The Hotel Fakir

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The other night Max was listening to Francisco Canaro and his Tango orchestra when he noticed he was running on empty. He pulled into a gas station on Meeting Street, not far from the Charleston waterfront. The sun had set hours before, the sky was deep lavender, and bullfrogs were calling from the marsh. He leaned against the car, holding the gas nozzle, and closed his eyes. He moved imperceptibly in time with the music. And then he heard, faintly, a different tango song wafting softly on the humid evening air. He walked across the street, following the song, and turned into an alley just beyond Prioleau Street. He passed through a wrought-iron gate and a cobblestone patio, and came to a black lacquered door with polished brasses. An etched glass transom showed a poised cobra and the words “Hotel Fakir”. The music was louder now, and silhouetted shadows of dancers moved across the glass.

Max knocked once, tentatively; the door was unlatched and swung silently open. He crossed the threshold into a candle-lit room. Foxed mirrors and century-old Cunard Line posters adorned the walls. A handful of men and women conversed quietly at bistro tables set to one side. The ladies’ heels and slit silk skirts accentuated their elegantly crossed legs. A lone couple was dancing to Pugliese’s seductively sublime vals “Desde el Alma”. At the back of the room, a Tiffany lampshade cast a soft glow over the bar. Max eased onto a barstool. Beside him, a bouquet of gladioli, clematis and orchids breathed intoxicating scents into the air. The elderly bartender, grave and formal in starched shirt and tie, set aside a polished glass and inclined his head.

“Welcome to the Hotel Fakir,” he said, and raised an eyebrow.
“Tiza Malbec, please. Nice place you have here. What is this?”
“We’ve always been here. Those who love the tango, the true aficionados, they need to dance every day. We try to feed that need, from late afternoon until early morning. Now that you’ve found us, you’ll always be back.”

Max turned to watch the dancing couple as they swept by. Their upper bodies moved as one, and their feet flew in a syncopated rhythm of fast intertwining steps. His hand on her back traced subtle patterns of touch and go. Her eyes were closed, and the expression on her face was dreamy and peaceful. A lady in gilded stilettos sitting nearby caught his eye. She held his gaze, smiled, and took his offered hand. They embraced and swayed hypnotically for a moment, seeking the next musical phrase. The tango poised within them came to life, and they moved fluently from a walk into an ocho cortado, a molinete, and a flamboyant sentada… Suddenly, from nowhere, cold gasoline splashed over his hands and feet as his car overflowed, and the Hotel Fakir, the hypnotized cobra and his ardent partner all evaporated into the night… On the radio, Canaro and his orchestra were signing off with “La Cumparsita”, singing the melancholy words: “Tell me, Senora, what have you done to my poor heart?”

Aquitania

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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.”

Transfection

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Tango had barely crossed Max’s mind until he met Dolores, an Argentine post-doctoral scholar who had sent an email to graduate faculty looking for an instrument to transfect her cultured cells with foreign genes. Max had just the thing in his lab, packed in its original box and rarely used. He replied at once, and after discussing some technicalities of transfection, they agreed to meet the next day for a drink. Somehow wires got crossed, and while Dolores sipped a lonely Pinot Grigio at Fuel, Max was still at the BioScience Center, tapping anxious queries into his phone. They got together at last, and sitting at a table inlaid with a maple and ebony chessboard below framed prints of Left Bank demi-monde, they regarded each other with interest. Dolores was fair-complexioned, with abundant blonde curls framing her face and a mature, lithe dancer’s body. Her eyes caught his in a hypnotic grip.

Dolores said that her father had taught her how to play, and that she’d once earned the title of Best Unrated Player in a chess tournament in Phoenix. In the final round, her opponent had sat convulsing in a wheelchair, a powerful strategy when the chips are down. Her trophy, a kitschy simulacrum of victory gained in defiance of common wisdom, had languished for years in a closet. Well into his second beer and transfixed by her calm gaze, Max perceived an opening into deeper connection with Dolores. He said a University chess club would be marvelous, and as his mind darted over the logistics, Dolores said Tuesdays were out; Tuesday was Tango night.

