Tango Lessons_A Memoir

by Meghan Flaherty

  If you’re attracted to that partner, yes, of course, a tango—any tango—can be an overture. Just as any comment can be a come-on. Dancing does not manufacture feeling; it releases it. In the classic sense, a tanda is an act of romance: three minutes in the mysteries, remote from all things commonplace. A taste of courtly love. Imagine veils and corsets, a sword hilted at your leader’s side. But consummation equals certain death. That’s why tango flings cannot survive: a passion built on tango only is illusion—a game of love, not love itself.

  It is easy to become confused. After all, you share an axis sometimes. You move in each other’s arms, close enough to taste each other’s breath. It is sensual and satisfying, and so easy to mistake the closeness of the close embrace for intimacy. I had done that twice. I’d asked what if. With Barry, now, there was no question.

  When spring came, we took a discount bus to Washington, D.C., to ¿Por Qué No?, a new tango festival attended mostly by local dancers. As volunteers, we got in free. We turned up in the early afternoon and checked in to a room that we could only just afford. It was our first weekend away, our first shared suitcase—my half packed with tango clothes and newly purchased lingerie—and our first foray into the challenges of couples tango.

  Our duties didn’t interfere much with the festival. We helped set up the dance floor, lugging heavy wooden squares from loading docks up to the ballroom before drilling them in place. We rolled partitions in and out to form and unform classrooms, bolting them to brackets in the floor. We wore sweatpants and dance sneakers until the time came to shower and dress for evening milongas, where we validated passes at the door. We were otherwise free to do just as we pleased.

  It wasn’t lonely, as Baltimore had been, because we had each other. Though all the usual frustrations applied. Festivals are especially difficult for followers. For all the tango world celebrates women, shows them off, deifies them, even, the fact remains that, at least according to the códigos, the social dancing codes, the men do all the asking. A follower can’t cabeceo if a leader utterly avoids her gaze. Once a man identifies his preferred followers, he has total freedom with his invitations. He asks whomever he wishes, when he wishes, to the music he finds most appealing. Women of his level, likely looking on from the perimeter, see him in action and accept. One run of bad luck sidelines a follower for hours. If you are not among the favored, it’s easy to find this state of affairs unfair.

  Barry was uncharacteristically shy, and so he sympathized. I’d slink along the milonga’s edge and he’d slink right behind me, like a child at his mother’s pant leg. Even when you’re attached, it is important to dance with other people—otherwise your tango stales. We goaded each other into dances. “Look,” I’d say, “there’s Midriff. Go ask her!” He’d say, “Red Trousers is free; stand over there where he can see you.” He was genuinely sensitive to the plight of wallflowers. Months later, he would make an abortive attempt to start a movement urging the New York tango scene to try things Sadie Hawkins style. This degenerated into a contentious online gender war in which the chauvinists all bloviated about how the man must ask the woman because that’s just how it is done, the feminists all railed against the patriarchy, but the consensus became clear: we all preferred the status quo. The convention isn’t perfect, but it works.

  When hunting for dances, Barry and I respectfully avoided eye contact across the crowd. He went his way; I went mine. For all his shyness and egalitarian ideals, he was the better strategist. Where I wandered aimlessly, half the time with eyes trained on the wainscoting, Barry had a system. When dancing somewhere new, he opted for a humble stratagem—decent followers who weren’t getting many dances. He went for foreigners, or B-list ladies in the corners, culled from the flock at large. In his words, “the wee wounded gazelles.”

