Black Swans, page 10
And though I’d heard from a lot of people that I would love Tango Argentino and should go, I was afraid it would be like the Filipino Folklorico ballet, you know, too quaint and ridiculous for words. Winking at the audience and dropping hankies—Imelda kinds of things.
It had been a long, long time since any dance appealed to me, though I had once loved dancing and had taken a lot of weird lessons when I was growing up, even Indian Hindu dance, except I couldn’t make my head go sideways. And flamenco and modern from my aunt, who was a premiere dancer with Martha Graham. I studied ballet too and still loved seeing any great dancers. But how could any tango be great?
My wonderful friend, Femmy de Lyser, though, called and said, “I am getting two tickets to see this tango show near your house and since you live so close, you’ll come too, right?”
“Oh, okay,” I said, feeling that since we’d be going to a matinee and it was three weeks from her call, I might never actually have to go. Although someone I knew in New York, Renzo, had written me about seeing this show—he said he’d seen it and “. . . you’d love it, it’s got everything a person could want—legs, madness, and inspiration.”
However, the day arrived, and with trepidation, I agreed to meet her at the Pantages Theater. We arrived eager to see what kind of performance it could be that filled this large theater with an audience dressed in sequins, mantillas, and large tortoiseshell combs.
Everyone in that audience but us, it seemed, had white skin, black hair, intense expressions, and flair.
“I hear it’s very sexy,” Femmy said, but she was from Holland, so what did she know? This show was advertised as a musical, and I had never known a musical to be sexy, no matter what they proclaimed in the ads or the Playbill.
Coming in, in fact, I had seen across the mob in the lobby an old lover of mine who really was sexy, so sexy and divine, in fact, that I had thrown myself headlong into a mad affair with him when I was eighteen and drank Rainier ale, even though he was married. It had lasted for years and years, and though we hadn’t seen each other in ages, my hands still shook at the sight of him, but I realized he was with his wife, so I didn’t say or do anything to embarrass us, but now here we were sitting up in the balcony, and my old lover was standing beside my seat, his hands shaking too, and he said, “I missed you, where have you been?”
“Nowhere,” I said, turning red as a rose.
“I’m here with my wife,” he said. “She loves this show, we’ve seen it four times, it’s so great. Have you seen it yet?”
“No,” I said. “I . . .”
“I’ll call you later,” he said.
He kissed me, my cheek, and because the lights were dimming, he fled, and my friend Femmy said, “Who was that guy, he’s so cute . . .”
“I was once his slave,” I said, “and still am.”
“Yes,” she said, “and he yours. His hands were like leaves.”
He was always more my type than Bradly; he was sweet and cozy and took care of a lot of women, giving them jobs on movies he directed, giving them money, helping them buy houses, finding us cars; one girl who loved him, after I had gotten practically a decade, stood beside me one night at a screening of one of his movies, and she looked at me, knew who I was, and said, “I wonder who’s kissing him now.”
He never threw anyone away, never so much as threw an old cashmere sweater away. For a sick man, he was the kind I like.
The lights had now gone down, an orchestra was on stage; five violins, a bass fiddle, cello players, and these bandoneons, two pianos—an embarrassment of percussion and strings, you might say—and suddenly music filled the air with irrevocable loss.
Or sex gone by.
All tango is by Carlos Gardel, and everything they played or sang or danced was Gardel music.
(I once heard that Astor Piazzolla, a modern Argentine tango composer who does very well in Europe, went home to Buenos Aires, and when the taxi driver who picked him up at the airport learned who he was, he threw him out of the cab. In Argentina, apparently, they don’t like improvements—sort of like me with architecture in L.A. Give me a 1926 building or give me death.)
IN MOST CIVILIZATIONS, it’s considered a tragedy for people to become obsessed with each other to the exclusion of “more important things”—i.e., art, great deeds, etc. But with tango, obsession is nakedly celebrated. Or celebrated in great clothes, implying nakedness.
