…Tango

The Tango Club (1994)

After gringos shouting for more

It seems anything can be

Nailed like a body to the cross

Of the US dollar

Fat faces and western blazers

For formal wear

Dirty harry economics lessons

The gossip patters the street

Outside the best known

Tango show

El Presidente will make his appearance

Señor Menam

Secret service positioned

All over the theater

Their brutal English

The emphatic steps of the dancers

Face to face

The ministers

Of disappearance

A car a face a history

As if all can be

Forgotten

In the seduction of the dance

The inflated value

Of currency

As if

Everything can be

choreographed

Without the souls

Of the dancers

The Tango Club was composed years after the journey, after the dance, after my sense of self had re-emerged, like inti, the sun god, rising over the Andes and the altiplano, into something more than it was the day before, something it couldn’t be without everything else around it. I would return to El Norte changed forever, my sense of self, my relationships. The trip was the foundation for personally confronting patriarchy and white supremacy. I would finish my undergraduate coursework, only to take on another major in women’s studies.

I met Katy, at the time, the 1^st year law student from California who would become my wife and later my ex-wife in Santiago, at the end of her summer-abroad program studying law at Universidad Católica de Santiago. While she was picking apart the primacy of the US legal system by imbedding herself in Chile’s civil-law legal system, I distracted myself from pining for her by trying to experience that place, that world without being there. I listened to Victor Jara’s greatest hits with anyone who would join. To this day, the haunting echoes cascading through the blend of acoustic guitar and psychedelic sounds of El Derecho De Vivir En Paz lift me to the possibility of overcoming all of humanity’s struggles. 

Our plan was to travel for six weeks – Chile, Argentina, Easter Island, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia. We had been dating for less than a year, and people told me we would come back with a plan to marry or a firm determination to go our separate ways. While we were eager to see each other again, we yearned for more, perhaps with the yearning that propels many travelers – to grow, to find something previously unreachable in each other and the world around us that could only be touched by stepping out of what we knew. Then there are those travels propelled by suffering and the drive to escape, the existential need to live, to flee war, brutality. While we may not have known it at the time, we too were immersed in the struggle for independence that has dominated the Americas since the time of “discovery.”

We had arranged to stay with Claudio, a law professor and jazz pianist, one of “Los dos Claudios,” star law professors that had instructed, hosted and seduced the exchange students, at his apartment in Santiago as a home base while we tried to step as gingerly as possible across the continent. Being a new world traveler, I deferred to Katy on the itinerary. My task was to purchase the Lan Chile passes, which could only be purchased outside Chile, so that we could enjoy unlimited flights throughout our journey. Having successfully secured the Lan Chile passes at the student travel center, I had done my part, and was too willing to take a back seat for the rest of the trip.

Like many places, Santiago thrives on the network of social relationships. Our privilege, me as a recent college “graduate” with graduation cash to spend, and Katy, as an attractive young law student, in a culture tinged by a heavy dose of machisimo, allowed us access beyond our means. The other Claudio, also a law professor, and chief counsel for many airlines, knew a “great” travel agent. Katy, a former dancer forever longing to dance, “had” to see the Tango in person. Thus, our very journey to see the tango, was its own Tango. We had to understand the steps of our own dance, the structure, the intensity of our attraction, what grounded it and what was left after.

From the time I landed in Santiago, I became “El Rubio.” My reddish-tan skin and dirty blond hair marked me instantly for what I desperately didn’t want to be – the ugly American, the entitled tourist trapsing over a land mass, colliding with more culture and more history and wisdom than I could possibly ever know. I was determined to not be another manifestation of manifest destiny, of Anglo-Saxons descending from the north with gold in their eyes and blood on their lips.

That first cold morning outside the airport, the only thing on my lips was the smoke from the flight and the taste of smog in the gray morning. I dug through my papers for the address and showed it to the taxi driver who pushed me into the old metal Datsun and jolted me into Santiago’s asynchronistic morning traffic. Before I could get my bearings, we were driving through the Civic District, along Alameda del Libertador, past La Moneda – The Mint. The old coin factory had long been the seat of the Presidency. I tried to picture the helicopters on the neoclassical roof, blades roaring while the US-backed forces of Augusto Pinochet had stormed to overthrow President Salvador Allende.

