Lara Triback's Buenos Aires Journals

Three Minutes of Freedom
Seeking Ecstasy on the Dance Floors of Buenos Aires
By Lara Triback

I arrived in Buenos Aires on the first of January, 2005, on a pilgrimage I did not fully understand. I needed to learn Tango, and the lessons I'd been taking over the previous year had taken me as far as they could and had left me frustrated. Although I had developed a basic aptitude on the dance floors of Boston, I was still left on the sidelines by the best dance partners whose musically sophisticated leads I coveted, and was filled with a hungry urgency, dancing nearly every day with a desperation that refused all pleas for moderation. There was a feeling and an experience while dancing I could get near, but couldn't quite reach, and like a hungry dog, the smell and imagined taste of it drove me madder and madder, leaving me snuffling obsessively in every corner to hunt it down.

In the end I decided to offer an unequivocal surrender. I delivered my notice at my dead-end office job and bought a ticket for Buenos Aires with plans to spend six months on a trip the necessity of which, although I realized I could not understand, I realized also that I could not control. I crammed my belongings into three small bags and boarded the plane.

It was 93 degrees when I arrived at Monica's. In the dark, high ceilinged apartment were four tiny bedrooms, each the size of a large closet. Monica provided affordable rooms for students of the nearby language school where I would be taking Spanish classes. My effusive, affectionate host mother maintained a large presence in the household and nearly smothered me when I presented her with the expensive perfume she requested days before I left. I slept in a twin-sized bed that used to be hers, and I couldn't imagine how she ever fit her large frame into it.

The perpetual thick fog of cigarettes and sweet perfume, the 24 hour blare of Argentinian television, the accompaniment of a shrill, yipping dog, and remarkable lack of privacy (in my first few days of residence Monica burst into the bathroom to wrestle with the bucking washing machine, completely unfazed that all the while I was sitting on the toilet) would test me mightily. But in exchange for cheap room and board I was willing to put up with a lot.

On Day Three, I planned my first tango outing. I first consulted my Tango Dance Map, listing at least 25 places to tango at any hour of the day, every day of the week, in blurry, microscopic font. Tuesday night: El Beso. Next, transportation. Buenos Aires has an impressive and extensive network of local buses, called collectivos, that avoid the main streets and follow arbitrary zig-zag routes in order to hit every side street in the city. I studied my super-sized Guia, filled with colorful grid maps on one side and corresponding bus routes on the other. Matching up the bus route numbers near Monica's apartment to the numbers listed in the grid near El Beso, I found the bus which, for thirty cents, would deliver me to within three blocks of my first milonga. I left myself ample time to get lost, and Monica, able to name any of the hundreds of bus routes without blinking, provided specific directions for me to dutifully follow. Armed with my thick bus-route and tango map, I donned my prettiest pink summer dress and headed out for my first night of tango.

Boarding the bus, I told the driver exactly where I wanted to get off, studied the route, compulsively checked it against my tango map, and 45 minutes later I arrived exactly where I had intended to go. With an air of victory, I strutted the four blocks to the address, and Voila! Within moments my confident and triumphant pride dispersed into panic as I discovered that I had misread the tango map and traveled to a milonga that took place on an altogether different evening, and on the other side of town. And now it was an hour later, dark, and I didn't have a clue which bus to take from there.

A woman I accosted in panicked and stuttering Spanish suggested I take Bus #86 to Avenida Rivadavia 0 and walk from there. I waited for ten minutes until I spotted Bus #86 approaching. Relieved, I stepped to the curb with my arm raised, smiling, to flag it down, but it raced past me. Five minutes later, another Bus #86, another failed attempt to wave it down, and another, and another. I began to walk in the direction my busses had disappeared, feeling increasingly despondent and desperate. Finally I enlisted the help of a fellow bus traveler, who, sensing my desperation, successfully flagged the bus down for me by simply standing in front of it, forcing it to screech to a halt.

I paid my fare and and asked the driver to let me off where the woman had suggested. He shrugged his shoulders, signaling he'd never heard of such a street, and stared straight ahead. I approached a policeman sitting up front and asked "Rivadavia Cero?" He responded curtly, "I don't know. Ask the bus driver." I pulled out my map and waved it in his face. He still refused to help. Now panicking, I tried to read the map and confer with the driver in my broken Spanish, as the bus raced down the street to an unknown destination. Finally, I recognized a street name and demanded to be let off, and the driver eagerly complied. I began to walk, trying not to be overly conspicuous with my oversized bus route, foldout map and rapidly wrinkling party dress.

