Mango Tango

While in a café reading the Argentine rags for bird droppings, I came upon an advertisement for an upcoming Tango show at the Teatro Colón.

They named the show: Café de Los Maestros (The Masters Café) was to be an offshoot after the wildly successful Ry Cooder reassembly of old Cuban Masters in his album: Buena Vista Social Club. The idea, contrived by Gustavo Santaolalla, the Argentinian composer and musician who scored Brokeback Mountain, 21 Grams, The Motorcycle Diaries - was to make a compilation mix of the old tango masters while they were yet drawing breath.

I promptly gulped the coffee and headed out to stand in line at the Teatro Colón to get tickets for the show. It was to be my first experience of the form in the flesh and why not begin with a troupe of octogenarian Argentine masters (music = longevity) at the renown Colón? Being audience to the early 20th century musicians and singers, reliving a bygone glory of themselves, what could possibly be better?

Ticket in hand I paid the grand old dame a visit. August 26th. A lovely early spring shudder was afoot. Crowds making their way in escorted by a band of white-gloved ushers in their late fifties and sixties aping for program handouts as they take your ticket and steer you like a vessel through the sea of red and gold. All the while, the night upon us all. We are moon-covered and in attendance, the entire crowd glazed with an air of expenctancy and desire.

Everything is visually rococo, golden gilded and even-aged, the glowing golden shining brass-numbered plates on the seats assign you and the climbing levels of horseshoe cake with garlands of people hanging from the rafters above make the space become a well ordered circus of sorts. It is lovely. The yellow globes hanging from the bronze of the big light fixtures throughout the large house. Ladys leaning forward thrust into space above like seraphs untethered.

The stage curtain is a red velvet bloodstain also gilded and heavy with time on her like a tired whore . The chatter echoes throughout the space, or rather, resounds in rich timbre the cacophony of pre-curtain mumbling and fumbling about.

All this was crowned by a pallid painting I did not much like, a circular storyline of seasons I imagine, or moments from great operas, semi-coloned by a kind of Don Quixote figure in various attire in a pale medicinal light in the alcove above. Lit a pale blue it seemed to me like certain pieces of bad fifties pale. In my opinion it should be painted over by a new artist and art.

The rest of the place feels like the old rich city that once bathed in a richer pomp and place in world affairs and the old pleasures gather and El Colón yet conveys her time and art and the presence of artists and singers long silent and one is indeed transported to higher level of thought and feeling. You are aware of being very very far away in a strange and magical place.

I picture the Perons in the President’s Box arriving to a performance in those days of their transitory but eternal glory. This is their place. This is Argentina's history and bosom. In this room great minds and talents have cavorted and made magic of the hours.

Yet deified in so many places and people's hearts and I wonder will there always be a part of human nature left to idolatrizde that way. Absurd love seems a scarce commodity.

I didn’t bring a camera but should have as every tourist and his mom was shooting it up to high heaven before, during and after the performance, shameless, waving their glowing video devices like sparklers in your field of vision. Contemporary perversions cell cameras. What abortion of a mind conceived of such a thing?

The concert was being filmed for a documentary on the Masters.

Me. Alone. A sea of strangers at the grand Argentine Event.

It was then the lioness man/boy creature with the porcelain black doll's eyes came and took a seat beside me out of nowhere, a fright wig of black endlessly expanded dead keratin on a skin as wan and pale as a north sea carp, translucent and morbid. I say hello to it in the native tongue half still in shock. He nods at me in a general way, in a kind of Marie Antoinette sort of way. I yawned in reply and we both shuddered in disgust. The chatter continued. The seats before me remained empty. I felt enchanted with my solitude and just drinking in the molasses when

Then:

Of a sudden he came and strode down the aisle in front, tall and ruddy reddish brown hair all Swift and Cambridge in curls with a velvet jacket in a deep blue or so I remember it blue, to take his seat before me, he who was to be Harry Williams.

I watch him take his seat, look hither and thither and I notice he is the combined strands of a few good filaments of Europe. He is a strawberry white man all blush and softness draped over his masculine moustached profile and he was aglow with life. He inhaled and exhaled English through his large and scarlet mouth, but he could have been Dane from the seafaring kind of way he had about himself. A certainty to his gaze. Although he possessed a generally languished and relaxed demeanor, lush and open as a spring rose as well. Harry Williams is a contradiction or combnation of opposites brought together harmoniously. Like a seaborne ship he always seemed poised against the waves of time, like all young men. I tapped him on the shoulder. Invited myself into his life and he turned to me and I asked, “Traveling alone? You look like a traveler to me,” and he, "I am. I am. Hello." and so forth, etc..



