Cultural Amnesia (97 page)

The tango . . . is the strangest popular song that mankind has
ever produced, a popular song which is also the one and only introverted, even introspective, dance.

—ERNESTO
SÁBATO,
Entre la letra y la sangre,
P. 131

About the tango, Sábato intuited what Borges didn’t: that this strangest and most lovely
of all dances is a self-assessment made compulsory by music. Borges is often given credit for a love and understanding of the tango, but the sad truth is that he declared it dead by the way he
loved it, and missed its meaning by the way he understood it. When he came back from Europe to Buenos Aires in the twenties he did some legwork in the low-life haunts of the
compadrito
, the bad guy of the bars and brothels. He concluded that the best of the music and the dancing was already over, when in fact it had just begun. But
Sábato, if he said more than Borges ever did about the tango, still did not say much. Sábato sometimes gets the credit for the famous definition of the tango as a sad thought,
dancing. It is nice to know that he was sensitive to the idea, but the idea was not his. As he was always careful to acknowledge, the definition was coined in the 1930s by a vernacular poet,
Enrique Santos Discépolo. There were many gifted tango lyricists in Buenos Aires. Some of them were more celebrated than he was—Carlos Gardel was world-famous—and a few of them
were almost as prolific, but nobody was both as gifted and prolific as Discepolo. All the literature that will ever really matter about the tango is in his lyrics. The acid jealousy is in them,
and the dirt and the danger. They can be read with profit as an example of what an unrecognized poet can do with his freedom from respectability. But they can’t be read with as much profit
as they can be listened to. Even with Discepolo, the words take you back to the music, and the average lyric by a less inventively observant writer never leaves the music, because it is too thin
and predictable. The usual tango text is a sob story that clinches almost every quatrain
with the word
corazón
. (Try substituting
our non-resonant little word “heart” and you’ll see straight away why most tango lyrics don’t translate.) Accumulating over decades, the treasury of tango lyrics,
repetitive though it is, already represents a large potential distraction from the music, and hence from the dance.

Unfortunately scholarship, which rarely dances, has an imperative of its own, and has been inexorably
crowding into the act. In one language or another, there is a new book about the tango every month. There are whole sociological treatises on how the dance started. Was it a ritual parade of
mutual ownership staged by a hooker and her pimp? Was it an elaborate ruse by two gay gauchos to placate a fractious steer? The one thing certain is that the news first leaked out from La Boca,
the low-life port district of Buenos Aires. It definitely didn’t come in from Africa with the slaves, because there weren’t any. If the denizens of the bars and brothels did not
actually invent the
milonga
and transform it into the tango, why did people of such low expectations develop an art-form so infinitely, so incongruously, so
needlessly
elaborate? (Because the tango’s improvised steps, like the moves in chess, rapidly extrapolate towards infinity, you will never dance the
same tango twice unless you repeat the whole pattern from memory, on an empty floor.) How did it all happen? Since the origins are blurred, the opportunities for speculation are endless. As
happened with jazz, the main threat posed by scholarship is that it will raise the tango to the level of respectability, and thus drain away some of the excitement. But comfort can be taken from
the piquant fact that the tango has never become socially acceptable in its country of origin. For the upper classes of Argentina, the tango is a low-life event, and President Carlos Menem, by
his avowed passion for the dance—in the ten years of his presidency from 1989 to 1999, he must have mentioned it a thousand times—only proved that his origins were on a par with his
hairstyle and stacked heels.

To hear Menem tell it—and I heard him tell it, when I interviewed him in his office—he is a
tanguero
born and bred. In fact he can dance about three steps, which at least puts him ahead of Eva Perón, who never danced the tango in her life. Since her
death, of course, she has been dancing it more and more all the time. In the movie of
Evita—
fun fascists burn the boards!—the tango goes on all
around her, as if it
had been the national dance of Argentina. It never was, still isn’t, and probably never will be as long as there are young females of good family
who want to look as if they are saving themselves for a suitably elevated marriage. Strangely enough, there
is
a country which has the tango as its national
dance: Finland. But an Evita story relocated to Finland was never on the cards.

If the tango has yet to complete its conquest of the country that gave it birth, it has certainly
conquered the rest of the world, almost certainly because of its unique combination of beauty and difficulty: it is lovely if done well, but doing it well takes intense application. In Japan, for
example, where ballroom dancing is taken very seriously, the tango is correctly judged to be the dance that leaves all the other dances looking elementary. It should be said in haste that the
Argentinian tango is not really a ballroom dance at all. For a long time, the ballroom version of the tango was the only version the world knew about. Hence the impression, still widespread, that
the dance is assembled from struts and poses, with a rose being passed from one set of bared teeth to another, as in
Some Like It Hot
. Gradually the touring
tango shows from Argentina have supplemented that impression with a more subtle one, and among dancers all over the planet the tango is now seen to be a truly international culture in itself,
with a full attendant panoply of legend, protocol, dress code and scholarship. Quite a load for a mere dance to carry.

