Kafka Was the Rage_ A Greenwich Village Memoir - Anatole Broyard [41]
The music came pouring out of the entrance to the Park Plaza. It had a kind of crippled syncopation, like a dancer who has one leg a bit shorter than the other. This was before mambo came in. They were still doing the Afro-Cuban rumba, a flinging emphatic version of the Cuban rumba, which I found to be a fussy, cramped, voyeuristic sort of dance, where you peered down at your own feet.
Everybody in the Park Plaza—and there must have been two hundred people there—knew how to dance, and this struck me as a remarkable feat in itself. All good popular dancing is a toying with rhythm, an attempt to respond to it and to transcend, to outdo, it, all at the same time. The bad dancer is a victim of the rhythm. He can respond only by being slavishly obedient, by accepting the rhythm as a drill, or an ordeal. In Afro-Cuban dancing, one dragged the beat, like postponing orgasm, withholding assent, resisting, buying time. Nobody danced on the beat—nothing was ever that simple. Here at the Park Plaza, everyone skillfully toyed with the rhythm, and it was exciting to see so many people triumphing over time, at least for the moment. They all seemed competent. It was like a society with no failures.
The Park Plaza was a large, high-ceilinged, rectangular hall with a balcony on one side over a bar and a bandstand at the far end. Tables and chairs lined the walls. We found a place to sit near the bandstand and I went to get a pitcher of beer.
As I watched them, it was Delmore’s reaction I noticed most, because he had such a large face. He was looking at the dancers with a terrific intelligence—but his intelligence bounced off them like someone trying to force his way across the dance floor. I could see that he didn’t know what to make of the Park Plaza. So this is the real, he seemed to be thinking, this is what Flaubert meant when he said, Ils sont dans le vrai. He looked bemused, as if he was trying to imagine another culture, one in which dancing took the place of books.
The band was playing Sopa de Pichon, and I explained that pigeon soup was slang for pot. I translated the first stanza of the song: “If on your wedding day / you’re lacking a kidney [pun for cojon, “ball”] I advise you to take / some pigeon soup.” Most of the songs, I explained, contained puns and double meanings—like the pit humor in Shakespeare.
A tall, beautiful girl in front of us was vibrating one buttock while holding the other still. In elaborately crossing his legs, her partner slipped and fell—but he converted it into a flourish. Or perhaps he hadn’t fallen at all. In the middle of the next number, the piano played a long riff called a montuno and after that the bongo and conga had a long duet. They were especially good, so when the music stopped, a few of the dancers fell to the foor and closed their eyes in ecstasy and cried, ¡No! ¡No!—meaning, Don’t stop, or ¡Fenómeno!
Would you like to dance? I said to my guests. I knew one or two girls who came regularly to the Park Plaza and I offered to find partners for our group. Delmore, who never hesitated to play the crazy, impulsive poet, had a blank look on his face. Clem was sliding his eyes around—not like an art critic, but a tourist. Only Dwight, who was a permanent revolutionary, wanted to dance and appeared to be at home in the Park Plaza. I found him a girl named Dinamita, which appealed to his political tastes, and he gyrated away with her. He didn’t know what he was doing, but it didn’t matter, because he had rhythm, and also an air of conviction, as if there was nothing in human behavior that was alien to him. Tall, thin, white-haired even then, with glasses and a goatee, he