Tango

by Mike Gonzalez

  This prosperous and optimistic urban middle class demanded its own street life, though one very different from the unlit alleys of La Boca and Nueva Pompeya. They had elegant streetlights and well-lit cafés and restaurants, as well as cabarets and theatres. From there you could not see the dimly lit slums down by the riverbank; they remained physically and socially invisible, though the middle classes were increasingly uneasy about the proximity of this population of the lower depths.

  MEANWHILE . . .

  While the law of 1875 had made brothels legal subject to stringent conditions, the Civil Code, published in 1871, had stressed the importance of the family, and the role of women as exemplary mothers. The paradox, or perhaps we should call it ‘hypocrisy’, persisted; the Code’s condition of existence was the marginalization of that other obscure world of the poor. The obsession with ‘infection’, the endless public debates over venereal disease, the fascination with the forbidden, all testify to the contradiction. And for a decade or two, the two worlds were successfully kept apart.

  The poor areas of the city supplied a working class for the new factories, most of them small plants at first, and for the larger factories that would spread through the Barracas district, later (and still) called Avellaneda. As the city was beautified and transformed, the prostitutes – or at least the majority of the street and café workers – were expelled from the upper-class districts. The elegant brothels catering to the upper middle class, like La Casa de Laura, however, were never closed. And there were growing numbers of women seeking work in the brothels. The transformation of the countryside, and the shortage of rural employment, brought a new generation of women to the shadowy demi-monde of cafés and academias.

  Yo soy la Morocha

  La más agraciada,

  La más renombrada

  De esta población.

  Soy la que al paisano

  Muy de madrugada

  Brinda un cimarrón. . .

  Soy la morocha argentina,

  La que no siente pesares,

  Y alegre pasa la vida

  Con sus cantares.

  Soy la gentil compañera

  Del noble gaucho porteño

  La que conserva la vida

  Para su dueño.

  I am the Brown Girl / the best endowed / the most famous woman / in this town / I’m the one the countryman / early in the morning / makes a present of a pony to . . .

  I’m the Argentine brown girl / who feels no sorrow / and cheerfully spends her life / singing her songs.

  I’m the charming companion / to the noble gaucho of these plains / the woman who protects the life / of her master.

  (‘La Morocha’, The Brown Girl – Ángel Villoldo, 1905)

  The majority of registered prostitutes were foreign women, for whom registration offered some minimal degree of protection, even if it involved paying off the police on a regular basis. And the disproportion of men to women (170 men per 100 women) guaranteed a growing clientele, as immigration picked up again through the 1880s after a brief lull at the end of the previous decade.

  The 1880s and 1890s brought other opportunities for employment for women outside the home, as they found work in the factories producing food or clothing, or sewing the sacks for the growing quantities of cereals that the country exported. The bulk of those who worked, however, still found positions in domestic service. In the 1890s, some would find work in the elegant department stores opening their doors on the Calle Florida – the most famous of which, Harrod’s, was opened later, in 1914. By 1895, 20 per cent of the workforce were women. Some of them, of course, would have supplemented their wage labour with extra hours as waitresses downtown.

  The men, waiting in the queues outside the brothels for their opportunity to dance, might have found the street a freer place to be than the overcrowded slums they returned to after a day’s work on the construction of the new city.

  Tango remained the dance of the lower depths; the expression of the strange merger of people and communities that was the melting pot where the new Argentina was being formed. Since the women were relatively few, and their time for dancing restricted, the men would practise in the street or in the academias. The musicians who played for them were workers like themselves who often played through the night before leaving for work early the next morning. Their trios, most commonly comprising the flute, violin and harp (the guitar, the clarinet and the emblematic bandoneon came later), played the fast, improvised rhythms of the new dance, associated in style and location with the underworld of pimps and prostitutes. It was still marked by its origins in the black population, from whom came the elaborate twisting and jerking of the body which so appalled the respectable ladies of the city.