And a dance is all it is. It’s
the
dance, and you have to take it seriously
or you’ll never dance it, but if you can’t laugh at yourself along the way you’ll crack up before you get there. This is especially true for a man. A woman can learn the steps
with reasonable ease, but a man, because he must lead, will be face to face with his own character when he finds he can’t. Previous experience in any form of dancing which entails holding
on to a partner will be a help, but it won’t be enough to keep him from despair as he once again, for the tenth time that evening, steers a woman into trouble. Apart from her twitching hand
and trembling back, the thing to grasp is that a minute’s dancing is worth a month of talk. A lot of what comes with the dance is fascinating, yet still irrelevant. What’s
unequivocally worthwhile is the music, but it’s possible to go overboard even for that. By now even the wax cylinders of the first tango bands are on compact disc, proving that the
sumptuous
texture of the tango sound was there from the start. The sound has always had a drive that needs no drums: the bass fiddle, the pacemaker guitar, the staccato sob of
the
bandoneon
squeezeboxes and the plinking pizzicato of the strings combine to provide the inexorable momentum. On top of the momentum the melodic
interplay gives continually varied signals for the leader to alter his steps and for the woman to decorate hers with a kick or flicker of her free foot. The texture has always been an invitation
to musical talent, and to trace the achievement of the individual composers and bandleaders like Anabal Troilo, Enrico Cadicamo, Oswaldo Pugliese or Carlos de Sali is almost as rewarding, in each
case, as following Duke Ellington through the late thirties and early forties.

Standing at the post–World War II peak of the tradition, Astor Piazzolla was certainly a prodigy,
but he might also have been a portent, not to say a nemesis. As a working member of Troilo’s orchestra, Piazzolla was boiling with so many of his own out-of-tempo ideas that he had roughly
the same effect as Charlie Parker on Jay McShann’s sax section. When Troilo warned Piazzolla that people didn’t come to listen, they came to dance, he might not have been wrong.
Piazzolla pushes the characteristic rubato of the tango to a point where only an expert dancer can respond to it, and tango music is dead if it loses touch with the dance. Collect the records by
all means. A Japanese tango fan who goes by the name of Baba has accumulated more than five thousand of them. Several times a year, Baba makes the thirty-five-hour trip from Tokyo to Buenos Aires
in order to bury himself in the record stores on and around the Avenida Corrientes. By my calculations he will never finish listening to the discs he already owns even if he spins them only once
each, but one salient fact saves him from being a clinical case of
tango loco
: he must be practising his moves while he listens, because he dances pretty
well. Several times in Buenos Aires after midnight, I have seen him dancing to the music he loves so much. He has a nice long tread and a neat swerve that he must have perfected while dodging
around his free-standing stereo speakers back there in Japan.

Baba has been listening with his feet, and so should we all, because they are trying to tell us something. They are
telling us that we can’t hear that bewitching music in its full whining, weeping, surging succulence until we see it danced. What was once true of jazz is still true of
the tango. The rhythmic measure of pre-bop jazz was the human heartbeat, and the way to feel it fully was to watch dancers fling each other about. The rhythmic measure of the tango
is the human breath, and you can feel it fully only when you watch dancers perform the visual equivalent of a sigh of regret and a moan of bliss. You have to see the sad thought, dancing. Even if
I had been a mere onlooker, my own involvement with the tango would have been worth it for what I have seen. Not just in Buenos Aires but in London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, New York, Nijmegen,
Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Auckland I have seen men and women, right in the middle of a jammed salon, create something for which only the word “poem” can serve the turn: the word
“sculpture” would be too static. If I hadn’t been present, I would never have known, because these were poems written to be thrown away. No minicam will ever be able to capture
those moments, even if it follows the dancers through the crowd. The observer has to be there, with the thing observed.

As to the question of how a man of my generation feels about women, I detect, at the eleventh hour, signs of improvement.
Undoubtedly it was the sight of old goats with pretty young women in their arms that helped draw me into the tango world, a man in winter longing for a touch of spring. It is also inescapably
true that sex and the tango are in close connection. But to be connected, things first have to be separate, and the beginner soon finds out that if he regards the salon as a make-out mall he will
not get far. The attractions are real and the jealousies are awful, but they are usually more about dancing than about desire. In Buenos Aires, I have danced with women old enough to be my
mother, and got furious when they danced better with their husbands. So if the passion to possess has not been quelled, at least it is operating on a scale less narrow. On the whole, I have seen
few fields of human activity where the deep urge to love has come closer to being tamed and civilized. I am not even sure, any longer, that the urge to dance might not lie just as deep. On those
terrifying nights of compulsory jollity in Stalin’s dacha, when the maidservants had been dismissed and the crazy old killer kept his drunken ministers awake until dawn, he would make them
dance, and occasionally join in himself. His madness and their fear had reduced them all to a condition so primeval that they might as well have been wearing skins, yet dancing is what they
did. There is a neutrality to dancing, if only because people, while they are doing it, can’t easily do anything else. Even a war dance happens before the war, not
during it. Hitler and Goebbels both heard a tango orchestra, and quite approved. A pity they never got addicted, because as any man who tries it is bound to discover, it can’t be done
without humility, and if you haven’t got much of that, you have to get some, or else give up. Sábato was right about the introspection. A man who wants to find out who he really is
should try watching the woman he loves as she dances the tango with a maestro.

EDWARD SAID