  I was much less organized, and still quite bashful with my cabeceo, but I managed. At first, when I saw him dancing with a string of beauties in bandeau tops and bangles, like bedazzled deities, it stung a little somewhere deep. Perhaps he felt the same to see me in the arms of tango dandies, asserting their tender grip around my hips. We adjusted. I cracked an eyelid from within the arms of someone else, to locate him across the room. He did the same. He had his peacock strut and so had I. Sometimes I performed a little if I caught him watching me. Sometimes we even shared a wink. We fell into the couple code, which is to say, we danced the first few tandas just to warm each other up, and then the last two, plus a special something in the middle—usually a vals, or something exquisite, like “Farol,” which, by that time, had taken on the aching resonance of our romance. It was marvelous: checking in with him and flitting to and fro, receiving small and secret kisses on the sweaty brow. I had never been secure, but there, with him, I was. The milonga was our shared world where he was king, preening and lashing his tail against savannah flies, and I hunted like a queen. I stretched my yoga-sinewed haunches out behind me, flirted, danced. He was charming, strong, and threw pouncing leaps into his lead (like valiant house pets after vacuum cleaners) and bouncy wiggles that made the ladies laugh. At any point, however, we could unpuff, retract our claws, and fold away our plumage. We could dance together and the games of prey would fade to privacy. And when we tired of dancing, we went upstairs and sprawled out on our queen-sized bed, in various stages of undress, with take-out pizza, pale ale, and CNN. That felt like coming home.

  By light of day, we took class with the unsinkable Silvina Valz. It was my first exposure to her in the classroom. She was as exacting as Mariela had been, but more brilliant, and much kinder—as if it actually mattered to her whether her students improved. Her ideology was radical, but her approach was not. She strolled about, coiling and re-coiling her thick lariat of hair, demonstrating, sometimes crouched beside us on the floor, how someone’s leg should move. She sees herself as something of a missionary, a bannerwoman for Gustavo. When she speaks of him, she speaks in sentence fragments with emotion in her throat. Personally, Gustavo is “very touching,” “very Argentine sentimental,” “lovely.” Professionally, he is a revolutionary.

  “Gustavo and these kids,” she calls them, meaning the laboratorio crowd, took “an intellectual approach.” They are the theorists, the prophets and professors of the dance. They made teaching tango possible, but she will not call them teachers. If a student is not immediately capable of translating all that innovation into physical mechanics, he or she requires a pedagogue. Someone like Silvina to take Gustavo’s methodology, his “vocabulary for transmission,” and help mere mortals access it. “In this specific body,” she says. Her accent was pure porteño castellano, the zhe sound a straw broom swept across her “y’s” and double “l’s.” Her approach was similar to Sara’s, albeit more empathic. Her tango is a circle that begins and ends with who you are; she might as well add in this specific soul.

  Silvina spoke more confidently than any woman I had ever met, even in English, which was her third language and dotted with Spanish syntax and random words in French. “Tango is nostalgie,” she said; a woman is sometimes machiste. She was contemporary tango’s grand philosopher and muse, and, at the end of three days with her, Barry and I were ready to sell our worldly goods and follow her into the desert. We promised each other we would practice seven days a week until our bodies understood.

  Technique seems such a tedious pursuit at first—rigorous and slow to learn, particularly when you signed up for amusement. But without it, something will always be missing in your dance. Without it, there can be no tangüedad. Even if tango, to you, is just a hobby. “So what?” Silvina says. “You can get the best of pleasure that you can get, so let’s go for it.” Dedicate yourself to mastering even a fraction of its intricacy and you will begin to own it. That’s how to get your body and your brain to disappear into your art. That’s how to melt. Concentrating on tiresome fundamentals today internalizes them tomorrow, when you can truly sex your chickens. Move, unencumbered by your limitations. It is arduous, but worth it in the end.

 
I had idolized Silvina since the first time I had seen her lead. She was supernatural to me. She had so much power, a power she took such pleasure in relinquishing that her vulnerability made her even mightier. When asked about unfairness in the dance—men leading women, men doing all the asking—she dismisses it as play. “We cannot take that seriously,” she says. Tradition is just another structure, the base from which we fly.

  Then again, a woman never has to languish idly, waiting for a man to come and claim her. Every follower, regardless of her level, has the right to initiate the cabeceo, to choose a leader and stare pointedly in his direction until catching his eye. They both reserve the right to look away.