She explained that she was obsessed with Argentine tango, which spun physical and psychic tendrils that entangled the unwary. The image of Dolores dancing tango nudged Max into hectic overdrive. He had glancing experience with tango. Some years before, a Romanian student in his lab, tilted in a tight mini-skirt over a light-box, had thrilled him with glimpses of panty as she observed proteins migrating through agar gels. She too was interested in tango, and had urged him to come to tango class. Tantalizing prospects had nibbled provocatively but unproductively on the farther fringes of his mind. Now, fueled by Dolores’s earnest advocacy, the distant prospects came into sharper focus.

“So tango offers euphoric fusion of body and soul that ends conclusively with each tanda?” Max said. “Surely that’s a betrayal of feelings that may go further.”
“Feelings are dime-a-dozen,” she said, “love is elusive and redemptive. Tango guides calm reflection on the forces shaping our lives. Let me show you”

She drew Max to his feet, tapped her iPod once or twice, and offered him an earbud. As a Di Sarli waltz swelled silently between them, she tucked an errant curl behind her ear and led Max into a tango. Later that night, she filled his flash drive with all of her tango. The foreign melodies snaked effortlessly into the unfathomed cells of his soul, navigating ubiquitous shoals of death or redemption in the relentless pursuit of love.

Head Over Heels

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Max was smitten, got some tango CDs and joined the local Argentine Tango Society. He ventured online, and next thing he knew, he was surfing the digital weft and weave of Tango. Thoughts of tango infiltrated the everyday. He watched dozens of Osvaldo Zotto videos on YouTube, and waited impatiently for class. He encountered, sometimes head over heels, women and men with lives at intriguing and agreeable tangents to his own. More and more, tango was poised within him, awaiting awakening and thrilling release. He learned some simple steps that were responsive to the lilting rhythms of classical tango. Every now and again the steps fell into fortuitous synchrony with his partner’s, offering glimpses of physical and psychic harmonies that promised to be addictive. More often than not, the addictive steps emerged when he danced with Dolores.

Tango music, derived from innocuous Romany folk songs, revealed itself as charged and elemental. The repetitive interplay of violin, piano and bandoneon snaked effortlessly into neural circuits entrusted with oversight of human emotion. One night Dolores filled Max’s flash drive with her entire Tango collection. Transferred to an iPod and fed wirelessly to a compact JamBox, the melodious gigabytes became his constant companions. Late at night, strolling out to the creek at the far end of his garden, Max noticed that the music elicited intuitive steps and turns that gained in nuance as second-by-second the music dipped and swerved in time with the bats flitting over the marsh.

The Argentine Tango Society met in a studio where hyperactive women had just concluded an aerobics session led by a barrel-chested trainer in black tights backed by a percussive sound-track. The tango dancers were sedate by comparison, fewer men than women, and all of a certain age. Tango merely whispers to the young, but speaks loud and clear to the worldly-wise. The typical class began with a warm-up. The pupils slipped on their dance-shoes and formed ranks behind the instructor. Like an orchestra conductor, she waved her remote decisively, drawing Tango from a docked and amplified iPod. Watchful and alert, the dancers advanced across the dance floor imitating her every move. The mirrored walls captured the effortless grace of her steps, and mercilessly reflected the relative imperfection of theirs, fraught with complexity and thought. After some minutes of demonstration and analysis, the dancers paired up to practice arcane details of merging music with movement. Their skills ranged from the fluidly intuitive to the strictly mechanical, and the transfer of knowledge from one to the other was slow. Their Tango lexicon grew as they listened and danced, rehearsing steps that unlock and shape interpretation of the music. But they had to tread carefully. The aftermath of a shared dance is unpredictable, for Tango shamelessly inflames the sparks that fly from spontaneous connection with another. As the class ended and the practica began, lights were turned down, bandoneons and violins came into their own, and everyone surrendered to the allure of those igneous connections.

Strawberry Tango

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Watching Dolores in class, in the low-lit practicas, and especially in the Hotel Fakir tango salon, as she waltzed spellbound across the mirrored parquet in the arms of one tanguero after another, Max sensed that deeper communion with Dolores would entail technical expertise and natural ease in fulfilling Tango’s imperative: to please Dolores. Narcissus was never a tanguero. Group classes were merely an introduction, a revealing glimpse of complexities that required focused study. Formal lessons were inevitable, and he would eventually need to find a committed partner, the dicey variable in the two-to-Tango equation. One evening, breathing the intoxicating scents of tropical flowers on the bar, Max reached for his glass with one hand and for his phone with the other, and called Florida Takashi to arrange a private lesson.