What I hadn't realized was that this was one of the major avenues that runs the length of the city. Two hours later, makeup smudged, eyes wild, and hair tousled, I arrived at El Beso. A waiter greeted me. "Reservation?" I didn't have one, but possibly out of sympathy as I probably looked both slightly insane and on the verge of tears, was directed to a small table near the dance floor. I observed that the most popular dance partners were tall and blonde, with impossibly enormous breasts poking out the sides of their skin-tight dresses. Two hours passed, and I had danced with three people. I felt self-conscious and awkward on the dance floor. I walked home and was in bed by 3AM, exhausted and unwilling to admit to myself that I was glad the night was over.

Following the advice of previous visitors to Buenos Aires, I was warned not to accept a first dance until I was assured that the man asking was a skilled dancer. A new dancer's reputation is immediately established, and potentially destroyed, if she is observed dancing with an incompetent partner. At my next milonga I turned down dances and sat for two hours. At 4AM one of the young locals finally asked me to dance. I tripped over his lead and it didn't feel good. I hit my pillow at 4:30AM, feeling defeated and exhausted, not wanting to dance again, and having to attend four hours of Spanish class the following morning. If all else failed, at least Tango would teach me the virtue of patience.

The following Wednesday I attended an informal milonga at La Viruta and finally experienced my first tango fix. I accepted a head-nod invitation from a young Argentine. The moment he embraced me and inhaled slowly, with my body pressed against his, it felt as though I was sinking into sweet, warm butter. He exhaled, and we landed gently, softly, and began to move. Although his technique was subtle, he succeeded in making my body comply with every movement, every syncopation, every weight shift. My legs felt completely relaxed, flying in all directions under his artful navigation. I lost track of time. My feet were killing me. It was 3AM and I was ecstatic. This was why I had come.

On my way home I dodged drifting garbage and dogshit. The smell of rotting vegetables, cigarette smoke and diesel filled the air. I was morphing into a creature of the night. My average bedtime now fell between 3 and 4AM. With ever-darkening circles under my eyes, and untamable, tri-colored hair, I had begun to resemble a woman I did not know, but had always envied and maybe feared.

In the following weeks I made my pilgrimage to Tango Shoe Mecca "Comme Il Faut." A pair of two (or three, or ten) of this particular brand is the must-have of every tanguera. These limited edition shoes were snatched up from the shop as quickly as the women stumbling toward them in four-inch heels could grab them. I never had a shoe fetish, but upon fondling this new foot-candy I realized that I was nearly drooling. Once my shoe size was determined, I hungrily awaited the delicate surprise lying inside each plain white box brought before me. First came the violet with a twist of lime, then the tangerine orange with frills, followed by bright gold snake skin with black velvet, then a pair of psychedelic print, and topped off by furry fuscia leopard spots. I finally settled for a pair of high heeled copper and blue leopard-spotted delights.

I swapped suggestions back and forth with a chatty Swiss woman, (Green or red? Four inch heels or three and a half?). After she made her purchase, the subject of accommodations came up, and she charmed me with tales of her friendly host family, significantly lower rent cost, and promises of increased sanity. The rooms were clean, the faucets did not leak, there was no laundry hanging over anyone else's patio, and no stupid biting dog. At my disposal would be a fully equipped kitchen, free internet, and twice a week, tango lessons in the living room.

I purchased some purple flowers in a futile attempt to mitigate Monica's disappointment over her lost source of revenue. Ever since I broke the news of my moving, Monica acted bitterly towards me, irritated, and mildly depressed. She stopped calling me her "hija" and "chica" in her affectionate, singsong way, shrugged her shoulders and now said coldly, "The language school will send someone else to take the room." When I arrived home at 3:30AM that night I found her sitting in front of the TV, staring blankly, cigarette in one hand, glass of wine in the other, and three additional bottles surrounding her feet. The next morning, while schlepping my bags across the floor and out the door, she offered the following blessing: "You are moving to a bad neighborhood. You'll probably get robbed." Hasta luego.