The instruments that looked like accordions, only smaller, bandoneons, branded my heart like a gaucho branding a calf—smoldering flesh.
And once the dancing began, there was nothing to Tango Argentino, the “musical,” except one couple after another—or maybe three at a time—doing such incredible dances of carnality and abandon, no wonder my heart stopped dead. No head snaps, no ferocious expressions, something entirely else.
These bandoneons were as nasal as French horns; they sounded like hunting alerts; but instead of chasing foxes, the men wedded their bodies to this dance with women, and the women looked absolutely gorgeous, even though some of them had been tango champions in the thirties; their clothes were slinky, black, and silver, their shoes were dainty with high heels, their knees were adorable, their mouths were red and tragic, and then suddenly, their dance would be over, everyone would applaud like crazy, my heart was beating madly, and they’d do an orchestral number so the audience could cool down enough to see another tango couple—these magical silhouettes melting into the music in varieties of passionate experience.
The musical side of this show was that in between dances, singers would come and blurt these Gardel songs about how horrible life was in all its many details.
Nobody here ever heard of a “Bo-da” meeting, nobody ever heard of suicide hotlines, nobody ever heard of any self-help program—wallowing in self-pity with only a touch of stylish irony was the only idea.
And I loved it for its fearless wrongness.
Nobody “got on with their life” in Tango Argentino; they preferred suffering in hell for all eternity. It was the same the first time I saw Paul Butterfield play blues harmonica, rapture at finding a way to go on one more day by playing the blues. The bandoneon and the harmonica were a lot alike, both capable of nasal cascades in minor keys. Like Pied Pipers to the edge of tangoland.
By the middle of act two, I was jumping out of my skin with determination to learn how to do this dance for myself.
“But it says on the program these people have danced this way for forty years!” Femmy pointed out as we walked to the parking lot afterward.
“I don’t care if it takes ten thousand years,” I said.
“It looks very hard.” She shook her head. “How they move so fast and so slow, I don’t know.”
“I’m doomed,” I said, looking at a flyer about tango classes boys were distributing on the street.
However, just because seeing Tango Argentino makes you think you’re going to run right out and take tango lessons the minute you leave the theater doesn’t mean I did. What I did instead was run right out and buy more tickets to see the show again. And when I saw it again, I thought maybe it would be too hard, that Femmy was right, and that for just an ordinary person who wasn’t really a dancer, getting involved in something that was not ordinary and really a dance would be ridiculous, like taking flying-trapeze lessons. When I left the second time, I thought I would get over it—in time, I would forget this foolish impulse.
But no. For nearly a year, these images wouldn’t go away. They began erasing images of Bradly.
In fact, being obsessed with tango was, for me at that time, a step up. At least it was the art of obsession and not obsession itself.
Right at that time, a friend said, “Well, why don’t you try just ballroom dancing then?”
Of course, at the Hollywood YMCA when they announced a class in ballroom dancing, including “the fox-trot, the rumba, the swing, the cha-cha, and the tango,” I knew learning to dance in a gym with older couples trying to get good enough in six weeks so they could dance at their daughter’s wedding wasn’t at all what I had in mind. And especially not “the tango” we learned there—where the woman backs up, repeating LONG, LONG, short-short, LONG—to the letters T—A—n-g—O.
But there, I met a man who was helping our instructor, a nuclear physicist who was a bronze belt at Arthur Murray (you become a bronze medalist when you’ve been there a year), and though he was not my type in any way, he took me dancing in various strangely old-fashioned places around LA., especially one place that is now gone, called the Black Forest, where a German band played, and tall USC alumni of German descent did gorgeous old waltzes.
“But where is the real tango, do you think?” I asked him.
“I’ve heard there’s a place in the valley,” he said, “called Norah’s, where they do that, but it’s too hard.”
“It is?” I asked. “Then how does anyone do it?”
“They started young,” he said. “They’re born that way. Like surfing.”