Years of bloodshed followed. And death. Pinochet was still here. Still in power, seething after the “NO” vote. The 1988 Chilean National Plebiscite had ended absolute power for Pinochet. The artists and academics and intellectuals who had managed to get out led Chileans in the first steps of taking Chilean Democracy back. But he still had the military. The tanks and soldiers would still thunder in formation across the plaza when calls for truth and reconciliation would gasp for air.

I looked at the marble masterpieces. Had one of these been the building where Victor Jara was tortured? Had one of these lonely roads out of the Civic District led to the quiet neighborhood where his body was thrown and left on the street for all to see? El Derecho De Vivir En Paz. Even as I write this almost 30 years later, Chileans have just voted to rewrite the constitution, to put an end to the Pinochet era focus on the well-being of the market over the well-being of the people. I wonder if they still play El Derecho De Vivir En Paz in the streets as they rally and protest and reform a new vision of justice. The taxi stopped at the non-descript, brick apartments that housed the law students. Here I was, “El Rubio,” grabbing my bags, handing over my first Chilean Pesos and re-uniting with the woman with whom I would share this, the first of many journeys.

The apartment was full of women. Katy’s round cheeks flushed with the cold July air and the rush of actually being in the same place for the first time in months. She wrapped me in a warm hug and kiss, eyes beaming and introduced me to her classmates. I never really understood how many actually lived there, but all the students from the US – from American University, Georgetown, Colombia – all of them seemed to be in that efficient, small, three-bedroom, in constant conversation, practicing their Spanish or releasing their pent-up English and letting it bounce off the thin walls in fits of joyful familiarity. It turned out they all were staying there. There had been a situation with a room across the hall, where half of them lived, next to the son of Pablo Escobar. DEA agents had taken up residence on the other side of their apartment, “to protect him.” Thus, the risk-sensitive young law students collectively decided to stay together in the apartment least likely to become embroiled in an international incident.

I didn’t want to impose, but they insisted Katy and I share one of the bedrooms, at least for the night before we left. Before I could settle in, I was swept away, back to the Civic District, where we dined with Los Dos Claudios and some of the roommates. On our way there Katy and her friends chattered about how Claudio was hanging new “paints” in his apartment after going to visit a client in “Yale,” (jail). I was an outsider in their time, in whatever dynamic had built between languages and genders and power. Did the diminutive way they talked about his English make his advances on Bizzy tolerable on both sides? Was it a compromise?

The restaurant was cavernous and dark. The candles on the table lit our faces like campfires in a boundless wilderness night. Claudio Diaz Uribe smiled over the flickering flame.  The broad table dwarfed his small stature, but his smile lit the room. “We finally meet. Katy can’t stop speaking of you.” His graciousness softened his prominence. He had studied in the best schools in Chile, in Cambridge, had won a Fullbright and directed training programs for international law programs at American University in Washington. He was supposedly from one of the seven “power” families in Chile. “Later, I can play my new song I am learning. It’s so beautiful, but I have so much to learn. Have you ever heard The Girl from Ipanema?” I had. I smiled and nodded. “I don’t do it justice. But I will.”

Claudio’s curiosity carried him through centuries of knowledge and hobbies. His gentle smile concealed a fierce determination that he brought to every undertaking. Years later, he would find his own way through The Girl from Ipanema, mastering it and playing it on piano at our wedding as one of my groomsmen. That night he leaned back and introduced me to Pisco Sours, the cosmopolitan of Chile and Peru. Back at Claudio’s, the sedative effects of the Pisco Sours dulled my ability to really hear Claudio’s early attempts at the song. He played his favorite album Getz/Gilberto so we could all understand how it was really supposed to be. As I drifted off to sleep, Claudio asked Katy to tell him again about her class at Stanford with Stan Getz. I wanted to raise my head and ask him about Allende, about what those times were like in person, about what role he saw for himself in the legal structure of Chile as it moved forward. The waves of Bosa Nova washed over me and carried me into a deep slumber before I could speak of those things.

The next morning, we rushed out before we could eat the pancakes Claudio had made and left for us. We shot through Santiago’s buses and crowds to the travel agent, to pick up our itinerary and get to the airport. The Agent, smiling and standing to hug Katy, had a stack of documents ready. I stared across the catacomb of maps and travel guides while Katy handled the details. Katy couldn’t wait to see the Tango in Buenos Aires, but the journey there, insisted the agent, the journey there was just as special. We would hike through the cold rainforest of the Lakes District, the ferry ourselves between bus and boat across the mountains and lakes to Bariloche where we would ski, then spin ourselves on to Buenos Aires, dancers bound for to the Tango show. I listened to her Spanish, trying to pick up the details that would help me connect with people. My Spanish struggled and gasped in a desperate confusion between tenses and genders that would become the pattern of our journey to Buenos Aires.

