Tango (4 page)

The dance itself is a marriage – a ‘three-minute marriage', as some have suggested – an encounter between traditions far wider than the pimp's propaganda. The twisting of the body – the
firuletes
and
cortes
– must surely have its origins in the dances of the black communities, the
tangos de negros
banned by the Municipal Court of Montevideo in the 1850s as lewd and obscene.
¹¹
It might also have found those same movements in the tango of Andalusia. The elegant and complex footwork could have come from the fast
tarantella
of Northern Italy. But the embrace belonged to the
habaneras
that brought the European contredanse to Latin America via Cuba, brought perhaps by sailors who gave it its other name, the
marinera
. And the native addition to the mix was the
milonga
, the country dance that accompanied the rural exiles of the
arrabales
and the
compadritos
who claimed it for their own in the city.

The tango was simultaneously a ritual and a spectacle of traumatic encounters between people who should never have come together.
¹²

These dramas of challenge and transgression had their own very particular cast of characters. The theatre was the street – the ill-lit, unpaved streets of the dockland districts, or the lanes around the slaughterhouses, where the cattlemen came and went in their squeaking carts. The dance, at this first moment of its birth, was a wary meeting, its signs mute at first, though it would soon develop a language of its own, both a language of gesture and a new speech –
lunfardo
– which was itself a meeting, a fusion of languages and codes that were both inclusive (of this new riverside population) and exclusive (of the other Buenos Aires growing up in the centre and the north of the city).
Lunfardo
was a secret language shared by
a new community whose members were linked only by their marginality and their vulnerability. It is hard at this distance to know to what extent it was a spoken language, an authentic argot spoken to conceal and challenge the Spanish (or French or English) of bourgeois city folk. What we know of it is its second life, as the expression of an authentic experience viewed retrospectively, nostalgically, by the first generation to create a poetry in
lunfardo
that aspired to speak to an audience beyond the world of the docks.

In its early manifestations,
lunfardo
was a functional code that made possible the first interactions between immigrant communities that remained to a considerable extent isolated and enclosed to themselves. It arose and was forged at first in the spaces of social interchange and shared experience. It was also the language of the street, the brothel and the criminal underclass. A basic
lunfardo
vocabulary list provides several alternative words for prostitutes, pimps and brothels; it offers several variants for confidence tricksters and silver-tongued persuaders; it provides a number of ways to describe knives and the scars they leave on the face (
feite
,
barbijo
). The fraternity of thieves is divided by its particular skills; the
culatero
, for example, specializes in stealing from the back pockets of his targets. And this assortment of spivs, con men and flyboys has names for all its victims from the wealthy
bacán
who pays well for his mistress (his
mina
) whom he keeps in a
bulín
, to the soft fool and easy touch
boludo
or
gil
. And in permanent attendance are the corrupt police, moneylenders and fences who oversee this network of mutual small-scale exploitation.

When men danced together, they would mimic the pimp's promises or reenact an actual or imagined knife fight with the country boys who strolled the streets as if they owned them – and took very little persuasion to demonstrate their skill with the short knife – the
facón
– that was part of the uniform of the
gaucho
. Like the
malevo
(the criminal), the pimp restrains himself until the prettiest girl in the dance hall provokes him to fight.

Se cruzó

un gran rencor y otro rencor

a la luz

de un farolito a querosén

y un puñal

que parte en dos un corazón

porque así

lo quiso aquella cruel mujer
.

Cuentan los que vieron

que los guapos

culebrearon

con su cuerpos

y buscaron

afanosos

el descuido

del contrario

y en un claro

de la guardia

hundió el mozo

de Palermo

hasta el mango

su facón
.

Anger met with anger / in the light of a paraffin lamp / and a knife that / would cut a heart in two / flashed because a cruel woman / had wanted it so. / Those who were there said / the two men / swerved and swayed their bodies / while they watched / alert / for the other to make a false move / or to lower his guard / when the kid from Palermo / buried his knife in the other / to the hilt
.

(‘La puñalada', The Slashing – Celedonio Flores, 1937)

The fight, the two men swerving and moving their bodies around one another in anticipation of a strike, seems more dance than battle, and the precursor to an encounter that would later be endlessly relived, albeit without a blade, as tango.

In those early years the whole complex life of the community found expression in the physical theatre of dance. There would certainly have been singers improvising verses to the playing of the bands. Since they played in brothels and cafés, their content would surely have been mostly erotic, explicitly or obliquely, like the blues verses that have come to us from the riverside brothels of the South of the United States. In this phase of transition too, the rural tradition of Argentina itself, the
payador
or travelling troubadour who improvised couplets at local festivals and other social gatherings to the accompaniment of the seven-stringed guitar which was the predecessor of the contemporary instrument, was very much alive in Buenos Aires. The growing city had drawn in people from the countryside but in its expansion it had also absorbed rural communities around its edges. The newly emerging tango incorporated the rhythms of traditional music too, most significantly and enduringly the traditional
milonga
, whose fast pace defined the first tangos.

The early dancers still wore the
gaucho
's wide trousers and high boots and the short poncho and flat wide-brimmed hat that commemorated the days of horses and open common spaces of the pre-modern
pampa
. But that would give way very soon to a different uniform, to a dress that reflected not the origins of the immigrant population but its newly constructed reality. This contradictory, fragile, often dangerous world was represented by the
compadrito
.

