Four weeks after my trip to the UK I find myself wanting to push my boundaries. Wake myself up. Be the adventurer that I know I am born to be. Sometimes I can only do it in tiny ways (ways that don’t involve spending hundreds of pounds on flights around the globe), but I can still do it. I decide on a Buenos Aires milonga I’ve been meaning to try for at least a year. I take the 60 colectivo across the city and arrive in Congreso about six, early evening: pay my $15pesos; get three raffle tickets for two different draws; exchange my coat for a number; change my shoes in the Damas; receive warm welcomes all round. A lady in the loos even gives me a yummy chocolate eclair type toffee. The hostess shows me to a single empty seat in the second row (of two), behind a full to bursting front line. I beam a smile to both sides as I squeeze through crossed legs and stilettos. Alas (and I confess, because I have a soft heart, that it places a tiny dent in my joy) my fellow tangueras look straight through me. Once I might have shrunk in confidence. Not anymore. Truth is I believe in myself these days. There’s that, and the fact that I’ve already spotted three men I know.
By the time the next tanda begins I’m ready. A foreigner male pal of mine is on the table dead opposite me, in the second row (so let’s call him SecondRow), back against the wall. We make eye contact, and he grins. There are already dancers on the floor and it’s a stretch to keep him in my sights. I lose his eyes. Find them. He nods. Lose him. Find him. I nod. All going swimmingly. Then the Argentine bloke sitting in front of my friend gets up.
It all happens muy rapido and I don’t quite know how I do it, but I clock almost instantly that this man (let’s call him FrontRow) thinks I have nodded or smiled or something, at him. I also realise that I know him, dance with him every week somewhere else, kissed him hello in the hall ten minutes earlier as I was paying the entrada. I would have given him my best mirada later of course, but haven’t actually done so yet.
For a milli-second I am stuck in a freeze frame of uncertainty. I consider abandoning SecondRow just because I can’t bear the idea of anyone being stranded on the dancefloor without a partner, and SecondRow is not actually on his feet yet. Then my thoughts tumble, No! I won’t do it. I can’t. My contract is with SecondRow. He knows it. I know it. I wanted him. He wanted me. We’ve done the nods…
More bodies are on the floor. Maintaining eye contact with SecondRow around the dancers makes me wish I had the neck of a giraffe, but I manage to reassure him with my gaze and he gets up. FrontRow must see me staring at SecondRow because he sits down and apparently, I learn later from SecondRow mutters, Mujeres.
FrontRow then ignores me for the entire session. I even look at him for vals, but he refuses to bite. I know he knows I try, but he avoids. Punishing me? I reckon so, and I doubly reckon so when my girlfriend arrives a couple of hours later and he almost immediately dances with her. Will he still be punishing me next week? It won’t break my heart if he does, but it will make me sad. Everyone can make a mistake, and in this case I have to say that I don’t really think that the mistake was mine. I know who I looked at. And I had my glasses on.
I do enjoy the evening. Gorgeous traditional venue. Music that pulls me from my chair again and again. Gentlemen who I feel would forgive me anything on the basis of the shine in their eyes as they pull away from our tandas. Yet, I can’t help allowing FrontRow into my thoughts on the bus home. How he could barely bring himself to nod goodbye to me… so serious, so wounded, so out of proportion. Or so it seems to me. Couldn’t we have smiled, laughed, passed off the cock-up as just one of those things?
Months ago in another milonga, I managed to arrive on the dance floor to discover two men waiting for me, and not just any two men. Two men from the same prime front row table. Two men I’d been trying to land for weeks. Mortified, I explained to the one that I hadn’t looked at him… He cabeceo-ed me the very next tanda. Now that is what I call a gentle man.
Maybe my reaction is out of proportion to the unimportance of the events, but the episode with FrontRow puts me off the tango scene for a day or two. This weekend I abandon the dance that brought me to Argentina, and escape on the Semi-Rapido 60 bus to Escobar for the annual National Fiesta de la Flor (that’s the equivalent of the Chelsea Flower Show to us Brits). And bloody marvellous it is too. In amongst the orange Gerberas and the wafting smells of parilla-grilled beef, I find a knitwear designer who was possibly born to knit me the wedding coat of my dreams. I also spot a Barbie-inspired over the top cream floral sphere that brings the glitterballs of the Buenos Aires milongas to my mind and has me conjuring images of a massive globe of blooms hanging from the roof of La Glorieta on our special day… and now I am dreaming I know, but a dear friend has put the idea in my mind and I can’t help it. Where better for Me and C. to do the public bit of our knot-tying than in the bandstand in the park where we met? Course I need to work out how to get permission from El Gobierno de la Ciudad, or at least from the Belgrano City Council, but hey… if we actually manage to get our papers in order to wed in the first place, I’m sure that part would be a breeze. Wouldn’t it?
Ah well, maybe now I am digressing into fairytales. Nice one though no? And blessedly I’m now far, far, far from the little wolfcub in sheep’s clothing that was the genteel Buenos Aires milonga where this wee tale began. Sometimes you just gotta get away from all those cabeceos and codigos. Or at least balance them with something mucho removed. Yesterday it was the Flower Show in Escobar, and you can see the full picture story of our rather fabulous day out (including the ones of me posing in my new bruja-black designer knit) right here on Flickr. Next week it could be Temaiken. Or Lujan. Perhaps I’m entering a new phase of living in Argentina (at two years six months) involving exchanging the colectivos for the semi-rapidos and venturing beyond the city walls. And a good thing too I reckon. Flowers. Flight. Fresh air. Freedom.
In a strange twist of synchronicity today, a gorgeous girl I know in Buenos Aires sent me a Martha Graham quote. I’ve already got one on my wall. This one I’ve never seen. Here it is.
Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul’s weather to all who can read it.
I like it. Once in a previous life, I was stuck. I never want to be stuck again. And right now movement in my mind, seems to require movement in my physical world. So I’ll do it. Maybe in small ways. But I’ll do it. And thus, I will ensure that my soul will never again lose its glorious multi-coloured wings.
Where are you flying today? Do tell. I’d love to hear.