Like all American women, being led was my main downfall. Just having the patience to wait until my partner found the beat in so much as a fox-trot drove me bananas, but after getting the point that you couldn’t dance with a man unless you let him lead, I figured I had now discovered the meaning of life, and tango would be easy.
The nuclear physicist who wasn’t my type, though, did tell me about Norah’s, and one Saturday night he even took me there, though we were told at the door that the place was full and we couldn’t get in, even though the place was empty. “All reservations!” said the woman, who I later learned was Norah. “All full.”
“What about tango?” I asked.
“You come back Sunday night, six p.m., lessons,” she said, “tango class. Five dollars.”
“Let’s go,” I said to my friend. “Take lessons.”
“Only certain people can do it,” he said.
“Ohhh,” I said, “where did you hear that?”
“At Arthur Murray,” he said, “my teacher said Argentine tango is only for the most advanced Latin students.”
(Arthur Murray goes from bronze medal your first year to silver at the end of your second and gold after that. No class there is ever five dollars either; it costs a fortune.)
I couldn’t convince anyone I knew to take me to Norah’s. No one I knew would set foot in the valley, especially not to get involved with some demented tango plan of mine. No one liked ballroom dancing either.
I had the right shoes—I thought—for the tango. I’d bought them on Barham Boulevard at a store called Champion Dance Shoes. I had the right clothes and the right red lipstick and certainly the correct attitude of obsession, demented enough to climb Mount Everest if need be to become one of the torsos, swollen with regrets. I was stoked.
As far as anyone I knew was concerned, however, the valley was impossible. The valley was why everyone left home and moved to L.A. You didn’t go to the valley except in the daytime to work at Universal or Warner Brothers. People would go to downtown L.A. or the beach all the way to Malibu, any place in Beverly Hills, but the valley was a cold shower.
Fortunately, someone I knew from San Francisco who thought all of L.A. was so awful the valley was just more of it—who didn’t know any better in other words—agreed to take me, so one night we ignored the rain, got in his rented Cobra, and drove all the way out to a barrio neighborhood where we passed cumbia-dancing nightclubs, and there, dimly lit on a corner, was Norah’s Place once more.
“I thought you said this was Argentinian,” he said suspiciously. “Why does it say it’s a Bolivian restaurant?”
“It’s practically the same thing,” I said.
There were so many pink tablecloths and crystal glasses that I was surprised the interior was middle class and adorable. The same rich-looking Latins I’d seen in the audience of Tango Argentino abounded, ladened with sequins and flounces, and as we were led to a booth by the dance floor, I had a feeling we were in the right place, because a bandoneon lay near the small stage.
A salsa band had just finished playing and left the stand as we ordered from a menu that seemed Italian, but then I didn’t yet realize that Argentina is so European they don’t even believe they’re in South America, and they never heard of hot sauce. They have their own Spanish accent, which is sort of cut by a Portuguese softness, saying sho’ for yo.
We sat waiting for trout (me) and chicken (him), and two new musicians appeared, one going to the keyboard and another picking up the bandoneon, which he put on his lap after he sat down. These guys looked like they worked in banks, they were so square, but when they began to play, it was as tango as tango could be.
This tragedy music saddened the air, and two couples rose to their feet and began dancing exactly the tango I had in mind. This was tango, the one I knew would save me. But what style they had, what incredible balance—it seemed to me they were even better than the dancers in the show, although perhaps it was because they were so much closer.
In the beginning of the third tango, a man with silver hair emerged from a side table, dancing with an extremely stylish slender woman with Louise Brooks hair—and he danced as though he were under miles of sadness and loss so intense it made his feet into art. But then I realized his feet were the whole dance.
“Wow,” my friend from San Francisco said.
“That’s Orlando,” our waiter, José, explained. “He teaches tango here. Sunday nights and Wednesdays, six o’clock. Beginners welcome.”
“Ooooo,” I said, “do I need a partner?”