The Eco-tourist guide specialized in environmentally friendly journeys through the natural world. His graying hair and steely eyes made me think of a younger version of the man from The Old Man and the Sea, who I basically always saw as some version of Hemmingway anyway. Having left his corporate job servicing the copper mining industry that tore through Chile, he strode through the lobby with the purpose of his life’s real work – to show as many people as possible, from all over the world, the longest mountain range in the world. His home – La Cordillera de los Andes. The Andes rise into the sky along the continent, through Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela, lifting everyone to the sun through the crisp thin air.

  “I’ll take you up as far as I can,” he pointed his thick, hairy finger forcefully in the middle of what looked like a green puzzle piece on the map. “This is the place. Ancient. The oldest trees in the world. We drive until the road ends, then we hike you to the peak, to the road, and you go bye-bye. Boat, bus, boat, bus all the across the lakes district and into Argentina. He shivered. “No thank you. Not for me.” He pinched his nose and held it in the air. The border between Chile and Argentina, the third longest border in the world, held centuries of tension. For some, those animosities were fixed.  I looked at the map. “¿Y entonces?” He laughed and reached for coffee. “Then what? Then I fish! Take my time going back to wife and kids.”

He opened the door for Katy, who looked to me, “go ahead,” she smiled as I climbed in. I ducked under his arm and scooted as Katy climbed in beside me. “I see. The lovers want to sit together.” He laughed. “That won’t make it any easier.” We drove over the clay-covered volcanic slopes, bouncing like popcorn in the back of the pickup. As we began, the view of the coast and the wide road brought some comfort, but as we climbed higher, into the cold rainforest, the old growth crowded the road and darkened like night. The driver held the steering wheel loosely, to let the wheels give with the holes in the road. Every mile we covered was full of corrections, the engine roaring and pausing, up and up. The road narrowed to a trail and then nothing. Finally, we stopped. “Some roads end.” He got out and shut the door. The silence filled our ears with the absence of everything they had endured to that point. We got out, legs tingling with nerves and adrenaline.

As we ate the flakey salmon, a chief export of Chile, I couldn’t take my eyes off Katy. Neither, I thought, could our guide. I reached for Katy’s hand and watched his eyes track her receptiveness. He stood up. “We have a long way to go.” He cleaned the camp while we loaded our cameras. I whispered to Katy, “I don’t like the way he looks at you.” She laughed, “It’s a good thing you missed the cat calls in Santiago, or the other Claudio. He chased one of the students around his desk. When she pointed to his wedding ring, he just took it off and said, “what ring?” She picked up her camera. “Let’s get ready. You don’t have anything to worry about.” She held my chin and lifted my mouth to her lips. Still, I felt like a boy in a men’s world.

We had the wrong boots. The streams of melted snow and ice seeped through instantly. Every step sloshed and stung with cold. The ice held on to the bark of the redwoods like our struggling steps held the trail as we shifted our weight. “Who built the trail?” I heaved up a rise. “Mapuche. All this was the Mapuche. They fought off the Incas forever. Then forever ended and the army killed them.”

We said our goodbyes at a scenic overlook, waiting for the bus that would be the first leg of our next excursion. Our guide waved, walked back to the ancient trail and disappeared back in time. The dense, wet confines made it hard to get our bearings or any perspective on the bus through the forest. For days we moved through the wilderness. Bus. Boat. Bus. Boat. Through the snow. Across the glacial lakes, and in the middle of miles and centuries of melted snow, on a gorgeous boat, someone asked us where we were from. When we said, we’re American, they laughed and said, “So are we.”

The influence of the US and our ignorance preceded us at every turn. Debarking the boat, we ate alone at a formal table overlooking the lake. I was silent, shamed by my arrogance and ignorance. “Of course, I knew everyone here is American. People in the Americas are American.” I wasn’t, we weren’t, those ugly Americans. I had read The Quiet American. I should have said, “We were from the United States.” When the server came to the table, she grabbed Katy’s soup bowl. It was clear we were supposed to be group minded. Fit in. Katy’s uniquely United-Statesian individualism took over. Katy grabbed back. She wasn’t done. She wasn’t going to let anyone push her around. Like a me-too version of the woman’s part in the Tango, she broke free of the role and stood her ground. She had had enough of the men in Santiago whistling at her. She was standing up. Literally. The tomato soup sloshed back and forth precariously over the sterile white tablecloth, and the server relented.