  An early twentieth-century tango quartet.

  And the fast, tripping pace owed much to the rural milonga. It is significant that a very high proportion of tango musicians at this early stage were African Argentine. Their music made no bones about its function as an advertisement for the coitus to follow; and the improvised lyrics, of which we have only a fragmentary knowledge, fulfilled the same function. Like the early blues songs, they were largely improvised around erotic suggestion or plain bawdiness. While it is not clear when lyrics began to be written down, ‘Dame la lata’ (1884) has a claim to be the first written tango. La lata was the metal token with which clients paid their dancers; the speaker/singer here is obviously the compadrito or cafishio, that is, the pimp.

  Qué vida mas arrastrada

  la del pobre canfinflero,

  el lunes cobra las latas,

  el martes anda fulero.

  Dame la lata que has escondido,

  ¿Qué te pensás, bagayo,

  que yo soy filo?

  Dame la lata y ¡a laburar!

  Si no la linda biaba

  te vas a ligar.

  The pimp’s life / is a rotten life, / Monday he cashes the tokens in / By Tuesday flat broke again.

  Give me the tokens you’ve hidden away / Who d’you think you are, you ugly cow, / Think I’m a fool? / Give me the chips and get to work / If you don’t all you’ll get / Is the back of my hand.

  (‘Dame la Lata’, Give me the token – Anon., 1884)

  The manner of the dance was changing as the 1880s wore on. The barrio was evolving its special secret languages of exclusion, the street slang and underworld argot, like Cocoliche and lunfardo. As the idiom developed, the first lyricists began slowly to move beyond the bawdy calls and write brief verses to punctuate the music. And the musicians too found more work for themselves as the bordellos, cafés and academias proliferated.

  Tango was becoming permanent, just as the immigrant population began to reshape its relationship to the city in these last two decades of the century. Their sense of impermanence and marginality, their fragile hold on the city, reflected their world of work, of casual, badly paid labour and the absence of any forms of collective organization. Indeed, wages fell significantly between 1875 and 1879 in the city, and in agriculture, particularly in the distant sugar-producing areas around Tucumán, the already poor wages fell by 30 per cent – when they were paid at all. For in many rural areas, the truck system or forms of sharecropping persisted even as Buenos Aires was trying on its Parisian outfits. By the 1880s, the rise of industries associated with the export boom, together with stable employment for men and women in factories and shops, slowly and at first imperceptibly transformed the shifting populations of the arrabales and the conventillos. They were becoming workers, albeit highly exploited ones – and their relationship with the city and society was changing. By the end of the decade, tango too was becoming established.

  FORBIDDEN PLACES

  Those people turned their back on us, the immigrants. We were the unclean masses . . . The rich people crowded together in their exclusive areas and grumbled about their resentment at the invasion of the mob, the wretches who survived however they could, begging, stealing, whoring . . .

  Because the striking workers were al
ways Germans or Poles or Italians or French or Spaniards or Jews. Very few of them were Argentine. That was how the rich spoke about the nation and the racist ideas they liked to bandy about.5

  For the urban middle classes, the docks and the dark streets of the barrio were always the source of a deep ambiguity. On the one hand, they were seduced and excited by the shadowy figures from this other world, and the image of a world of luxurious bordellos, of beautiful women dancing naked, of forbidden music hidden behind velvet curtains. On the other hand, they were repelled by that universe of temptation and sexuality on the very edge of Sodom and Gomorrah. Intellectuals like Leopoldo Lugones and Manuel Gálvez thundered against the immorality that undermined the decent order predicated in the 1871 Civil Code. The very presence of these places threatened family life and the good Christian order anticipated in the Code. Emile Zola’s brutally naturalist novels, with their underlying theory of genetic sinfulness, found imitators in the Argentina of the late nineteenth century, where the weak sinner and the devious woman of the streets would have their first outing.6

  The fear of disease, of the syphilis and gonorrhoea they imagined to be lurking in this shadowy and corrupt environment, exercised both the feminists and the Christian ladies in equal measure. And the growing numbers of women workers came to be seen as a kind of bridge between these two worlds.

