Hold Me Tight and Tango Me Home (2 page)

“There’s close embrace, like this,” he said, pulling me to him so my arm reached all the way across his shoulders, my hand resting on the slope between his neck and shoulder. “When dance floors get really crowded, you have to stay close and keep
all the steps subtle. But if there’s room for bigger or longer steps, you need to be in open embrace.” He stepped away from me and we slid apart until my hand lay on his bicep. “Either way, we never lose the connection with our arms, but the most important one happens between our chests.”

He started walking forward and I stepped backward, moving slowly while he talked me through the steps. “Just relax,” he said. “Move to the pace I set. Okay, good.”

I felt warmth from his upper torso go straight into my chest, my solar plexus, my stomach, and the leaden feeling inside me softened. I could feel the dark, gaping hole — the deadness I had felt since learning of my husband’s affair — and I let the heat coming from this man fill that void. The second song started, and I became aware of Marcel’s arms around me: He supported my hand in his and kept the circle of connection, but it was the other arm I really felt, the one wrapped around my back that held me to him and made me feel secure and cared-for. By the third song, I had started to sense his pulse, and for a moment, with my chest pressed against his, I felt all the good intentions of the human heart.

He led me through three songs, a set known as a
tanda
, and that was enough. I had immediately gone from considering tango lessons to needing to know this dance. Marcel suggested a studio for classes and a few private teachers he thought were good.

“Honestly,” he said, “it takes a village to make a tango dancer.”

Marcel excused himself and disappeared into the crowd. The
shrieking of gulls filled the air, and a thick humidity started to settle over the port. I touched the place where my wedding ring used to be and for an instant wondered where it was. I had grown so used to it — fiddling with it unconsciously at times, at other times acutely aware of it. I had thought that being married meant never having to go through another breakup.

I decided to leave and when I had almost hit the street, the tango music fading to a distant buzz, I turned to watch the group. They were no longer individuals, each with a story, a distinct style; from a distance, they had become a collective noun, part and parcel of the tango community around the world, slipping off on the crisp nights to embrace one another in places as remote as Lapland, or moving in the shadows of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, or arriving very, very late, so late that night bleeds into day, at the milongas of Buenos Aires.

The people of Buenos Aires are known as
porteños
, or people of the ports. Currents and winds once ushered in boats full of immigrants from the Mediterranean, carrying remnants of their homeland up the Río de la Plata; black slaves from Africa had been shackled and hauled there; and white slaves, mostly women from Eastern Europe, were tricked into moving there — through marriage proposals and offers of a better life — not knowing until too late that they were to be forced into working the brothels to service this huge influx of men. The tragedy, hardships, and homesickness of these groups overlapped in the south side of the city, where the ships arrived. At these ports the tango was born.

The origins of the word
tango
are debated. Some claim it’s African, and in certain dialects it means “closed place” or “reserved ground.” Others say it has Latin roots in the word
tangere
, “to touch,” and was brought by the Portuguese slave traders. It came to mean the places where African slaves and free blacks gathered to dance. In the ports of Buenos Aires tango grew in popularity, particularly when the Cuban sailors started arriving and introducing a rhythm known as the
habanera
.

By the mid-1800s so many more men than women had arrived that the port brothels overflowed and men danced tango with other men, holding each other at arm’s length; they had contact: skin, human warmth, the pulse of another person’s heartbeat and the flow of his blood. According to some accounts, though, more than anything they wanted to catch the attention of a woman — and most of the women in the ports were prostitutes. Even prostitutes were in such short supply that they could be picky, charging men for just a dance. If a man danced the tango well enough, she might notice and acquiesce to partner with him. The money he paid her was well worth it: It bought him the touch of a woman’s skin, the smell of her hair, the finding of a sort of home, at least for a moment, in the arms of a stranger. In Spanish, the term for the tango embrace is
el abrazo
, which literally means “the hug.” This embrace is a hug that doesn’t pull too tight, last too long, or promise anything but a song’s worth of pleasure. It is neither friendly nor amorous. Much more complex than that, it is a tangle of paradoxes.

Tango is a way to learn through the body, to take one’s pain into muscle memory and translate it into something else, something nobler. The contradictions — that comfort could be found among strangers, intimacy felt within a crowd, songs about heartbreak help a person find a way out of it — are embedded in the tango, and it begins and ends with the embrace.