Florida’s thumbnail image was prominently posted on a local Tango Facebook page. She was businesslike on the phone, fielded Max’s questions fully, including a tactless query about her familiarity with the male lead, and fixed an appointment for three days later. Contrite, he bought on an impulse a basket of plump Florida strawberries as he navigated the richly-landscaped suburban maw north of the city. When he got to her second floor apartment, the door opened before he could knock. He stood aside deferentially as two little girls came out, serious in pink tutus. Florida greeted him politely, touching her auburn hair and smoothing an embroidered serpentine kimono. She was surprised when he brought out the strawberries. Prompted by the bold PADI logo on the otherwise effeminate bag that held his tango shoes, Florida asked about his scuba diving, then disappeared into the kitchen, saying the strawberries needed refrigeration, and asking Max to remind her afterwards.

Max slipped on his soft-soled dance shoes, and took in the polished hardwood floor flooded with light from a picture window overlooking a pond. A Muscovy duck, a pair of Canada geese, and three downy goslings waddled serenely by the water’s edge. The room was redolent with wisps of Satya Super Hit incense drifting from a stick balanced over a carved wooden tray by the window. Florida reappeared, a svelte hourglass in a black leotard, and waved her iPod towards a JamBox on the window ledge. A lilting Francisco Canaro milonga filled the room. Florida drew Max into an embrace, her eyes engaged, her arm draped lightly over his shoulder, her thigh grazing his, and asked how he’d like to start. The formal intimacy of her embrace took Max by surprise, accustomed as he was to lone viewing of tango videos. Osvaldo Zotto had taught him a simple eight-step sequence, and the rudiments of front and back ochos. Tentatively, Max led Florida through his budding repertoire. As Florida settled into connection with Max, and the arc of his arm lightly touched her breast, his first faltering steps gained energy and intent, and her murmured directions charged his movements with a transcendent thrill.

In no time at all, his time was up. Max retrieved from his little bag a plain white envelope addressed to Ms. Takashi, which he placed on the window ledge where Francisco Canaro was winding up with “El Portenito”. Florida smiled at this formality.
“They say you’re ready for a milonga after a year of class,” she said, “but the best way to learn is to dive right in. Can you come Saturday night?”
Max frowned, said he’d have to check, and gathered his things. The doorbell chimed as they shook hands. Max stepped aside to admit a man in loosely bunched dreadlocks, black jeans and a soft grey blouse, carrying an effeminate tote not unlike his own, and exuding a faint aroma of fine Sensimilla. Florida smiled gamely, but offered no introduction. Too late, not until Max had pulled out of the parking lot, braking momentarily to avoid the Muscovy duck, did he remember the strawberries.

Imbalance

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Every now and again, after a long day in his laboratory, Max would spend an hour or two at the Hotel Fakir dissecting with Ignatio the psychic and physical attributes of Tango. His sketchy qualifications for such analysis included his birth under the sign of Libra, training as a physiologist, and occasional classes at the local Tango Society. His fieldwork was limited to the Fakir’s bar where he nursed a glass of Malbec and listened to classical tangos while musing on parallels between Rumi, chess, literary fletches and Tango. On one side, the bar faced a parqueted inner room with a mirrored wall on the left, and bistro tables and a gallery of framed prints, including a heroic image of the Cunard Liner Aquitania, on the right. On the other side, the bar opened onto an outdoor patio paved in black and white flagstones. Wicker garden seats surrounded a shallow ornamental pool with a monumental blue-glazed amphora. Further back was an inviting Tiki-shaded dining room with candlelit tables and linen-wrapped silverware. Tall wrought-iron railings draped in wisteria and bougainvillea and overhung by fig trees separated the Hotel Fakir from its immediate neighbor, an imposing single-porch mansion looking out over Charleston harbor.

When sitting at the bar, Max preferred to face the patio, so that his view of wisteria was enhanced by desirable women gazing reflectively past him into the tango salon. He was usually subdued when he arrived, but warmed quickly to debate as time went by. Max liked to argue that Tango stimulated a physiological response that found expression in physical attraction, languid contentment, and an urge to dance some more. In contrast, Ignatio contended that the music and movements of Tango encoded an existential message that transcended simple sentiment. A fine distinction, Max said, on a par with doctrinal separation of Catholics from Episcopelians. Their debates were interrupted whenever Max ventured onto the dance floor. Such excursions induced minute but significant re-calibration of his argument. Thus an hour or two would pass quite pleasantly.

