Barrio de Tango

Yesterday I went to the school where my friend G teaches English, in the province of Buenos Aires (the ‘suburban’ district which surrounds the city). The school was having their end-of-year concert, and G had been asked to dance a tango. As the saying goes, it takes two, and she needed a partner, so she asked me! Little does she know how much I hate doing tango demos, and how many times I’ve sworn never to do one again! But she’s also been a very good friend to me here, helping me with all kinds of language and culture-shock things over the last year, so it was impossible to refuse.

So I found myself sitting in a taxi in the 40 degree heat (air-conditioning sporadic), chatting in Spanish amiably (with a sprinkling of comprehension) with the driver, trying not feel sick with nervousness and heading towards certain doom. A New Zealander dancing tango with a Jewess for Argentinian catholic school children and their parents in the baking sun in a playground deep in the province of Buenos Aires – I felt kind of far from home and wondering how I got there.

Fortunately no legs were broken during our brief interlude (actually, it turned out not to be an interlude so much as the grand finale – rather embarrassing), and I managed to get from one end of the tango to other without collapsing with fright.

The driver on the way back, after hearing G and I speak English, said in very broken English “I from Australian”, which he repeated a couple of times because we didn’t believe him. In Spanish he explained that his father was the captain of a cruise ship, and he had been born in Canberra, so held Australian citizenship even though he’d only been there for about a week. The taxi had a flat tyre, so the driver took a quick right turn and we rolled into a tyre repair workshop (literally wherever you turn here, it seems, there’s whatever you need – but that’s another story…). So G and I at least had a chance to relax and debrief over a coffee in the café next to the workshop.

When I finally got home, I had to go straight to L’s place for dinner, and again I felt a little surreal, sitting in my English friend’s apartment chatting in Spanish, eating curry and drinking (of all things British) Pimm’s and lemonade.

So it was a bit of a bizarre Friday…

No Produce Somnolencia

sung to the tune of Trasnochando:

Estornudando
como todo bomba
que no ve que le espera
que no sabe donde va
rechazaba
tus anti-alergicos, buen amigo
casi fuimos enemigos
por decirme tomar drogas

One Nighters

El Beso has without question the best dancers. I almost never have anything worse than an ok dance there, in stark contrast to, for example, Canning on a Monday night - last night at Canning I had nothing but the worst dances in my life.

But at El Beso, in the last couple of weeks, I've had two of the best dances of my life.

Interestingly (and possibly in keeping with my theory that enjoyment of a dance isn't necessarily mutual) in both cases, when I asked the lovely (twice my age) lady whether she came here often - ok, this may sound cheesy, but it's a pretty standard 3-minute-friend question - she evasively said "oh, I don't go to milongas regularly, just whenever and wherever I can".

Clearly these tango crone-goddesses don't like to be hunted down. That's ok, they were still lovely dances; as N would say, I can die a happy man.

Manic Depressive

Do I have a mood disorder? Or is this just what tango is like?

Sunday, at El Beso, I had maybe the best night I've ever had dancing. Every tango, every tanda was fantastic, euphoric, sublime. The milonga was seething with energy, the vibe from the music and the dancefloor enfolded and enlivened us. Thinking about it now is like a memory of intoxication. So this is what we seek; this is the tango 'hit'. It's been a long time since I've felt it, and it's never been so sustained. Annoyingly, I had to leave early, to meet some tourist friends at La Ideal - I could bearly drag myself away, but to borrow a sentiment from N, I felt like I could die a happy man.

Tuesday, at El Beso, you could set the scene the same way: music loud, dancefloor packed, room humid with humanity. But this time it was all too much. It was impossible to take a step in any direction, on or off the dancefloor, I couldn't string two steps nor two words together. Too crowded, too noisy, too chaotic to cope. All I wanted to do was break free and run. I went home and let cable TV wash over me before turning in. I guess it was the three hours sleep and the ten hour work-day that preceded it, but it was like a two hour retrospective of how I felt for the first nine months here - hemmed in and inadequate for the challenge.

Why did I keep dancing all that time? I guess because people kept telling me (and despite my protestations, I must have secretly believed it) that Sunday would happen. It better not take another nine months to happen again...

Librería ≠ Library

I love the bookstores here. They're tauntingly fascinating places.

Fascinating because they've got everything you could want. Looking for the complete works of Jules Verne? They've got it. Complete history of erotica from the 17th century to the current day? It's there. Greek / German / English philosophy? Check. Latest bodice-ripper / best-seller / sci-fi? Yes, and the not-so-latest too. There's whatever you might want, and quite a few things that you might not think of; it's a bibliophile's wet dream.

Taunting because, of course, it's all in Spanish. It's like being a diabetic in a lolly shop. My fervent desire is that those sweet treats will not be forever beyond my reach... (some day soon, ojalá)

Despite the language barrier, and confirming my status as a card-carrying linguistics egg-head, today I bought a treatise on the lexical, syntactic, and phonological variations of Spanish spoken across Argentina. Can I have anything but a basic conversation in Spanish? No. Can I tell you in which regions there is pre-consonantal aspiration of 's'? Yes! (And with a bit more practice, I'll be aspirating my 's's pre-consonantally with the best of them)

Flying Solo II

El Beso alone, but I actually coped. The training wheels are off.

In fact I had the curiously perverse pleasure of being mistaken for a local. Being rather tall and rather blonde, it's no mean feat mistaking me for an argentine. It's something that can only be achieved by a foreigner. I'm not quite sure why I enjoyed it so much...

Levantarse

I feel ridiculous to be learning all this after 8 months here:I'm still just cracking the cabezada thing, and I'm only just getting over the almost constant necessity to dance with strangers. I'm getting there, having had a long overdue injection of male solidarity - thank god for N, and what the hell am I going to do now that he's not here?

It's been an extremely long road, and I'm just beginning to realise that my shyness might possibly have burnt a few bridges with some locals - no I haven't been one to go around and kiss everyone in the room hello when I arrive; too shy. But I think for some people it's rude not to. And frankly, now that I think about it, I've spent 8 months seeing the same people Sundays and Wednesdays, week in, week out, and I'm actually acquainted with very few of them.

Now that I'm capable of putting myself out there a little (and taking it all a little less personally), there are a whole new raft of issues to face. For example, I'm terrible at remembering names, and often faces. But now I have to remember who I danced with last week, what their name is, what language they speak, how long they're here for... I made a complete shmuck of myself on Monday night at Canning with a German lady (B) - keeping to the standard smalltalk entre tango y tango, I asked her where she was from. She told me a little indignantly that I'd asked her that on Sunday, when I danced with her at El Beso. Argh! I couldn't remember her name, let alone whether it had been the night before or a week before! The worst thing was that she's a lovely dancer - one of the best around at the moment, and apart from feeling terrible about what effect it might have on her self-esteem to be so profoundly forgotten, I really wanted to be able to dance with her again.

But she can't have been too offended; the other issue I currently have no coping mechanisms for is being relentlessly hit on by tourists looking for a quick fling in an exotic city.