O
UR INSTRUCTOR
, D
ARIO
, walked with the pointed toes and erect posture of a ballet dancer. Slight of frame, he had brown hair and lively dark eyes closely set; he wore his shirt collar rakishly flipped up. When he caught his own eyes in the mirror, he lingered in his gaze. But then he snapped his attention back to the students and insisted we stand in a straight line facing the mirror, keeping our feet together, closing our eyes, and focusing on our breathing.

“Feel your feet push into the ground,” he said. “Feel the top of your head pulling up to the sky. Now balance your spine so you are aligned over your hips.”

To learn the basic steps, we started shifting our weight to one side, then back to the other. We ambled forward, balancing first on one leg, then the other. Once we’d dead-ended at the mirror, fully facing ourselves in ways perhaps more difficult than learning
steps, we returned, walking backward, switching weight, pressing down as we stepped.

“Enter the ground,” Dario shouted out at us. “Push into the ground. Let your hips fall as you walk.” We followed his movements, stepping side to side, back and forth, feet brushing the ground.

He then instructed us to find a partner and form a large circle. We practiced the very basic element of reading our partner’s shift in weight and trying to synchronize with it — not embracing yet, but holding each other at arm’s length in what’s known as a practice hold.

“Men, use the follower’s energy. You are not dancing alone. This is not about the ego, it is about your partner,” Dario said, standing in the center of our circle. “And followers, don’t be passive. He needs to feel your energy to lead.”

Between the large windows that opened onto Lafayette Street in Lower Manhattan and the mirrors that flanked us on the other side, the room felt too bright, too exposed for such closeness to another person. This kind of proximity needed the cover of night, but we were revealed in positions of strange intimacy: Our fumbling was just as visible to any bemused passersby as if we’d been dogs caught coupling on the street.

Dario explained that the basic step is the
salida
, which literally means “exit,” or “way out,” but also has a lesser-known meaning of opening an activity to someone; it can mean an opportunity. He put on a slow tango for us and clapped out the steady four-count beat as we stepped around in a circle,
the men walking forward, the women backward. Every few minutes we rotated and changed partners. Each leader had a different feel. The easiest to follow had an unwavering stride, others moved with a slight bounce, and some hesitated, questioning themselves, an insecurity that made it difficult to match their pace. The gaze of my partners made me uneasy. I noted the color of their eyes with a searching usually reserved for the very beginning of a romance: watery blue with charcoal flecks, bark brown around black pupils, murky green with gold irises.

One man held my gaze with an intensity that felt like a challenge, so I stared back into his unflinching amber eyes. Because he looked so much younger than I was — I guessed his age at early or mid-twenties — I interpreted his stare to mean that he was learning not to fear women, rather than as anything that involved me personally. His curly hair was just a shade or two shy of auburn, and he had the complexion of a redhead, with smooth, almost pale peach skin. He was turning out to be the class whiz kid.

“Who knows why we push the ground?” Dario asked the class. “Allen knows the answer.”

“To use gravity in assisting our balance.”

“
Eso es
,” Dario yelled. “Very good, Allen.” Dario started the music again, scrutinizing and correcting us as we walked: “No, push your energy out. Feel it in your center and have it radiate out from you. Push down with your feet. Stretch your head up. Relax your shoulders.”

He tapped out the beat as he tried to explain the salida to us. “Feet together. Everybody inhale — always remember to breathe — now, leaders right foot backward. Left foot to the side,” he instructed. “Okay, followers stay with them.”

The salida followed a basic eight count. Tango music evolved from the 4/4 upbeat, cheerful milonga, which is not only the name of a social dance where people tango but is also a lively type of music and dance related to tango. While some scholars claim the milonga beat is derived from music of the African Congo, others say it is from an ancient Spanish song with Arabic influence, from the Moorish stretch in Andalusia. The Cuban sailors disembarked in Buenos Aires with another dance and music, the
habanera
, which layered another, slower rhythm over the 4/4. The habanera is a derivative of the French
contredanse
, which was brought to Cuba by French plantation owners fleeing the slave rebellion in what is now Haiti. Then opera arrived via Italian immigrants along with Germans toting the bulky, accordionlike bandoneón; the gauchos, or cowboys of the pampas, came to town with their folk music and foot-stomping syncopation. At the ports of Buenos Aires, tango evolved with each group of new arrivals.