Back on the boat, no one else spoke to us. We had the upper deck to ourselves. We made our way through the lake territory to Bariloche for a day of skiing. I had insisted on the skiing. Katy couldn’t resist me when we skied. Our libido came to life racing across the snow, the wind hitting our faces, making our skin numb. The slopes of the Andes towered above the tree line, the elevation too severe for plants to grow. Every turn opened a new view to the horizon as we chased each other, eventually all the way back to the lodge.  We tore through layers of clothing to cling once again to each other’s bare skin. With all that we were seeing and discovering, we still needed the familiar to connect the passions and attractions that brought us together in the first place. Walking through the streets of Bariloche, we spoke in hushes and stayed to ourselves as busses of South American skiers drank and sang through the night. Outside the lodge, Katy turned to me. “Sometimes I think I’m just going to want friendship in our relationship.”

We were spent by the time we got to Buenos Aires. The tango still tempted, calling to us like a siren, through our exhaustion and the desperation of being completely outpriced. Paupers in a rich city. We were completely unprepared.  Unlike Chile’s recent turn away from the Chicago-school of economic policy, Argentina stayed the course. It latched itself, like a lamprey to the Chicago Boys, opening itself more robustly to the plunder from the North. Argentina pegged the value of its currency to the value of the US currency. Prices soared. The streets of the old historic core were empty. The sun burned through the topaz sky, reflecting off the colonial domes. We spent a day walking through almost empty museums, piecing together what was valued and what was archived, trying to stay afloat in a land and a time where everything was costly.

Desperation sometimes is the mother of innovation. Sometimes, desperation merely begets more desperation. Our own quest for self-sufficiency was drowning in Argentina’s aggressive push to privatize, deregulate and fix the exchange rate. A prideful descent into desperation. We schemed to raise our credit to get through the city while President Menem schemed to keep the economic plan on course, though it was doomed to crash. And as the capital fled the country, the country froze the bank accounts. The crusted acrylic gleamed with the heroic determination of Jose de San Martin, the “Liberator of America,” who had broken with his allegiance to Spain in 1812 to win independence for Argentina, Chile and Peru. Allegiance and independence can be difficult things to navigate, for individuals and couples, and for countries.  El Sur still fought against the economic and political constraints imposed by El Norte.

The disappearances of the Dirty War consumed the space around us. The roads scratched through the colonial facades standing over us, rearing ornate reminders of all that had been lost in the battle for independence. The life of the city had moved to the financial district. The citizens of Buenos Aires had no need for these reminders. Still, we saw ourselves in the eyes in the paintings. The ancient maps under glass. Our reflections. Our ignorance. And our struggling intimacy, trying to make it across another continent. Trying not to be the epidemy of the imperialism that created us.

At the hotel we showered separately. We took turns smoking on the tiled balcony. The steam lifted the dust of the day from our skin. We wrapped each other in the hotel’s stiff, white towels and laughed about how they must have been ironed and pressed with anger. I lay on the floor and called an outside line from the hotel phone, using every bit of my struggling Spanish to get through to our credit card company. We needed more credit.

We thought we could stave off our hunger by getting drinks and an appetizer at the hotel bar. The waiter brought drinks and bread while we waited for tapas. Before he left, I asked for butter, He spun on his heel and glared at me like a matador, “We say “Manteca! Manteca! Mantequilla? We are not in Mexico, Señor. We are not lazy Indians.” Everything else came to our table in silence, his eyes holding us in contempt as we pushed through the doors and into the night.

The taxi spun us around the big circles of roads. The server explained to Katy that Argentines are very particular about their language, not that there is one version of Argentine Spanish. “Of course you’re not silly enough to think that. Take your own English. Are you not from a different continent than England? Do New York and New Orleans even speak the same language?” He spit the car out a roundabout exit, hopefully toward our destination. “This neighborhood, which you would be wise to avoid. You can’t afford it. Not your wallet. Not your ego. They would not even deign to speak with you. If they did, well, you’d be lost between Italian and Spanish. They have ancient patios. But what is ancient is still all around. We Argentine’s, more than 60% of us have Italian ancestry.”