ENTER THE COMPADRITO

He may have arrived carrying a guitar, wearing the clothes of the
gaucho
, but he had left his horse behind. What he had brought with him from his settlement on the
pampas
was his memory, and the traditional songs and the rhythms of their country dances – the
chacarera
and the
milonga
. In the poor districts around the city or among the abandoned mansions of the centre he would have found lodging of some kind. But he was still the
compadre
– the man of the country.

Compadritos
.

The city did not allow him the luxury of remaining that way for very long. Survival in the city demanded new skills and new attitudes that would serve him best in the bruising encounters with the young men and women who had come from Europe to share this new urban space. He came from a world where survival was equally precarious, which is why his songs so often celebrated his prowess with horse and lariat, his skill as a fighter, and his successes as a lover. The myths, at least, were adaptable to the new environment, where he was equally required to show flexibility,
skill, and the wisdom of the street. More often than not he proved ill-adapted to work, and instead he cruised the muddy streets, observing his
china
(his girl), or seeking out a chance to steal or cheat or misdirect some innocent passing stranger.

Now he was the
compadrito
, the
compadre ‘venido a menos
' (come down in the world):

Instead of becoming only an urban Don Juan, the compadrito became a pimp. As skillful and valiant a fighter as the compadre, he became, not a defender of rights, but a bully, a robber, and at times a killer.
¹³

Most were less than killers, but many were pimps and confidence tricksters. And as their prestige grew, so they abandoned the short ponchos and glistening black boots in favour of the tight-fitting suits, high heels, spats and long, brilliantined hair depicted on so many posters and paintings (and in so many tangos) of the day. And with time, he might repeat, albeit in very different circumstances, his grandfather's role as the servant of a local chieftain or
caudillo
, although one that had exchanged spurs and saddle for the frock coat of the parliamentarian.

The compadrito was the man of the tango. And the tango was his dance, its choreographic style based on his affectations, developed in the brothels he ran on the edges of Buenos Aires.
¹⁴

He no longer danced in the country style, whirling and jumping as his partner mirrored him and held high her whirling skirts. He had taken on the style of the bourgeois – or at least his own version of it – mimicked his dress and assumed his seductive posture, his obvious superiority in comparison to the girls he came to find in his descent into the
arrabal
. The
compadrito
would rarely have ventured beyond the edges of the barrio, but he would
have increasingly seen the arrogant young men of Belgrano and the Barrio Norte come down to his world. And in the dance he posed and proffered this newly learned self, and also remembered the swift evasions and feints that had served him well in the drunken knife duels on the
pampa
. Outside the brothels, he may well have moved along the queue of men outside, moving his body to the music in suggestive anticipation of what was to come. From time to time he would draw out another man to practise his imminent moves or, in the better establishments, to anticipate the brief dance the client might expect in the hall before moving up to the bedroom.

This then was a new music, born in a modern city divided into immigrant ghettoes and the wealthier quarters where the middle classes lived. Directly and indirectly, the tango both echoed that gulf that separated the city from itself and provided its poetic voice. When it found its voice, it was that of a man who sang about women as lovers, as instruments and as sacrificing mothers. It also spoke of ambition and of the battle for survival that drained the tango and its music of any sentimentality. For this was a deep song of rootless people fighting the city and one another in order to survive, and both celebrating and resenting the marginality to which they were condemned by those who benefited from their labour.

The barrio, the
conventillo
, the
arrabal
were transformed as the tango developed in a way that idealized both the evils of the place and its deficiencies – the absence of solidarity, the fleeting pleasures of a life hard lived.

Eran otros hombres más hombres los nuestros
.

No se conocían cocó ni morfina
,

los muchachos de antes no usaban gomina

¿Te acordás hermano? ¡Qué tiempos aquéllos!

Veinticinco abriles que no volverán

Veinticinco abriles, volver a tenerlos

Si cuando me acuerdo me pongo a llorar

¿Dónde están los muchachos de entonces?

Barra antigua de ayer, ¿dónde está?

Yo y vos solos quedamos hermano
,

Yo y vos solos para recordar . . .

¿Dónde están las mujeres aquéllas

minas fieles, de gran corazón

que en los bailes de Laura peleaban

cada cual defendiendo su amor?

Men were more men in those days / they never used cocaine or morphine / the lads then used no grease on their hair. / Remember brother? What times they were! / Twenty-five Aprils that will never return now / Twenty-five Aprils, I wish I could have them again / When I remember I start to weep. / Where are the lads of those days? / Where's the old bar we used to go to? / There's just you and me left, brother / just the two of us to remember . . . / Where are the women, those women / loyal and generous / who would get into fights at Laura's dance hall / each defending her own lover?

(‘Tiempos Viejos', Old Time – Manuel Romero, 1926)

For the moment, the other Buenos Aires was closed to them, emphasizing their exclusion, their loneliness, their invisibility. But Buenos Aires was changing its shape and its appearance, building a new metropolis with the labour of the tango-dancing immigrants. Eventually the walls between would begin to fracture and a traffic would begin between the halves of the divided city. And when it did, tango would play its central part.