One night, Max noticed a dancer of understated but obvious expertise whose shaven head, red shirt, black pants and bare feet spoke of Argentine Tango authority. At one point the man ordered a Manhattan at the bar, and Max asked him how long he had studied Tango.
“Would you like to dance?” the man replied, looking him in the eye.
Max thought for a moment.
“Sure. Will you lead or shall I?” he said, knowledgeable in the ways of Tango.
They progressed around the dance floor, not in an everyday tango embrace, but simply facing one another, resting their hands on each others’ arms, or walking side-by-side with intermittent quick-step syncopations in time with the music. Max told Ignatio that in those few moments he learned essentials of Tango that had eluded him for months. The insight nibbled steadily into his confidence as he realized that so far he’d only scratched the surface. As Max reached meditatively for his glass, Dolores appeared from nowhere, an orchid in her hair, and the fulcrum of their little world shifted toward perfect balance.

Rejection Tango

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As his entanglement grew, Max began experiencing nuances of life in the enticing shadows of Tango. At a loose end one evening, attending a microbiology conference in San Diego, Max found himself waiting for Haile, the Ethiopian cab driver who’d driven him to a milonga the night before. Behind him, across a mini-mall parking lot and next to the Bull and Eagle Pub and Grill, discreet landscape lights illuminated the TuTu Tango studio. Tango songs diffused agreeably into the sultry night air, and silhouetted couples traversed the lightly curtained plate-glass windows. A lone tanguero sat smoking by the front door, enveloped in the aromatic embrace of Gauloises and Sensimilla. Max paced back and forth, scanning the highway for his errant cab; there were few cars out this late, and certainly no cabs. To return to the milonga, so recently abandoned, was out of the question. His confidence had been sapped by one-too-many failed cabeceos and by realizing that couples were not switching partners after each tanda, but returning to their own little tables and glasses of wine. One or two women, who had previously flown across the dance floor with fine-tuned elegant abandon, underwent mysterious lead-footed transformations when dancing with Max. A crowning indignity was conferred by a kindly fellow who told Max his wife would dance with him, if he liked. Max fled.

A car pulled up beside him and the window slid down. The driver flashed a salesman’s grin and raised a hand in greeting.
“Hi, I’m Willy. Are you a dancer?”
Max nodded tentatively, and thus emboldened, Willy rummaged around in the passenger seat and produced a flat faux-leather case the size of a large pizza delivery box. With a flourish, he snapped open the brass catches, revealing rows of variously-shaped little brushes with black-lacquered handles, each resting in its own purple felt niche.
“These take care of your dancing shoes. I import them from Buenos Aires; they’re made of the finest sable, will last a lifetime, and cost $300 online. But for you, let’s just say $75”. He looked at Max hopefully.
“Nice brushes,” said Max, looking around desperately for Haile, and adding unhelpfully, “I’m flying back to Charleston tomorrow. They wouldn’t fit in my carry-on.”
Defeat clouded Willy’s face, and Max felt for him. He gestured towards TuTu Tango.
“There are fifty people in there worrying about wear and tear on their dance shoes. Ask for Linda, and take it from there”.
Willy confessed he wasn’t accustomed to selling. Max told him faint heart never won fair maiden, and off Willy went.

Time passed, the night grew cooler, some heart-wrenching tango songs drifted out to the highway along with the Sensimilla, and still no Haile. After a while, Willy pulled up next to Max.
“Need a ride?”
“Well,” Max said, “I’m waiting for a cab…”
“Come on!” Willy said, “Pay me what you’d pay a cab. I have a wife and child and need the work.”
Max settled in, fixed the seat belt, and asked, “How did the brushes work out?”
“The lady told me to get lost,” Willy said. “An older guy, a kindly fellow you wouldn’t look at twice, asked was there a problem? Next thing I knew, I was out the door, my brushes scattered all around. Some stoner by the door helped pick them up and gave me $50 for the lot. Cost me ten bucks on eBay.”