  Although they had chosen the route of honest labour to maintain themselves and their dependents, the working women had nevertheless opted for a world outside the family and for a degree of independence; that gave them a freedom which could – and would, the conservatives argued – lead them inexorably into the circle of corruption and sin that beckoned to them from the dockside. The very fact that they worked was enough for them to be considered loose women who neglected their children, even though Argentine law permitted women to work and trade at eighteen, albeit not to marry until they were 21. Yet these working women appear very rarely in the lyrics of tango; they existed in a no man’s land.

  So the attitudes of both sides of this divided city could be expressed and interpreted through their attitude to the tango. The middle class shuddered with revulsion at the overt sexuality of the dance which was also beginning to find expression in lyrics that must have found their way into their areas; lyrics that were crude and brutal in their description of the sexual relations between men and women, and which, furthermore, spoke in the bizarre language of this other, threatening world.

  In the poor districts of the growing city, tango remained – for the same reasons – inextricably interwoven with the underworld of pimps and prostitutes, hucksters and tricksters, pickpockets and thieves. But it was a world familiar to their populations, and above all to the men who frequented their local bordello as much to escape momentarily from the promiscuity of the overcrowded conventillos and arrabales as for the music and the sex. Yet the barrio was changing. The immigrant population was settling into permanence, and many of the casual labourers of the early years were becoming waged workers as industry, and the city, expanded.

  The tango, too, was becoming resident in the city, and was now the sound of a stable community. Tango lyrics began to be written down and the first generation of lyricists emerged in the new world by the river, where the expanding docks also provided more work for the continuing flow of immigrants. Their lives were beginning to find some reflection in the words written by this first generation of tango poets. Silverio Manco wrote his crudely suggestive songs in the most impenetrable lunfardo; Alfredo Eusebio Gobbi, the father of one of the most famous musicians of tango’s future Golden Age, was another lyricist and singer. Ángel Villoldo (1861–1919) was probably the best known and among the most prolific writers of tangos in the first decade of the century; he was also a key figure in this moment of transition and change. For the barrios, the poor working-class districts, were beginning to find their voice through tango – and tango was pressing at the barriers that divided the city.

  Villoldo recorded many of the dramatis personae of this unfolding drama. He was a recognizable figure in the underworld of Buenos Aires. A singer, a dancer, a musician (he played guitar and harmonica, at the same time), he drew the threads of tango together around him. ‘La Morocha’ was one of his most famous and iconic lyrics; he wrote the music for another, equally emblematic piece – ‘El Choclo’ – to which words were later added by Enrique Santos Discépolo. But his 1903 tango called ‘El Porteñito’ laid out the scenario for generations of tangos to come.

  Soy hijo de Buenos Aires

  por apodo ‘El Porteñito’

  el criollo más compadrito

  que en esta tierra nació.

  Cuando un tango en la viguela

  rasguea algún compañero

  no hay nadie en el mundo entero

  que baile mejor que yo.

  No hay ninguno que me iguale

  para enamorar mujeres

  . . . Soy el terror del malevaje

  cuando en un baile me meto,

  porque a ninguno respeto

  de los que hay en la reunión.

  Y si alguno se retoba

  y viene haciéndose el guapo

  la mando de un castañazo

  a buscar quien lo engrupió.

  I’m a son of Buenos Aires / they call me ‘El Porteñito’ / the smartest compadrito / born in this country. / When some comrade / strums a tango on his guitar (vihuela) / there’s no one in the world / dances better than me. / No one gets the better of me / when it comes to seducing women / . . . I’m the terror of the bad lads / when I go dancing / because I respect no one / there at the party. / And if someone gets smart / and tries putting on airs / I’ll deal him a smack in the face / and send him to look for some other smart aleck.