No more exposed wires, no more rationing of toilet paper for the malfunctioning toilet! I moved to a bright, sunny apartment filled with smiling faces. Within minutes of my arrival, Guillermo, Columbian tango teacher of ten years, grabbed me for a waltz in the kitchen. His teacher soon appeared for their daily private lesson. The living room furniture was pushed aside, and the two men danced together for several hours. As I observed the two sweaty, hot-blooded Latino men in close embrace, nose to nose, arms and legs wrapped around one another, I looked on with giddy bemusement, wondering what strange and lovely pansexual Oz I'd been deposited in.

Out dancing, my ego continued to be crushed on a nightly basis. I began to feel as though I was on a tango cruise ship. Even when I traveled out of town to dance, the same faces followed me everywhere. There were nights where I would sit for hours without an invitation to dance, then I would have a beautiful dance that eradicated any feelings of self-doubt. But afterwards that partner would subsequently ignore me and never ask me to dance again. How wonderful it would be, if, before adding my name to the dancer blacklist, my partner would say something like: "I would love to dance with you again when ___________(fill in the blank)." For example, "when you don't feel like 100 pounds of rotting albatross in my arms", or, "when your feet no longer flap like canoe paddles on the dance floor." I craved this feedback desperately. It would give me something to work towards. I asked my tango teacher housemate for his professional opinion about what I needed to work on. His turned his vapid, doe-like eyes towards me, clasped his hands behind his back, smiled, nodded, and said: "Your steps, your embrace, and your posture. But you dance very well." Gracias por nada.

There was a man named Oskar who I saw every week perched by the bar at Salon Canning, with a drink in his hand and a cigarette dangling from his toothless mouth. The brown leathery skin on his face was covered in black patches and hanging in folds, and his black and grey hair was unkempt and bristly. He always wore the same tan scratchy jacket that smelled like mothballs and stale tobacco over a tie and shirt that covered his thin frame, and he reminded me of a man I saw in a documentary on tango who polished gravestones of the rich for pennies in order to attend dances in the evenings.

One night Oskar invited me to dance. Although his features were repulsive, his eyes were kind, and after weathering so many personal rejections from the young and the beautiful, I eagerly accepted. I closed my eyes and embraced him. He pressed my chest close to his and placed my right hand over his heart. When the music started to play, Oskar began to sing. As our feet moved in time to the music, his raspy voice belted out words of love and pain and loss and longing from deep within his gut, and I understood them all. After each song ended, he would whisper in my ear, "Bien?" and I would reply, "Si, Oskar, muy bien." When the set of three songs ended, he gently kissed my moist cheek and escorted me back to my seat. Embarrassed, I turned my face to the wall so no one would see my tears.

Nearly every day I wanted to quit, and then I experienced something that taught me again that this was the dance of the gods, lovers, whores, the old, the forgotten, the brash and the desperate; a dance of transformation and painful, ecstatic magic. I attended a women's seminar and was taught that in order to dance well, a woman should imagine a tube of water starting at her vagina and flowing through her fingertips, spouting out her head and over the head of her partner; "Water plus the lioness within equals tango," she said. My teacher was a short, older, chubby woman whom one would never notice on the street. But as soon as the "water plus lioness" entered her body, she appeared so regal and elegant that no one could shift their gaze from her. She did a brief demonstration of foot embellishments while grasping a rusty chair, and it made me teary.

I decided to allow myself to be exploited by the young Argentine dancers who believed that a high price for a private lesson "is nothing for Americans." In a country where the average monthly salary is 600 pesos ($200US) per month, paying 100 pesos ($35US) for walking around a hard wood floor for an hour certainly seemed extravagant. But I hungered to improve, and needed to make the best use of my limited time.

I began studying with Guillermo, an exceptionally musical and dynamic mover on the slick dance floors of Buenos Aires. He was nearly a head shorter than me, but transitioned from lightning to lugubrious in nanoseconds and interpreted the nuances of the music with his feet like a ten-toed orchestra. I worked with Guillermo three times a week, and after each lesson my dance technique improved significantly. I could now sustain a weightless connection, maintain my axis, and glide around the dance floor at breakneck speed. As a result of my newfound abilities, I no longer enjoyed partnering with people with whom I formerly loved to dance.