Max gave Willy a high-five and was dropped off on 2nd Street by the Convention Center. Max headed for a nearby hole-in-the-wall where he nursed a beer, listened to a raunchy blues band, and thought about tango. He remembered Ignatio Quiroga once telling him: “Turn your head first, and then your chest; show her the way like the matador shows the bull, and she’ll soar like an eagle.”

I’m not Dancing

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Dolores was there the night the Hotel Fakir burned down. She was sitting with Roxanne by the Aquitania poster, toying with her glass and listening as the insistent rhythm of a D’Arienzo song made her want to dance. She touched the orchid in her hair; she knew she looked good in her satin chemise, slit skirt and scarlet Soy Porteno tango pumps. And there came Max, stepping a playful cruzada as he crossed the room. He caught Roxanne’s’s eye or perhaps she caught his, for he paused at their table, smiling and inclining his head toward the dance-floor. Roxanne stood and gave him her hand, and they stepped into the flow of dancers and were gone. Dolores sipped her Malbec and thought about Max’s exploration of Tango which had foundered on the twin shoals of writer’s block and a growing understanding that thought could no more capture the essence of Tango than spectral analysis of color would let you see scarlet. Tango is only discovered in the farther reaches of love.

Ignatio Quiroga was absently wiping the zinc surface of the bar. There was a faraway look in his eye, but he glanced now and again at the small collection of photographs next to his tropical flowers. Dolores walked over.
“Tell me a story, Ignatio”, she said, “I’m not dancing.”
Ignatio paused and adjusted a photo of a woman cradled in a tango embrace.
“A long time ago I commanded a garrison defending a remote archipelago against foreign aggression,” he said. “My adjutant was political, the bureaucracy’s eye on the battlefield. His wife Graciela was my mistress; we were madly in love. I see her in you, Dolores.” Ignatio took her hand in his. She smiled, but his tired lined face was impassive.
“Things didn’t end well. I escaped a firing squad with the help of a young officer named Ferreyra, who was shot in my place.” Tears welled in Dolores’s eyes.
“Graciela died in San Diego years ago,” Ignatio said, “a tanguera to the end. I have never forgotten. And nor have they.”

Dolores was used to Ignatio’s darker moods, and turned away to look for Max, unprepared for what came next. There was a loud crash and the etched glass transom over the front door splintered into a thousand shards. Something smoking and ominous lay spinning in the middle of the dance floor. Dolores glimpsed a bottle, a rag, a tiny lick of flame. With an almighty silent detonation, the floor was suddenly an incandescent lake of fire, and instantaneously, for one terrifying second, everything came to a standstill. And then panic set in as they all fled screaming out to the patio, slapping with bare hands the sheets of fire that engulfed them as they ran. Roxanne and Dolores huddled by the wrought iron railings under the fig trees and watched the Hotel Fakir, triumphantly ablaze in its final moments, defiant in the assault of drenching fire hoses, slowly collapse in monumental showers of sparks. Just then Dolores noticed that Ignatio was no longer there. A spectral figure was silhouetted against the fiery tableau, heading back into the flames.

Manos Adoradas

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The fire that consumed the Hotel Fakir made the front page of the Charleston Evening Post. For those whose days are lived in fear, the blaze confirmed that citizen vigilantes, preferably armed in accordance with the Second Amendment, should defend the city against infiltration from all points north of Calhoun Street. Tango was of course the pre-eminent raison d’etre of the Hotel Fakir, and tango’s consensual intimate collaboration between men and women who would otherwise be strangers no doubt fueled, together with the gas, the enthusiasm with which the Post reported the spectacular demise of the Hotel Fakir.

The die-hard or even episodic Hotel Fakir regulars mourned above all the enigmatic Ignatio Quiroga, who could easily have escaped the catastrophe, but instead sought to save some prints, the Aquitania among them, and a handful of photographs of tango intimates, family, Hotel Fakir habitués, and written testimonials that adorned the bar just behind his extravagant daily displays of tropical flowers. Ignatio Quiroga died aged 90, a soldier and tanguero whose checkered career included command of the 7th Infantry in the Falkland Islands campaign. As a boy in Buenos Aires, accompanying his mother to milongas where she worked as a dancer, he had learned the feminine role in Tango because older young men needed compliant partners to hone their skills as tangueros. This knowledge animated the masterful tangos that he performed occasionally in the Hotel Fakir, but more often found expression in laconic and perceptive remarks as he concocted his heady drinks behind the bar.