“Come alone,” José said, “students here learn together.”
“I’m jealous,” my friend from San Francisco said. “I want to come with you.”
Of course, when you see someone great move so easily, you think it’s a trick and you could do it yourself, I know, but Orlando—if ever there was an embodiment of tango, it was Orlando. Rarely, watching tango, do you even notice the man at all, it’s all so much the woman that shows up (it was only much later when I saw the scene where Valentino grabs the girl in the bordello and yanks her across the floor into a tango that I saw any man with remotely the same crushing intensity), but with Orlando, even though his partner was perfect, he was the magic.
What every woman wants.
And Valentino did it in 1921, in Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, in his first scene as the bored aristocratic bad boy with the cigarillo, the gaucho pants, the whip, and the sneer, whereas Orlando did it in the middle of the eighties, in the valley, in street clothes, and left his cigarette behind in the ashtray, and was more than twice as old. I never saw Orlando dance when time didn’t come to a complete stop, and to me, the idea that every minute you spend in tango adds an hour to your life became believable.
From that night on, I never used “the” when referring to tango, I just said “tango”—the way people said it at Norah’s, as though once you knew what tango was, you’d never modify it with a definite article, because it was definite already. There wasn’t more than one tango, no matter what misapprehensions Arthur Murray might have been laboring under all these years. Selling to the ignorant americanos.
But then, Latins have a way of letting you know—you do mambo, not el mambo; you dance flamenco, not the flamenco.
Orlando and the people that first night at Norah’s were everything tango I wanted; they had merged the thin line between art and passion into one thing—and it looked a lot better than Jackson Pollock.
Valentino had joie de youth, no depth or beauty. But tango can withstand callow young men and elegant old ones; it’s that elastic a concept.
Although, like a marriage, it takes about five years to get anywhere into it; it’s so seductive to those with a heart for tango, that it’ll suck you in, and it sucked me, that night, right in. In farther.
In the group from Buenos Aires, Argentina, at the Pantages, one of the couples that danced had been divorced and married to other people, but still did tango together.
Hating your partner was not a hindrance in tango.
In fact, one man I knew used to whip his partner into a fury before they danced because, he explained, “It adds something in the eyes.”
In Argentina, of course, men are such brutes they brag about beating their lovers, but this is unfashionable talk in L.A. these days, we being the advanced people we are and women having so little sense of humor about black eyes. And self-help being so in evidence. Tango is the defensive position of women, letting it bleed until it turns into a cheap fiction.
Of the nine million Harlequin Romance and Silhouette Ecstasy books for women today, sold and read by the ton, no hero appears whose primary quality isn’t arrogance. If any man appears at first helpful, cheerful, and polite, he’s the villain. The man who at first appears hopelessly mean and insensitive, he’s the hero. It’s cornography. Margaret Mitchell’s inspiration for Rhett Butler was Valentino in that tango. It’s a twentieth-century malaise.
In pornography women are all sluts; in cornography, which women read to get hot the same way, men are all scornful monsters who, three pages before the end, turn out to have been misunderstood and really quite rich, kind, and sweet. I understand that married women who read these books have a far better sex life than married women who don’t, which in my opinion is what’s wrong with being married.
I prefer tango because you get to go home alone.
Anyway, my friend from San Francisco and I stayed a long time. We saw the tango couples change partners and, somehow, no matter whom the women danced with, they always had this strange concentrated look about them, lost countesses from the Orient Express waiting to be rescued. On their way to nowhere, dressed to kill.
It was right at the time that the punk look had come in with such a vengeance, and this too had the too-white skin, the red lipstick, and the black hair, but with tango, the women looked strong enough to throw a man out a window if he didn’t watch his back, whereas the punk look was more that you were found dead in Sid Vicious’s bed.
Tango and heroin, in other words, were mutually exclusive.