  Your dance is very personal, a combination of how you’re built and your imagination. And Silvina is traditional at heart. It is the paradox inherent in her tango. “I am machiste,” she says, “because I am absolutely so feminine.”

  More than anyone else, Silvina made me understand that there were some things one could only say in sex or tango. To do either well, you must present your body to another. There is little room for timidity or doubt. You have to know your body well enough to give and to receive—with restraint or with abandon. Lead and follow interlace and when it’s good, a sweet equality occurs.

  “That’s all I ever wanted for you,” my mother said, as if to explain her scandalizing candor about sex. “After everything you went through, I wanted you to stand a chance of feeling that way someday.” She hadn’t wanted me to hide in tango, to play dress-up with a fragile sense of sexuality, without learning the difference between physical act and intimacy, without working first to heal.

  I had been afraid of touch, but there was nothing left to fear; the worst had already occurred. I’d craved touch, been overwhelmed by symphonies after years of silence. Enzo had unlocked a part of me that terrified me, so I’d shuttered it. But desires denied led only to disaster. I learned to want and need, and to assert, but not to wait for someone who would listen. And so I closed myself again.

  The mistake I’d made was not in yielding to desire, to the what if, but in failing to see beyond it to where physical intimacy turns into love and trust. That’s what cannot happen on the dance floor—and will never happen off it unless you’re ready with your body and yourself. Unless you’re sure enough of each to share.

  So much of the dance, according to Silvina, “is the relation of seduction.” In the end, we can’t avoid it. Sex is part of tango—and of life. “That doesn’t mean it needs to end up there,” she says. The dance is just a means of setting free the pulsion, as she calls it, the drive to show up, fully, in the presence of another human body, either naked or in dancing clothes.

  I thought about my mother, about Robin Thomas, about wanting—needing—to be held. Dancing the so-called woman’s role, I’d learned fragility, surrender. I’d learned how to be touched. But it felt like so much more. Learning to be half of one embrace had taught me to be whole. “It’s not true what your mother says,” Silvina told me—about the predatory men and desperate women, occasionally the other way around. That element exists in tango, but does not define it. “We all come back for this embrace,” she said. “For this contentment.” It is and isn’t about joy. It is and isn’t about sex. “You know when someone takes care of you?” she asked. I nodded; finally, I did. “Peaceful,” she said, and I remembered Kerouac again. It wasn’t all just man and woman, being held. For Silvina, tango was the path by which our lives were shaped. A way for “living honestly and deeply,” in the embrace and out. In life and in art.

  On the fourth and final evening of the festival, Barry and I danced until the clocks sprang back for daylight saving, then danced an hour more. Neither of us had landed any dances to write home about, but we’d dressed up every night and gone down to the ballroom anyway, hunting for partners and “sparkling in our muscles,” as Silvina Valz had said to do. We danced until “La cumparsita,” which, as the first we’d ever danced to, had become our song. It was just past three, by the new time of early spring. He caught my eye across the crowd. We found our way through all the milling dancers to an open patch of floor. He opened up his arms and took my right hand in his left. We stepped toward each other, torso to torso, heart to heart, and we stood still, listening, until the music told us where to go.

  It was a quiet thing.

  I closed my eyes, and thought about the what if, how it disappears only when your heart is tuned to someone. When there is no more need for make-believe. Our tango was bigger than three minutes. It unfolded, deepened, and became a space for everything we could not put to words.

  The crowd applauded warmly to conclude the festival, and then receded. Barry and I took up a pair of power drills and set about stripping the floor. By the time we’d helped to ferry all the wooden flats down to the loading dock, it was nearly dawn. Too wired for sleep, we strolled the silent streets of Alexandria. It was cold still. We walked hand in hand, the whole world to ourselves. Sabrás, I hummed, wordless, as we crawled into bed, the music and the lateness pulsing in my ears, que por la vida fui buscándote. I had looked for him so long, but also for myself. The bad dreams were fading to belief, which was another very quiet thing.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  day one: a stabbing, unwalkable pain in my left hip keeps me from RoKo on a Sunday night. I’m left behind with Barry’s roommates at the dinner table, while he marches off into the night, armed with bananas and his tango shoes. He kisses me goodbye, the smell of ninety-nine-cent coffee on his breath. I dig my thumbs into the flesh around my joint, hoping to bore into the offending ligament and tear it out by fist.