The next morning, firemen probing the smouldering ruin of the Hotel Fakir found Ignatio Quiroga’s remains behind the blistered black-lacquered door, with shattered fused globules of etched glass from the transom strewn all around. His right hand, which had somehow escaped incineration, grasped a framed sepia photograph of his mother, smiling, her hand raised in incipient embrace as she invited a long-departed partner to a tango. In the background, Osvaldo Pugliese was leading his orchestra in a performance of what could only have been “Manos Adoradas”.

Then As Now

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Among Ignatio Quiroga’s meager effects were found disorganized reminiscences and fragments of letters from his wide circle of correspondents over the years. Max examined these feuilletons at the request of Quiroga’s executor, Tadeusz Poniatowski, his erstwhile comrade-in-arms and second son of the Ambassador’s amanuensis in the Austrian Embassy in London in the 1910s. This fragment, written by Count Albert Mensdorff-Pouilly, Austro-Hungarian Ambassador to the United Kingdom, offered insights into Quiroga’s life-long fascination with Tango.

The invitation, on heavily embossed vellum, resting on a small silver tray, was presented by my secretary Poniatowski. I had just signed my weekly dispatch to Vienna, and was discreetly rehearsing an ocho cortado while gazing out across Regent’s Park.

“Her Majesty Alexandra would be pleased if Your Excellency would honor her with your presence at an informal soirée at St. James’s Palace. Alexandra, R.”

I regained my ambassadorial poise and looked questioningly at Poniatowski.
“Sir, the Queen and her Lady of the Bedchamber Countess Alice are much taken with this insidious Tango. I understand they seek suitable partners to advance their studies.”
I pondered. “Why me?” I asked.
“Sir, we Poles have a reputation for gaiety and a love of dancing, and your recent dabbling with Tango, private classes and so on, has clearly piqued the Queen’s and Countess’s interest.” I pondered no more.
“Please see that my dancing shoes are well-polished.”

“My cultural attaché, Arsenio Quiroga, a talented tanguero who often offers advice on my tango and especially on my walk, which tends towards a slouch after a glass or two of Argentine Malbec, accompanied me to the Court of St. James. Our carriage turned into Marlborough Road, and drew into a covered portico. A uniformed retainer unlatched the door and Quiroga helped me down.
“Sir, imagine yourself a young man in Buenos Aires,” he murmured, “stepping out on a summer evening with your sweetheart. Move with natural grace, intention and love…”

I told him I’d never been to Buenos Aires, was certainly not young, and as for love… Before I could finish, deferential courtiers whisked me away and presently announced my arrival in a chandeliered drawing room with a mirror-like parquet floor. Servants bearing trays of champagne and canapés circulated among bejeweled ladies in daring tango cocktail dresses or harem trouser-skirts in the latest apricot shades. Raising an ivory baton, a pomaded maestro gestured towards an elevated dais where four bandoneonistas, three violinists, two flautists, and a pianist waited expectantly. He smiled genially at the glittering assembly.
“Tonight we celebrate the birthdays of Her Majesty, Queen Alexandra, and Lady Alice. Comencemos por un tango de cumpleaños!”

“The orchestra led off with Angel Villoldo’s “El Choclo”. I downed in rapid succession two glasses of champagne from a passing tray and stepped onto the mirrored parquet. As the Queen waltzed by with the Uruguayan Chargé d’Affaires, I tapped his shoulder; he bowed and withdrew. I took Alexandra’s proffered hand. We embraced tentatively and then surrendered to the mesmeric allure of a tango grapevine. Her bosom was lightly sprinkled with freckles and talc, and I was enveloped in a perfumed tincture of roses as she pivoted before me in an ocho, preoccupied and smiling. Someone tapped my shoulder and took her away. The orchestra seguéd into the next tanda, and the Queen and Countess suddenly found themselves face-to-face. Impatiently, they shrugged off their partners and came together like magnets into each other’s arms. Alexandra and Alice danced with absorbed precision, capturing every nuance of the lilting tango vals, their limbs and bodies in fine and beautiful synchrony, an epitome of what men create in tango dreams.”