Not that tango women looked like bodybuilders, but they could move very fast, their heels were very high, and even the sylphlike Louise Brooks–like dancer who’d danced with Orlando first had all those muscles in her thighs and down her back on tenterhooks.
It had been a long, long time since any dance appealed to me, though I had once loved dancing and had taken a lot of weird lessons when I was growing up, even Indian Hindu dance, except I couldn’t make my head go sideways. And flamenco and modern from my aunt, who was a premiere dancer with Martha Graham. I studied ballet too and still loved seeing any great dancers. But how could any tango be great?
My wonderful friend, Femmy de Lyser, though, called and said, “I am getting two tickets to see this tango show near your house and since you live so close, you’ll come too, right?”
“Oh, okay,” I said, feeling that since we’d be going to a matinee and it was three weeks from her call, I might never actually have to go. Although someone I knew in New York, Renzo, had written me about seeing this show—he said he’d seen it and “. . . you’d love it, it’s got everything a person could want—legs, madness, and inspiration.”
However, the day arrived, and with trepidation, I agreed to meet her at the Pantages Theater. We arrived eager to see what kind of performance it could be that filled this large theater with an audience dressed in sequins, mantillas, and large tortoiseshell combs.
Everyone in that audience but us, it seemed, had white skin, black hair, intense expressions, and flair.
“I hear it’s very sexy,” Femmy said, but she was from Holland, so what did she know? This show was advertised as a musical, and I had never known a musical to be sexy, no matter what they proclaimed in the ads or the Playbill.
Coming in, in fact, I had seen across the mob in the lobby an old lover of mine who really was sexy, so sexy and divine, in fact, that I had thrown myself headlong into a mad affair with him when I was eighteen and drank Rainier ale, even though he was married. It had lasted for years and years, and though we hadn’t seen each other in ages, my hands still shook at the sight of him, but I realized he was with his wife, so I didn’t say or do anything to embarrass us, but now here we were sitting up in the balcony, and my old lover was standing beside my seat, his hands shaking too, and he said, “I missed you, where have you been?”
“Nowhere,” I said, turning red as a rose.
“I’m here with my wife,” he said. “She loves this show, we’ve seen it four times, it’s so great. Have you seen it yet?”
“No,” I said. “I . . .”
“I’ll call you later,” he said.
He kissed me, my cheek, and because the lights were dimming, he fled, and my friend Femmy said, “Who was that guy, he’s so cute . . .”
“I was once his slave,” I said, “and still am.”
“Yes,” she said, “and he yours. His hands were like leaves.”
He was always more my type than Bradly; he was sweet and cozy and took care of a lot of women, giving them jobs on movies he directed, giving them money, helping them buy houses, finding us cars; one girl who loved him, after I had gotten practically a decade, stood beside me one night at a screening of one of his movies, and she looked at me, knew who I was, and said, “I wonder who’s kissing him now.”
He never threw anyone away, never so much as threw an old cashmere sweater away. For a sick man, he was the kind I like.
The lights had now gone down, an orchestra was on stage; five violins, a bass fiddle, cello players, and these bandoneons, two pianos—an embarrassment of percussion and strings, you might say—and suddenly music filled the air with irrevocable loss.
Or sex gone by.
All tango is by Carlos Gardel, and everything they played or sang or danced was Gardel music.
(I once heard that Astor Piazzolla, a modern Argentine tango composer who does very well in Europe, went home to Buenos Aires, and when the taxi driver who picked him up at the airport learned who he was, he threw him out of the cab. In Argentina, apparently, they don’t like improvements—sort of like me with architecture in L.A. Give me a 1926 building or give me death.)
IN MOST CIVILIZATIONS, it’s considered a tragedy for people to become obsessed with each other to the exclusion of “more important things”—i.e., art, great deeds, etc. But with tango, obsession is nakedly celebrated. Or celebrated in great clothes, implying nakedness.
The instruments that looked like accordions, only smaller, bandoneons, branded my heart like a gaucho branding a calf—smoldering flesh.
