Aquitania

One of the Cunard Line posters that used to adorn the Hotel Fakir tango salon showed the RMS Aquitania, a luxurious ocean liner launched on the eve of the First World War. Aquitania’s towering black hull and four red funnels loomed over gliding tango aficionados, evoking an age of civility and culture that has no place in today’s insular informality. The Aquitania was built by Scots in a Clydebank shipyard and was christened by Alice, Countess of Derby, who served at the time as Queen Alexandra’s Lady of the Bedchamber. Ignatio Quiroga, bartender at the Hotel Fakir, a highly-decorated but somehow disgraced Argentine general exiled in Charleston, and himself a skilled tanguero, once mentioned that both Alice and Alexandra had been avid tangueras. Max, a college professor whose bacterial physiology lectures were popular with the few medical students who still came to class, and a frequent visitor to the Hotel Fakir where he sipped Malbec next to tropical flowers that Ignatio refreshed every day, was intrigued but skeptical.

Months after the disastrous fire, by improbable chance, Max came across the framed Aquitania poster in a run-down rural thrift-store on Johns Island in South Carolina. The glass bore sooty mementos of the gas-fueled inferno that had consumed the Hotel Fakir. On the back was a pasted book-plate depicting a poised cobra and the words “Ex Libris Ferreyra, Buenos Aires.” More improbably, while buying the poster, Max noticed behind the counter a well-worn bandoneon in a faux-leather purple-felted case. Fingering the ivory buttons inexpertly, he coaxed out a few bars of an Astor Piazzolla song. The storeowner’s pubescent daughter, bored and eager for diversion, flipped switch after switch on an ancient electric piano keyboard, and finally elicited a synthesized tango rhythm. Max thought back to the days before DJs when a bandoneon, violin, and piano trio played the crowded Fakir. The air would be permeated with the heady fragrance of ladies’ perfumes, fine wines, cigarillos and tropical flowers. Added to this potent mix were emanations of intense personal dramas driven by desire, jealousy, unrequited love and Tango.

All this was a far cry from the Gullah everyday on Johns Island. Max bought the bandoneon but passed on the synthesizer, earning a glance of reproach from the incipiently beautiful daughter. Installed in his study, visible through the open door from the hall, the Aquitania forever set out for the high seas, a tango orchestra in the great ballroom on the first-class deck faintly audible as he passed by. On a baby grand below the poster, the well-worn bandoneon languished next to a guitar and a clarinet. All four instruments once defined his musical ambitions, and now testified mutely to their abandonment. But all was not lost. Ignatio Quiroga, a man of unchallenged wisdom who was ever ready with Max’s favorite Malbec, had confided in him the key to Tango.

“Embrace your partner with care, confidence and love, and let the music pick the lock.”

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