Tango (12 page)

a los garabos reos deseosos de tanguear
.

La orquesta mistonguera musita un tango fulo
,

los reos se desgranan buscando, entre el montón
,

la princesita rosa de ensortijado rulo

que espera a su Romeo como una bendición
.

El dueño de la casa

atiende a las visitas

los pibes del convento

gritan en derredor

jugando a la rayuela
,

al salto, a las bolitas
,

mientras un gringo curda

maldice al Redentor
.

El fuelle melodioso termina un tango papa
.

Una pebeta hermosa saca del corazón

un ramo de violetas, que pone en la solapa

del garabito guapo, dueño de su ilusión
.

Termina la milonga. Las minas retrecheras

salen con sus bacanes, henchidas de emoción
,

llevando de esperanzas un cielo en sus ojeras

y un mundo de cariño dentro del corazón
.

The slum is in its Sunday best / the girls arrive all ready to show off / Their best clothes, their figure and their style / and the lads all ready to dance a tango / The dance band plays a simple tango / the lads rush to find among the crowd / the pink princess with curls in her hair / waiting to be blessed by her Romeo
.

The owner of the house / attends to his visitors / the kids from the slum / Rush about shouting / playing hopscotch / jumping, rolling marbles / While a drunken foreigner / berates the Redeemer
.

The tuneful bandoneon ends a fine tango / a lovely girl pulls from
her breast / a bunch of violets which she pins to the lapel / of the handsome boy who is the object of her dreams / The dance ends, the girls / leave with their rich boys, swelling with emotion / their eyes full of hope / and their hearts full of love
.

(‘Oro muerto', Dead gold – Juan Raggi, 1926)

The innocence of the street party is as brief as the tango itself. The girls leaving joyfully with their rich boyfriends (their
bacanes
) may well be leaving the
conventillo
for a brothel like the one at 348 Corrientes Street, commemorated in Carlos César Lenzi's emblematic tango ‘A media luz' (In the half light) of 1926. Here, in the shadowy places of transition between the city and the barrios by the port, men could come for tea or cocktails, comfort, a dance or sex, in the discreet second-floor flat furnished tastefully and expensively from Harrod's store on Florida Street. It offers discretion (there is no concierge), comfort, drugs and love – at a price. Even here the joy is short-lived, the ecstasy a three-minute dance, the roles played out by each partner the aspiration of people without roots. The pining voice that sings ‘Mi noche triste' is almost certainly the pimp, the smart
compadrito
who will have watched with satisfaction as his woman danced and made love with others. His love was also his hope of redemption and survival in a world with very little morality.

There are others in the theatre of tango; the Mother, remembered and evoked as a woman incapable of deceit, loyal and loving, is located in some other, previous world, in which the order of things was uncorrupted. The Barman who listens endlessly in silence to drunken laments from young men for whom this is almost always the ‘last binge' before dying. There is the rival, or the Rival, another pimp fighting for the
milonguera
, or the rich man slumming in the barrio who tempts and tantalizes her with promises of wealth and stability. And the Madam, herself once a dancer or a prostitute, who now shares her wisdom with the young girls she gathers round her at establishments like the one on Corrientes Street.

There is a supporting cast too, to watch and sometimes to sympathize, sometimes to gloat. The Friend, who is loyal and concerned, but unable to alter a destiny that he sees unfolding before him. There is the Gambler, whose most famous song is Gardel and Le Pera's ‘Por una cabeza' (On the nose), the embodiment of the yearning for a quick fortune that is the key to another world. And there is the Dying Lover, the Lady of the Camelias, so familiar from late-nineteenth-century literature.

Man is the victim, though his innocence is certainly open to question. The tango interweaves all these stories, in an elegant ballet of shifting fortunes and moving powers.

Contursi certainly established an idiom, an atmosphere and a universe of feeling for tango with ‘Mi noche triste'. The lament for lost love, the sense of betrayal, the impotence of the song's protagonist will endlessly recur in one form or another.

‘You left me with my soul in tatters . . .', he sings. For the tango ‘is the complaints book of the arrabal'.
⁶
Woman (with the exception of the Mother of course) is the betrayer here – the one who buys and sells love. Contursi had introduced us earlier to the cynical woman in his ‘Champagne tango' (1914).

Se acabaron esas minas

Que siempre se conformaban

Con lo que el bacán les daba

Si era bacán de verdad
.

Hoy sólo quieren vestidos

Y riquísimas alhajas
,

Coches de capota baja

Pa' pasear por la ciudad
.

Nadie quiere conventillo

Ni ser pobre costurera
,

Ni tampoco andar fulera . . .

Sólo quieren aparentar

Ser amigo de fulano

Que tenga mucho vento

Que alquile departamento

Que la lleve al Pigalle
.

Those girls don't exist any more / the ones that just accepted things / took whatever the rich man gave them / if he really was so rich. / Now they just want dresses / and fancy jewels / convertibles to ride in / around the city
.

No one wants to live in conventillos / nor be a poor seamstress / or be less than well dressed. / They just want to put on airs / be best friends with so-and-so / who's got plenty of money / rents them a flat / and takes them to the Pigalle
.

(‘Champagne Tango – Pascual Contursi, 1914)

How very far this all seems from the world of the dance, where the man controls, manipulates and drives his woman, expresses his domination of her, and she twists and turns to the touch of his hand – sensual, seductive yes, but never leading. Yet here, in the
tango-canción
, the tango-song, the woman is cynical and manipulative, and the man, the
compadrito
, who lived from her earnings in the past, now presents himself as the victim. The transgressive, amoral universe of the underworld provides the new tango-song with its dramatis personae, but its moral universe seems to have turned upside down. Now the tangos are ‘male confessions that talk overwhelmingly about women'.
⁷

As he protects himself with a facade of steps that demonstrates perfect control [the male tanguero] contemplates his absolute lack of control in the face of history and destiny.
⁸

This is one interpretation – that tango is an expression of a general sense of alienation and powerlessness, an echo of the marginality
of the immigrant. But there is another text at work in these sometimes melodramatic pieces. The man laments his impotence before the wiles of women, women who, as Contursi notes, are unwilling to accept the life of decent poverty, sacrifice and self-abnegation that awaits them in the slums and clapboard houses of the
conventillos
and the
arrabales
.

