectively, nostalgically, by the first generation to create a poetry in lunfardo that aspired to speak to an audience beyond the world of the docks.
In its early manifestations, lunfardo was a functional code that made possible the first interactions between immigrant communities that remained to a considerable extent isolated and enclosed to themselves. It arose and was forged at first in the spaces of social interchange and shared experience. It was also the language of the street, the brothel and the criminal underclass. A basic lunfardo vocabulary list provides several alternative words for prostitutes, pimps and brothels; it offers several variants for confidence tricksters and silver-tongued persuaders; it provides a number of ways to describe knives and the scars they leave on the face (feite, barbijo). The fraternity of thieves is divided by its particular skills; the culatero, for example, specializes in stealing from the back pockets of his targets. And this assortment of spivs, con men and flyboys has names for all its victims from the wealthy bacán who pays well for his mistress (his mina) whom he keeps in a bulín, to the soft fool and easy touch boludo or gil. And in permanent attendance are the corrupt police, moneylenders and fences who oversee this network of mutual small-scale exploitation.
When men danced together, they would mimic the pimp’s promises or reenact an actual or imagined knife fight with the country boys who strolled the streets as if they owned them – and took very little persuasion to demonstrate their skill with the short knife – the facón – that was part of the uniform of the gaucho. Like the malevo (the criminal), the pimp restrains himself until the prettiest girl in the dance hall provokes him to fight.
Se cruzó
un gran rencor y otro rencor
a la luz
de un farolito a querosén
y un puñal
que parte en dos un corazón
porque así
lo quiso aquella cruel mujer.
Cuentan los que vieron
que los guapos
culebrearon
con su cuerpos
y buscaron
afanosos
el descuido
del contrario
y en un claro
de la guardia
hundió el mozo
de Palermo
hasta el mango
su facón.
Anger met with anger / in the light of a paraffin lamp / and a knife that / would cut a heart in two / flashed because a cruel woman / had wanted it so. / Those who were there said / the two men / swerved and swayed their bodies / while they watched / alert / for the other to make a false move / or to lower his guard / when the kid from Palermo / buried his knife in the other / to the hilt.
(‘La puñalada’, The Slashing – Celedonio Flores, 1937)
The fight, the two men swerving and moving their bodies around one another in anticipation of a strike, seems more dance than battle, and the precursor to an encounter that would later be endlessly relived, albeit without a blade, as tango.
In those early years the whole complex life of the community found expression in the physical theatre of dance. There would certainly have been singers improvising verses to the playing of the bands. Since they played in brothels and cafés, their content would surely have been mostly erotic, explicitly or obliquely, like the blues verses that have come to us from the riverside brothels of the South of the United States. In this phase of transition too, the rural tradition of Argentina itself, the payador or travelling troubadour who improvised couplets at local festivals and other social gatherings to the accompaniment of the seven-stringed guitar which was the predecessor of the contemporary instrument, was very much alive in Buenos Aires. The growing city had drawn in people from the countryside but in its expansion it had also absorbed rural communities around its edges. The newly emerging tango incorporated the rhythms of traditional music too, most significantly and enduringly the traditional milonga, whose fast pace defined the first tangos.
The early dancers still wore the gaucho’s wide trousers and high boots and the short poncho and flat wide-brimmed hat that commemorated the days of horses and open common spaces of the pre-modern pampa. But that would give way very soon to a different uniform, to a dress that reflected not the origins of the immigrant population but its newly constructed reality. This contradictory, fragile, often dangerous world was represented by the compadrito.
ENTER THE COMPADRITO
He may have arrived carrying a guitar, wearing the clothes of the gaucho, but he had left his horse behind. What he had brought with him from his settlement on the pampas was his memory, and the traditional songs and the rhythms of their country dances – the chacarera and the milonga. In the poor districts around the city or among the abandoned mansions of the centre he would have found lodging of some kind. But he was still the compadre – the man of the country.
Compadritos.
The city did not allow him the luxury of remaining that way for very long. Survival in the city demanded new skills and new attitudes that would serve him best in the bruising encounters with the young men and women who had come from Europe to share this new urban space. He came from a world where survival was equally precarious, which is why his songs so often celebrated his prowess with horse and lariat, his skill as a fighter, and his successes as a lover. The myths, at least, were adaptable to the new environment, where he was equally required to show flexibility, skill, and the wisdom of the street. More often than not he proved ill-adapted to work, and instead he cruised the muddy streets, observing his china (his girl), or seeking out a chance to steal or cheat or misdirect some innocent passing stranger.
