One problem in writing about Argentine tango is that so many tango productions are larded with cliché. To name just a few:
Tough Buenos Aires tangueros hanging around in a run-down boliche club, eyeing the loose women.
The tanguero lamenting the love he has mis-spent on yet another heartless woman.
The heart-broken streetwise lover wandering alone through the midnight mists.
La ultima curda: Drunkenness as the antidote to lost love.
Lovers on a dark side-street, embraced and kissing in the light shed by a lonely streetlamp.
Trivial sentimentality for the neighborhood of the tanguero’s lost youth.
There are many, many others, and all of them seem to be essayed in the immensely popular stage presentations that have been mounted around the world since the 1980s. There is usually also an extra enactment, the pièce de résistance. It is the knife-fight scene between one jealousy-ridden capo and another for the heart of the beautiful whore, each man supported by a dangerous crew of knife-wielding gangsters, all of whom somehow seem also to be very well-trained performance tango dancers.
I have been worrying about this throughout the writing of my current project, a novel titled Martín Shadow. It begins with a tango dance scene in a run-down Buenos Aires boliche called Perdición. So, right away I was flirting with danger. There is only one dangerous gangster in the scene…Martín himself…and he’s unarmed. In this scene, all he wants to do is dance with Adonia Faustino, who is intelligent, beautiful, and decidedly not a whore. She is an aristocrat’s daughter who just happens to be passing through the boliche, slumming with some girlfriends in order to see the great singer and bandoneonista, Rubén Juárez. (If you’re not familiar with this idiosyncratic genius’s music, here is your opportunity.
If you put aside Martín’s feverish wish to know more about Adonia, the boliche scene in my novel is innocence itself, although it is the beginning of the dangerously threatened love affair, the resulting forced marriage, and the child whose father…whose father….
To find out, you’ll have to read it.
“She sat down with a few girlfriends, Argentines, to order glasses of wine and await the tango musician whom they had come especially to see. Black-haired…with the kind of Spanish skin that, though touched by the sun, had such a fine creaminess that its color resembled what Pablo Neruda, in his love sonnet #8, describes as el pan que la luna fragante/elabora paseando su harina por el cielo (the bread that the fragrant moon/finishes so finely, passing its wheat about the sky). Pablo Neruda. Martín grinned with the notion that he not only knew who Neruda was, but had read hundreds of his poems. Martín, on his tenth birthday, a street urchin, had not been able to read at all. He mumbled the lines now as he glanced at the young women, to whom the waiter Raulito was serving glasses of Mendoza malbec wine. Their conversation wavered between gathering gayety and self-conscious embarrassment. They were elegant, slumming oligarchs speaking English and Spanish, none of whom normally would ever set foot in a place like Perdición.”
The real themes of the book are love found, love betrayed, and love renewed in the midst of great political danger. It is therefore the sort of novel that you would easily find in a European bookstore in the nineteenth century. Readers of contemporary north American fiction…which is in general a very thin fiction… may find this sort of thing beyond their ken. But if you know South America, you understand the profound truths that such a novel can still tell, when placed on that continent.
In this book, tango itself is somewhat peripheral. Martín is a superb dancer of tango, taught as a child by his mentor, Canchero, a Buenos Aires capo whose work with the military junta of the 1970s enriched him…much to the junta’s ultimate worry. Martín and Adonia initially seek each other out through tango, despite the distance that lies between them socially, a distance that is seldom overcome in rigid class-conscious societies like that of Argentina. Indeed, in that country, the privileged classes to this day usually disparage tango as a noisy braggart from a raggedy slum. (As mentioned above, the tango stage-dance presentations around the world actually celebrate this same thing, not realizing, just as their wealthy neighbors don’t, that this is such a hackneyed idea.)
But I felt that I could not write a novel that takes place in Buenos Aires and features a classic, danger-ridden love affair between a gangster and an heiress, without tango. They are both drawn to the soulfulness that, in truthful, trained, sensuous hands, tango does provide. Because of the risk of cliché, though, I use tango sparingly. It is a metaphor for the love that Martín and Adonia have for each other. But it is the love and not the tango that carries the day.
These days, stage tango is mostly filled with the kinds of clichés I’ve mentioned. That’s a shame. Argentine tango deserves better treatment than it usually gets in the theater presentations we see ad. nauseam.
© Copyright 2022. Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.
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