Even as the music became more complicated, the lyrics stayed ribald, chronicling sexual conquests, championing dancing skills and unfettered bravado. These early comedic bards had not yet lost their innocence and knew nothing of a broken heart. That would come later, with Carlos Gardel.

We continued walking in a circle, and Dario instructed us.
“Enter the woman,” he said, “Enter her space — keep your chests together.” He then shouted, “Beautiful Moment. Right now, this is the Be-U-Ti-Ful Moment! This is where your energies mix and you feel tango. Do you feel
tango
?”

Here, you twist at the waist and your chests are still together. During this synchronized torque, your centers of balance, or axes, mingle, and for an instant you share the same intimate universe.

Right then, the leader moved into my space and for a moment our legs moved at different angles, but our chests stayed connected and the effect was sublime. In that quick transition, that moment just before I conceded my axis to the leader, I felt something I had been craving my entire life. I had always thought of tango as a verb, as in “you are tangoing.” But Dario described it as a noun, a state of being. It was the most basic of intimacies, and I started to feel tango as a swelling of pleasure that started in my chest and spread through me.

Then my partner and I realigned. Our legs, feet, and chests moved back to parallel and we faced each other once again. The final step of the eight-count basic is the “resolution.” Like an exhale, the leader merely slides to the side and the follower does the same. The salida, the beginning and end, the exit and the opportunity, start all over again.

When class ended and we emptied into the hall to change out of our dance shoes, I realized that for one hour I had not felt bad, and it wasn’t just the absence of pain. Since finding out about my husband’s affair, I had felt like I had been poisoned
and was slowly dying. But during class I had experienced a simple happiness, a reprieve from the weight of grief.

I sat down next to a woman named Claire. Her kind, sparkling brown eyes were early indicators of her easy friendliness. While unstrapping my basic black, practical, chunky-heeled dancing shoes, I commented to her, “One lesson a week isn’t enough. I’m learning too slowly.”

“I want to dance tango every night until I’m exhausted,” she said. She tucked one black dance shoe into a cotton bag and then pulled off the other. “Until I just drop.”

“I think we’re going to be friends,” I said.

In fact, Allen, the class whiz, Claire, and I went out to lunch, as we all planned to return to the studio in an hour for the afternoon
practica
. We found a little Vietnamese restaurant in nearby Chinatown, settled around a Formica table, and sipped tea. I still couldn’t really eat (my stomach had been a cluster of knots since my husband left, about two weeks earlier), but I stirred the noodles around in the bowl of soup I had ordered and inhaled its steam. Since our common interest was tango, we talked about what attracted us to it.

“I loved that documentary with the kids dancing,
Mad, Hot Ballroom
,” Claire said. “So I signed up for ballroom dancing — the classic five. But one night I saw an Argentine tango class, and I went and asked if I could switch and start tango lessons right away. I just knew it was for me.”

Allen went next. “I like the music. I think that’s what attracted me.”

“I’m going to a wedding in Montevideo in December,” I volunteered, “and I’m meeting friends in Buenos Aires a week beforehand. I figured it would be more fun if I knew some tango.” I didn’t tell them the whole truth: that time passed for me in a haze. Constantly lost, I made wrong turns and mistakenly drove over toll bridges with no cash on me. I sat stony faced, pulled to the side while the cops shook their heads and wrote out tickets. I couldn’t eat — I rarely felt hungry, and I didn’t have the mental capacity to organize myself in a grocery store. I slept on the couch, avoiding our bed, and wore the same jeans and T-shirt almost every day. It was a struggle to pull myself together to work at my computer — and I really needed to work. Between writing out a big check to my divorce lawyer and my monthly expenses having doubled overnight, I had to write and sell articles. But I just couldn’t think straight. My world was filled only with bruising memories, raw, bottomless aches, and disbelief that my life had become so uncertain. Every once in a while I called my husband and screamed at him like a person with Tourette’s. If I happened to be in public when the impulse hit, other people backed away from me, very slowly.