Now he was the compadrito, the compadre ‘venido a menos’ (come down in the world):
Instead of becoming only an urban Don Juan, the compadrito became a pimp. As skillful and valiant a fighter as the compadre, he became, not a defender of rights, but a bully, a robber, and at times a killer.13
Most were less than killers, but many were pimps and confidence tricksters. And as their prestige grew, so they abandoned the short ponchos and glistening black boots in favour of the tight-fitting suits, high heels, spats and long, brilliantined hair depicted on so many posters and paintings (and in so many tangos) of the day. And with time, he might repeat, albeit in very different circumstances, his grandfather’s role as the servant of a local chieftain or caudillo, although one that had exchanged spurs and saddle for the frock coat of the parliamentarian.
The compadrito was the man of the tango. And the tango was his dance, its choreographic style based on his affectations, developed in the brothels he ran on the edges of Buenos Aires.14
He no longer danced in the country style, whirling and jumping as his partner mirrored him and held high her whirling skirts. He had taken on the style of the bourgeois – or at least his own version of it – mimicked his dress and assumed his seductive post
ure, his obvious superiority in comparison to the girls he came to find in his descent into the arrabal. The compadrito would rarely have ventured beyond the edges of the barrio, but he would have increasingly seen the arrogant young men of Belgrano and the Barrio Norte come down to his world. And in the dance he posed and proffered this newly learned self, and also remembered the swift evasions and feints that had served him well in the drunken knife duels on the pampa. Outside the brothels, he may well have moved along the queue of men outside, moving his body to the music in suggestive anticipation of what was to come. From time to time he would draw out another man to practise his imminent moves or, in the better establishments, to anticipate the brief dance the client might expect in the hall before moving up to the bedroom.
This then was a new music, born in a modern city divided into immigrant ghettoes and the wealthier quarters where the middle classes lived. Directly and indirectly, the tango both echoed that gulf that separated the city from itself and provided its poetic voice. When it found its voice, it was that of a man who sang about women as lovers, as instruments and as sacrificing mothers. It also spoke of ambition and of the battle for survival that drained the tango and its music of any sentimentality. For this was a deep song of rootless people fighting the city and one another in order to survive, and both celebrating and resenting the marginality to which they were condemned by those who benefited from their labour.
The barrio, the conventillo, the arrabal were transformed as the tango developed in a way that idealized both the evils of the place and its deficiencies – the absence of solidarity, the fleeting pleasures of a life hard lived.
Eran otros hombres más hombres los nuestros.
No se conocían cocó ni morfina,
los muchachos de antes no usaban gomina
¿Te acordás hermano? ¡Qué tiempos aquéllos!
Veinticinco abriles que no volverán
Veinticinco abriles, volver a tenerlos
Si cuando me acuerdo me pongo a llorar
¿Dónde están los muchachos de entonces?
Barra antigua de ayer, ¿dónde está?
Yo y vos solos quedamos hermano,
Yo y vos solos para recordar . . .
¿Dónde están las mujeres aquéllas
minas fieles, de gran corazón
que en los bailes de Laura peleaban
cada cual defendiendo su amor?
Men were more men in those days / they never used cocaine or morphine / the lads then used no grease on their hair. / Remember brother? What times they were! / Twenty-five Aprils that will never return now / Twenty-five Aprils, I wish I could have them again / When I remember I start to weep. / Where are the lads of those days? / Where’s the old bar we used to go to? / There’s just you and me left, brother / just the two of us to remember . . . / Where are the women, those women / loyal and generous / who would get into fights at Laura’s dance hall / each defending her own lover?
(‘Tiempos Viejos’, Old Time – Manuel Romero, 1926)
For the moment, the other Buenos Aires was closed to them, emphasizing their exclusion, their loneliness, their invisibility. But Buenos Aires was changing its shape and its appearance, building a new metropolis with the labour of the tango-dancing immigrants. Eventually the walls between would begin to fracture and a traffic would begin between the halves of the divided city. And when it did, tango would play its central part.
2 A CITY DIVIDED
THE BIRTH OF A METROPOLIS
By 1880, Buenos Aires was ready for its new clothes and its new face. The village by the river had grown and spread. It had split into two worlds whose occasional contact was enough to create aspirations among the new immigrants in the slums and fantasies of desire among the middle classes gazing across at the transgressive and forbidden worlds down by the docks.
