Tag Archives: tango

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.”

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.

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.

Cabeceo Cowboy

I get it. Norms must be followed. Structure underlies function. Or is it the other way round? No matter. Here’s the thing. Catch her eye, or let hers catch yours, and you’re good to go. Catching is key. Cast your line across the darkened expanse of polished parquet, baited with all you’ve got. Which boils down to a commanding presence, equal parts upright posture, a clean shave, a confident demeanor, and totally at one with the intricate tango song flowing from the DJ’s shaded nook. Oh, you don’t measure up? No nibbles from the far side? Averted eyes? Preoccupation with a half-empty glass of Prosecco, or a chafing strap on that new dance shoe? I get it. Been there, done that. And now the cabeceo cowboy takes over. 

You stand, hitch up your pants, and stroll around the perimeter of the busy dance floor, casual as you please, approving with a smile faultlessly-executed enrosques, barridas and molinetes. You come to the first far-side bistro table, where three women, two of a certain age, and one half that, are deep in conversation. You pause, bow mock formally, and extend a hand over the flickering electric candle that adorns their table. They glance up, inspect you briefly, and then carry on as before. Oh, well… At the next table, on which lie a lady’s purse and a cast-off silk scarf, someone is slouched over a smartphone, his thumbs dancing obsessively over its obsidian surface. You suppress an involuntary sigh of disgust, and move on. But, be still my heart, what’s this? Here’s a beautiful woman, hitherto obscured by a potted palm. She’s all alone, one hand idly fingering an errant curl behind her ear, the other smoothing the silken surface of her dress  where it clings to her thigh

You pause, take stock, and catch her eye. She bestows upon you a long cool look that starts at your hairline, receding it’s true but testifying to maturity if not hard-earned wisdom, surveys the barely-noticeable bags under your eyes, the paper-thin wattles of your throat, your paunch held at bay by your belt buckle, and your thin shanks, draped in loose pants but nevertheless itching to dance. You short-circuit her possibly unfavorable review by offering her your hand, a smile, and a sidelong glance at the dance-floor. She closes her eyes momentarily, and when they re-open she’s no longer looking at you, but instead studying the shaded nook where the DJ is fussing with his laptop. Your heart stills. You’re about to move on when she turns to you, bats her eyelashes, indicates the empty seat beside her, and murmurs, “I’m not crazy about this song. Let’s see what’s up next.”

You sit down, shoot your cuffs, and venture an ad hoc critique of “Regreso al Amor”. She puts an index finger to the perfect crimson arc of her lips. Cabeceo is treading unfamiliar ground, but this cowboy is able and willing to go with the flow…     

Footloose Tango

I’m immunized now. Both doses of a fancy vaccine, tested first in scurrying rodents, then given experimentally to humans, and finally subjected to robust statistical analysis, are now infiltrating my cells, busily erecting barriers to viral onslaught. I hope. We’ll see. Along the way, invariably masked and gloved, I’ve languished in Tango limbo, my female contacts limited to disinterested supermarket check-out girls. I no longer encounter intriguing women at milongas, who back in the day used to offer intoxicating alternatives to everyday life. I’ve suffered, it goes without saying, as we all have. But I never realized how essential those encounters were to my imaginative life, the life that fuels my Tango stories. Fully immunized, yes, but notwithstanding daily bird-watching, online chess and cryptic crosswords, I’m still deprived of the magical sensual stimulus that is Tango. Understandably, when writing, my mind is often as blank as my laptop screen with its mocking cursor.

And so, I responded eagerly when Maria texted me late one night about an editorial she’d come across in a medical journal addressing the public health issue of gun violence. Guns and Tango have very little in common, but Maria, a surgeon who daily deals with gunshot injuries, intentional and otherwise, and an accomplished tanguera to boot, is my lodestar for local Tango engagement. I replied by asking if she’d been immunized, and when she would host another of her much-anticipated milongas. Long moments passed, during which I buffed my Tango shoes, if only for old time’s sake, listened to Argentine Tango Radio Budapest, and wondered what next. At length, Maria replied: “Wishful thinking, Max. It’ll be another year at least for those of us who’re careful. But here’s something to cheer you up.”

I clicked on her YouTube video.  A hooded lout, crouched in full camo gear and armed with an AR-15, was spraying high velocity bullets from twenty yards into a fat scarecrow wearing a suit and sporting a dangling red neck-tie and a flamboyant blonde hair-piece. Bits of straw flew and the manikin jerked as if demented. The soundtrack inevitably played the dulcinate strains of “Assassination Tango”. No vaccine, however fancy or clever, could withstand that particular onslaught. Good to know. The video faded, and segued into Oswaldo Zotti’s seductive first class in the immortal “This is the Way to Dance Tango” series. I recalled in that moment my first faltering steps on the yellow brick road that leads to Tango. I realized that all may be right with the world after all. Just a matter of time, vaccines, masks, and patience. And perhaps, hard to imagine I know, one day we’ll dance again, footloose and fancy-free.