The lights go down. I tell him we’ll talk more at intermission.

The show’s not bad. It is being filmed live for a documentary and a man with a guide slides across the stage from time to time swimming throughout the proceedings, shooting footage for the doc.

I listen and fall under the spell of the sad strains coming from the orchestra. A Viola, Violins, Cellos, Bass and of course the ubiquitous accordions . These are the strains and heart-wrenching beats of palpabe and deep music born from the old tangos performed by the elders who made this music known to the world. Some of it is truly good and the applause wrinkles the time and space after each song or number. Some of it seems a bit maudlin in delivery, but always with a grace and a gesture of humility.

Tango seems to me, to be the unfulfilled cry of sexual disillusionment. It begins with great seduction and arousal and then becomes a cacophony of ferocious and thrusting desperate jerks, the accordions, musical foreskins pulled and yanked and caressed, but they always end in lamenting. It is a metaphor for love. The music expresses the inherent pain of communion and separation, intimacy and eternal distance. It is a kind of sadomasochism, but more masochistic than sadistic. It is the sound of pain and ever un-whetted, unrequited, unfullfilled love. A longing for what is in the hand and though one tastes and holds it, it is empty and not real, or at least does not belong to us. It is the most yearning and longing of any sad and needful tone.

When you allow yourself to succumb to its charms, you feel androgyne: both man and woman at once. Its sound comes from deep within as if from the bowels of a conch shell, straining through the endless corridors of a turbulent sea.

It is the dance and the sound of the coming together of man against and alongside woman; bullfighting steps, careful veronicas of movement, spiderlike and sensual, sublime and sorrowful, wet and warm, yet cool in precision. It is sex with the sorrow of inevitable goodbyes.

Internission. Harry and I speak over the seats and decide to walk out to the lobby to intermt and get to know one another. Right off let me say Harry is a charmer. His are large and inviting bovine eyes with a vivacity and casual disinterest that only a true Briton can muster. He is a fine raconteur and at the ready with a phrase. He smoked and I did not yet and we told a little of one another to each other and then returned. I took one of the empty seats at either side him. We watched and listened to the second set and when it was over we dutifully stood and applauded approval and then went out into the cool night and I let Harry direct me to the Café Tortoni which was supposedly the classic after Colón venue and off we went to it together, he smoking and me not yet.


The café Tortoni is a tourist spot without its being a rat trap. It is a classic. It is the old café life setting with an old glass ceiling done in deco like many Parisian brasseries with a good old bar and tables scattered well wall to wall. There are musical numbers from time to time and when I went with Harry there was an awful saccarin guitar singer with a couple of his buddies bravely backing him.

We ordered drinks. This was my first real cocktail in over three weeks of life in Buenos Aires. I ordered Sapphire. With a lemon wedge and got a lemonade. Harry was a sport and drank the mixed thing and they brought me another straight with the wedge itself on its side.

Harry ate a king’s meal of a steak with ham and melted cheese atop it. I had ever seen such a thing, or at least not in years. We talk about his work, his family. I tell him about the work. We talk poetry, writers. We hit it off. He tells me of having been in Barcelona for some months and then much longer here and preferring Argentina to Barcelona. It is great to be talking to someone who travels who eats with gusto and loves books and places and people. Harry is the bees knees.

Afterward we walked the city. Harry having lived in it for the better part of those months led the way. Eventually we ended at my place and drank more wine and spoke about more poets and I read him some of the old things I'd done from memory and some of Pura’s poems from the books I'd brought with me. And then of a sudden I cried for no good reason.

So very like a lonely train bum who has shared good rum with another rummy of the rails and sitting at that cold night fireside he recognizes that they have shared a tin of hot soup and then one of them cries for no good reason at all except that this other person is a friend and he knows it and it counts against the frost and the solitude.

We were sloppy drunk or at least I was and I do think I did smoke that first partial cigarette in the two months of tobacco celibacy just then. It was just books and time and a new friend and the night upon us moonbeaming and it was wonderful. And the puff didn't seem to hurt.

I had now my first good friend in Buenos Aires; he was convivial, ripe with intelligence and a keen sense of place and pleasure and he was to leave the following Friday. This was an unfortunate fact too that marred the real fun it was to be in his company for there was always the knowledge and sense of imminent loss . I suppose we are meant to know someone ever so briefly sometimes and yet their trace, the mark left in their wake by their gestures, honesty, friendship endures and remains. It is like the Tango, even among men at times.