Argentina had changed profoundly in the previous decade. Roca’s last war against the Indian populations in 1879 had not only driven them to the margins – it had also, more profoundly, made the indigenous peoples invisible to the new urban culture. The pampas were now enclosed as large working farms serving the burgeoning export trade. The gauchos who had spent their lives riding the wide grasslands were gone now – not disappeared, but transformed into shiftless wanderers in the darkened streets of the poor suburbs, the arrabales. In 1880, Buenos Aires was formally named the federal capital of the republic. The battle that had marked the years since formal independence in 1816 between the capital, with its European connection, and the interior provinces, whose horizons were in Latin America, was now finally resolved in the city’s favour. The implications were profound. It was not just a question of where the administration of the country was located. It was a decision about how it would develop economically, and what expressions of nationhood would prevail. It was a decision about how Argentines would see themselves, and what kind of society would emerge from the fusions and encounters that were shaping the new capital.
Nineteenth-century map of Buenos Aires.
The material changes were dramatic. Between 1872 and 1888 the amount of land under cultivation had risen from 600,000 hectares (about 1,500,000 acres) to 2.5 million as Argentina fast became a major producer of cereals for export. Just 20 years before, it had been importing wheat and flour! The number of sheep increased sixfold in the same period, as exports of meat and wool grew at an extraordinary rate. And in the province of Buenos Aires, surrounding the capital, some five million cattle grazed; later their numbers would also increase at speed.1 With Buenos Aires as its capital, the Argentine economy was now confirmed as export-led – its wool and meat and hides and cereals were all destined for Europe, and all passed through the growing port city.
The agricultural products were transported to the docks across the fast expanding rail network, mostly financed by British investors. In 1857, the country boasted just six miles of track; by 1890 that had extended to 5,800 miles. It is unlikely, of course, that any of these changes (and they were dramatic in their speed and breadth) would have been possible without the immigrant populations.2
In the far south, the Welsh colonists enticed to Patagonia in the mid-1860s were important sheep farmers.3 In Mendoza it was (unsurprisingly) French and Italian immigrants who drove wine production forward. But if many of them had come hoping for a piece of land to cultivate, they were mostly disappointed. They rarely managed to fulfil that dream. The bulk of immigrants made their way back to the cities, and principally to Buenos Aires, where they could find work on the docks or in construction, or in the small factories now being set up (often by wealthier immigrants) producing textiles, cigarettes and food products. Later, many would work in the slaughterhouses and meat packing plants that became increasingly central to the economy.
This newly modernizing Argentina remained a country dominated by large landowners. And they were growing very rich very quickly, not just from the goods and products they exported, but also from the lucrative land deals always associated with the laying of the railways, not to mention the earnings of lawyers and others in attendance! (Think how many Hollywood Westerns have the battle between farmers and the railway companies as a central theme.)
But the small layer of people who were growing rich in this boom period would not, by and large, be found ensconced in their rural mansions. The management of their lands would be left to stewards and foremen, while the propertied classes took themselves to the capital to enjoy the benefits brought to them by others. The capital’s new status demanded a transformation that would leave no one arriving in the city in any doubt that they were entering what would very soon be the largest city in South America – and the heart of an unprecedented economic boom.
As always, the symbolic home of civilization was Paris; a Mecca towards which every middle-class and bourgeois Argentine looked. And Paris too was in the throes of a magnificent transformation that continued the work begun under the direction of Baron Haussmann. His ideal in city planning was ‘long straight streets’ and wide avenues, where ‘
the temples of the bourgeoisie’s spiritual and secular power’ would find expression.4 Walter Benjamin describes the Baron’s ‘love of demolition’ that expropriated and swept away the old town, though his impulse came from a political need: to ensure that the barricades that had blocked the narrow streets during the short-lived workers’ government of the Commune in 1871 would never appear again. Nevertheless, all the Argentine visitor saw were the Champs Élysées, as wide as a river, and the grand palaces and mansions around the Place de la Concorde. That was a proud, modern city.
Immigrants on the gangplank.
The mayor (or Intendente) of Buenos Aires between 1880 and 1887 was Torcuato de Alvear, and he oversaw the emergence of the new city out of the ashes of the old. The Avenida 5 de Mayo was turned into the vast avenue it is today (though it would later be surpassed by the even wider Avenida 9 de Julio). He expanded the city’s main square, the Plaza de Mayo, thousands of trees were planted and parks laid out by the French director of city parks, Carlos Thays. New public buildings and private mansions announced their civic pride. The grand new stations imitated their European counterparts, and paid homage to the critical importance of the railways. And trams, horse-drawn at first but electrified by 1900, carried the growing population from place to place.
Tango Page 3