Their unwillingness to accept a wretched fate perhaps reflected the atmosphere of emancipation spreading among the middle-class women of Buenos Aires. Their attendance at the afternoon
thés dansants
was more combative and challenging than their thoroughly respectable equivalents in New York. It was said that the women of Buenos Aires snorted cocaine and drank enthusiastically with their part-time afternoon gigolos, just as their husbands did in the evenings with the
milongueras
. The symbolic universe of the new Argentina, with its emphasis on family and decency, was in some sense enshrined in the Radical Party, which increasingly came to represent these values. Yet women seemed increasingly unwilling to passively accept their role in this new arrangement, be they middle-class women or the working-class girls whose route out of the barrio passed through the dance halls and cabarets. It is a curious contradiction that the growing number of women employed in factories, shops and increasingly in offices expressed fewer concerns with independence and liberation, despite the level of organization and militancy in the working class in general.
⁹
For even the anarchists saw the role of women in similar ways to social organizations – as mothers and supporters of male activity.

Rosita Quiroga, one of the early group of women tango singers, described the trajectory of a typical
milonguera
, responding to the criticism implicit in so many of these early tangos.

Yo de mi barrio era la piba más bonita

En un colegio de monjas me eduqué

Y aunque mis viejos no tenían mucha guita

Con familias bacanas me traté
.

Y por culpa de este trato abacanado
,

Ser niña bien fue mi única ilusión

Y olvidando por completo mi pasado
,

A un magnate le entregué mi corazón
.

Por su porte y su trato distinguido
,

Por las cosas que me mintió al oído
,

No creí que pudiera ser malvado

Un muchacho tan correcto y educado
.

Sin embargo me indujo el mal hombre
,

Con promesas de darme su nombre
,

A dejar mi hogar abandonado

Para ir a vivir a su lado
.

Y por eso que me vida se desliza

Entre el tango y el champán del cabaret;

Mi dolor se confunde en mi risa

Porque a reír mi dolor me acostumbré
.

Y si encuentro algún otario que pretenda

Por el oro mis amores conseguir
,

Yo lo dejo sin un cobre pa que aprenda

Y me pague lo que aquel me hizo sufrir
.

Hoy bailo el tango, soy molinera

Me llaman loca y no sé qué;

Soy flor de fango, una cualquiera
,

Culpa del hombre que me engañó
.

Y entre las luces de mil colores

Y la alegría del cabaret
,

Vendo caricias y vendo amores

Para olvidar a aquel que se fue
.

I was the prettiest girl in my district / I went to a convent school / And though my parents didn't have much money / I spent time with rich families. / And because of that contact with wealthy people / all I wanted was to be well off / and forgetting my past completely / I gave my heart to a wealthy magnate. / His manner and the way he treated me / and the lies he whispered in my ear / Made me think he could do nothing wrong / he was too well brought up
.

Yet that bad man / promised to give me his name / persuaded me to abandon my home / and live with him. That's why now I live my life / between the tango and champagne cabaret / my pain flows into my laughter / and I've got used to laughing off the pain
.

And if I ever meet a man / who tries to win my heart with gold / I'll leave him without a penny to his name to teach him a lesson / and to get back at him for what the other put me through. I dance the tango now, I am a cancan girl / they call me crazy and other things; / I come from the lower depths, / just another victim of the man who took her for a ride. And among the coloured lights / and the joy of the cabaret, / I sell my kisses and I sell my love / to forget the man who left me
.

(De mi barrio, In my district – Roberto Goyheneche, 1920–25)

Enter the
Milonguita
, herself a victim of the men who have abused her, on whom she takes her revenge. The tango lyricists warn her that all pleasure is fleeting, and that this dissolute public life will soon end when youth and beauty fade. But there is no road back from the life she has chosen, or the carpe diem it implies – living for the day like ‘La Mina del Ford' – the girl in the Ford.

The man who suffers an unrequited love for this fallen girl, so easily seduced by wealth and glamour, is for the most part alone and abandoned, suffering in eloquent images the consequences of his loyalty and authentic love. Yet surely this is the same
compadrito
who just shortly before had boasted of his prowess with the knife
and his ability to cheat and con vulnerable visitors to the lower depths. His background, as we have seen, was rural in most cases. He too was an immigrant, an exile from the changing countryside cast into the world of the
arrabal
, where survival was a matter of skill and ruthlessness. The arts he learned transformed him into a pimp – isolated, individualistic, using his women to feather his own nest. He never worked, yet found the resources to dress in self-conscious imitation of the upper classes.

His life changed as the city changed, and now the poor room in which Contursi places him is probably in one of the working-class neighbourhoods that have recently arisen. Perhaps he, like the
Milonguita
, had moved out of the dockland barrio in search of better things. His failure, as it is painted here, however, is not a financial one but a kind of moral fall replayed against the gaudy background of the demi-monde. All that is left to him now is nostalgia for that world, now lost, and loquacious self-pity poured into song.

Eche amigo, nomás, écheme y llene

hasta el borde la copa de champán
,

que esta noche de farra y de alegría

el dolor que hay en mi alma quiero ahogar
.

Es la última farra de mi vida
,