Tag Archives: tanda

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.”

Dolores sipped her glass of Pinot Grigio and told Max about an advertisement for a masked ball held by medical interns in 1920s Buenos Aires, showing a defiant vulture perched over a blood-spattered banner. Back then, she said, Tango was the lingua franca of the dance halls, and the music, the dance, and cheap Malbec all conspired to fuel indiscretion, and worse. Max was skeptical, but listened attentively.

Dolores said that the interns used to terrify the ladies with body parts spirited from the anatomy labs. No excess was considered excessive. The tender embrace of a lady’s waist by a dessicated skeletal arm was fair game, as were more intimate caresses by a rigid leathery hand. Things came to a head when a guileless intern sought to trump all previous excess while dancing with the dazzling wife of the Orquestra’s manager. Consumed with passion and bravado, the intern swept off his cape and revealed the severed, formalin-stretched head of a cadaver. The grimacing skull nuzzled her silken throat to the strains of “La Cumparsita”. She was flamboyantly indignant, enjoying the attention accrued by such an outrageous stunt. Her husband, portly and enraged, confronted the couple out on the dance floor. The intern was amused but solicitous, waving a bamboo fan over the wife’s beautiful brow. He turned in surprise when challenged by the husband, who had drawn a pearl-handled Derringer from his waistcoat.

The interval between one bar of “La Cumparsita” and the next was marked by a single sharp crack and a second of shocked silence. The intern collapsed without a sound, a pool of blood over his heart, a smile still engraved on his face and his eyes just beginning to startle. The macabre head followed him to the floor and seemed to kiss his cheek as his colleagues rushed to administer fruitless first aid. The poor intern, his bravado, and his passionate love bled out in a matter of moments, and he and the masked ball were never revived.

For a moment, Dolores was silent, and Max wondered if the prospect of love trumped the certainty of death. But 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.

My Tanguera, My Dog, and Me

Sootie is a mute observer of my black dog as I leave home and cross the lawn. I duck under an orb spider’s golden web, and step out onto the dock. The sky at dusk is overcast, and bulrushes sway in a stiff breeze out of the north. An incoming tide bears grassy flotsam and iridescent organic swirls. Off to the east, far away across the marsh, a thoughtless suburbanite stabs the night with a thousand watt security light. My black dog edges closer. I turn my back on the intrusion, sink onto the bench at the pier-head, and see drifting clouds give way to stratospheric flashes of jets heading west. I think of the leisurely stroll of milongueros and the electric recognition of souls sensing communion half-way through the first tanda.

I reach for my phone and fire up Di Sarli’s “El Once”. My black dog backs off. I imagine that even Sootie, still as night at the edge of the marsh, stirs and yearns to be free. As I do. Two years and counting have atrophied neural circuits whose sole function is to transform physical contact into rhythmic synchrony, induce graceful transcendence of the everyday, and carry me off on a musical wave in a protective embrace. No wonder Sootie stirs. Instead, two years and counting have conjured up an unwanted but faithful black dog that trots at my heel, rejects all frivolity, and insists on dire interpretation of life as we know it. But the black dog retreats before the seductive weft and weave of Tango emerging from my phone that casts its spell over the wide horizon before me.

And so, I get to my feet and await Sootie’s arrival. She comes to me and we face each other for a moment or two, close and still, save for the near imperceptible sway of our bodies as we anticipate the next musical phrase. And then, with a quiet introductory flourish, I take a long slow step into her space, and another, and another, while Sootie enticingly retreats and accommodates me, gathering me into her embrace. We dance as if the pandemic, and not our nestling, is just a dream. At last the song concludes, and I reprise my initial flourish as a coda to Di Sarli’s final note. Sootie and I prolong our embrace for a few seconds more, before an admonitory growl from my black dog intrudes. Sootie disappears, a wisp dissolving into the night. I make my way back along the dock, hangdog at my heel. The wind picks up and the first drops of rain follow me home.