All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [57]
Claudia has thick dark hair and big eyes; she’s attractive and accomplished in a creative field. Like me, she is divorced with no children and wondering what’s happening next. She also loves to travel and is considering a move to Argentina. She is fed up with Mexico City because there are no men there, the way I am fed up with San Francisco, the way urban women in their early forties are fed up with cities in the entire postindustrialized world. She seeks solace in tango, when she can drift in a man’s arms and feel him leading her and then move on to the next encounter. Her relationships are like that, too; last night she met a gorgeous man in his early thirties, said good-bye to him before coffee, and now rolls her eyes at his text message on her cell, though she’ll probably meet up with him again later on. Claudia has stopped having any expectations of men except to dance with them, and sleep with them when it’s convenient and fun. She seems pretty happy with this arrangement; it’s one that has made me happy, too, at times, just not necessarily the next morning. She’s focusing on her career and her move and isn’t worried about having a partner, though her family in Mexico thinks she’s crazy, an old maid, ruining her last chances.
We go daily to the Confitería Ideal, a grand old ballroom with tarnished mirrors, worn tablecloths, and white-jacketed waiters, for afternoon milongas. We wait on the sideline with the other women, nervously sipping water, for men to ask us to dance with a glance from across the room. The porteños—B.A. natives—are friendly, and the dapper, aging men give me courtly advice as we dance, calling me “bambina,” or “little girl.” I dance with perhaps fifty men at the classes, each two-minute dance like a one-night stand—physically close but emotionally distant. Only such strict indifference allows people to rub their chests close and intertwine their legs, moving across the floor like caressing skin.
Since Claudia and I both speak Italian, we are in demand by a couple of gentlemen visiting from Florence. Otherwise, aside from the classes, I sit out a lot of dances. Tango is a real meritocracy: men choose women not for their beauty or youth but for their ability to close their eyes and meld into the man’s lead. The woman who gets the most dances, bless her, is a short, stout señora in her seventies with a sparkling blouse and a skirt slit to the knee.
Discouraged on the dance floor, I try to find a regular partner, someone I can relax with and work on a few steps. I go on Match.com, saying I am seeking a man who can show me the tango scene for an article. Many men contact me—being a relatively blond American seems to hold a certain allure in B.A.—sending me virtual besos, but most want quick sexo. I chat with a couple by phone but violate some cultural rule by brazenly suggesting coffee; men, it seems, do all the inviting in Argentina. It’s a tango thing. One man wants to take me to an Argentine ranch but won’t meet me for coffee first, and I am not about to set out for the distant pampas alone with him.
Then Juan Miguel, a fifty-year-old, cueball-pated architect who also teaches yoga, contacts me. He invites me out to a trendy Middle Eastern restaurant in Palermo Viejo, reaches for my hand over dessert, and makes poetic comments about my appearance. “Piel como terciopelo.” Skin like velvet. “Ojos como topacio.” Eyes like topaz. He correctly guesses my astrological sign—“You’re such a free-spirited woman, you must be Aquarius”—which makes him think we might be fated for each other.
But it is not to be. After dinner, we go to a crowded milonga, where Juan Miguel drives me around the dance floor like a bumper car, crashing into other couples, whose female partners adroitly jab me with their spiked heels. No one, including Juan