And once the dancing began, there was nothing to Tango Argentino, the “musical,” except one couple after another—or maybe three at a time—doing such incredible dances of carnality and abandon, no wonder my heart stopped dead. No head snaps, no ferocious expressions, something entirely else.
These bandoneons were as nasal as French horns; they sounded like hunting alerts; but instead of chasing foxes, the men wedded their bodies to this dance with women, and the women looked absolutely gorgeous, even though some of them had been tango champions in the thirties; their clothes were slinky, black, and silver, their shoes were dainty with high heels, their knees were adorable, their mouths were red and tragic, and then suddenly, their dance would be over, everyone would applaud like crazy, my heart was beating madly, and they’d do an orchestral number so the audience could cool down enough to see another tango couple—these magical silhouettes melting into the music in varieties of passionate experience.
The musical side of this show was that in between dances, singers would come and blurt these Gardel songs about how horrible life was in all its many details.
Nobody here ever heard of a “Bo-da” meeting, nobody ever heard of suicide hotlines, nobody ever heard of any self-help program—wallowing in self-pity with only a touch of stylish irony was the only idea.
And I loved it for its fearless wrongness.
Nobody “got on with their life” in Tango Argentino; they preferred suffering in hell for all eternity. It was the same the first time I saw Paul Butterfield play blues harmonica, rapture at finding a way to go on one more day by playing the blues. The bandoneon and the harmonica were a lot alike, both capable of nasal cascades in minor keys. Like Pied Pipers to the edge of tangoland.
By the middle of act two, I was jumping out of my skin with determination to learn how to do this dance for myself.
“But it says on the program these people have danced this way for forty years!” Femmy pointed out as we walked to the parking lot afterward.
“I don’t care if it takes ten thousand years,” I said.
“It looks very hard.” She shook her head. “How they move so fast and so slow, I don’t know.”
“I’m doomed,” I said, looking at a flyer about tango classes boys were distributing on the street.
However, just because seeing Tango Argentino makes you think you’re going to run right out and take tango lessons the minute you leave the theater doesn’t mean I did. What I did instead was run right out and buy more tickets to see the show again. And when I saw it again, I thought maybe it would be too hard, that Femmy was right, and that for just an ordinary person who wasn’t really a dancer, getting involved in something that was not ordinary and really a dance would be ridiculous, like taking flying-trapeze lessons. When I left the second time, I thought I would get over it—in time, I would forget this foolish impulse.
But no. For nearly a year, these images wouldn’t go away. They began erasing images of Bradly.
In fact, being obsessed with tango was, for me at that time, a step up. At least it was the art of obsession and not obsession itself.
Right at that time, a friend said, “Well, why don’t you try just ballroom dancing then?”
Of course, at the Hollywood YMCA when they announced a class in ballroom dancing, including “the fox-trot, the rumba, the swing, the cha-cha, and the tango,” I knew learning to dance in a gym with older couples trying to get good enough in six weeks so they could dance at their daughter’s wedding wasn’t at all what I had in mind. And especially not “the tango” we learned there—where the woman backs up, repeating LONG, LONG, short-short, LONG—to the letters T—A—n-g—O.
But there, I met a man who was helping our instructor, a nuclear physicist who was a bronze belt at Arthur Murray (you become a bronze medalist when you’ve been there a year), and though he was not my type in any way, he took me dancing in various strangely old-fashioned places around LA., especially one place that is now gone, called the Black Forest, where a German band played, and tall USC alumni of German descent did gorgeous old waltzes.
“But where is the real tango, do you think?” I asked him.
“I’ve heard there’s a place in the valley,” he said, “called Norah’s, where they do that, but it’s too hard.”
“It is?” I asked. “Then how does anyone do it?”
“They started young,” he said. “They’re born that way. Like surfing.”