  (‘El porteñito’, The City Kid – Ángel Villoldo, 1903)

  Villoldo was also a worker, at different times a printworker and a carter, carrying loads to and from the port, so he was also a participant in the unfolding story of working-class organization and resistance. The early trade unions were being formed as the nineteenth century drew to its end, influenced above all by the anarchist ideas, which Villoldo himself shared, carried across the ocean from Spain and Italy.

  Es el siglo en que vivimos

  de lo más original

  el progreso nos ha dado una vida artificial.

  Muchos caminan a máquina

  porque es viejo andar a pie,

  hay extractos de alimentos

  y hay quien pasa sin comer.

  Siempre hablamos de progreso

  buscando la perfección

  y reina el arte moderno

  en todita su extensión.

  La chanchulla y la matufia

  hoy forman la sociedad

  y nuestra vida moderna

  es una calamidad.

  De unas drogas hacen vino

  y de porotos café,

  de maní es el chocolate

  y de yerbas es el té.

  . . . La leche se ‘pastoriza’

  con el agua y almidón

  y con carne de ratones

  se fabrica el salchichón.

  Hoy la matufia está en boga

  y siempre crecerá más

  y mientras el pobre trabaja

  y no hace más que pagar.

  Señores, abrir el ojo

  y no acostarse a dormir,

  hay que estudiar con provecho

  el gran arte de vivir.

  In this century of ours / this very original time / progress has given us an artificial life. / Lots of people travel in cars / because walking is old hat/there is food everywhere / and there are people with nothing to eat. / We talk about progress / looking for perfection / and the modern arts prevail / everywhere you look. / trickery and cheating / are what society’s about today / and our modern life / is a calamity.

  The wine’s made of drugs / and the coffee of kidney beans / the chocolate’s made with peanuts /and the tea is really grass . . . / Milk is ‘pastorized’ / with water and
starch / and sausages are made / from the flesh of mice. / Trickery’s in fashion / and more so every day / and the poor man keeps on working / and keeps on paying out. / Ladies and gentlemen, open your eyes / and don’t just go to sleep / it’s time to study carefully / the great art of living.

  (‘Matufias o el arte de vivir’, Trickery or the art of living

  – Ángel Villoldo, 1904?)

  TANGO COMES OUT OF THE SHADOWS

  Villoldo deserved his reputation as the troubadour of the changing immigrant community. But he was also part of the first generation of tango artists whose renown spread beyond La Boca and Nueva Pompeya as the city expanded. The prelude to tango’s emergence from the darkened streets down by the docks was musical, a moment both symbolized and in some sense made possible by the arrival from Germany at the end of the 1880s of a new instrument: the powerful, large accordion first developed as a substitute for the harmonium in religious services. And the bandoneon has since become emblematic of the tango itself – its notes the defining sound of the modern tango – from its first appearance to its flowering in the hands of virtuosi like Aníbal Troilo, Pedro Maffia and Ástor Piazzolla in later days. It is celebrated in famous tangos by Celedonio Flores, Pascual Contursi, Homero Manzi and this song by José González Castillo, father of the outstanding Cátulo Castillo.

  ¡Bandoneón! . . .

  Que lanzás al viento

  por tus cien heridas

  tu eterno lamento,

  y que en cada aliento

  renovás cien vidas

  ¡pa’ gemir mejor! . . .

  ¡Sangrando armonías

  o llorando quedo,

  sos el fiel remedo

  de mi propio amor!

  Cuando se hinchan tus pulmones

  para volcar en mil sones

  el alma de tu armonía,

  ¡me parece la mía

  tu doliente canción! . . .

  Y te oprimo entre mis brazos

  para arrancarla a pedazos

  en una queja postrera,

  ¡como si en vos gimiera

  mi propio corazón! . . .

  ¡Corazón! . . .