  Day two: I spend a humiliating afternoon in paper shorts, among the brittle elderly in an orthopedic x-ray waiting room. A surgeon consigns me to a chiropractor, both recommending ice and ibuprofen, a strict regimen of rest. It’s just a muscle strain.

  Week two: the chiropractor returns me to the orthopedist. The pain has started shooting up my vertebrae. An MRI shows one herniated lumbar disc, another slightly bulging—but neither serious enough to warrant surgery. “Good news!” he exclaims, before dismissing me. I am prescribed more bed rest, and more ice.

  I cry. It seems a minor injury, but still I feel like my world is ending. I lie on bags of frozen peas. I read, and watch a lot of movies with my laptop propped up on my knees. No yoga, no fast walking, no bending from the waist, no lifting, carrying, sitting, stretching, strenuous behavior, sex—and, more damning: no tango. I panic, certain Barry will abandon me—and our new, ice-spun us—if I can’t dance.

  Week three: I still can’t dance. The ibuprofen is making mincemeat of my stomach. I have chemical burns from overuse of heating patches. I have gained five pounds. I take a lot of taxis I cannot afford. I ride in elevators. I start having dreams of dancer’s pose, natarajasana, only I’m in tango shoes. Then unkind morning comes. I lie in bed imagining myself in heels in downward dog. The surety of the yoga mat seems far away. I feel my muscles turn to pudding underneath my skin.

  Week four: I stop counting weeks.

  Barry cares for me, carries me downstairs, ferries me up in service lifts, and breakfasts me in bed. I write while he writes. I sleep while he dances. He has the patience of ten men, so I hate myself for hating him when he goes dancing, three, four times a week. I turn my face away from him, his metronomic heavy sleep, deep in the wee hours, to cry until the muscle drugs thud sufficient tiredness through my blood. Tomorrow he will dry my tears and make good-natured jokes at my expense. “You silly girl, it’s just a bit of nature. You’ll be back to normal in no time.” We’ll go see a violinist rassle Paganini one night in lieu of dancing. We’ll spend some Sunday evenings eating garlic, drinking beer. I’ll make elaborate dinners, start roasting meats in hopes that the smell will keep him home.

  Eventually, I put two and two together. The D.C. festival. The dance floor and the power drill. The sixteen screws per every wooden square that we put down and then took up that weekend. The hours I spent, bent and drilling, sti
ll in heels. And Barry’s voice repeating in my head. “Be careful, babe. Don’t hurt your back.”

  The weeks turn into months. I give up any hope of yoga, and shove my mat into the closet—without bending at the waist; I lower myself as one stiff trunk. I do everything at half speed, still cleaning house, but shoddily; the sweeping and the bending aren’t good for me. I feel that I am taking up too much of people, of their sympathy. I spend hours and hours alone, not moving, with no way out of my own head. Three days a week, I see the chiropractor. Three days a week, I ask:

  “Can I ride a bicycle?”

  “No, you certainly cannot.”

  He kneels beside the exam table and gouges a thumb pad deep into my butt flesh. My gluteus medius and my psoas have pulled too tight, wrenching my spine, and my gluteus maximus has erupted into little fascial knots, hard blooms to be elbowed smooth.

  “Ow,” I say.

  “Yeah,” he says. “That’s pretty bad.”

  When Dr. K has done all he can, he passes a giant vibrator over the soft tissue of my backside, pausing at my hamstrings, which are taut almost to snapping. He tells me about his wife and lawn up in Connecticut, both of which he tends evenings and weekends, and about his yoga practice. He is a yoga fiend. Well, I think. Bully for him.