Like all American women, being led was my main downfall. Just having the patience to wait until my partner found the beat in so much as a fox-trot drove me bananas, but after getting the point that you couldn’t dance with a man unless you let him lead, I figured I had now discovered the meaning of life, and tango would be easy.
The nuclear physicist who wasn’t my type, though, did tell me about Norah’s, and one Saturday night he even took me there, though we were told at the door that the place was full and we couldn’t get in, even though the place was empty. “All reservations!” said the woman, who I later learned was Norah. “All full.”
“What about tango?” I asked.
“You come back Sunday night, six p.m., lessons,” she said, “tango class. Five dollars.”
“Let’s go,” I said to my friend. “Take lessons.”
“Only certain people can do it,” he said.
“Ohhh,” I said, “where did you hear that?”
“At Arthur Murray,” he said, “my teacher said Argentine tango is only for the most advanced Latin students.”
(Arthur Murray goes from bronze medal your first year to silver at the end of your second and gold after that. No class there is ever five dollars either; it costs a fortune.)
I couldn’t convince anyone I knew to take me to Norah’s. No one I knew would set foot in the valley, especially not to get involved with some demented tango plan of mine. No one liked ballroom dancing either.
I had the right shoes—I thought—for the tango. I’d bought them on Barham Boulevard at a store called Champion Dance Shoes. I had the right clothes and the right red lipstick and certainly the correct attitude of obsession, demented enough to climb Mount Everest if need be to become one of the torsos, swollen with regrets. I was stoked.
As far as anyone I knew was concerned, however, the valley was impossible. The valley was why everyone left home and moved to L.A. You didn’t go to the valley except in the daytime to work at Universal or Warner Brothers. People would go to downtown L.A. or the beach all the way to Malibu, any place in Beverly Hills, but the valley was a cold shower.
Fortunately, someone I knew from San Francisco who thought all of L.A. was so awful the valley was just more of it—who didn’t know any better in other words—agreed to take me, so one night we ignored the rain, got in his rented Cobra, and drove all the way out to a barrio neighborhood where we passed cumbia-dancing nightclubs, and there, dimly lit on a corner, was Norah’s Place once more.
“I thought you said this was Argentinian,” he said suspiciously. “Why does it say it’s a Bolivian restaurant?”
“It’s practically the same thing,” I said.
There were so many pink tablecloths and crystal glasses that I was surprised the interior was middle class and adorable. The same rich-looking Latins I’d seen in the audience of Tango Argentino abounded, ladened with sequins and flounces, and as we were led to a booth by the dance floor, I had a feeling we were in the right place, because a bandoneon lay near the small stage.
A salsa band had just finished playing and left the stand as we ordered from a menu that seemed Italian, but then I didn’t yet realize that Argentina is so European they don’t even believe they’re in South America, and they never heard of hot sauce. They have their own Spanish accent, which is sort of cut by a Portuguese softness, saying sho’ for yo.
We sat waiting for trout (me) and chicken (him), and two new musicians appeared, one going to the keyboard and another picking up the bandoneon, which he put on his lap after he sat down. These guys looked like they worked in banks, they were so square, but when they began to play, it was as tango as tango could be.
This tragedy music saddened the air, and two couples rose to their feet and began dancing exactly the tango I had in mind. This was tango, the one I knew would save me. But what style they had, what incredible balance—it seemed to me they were even better than the dancers in the show, although perhaps it was because they were so much closer.
In the beginning of the third tango, a man with silver hair emerged from a side table, dancing with an extremely stylish slender woman with Louise Brooks hair—and he danced as though he were under miles of sadness and loss so intense it made his feet into art. But then I realized his feet were the whole dance.
“Wow,” my friend from San Francisco said.
“That’s Orlando,” our waiter, José, explained. “He teaches tango here. Sunday nights and Wednesdays, six o’clock. Beginners welcome.”
“Ooooo,” I said, “do I need a partner?”
“Come alone,” José said, “students here learn together.”
“I’m jealous,” my friend from San Francisco said. “I want to come with you.”