At the end of another circle, the taxi spit us out. The door opened into a cavernous night of concrete and marble. The restaurant door heaved open like a bank vault, exposing a wide- open room of tables, a long bar on the side of the room, and a man in a ten-gallon hat stumbling through the diners. “Gimme a Chivas,” he yelled and held his empty glass to the whole room. The host led us silently around him to an open table and placed the menus in front of us, and the ten-gallon hat clinked the ice in his empty glass and fell back in his seat.

We were aghast. “Can you believe him? What an ass!” I opened the menu and stared. The salad was $35.00. The salad. “Is this right?” I slid the menu to Katy and pointed. She laughed and shook her head. “Inflation.” The eyes all around saw how completely we were out of our element. That $35.00 salad was the cheapest thing on the menu, and the only thing we could eat. The server came back and raised his eyebrows. ‘Can we split?”

“No splitting.” He scribbled on his note pad. “Shall I say two salads?” We nodded and handed the menus back. So, we spent $70.00 dollars on salads of four pieces of romaine balanced like sticks on a white tundra of porcelain, while the man in the ten gallon hat snored three tables away. Despite our anti-imperialist ideas and pocketbooks, a place of this finery had no patience for us. We were outclassed. Outspent.

Thankfully, the tickets to the Tango show had been pre-paid. Still, our assumption that our best was good enough made a mockery of what seemed like our very being. We had only packed nice-ish clothes, made for hiking and casual activities. Why hadn’t we considered that going to a Tango show in Buenos Aires would be the equivalent of a night at the Met? The Tango had come much farther than us, from its origins in the Rio Plata, in bars and dockside dance halls, in the nightclubs and brothels where “society” wouldn’t deign to be seen. And here, it had risen after having gone underground, to its own apex as a National treasure, something the entire world revered.

People sneered without for even a moment diminishing their elegance. Their dresses and tuxes sliced through the night in a cadence choreographed like the Tango itself. Inside the theater, the usher led us up almost to the ceiling, and as we sat, two lumbering men with earpieces and Texas accents came fumbling up and wedged themselves next to us. “The dancer is in the building. The dancer is in the building,” one of them said into his wrist. “Relax. Enjoy the show,” the other one said, almost to us. Then he raised his hand. “Cerveza, por favor.” And he pointed to us, making sure drinks came to us for the rest of the night. And the lights dimmed.

I leaned into Katy. Spotlights chased themselves across the stage. The dancers came out, stepping into the light with their shoes like leather spears, gleaming, arching the feet, the legs, all the way up the spine. And the bandoneon heaved, a great velvet breath of sadness and longing. The dancers circled slowly, deliberately. Her long red lace dress blowing behind her. His white sleeves puffing out of his tight black vest. If you’ve never seen a tango in person, do. They stepped to each other and breathed and put their arms around each other, without touching, somehow, something preventing them from being together, but being unbearably close. And then they locked arms in place around each other’s backs, and her long leg searched an arc around his feet, toe to the floor, scratching, and he back away, and she followed, and their hips and legs twirled around each other. Their steps somehow came off the stage, their feet moving as one, four legs in one movement. Their legs knifed in and out until they stiffened and leaned against each other, one holding the other up, sliding into place unable to come apart, spent and unable to continue.

And we went back outside, the hum of the night around us. The lumbering Texans crouched over something small and fragile between them. They shuffled to a long black car, opened the door, threw in their cargo, shut the door and ran back to a car of their own. And in front of the Tango-sated crowd, a window rolled down, and the President stuck out his hand and waved as the car departed, itself disappearing in the night.

We returned to the hotel. A lusty mess of a young drunken couple, wrapping clumsily around each other. I held Katy up at the door as she swayed, lost in more than a few too many drinks courtesy of the Texas secret service, and the fantasy of moving across her own stage, our stage. I headed to the bathroom, exhausted. “When you come out, wake me, no matter what. Wake me.” She kissed me as tenderly as ever. Minutes later, she was unawakenable. After a year of planning, a summer of studying and a week exploring, she had made it to the Tango. We had immersed ourselves in this dance of stepping outside our own conventions, of getting stuck within them again, emerging and returning like the Tango, like the uprooting coils of colonization circling our limbs and hearts, and our hearts still beating, our eyes still searching inside and out in the journey.