Of course, when you see someone great move so easily, you think it’s a trick and you could do it yourself, I know, but Orlando—if ever there was an embodiment of tango, it was Orlando. Rarely, watching tango, do you even notice the man at all, it’s all so much the woman that shows up (it was only much later when I saw the scene where Valentino grabs the girl in the bordello and yanks her across the floor into a tango that I saw any man with remotely the same crushing intensity), but with Orlando, even though his partner was perfect, he was the magic.
What every woman wants.
And Valentino did it in 1921, in Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, in his first scene as the bored aristocratic bad boy with the cigarillo, the gaucho pants, the whip, and the sneer, whereas Orlando did it in the middle of the eighties, in the valley, in street clothes, and left his cigarette behind in the ashtray, and was more than twice as old. I never saw Orlando dance when time didn’t come to a complete stop, and to me, the idea that every minute you spend in tango adds an hour to your life became believable.
From that night on, I never used “the” when referring to tango, I just said “tango”—the way people said it at Norah’s, as though once you knew what tango was, you’d never modify it with a definite article, because it was definite already. There wasn’t more than one tango, no matter what misapprehensions Arthur Murray might have been laboring under all these years. Selling to the ignorant americanos.
But then, Latins have a way of letting you know—you do mambo, not el mambo; you dance flamenco, not the flamenco.
Orlando and the people that first night at Norah’s were everything tango I wanted; they had merged the thin line between art and passion into one thing—and it looked a lot better than Jackson Pollock.
Valentino had joie de youth, no depth or beauty. But tango can withstand callow young men and elegant old ones; it’s that elastic a concept.
Although, like a marriage, it takes about five years to get anywhere into it; it’s so seductive to those with a heart for tango, that it’ll suck you in, and it sucked me, that night, right in. In farther.
In the group from Buenos Aires, Argentina, at the Pantages, one of the couples that danced had been divorced and married to other people, but still did tango together.
Hating your partner was not a hindrance in tango.
In fact, one man I knew used to whip his partner into a fury before they danced because, he explained, “It adds something in the eyes.”
In Argentina, of course, men are such brutes they brag about beating their lovers, but this is unfashionable talk in L.A. these days, we being the advanced people we are and women having so little sense of humor about black eyes. And self-help being so in evidence. Tango is the defensive position of women, letting it bleed until it turns into a cheap fiction.
Of the nine million Harlequin Romance and Silhouette Ecstasy books for women today, sold and read by the ton, no hero appears whose primary quality isn’t arrogance. If any man appears at first helpful, cheerful, and polite, he’s the villain. The man who at first appears hopelessly mean and insensitive, he’s the hero. It’s cornography. Margaret Mitchell’s inspiration for Rhett Butler was Valentino in that tango. It’s a twentieth-century malaise.
In pornography women are all sluts; in cornography, which women read to get hot the same way, men are all scornful monsters who, three pages before the end, turn out to have been misunderstood and really quite rich, kind, and sweet. I understand that married women who read these books have a far better sex life than married women who don’t, which in my opinion is what’s wrong with being married.
I prefer tango because you get to go home alone.
Anyway, my friend from San Francisco and I stayed a long time. We saw the tango couples change partners and, somehow, no matter whom the women danced with, they always had this strange concentrated look about them, lost countesses from the Orient Express waiting to be rescued. On their way to nowhere, dressed to kill.
It was right at the time that the punk look had come in with such a vengeance, and this too had the too-white skin, the red lipstick, and the black hair, but with tango, the women looked strong enough to throw a man out a window if he didn’t watch his back, whereas the punk look was more that you were found dead in Sid Vicious’s bed.
Tango and heroin, in other words, were mutually exclusive.
Not that tango women looked like bodybuilders, but they could move very fast, their heels were very high, and even the sylphlike Louise Brooks–like dancer who’d danced with Orlando first had all those muscles in her thighs and down her back on tenterhooks.