Tango had become my nemesis. The focus of the dance is the feet, and my flat, non-arched paddles consistently struggled to recreate graceful, swift-moving toe-tapping adornments. I always suffered from holding excessive tension in my hips, which made learning to flip my legs in a swift boleo a nearly impossible task. I had been attempting to break a bounce in my stride, resulting from an inability to shift weight in my hips at the appropriate time, and Guillermo asked me to perform a simple exercise, involving stepping backwards while pulling up the hip on the standing leg and then using that leg to propel the movement backwards. Easy for some, but to me it felt like hacking at an iceberg with a fork.

While focusing attention on my hips with Guillermo, I suddenly felt self-conscious. My hips felt as though they were filled with a paralyzing ball of energy and refused to budge. I felt ashamed for feeling stuck. Having learned anatomy, I could picture my skeletal structure and the muscles connecting to the bone, and urged them, fruitlessly, to move. My eyes filled with tears and I felt even more humiliated. I felt like I couldn't even walk right, and started to cry. I sat down on the floor. Guillermo asked if I wanted to take a break, but I shook my head. I got up and continued to attempt the simple elevation of the hip and extension of the legs. At Guillermo's gentle urging, my hips suddenly began to move with ease, and the tears continued to stream down my face.

Guillermo wiped my tears, declared me "crazy like his mother," and we danced. For the first time in my life my hips had the sensation of weightlessness, and I felt free.

After a long night at El Beso, I sat exhausted, my feet propped on a chair as the sun rose outside. I was so tired I could barely keep my eyes open, and I was just hoping to gain enough strength to head home to my bed and sweet sleep. I was done for the night. As I sat, sweaty, aching, exhausted, and with the inevitable raccoon eyes from my melting makeup, a bald man with bushy black eyebrows and big feet approached me. He raised his eyebrows at me and shyly shrugged his shoulders, inviting me to join him on the floor. I had no expectations, but figured, Why not one more? and accepted.

His embrace felt like no other. It had neither the gel-like or buttery-sensual quality of other memorable connections, but rather, when I was in his arms, we were flying. In slow motion. His embrace was soft and gentle, yet secure and filled with clear intent. Dancing with him felt like skimming over water, just touching, smooth and breeze-like, like an artist's brush. It was as if we moved simultaneously in two planes, one ghostly, and insubstantial, and the other firmly grounded, as if we were connected softly to the earth and bodily to the music. It was otherworldly.

After our dance, I needed to confirm that what I felt was real, that this incredible sensation wasn't merely a product of exhaustion and dehydration. I introduced him to a stunning and discriminating dancer friend who has danced for many years and dances only with the best. After dancing with him she returned, quiet, her face slack and dumbfounded. I asked what she thought, and after a hesitation she looked at me and with a drunken smile said, "No tengo palabras." I have no words.

Later, as I was getting ready to leave, my friend pulled me aside and said, "I have a story for you." Three years ago she had gone to a milonga at Salon Canning. It was late in the evening and she was worn-out. Her feet were throbbing so badly she could barely move. As she hobbled to a chair a beautiful song came on and an older man wearing a black suit caught her eye from across the room. He approached and embraced her and they began to dance. She closed her eyes. When she opened them again an hour-and-a-half had passed. The staff were folding tablecloths and stacking chairs and they were the only two dancers remaining on the floor. As she spoke her eyes shimmered lightly with tears, and she said: "This is why we do this. This is why we put up with everything else."

Many Argentine men only dance with their partners or their cluster of friends. Another crop of Argentines dance almost exclusively with foreign women. A man of this caliber is often on the prowl for a potential student to charge an exorbitant rate for a private lesson, or for a tasty dessert to devour after the milonga. Once he has eaten his fill, (usually after the span of one evening) his craving has been sated, and he will no longer invite her to dance. If the woman refuses the man's invitation for a "coffee after the milonga," he will become insulted and will never ask her to dance again. It's a tricky game.

I boldly took a seat at a table during a crowded milonga occupied by three Argentines. I first sat at that particular table when I arrived, and it was usurped at some point during the evening. But my feet were tired, and I wanted to rest, so I pulled up a chair and plunked myself down. A tall, slim man with a spiky crew cut and a profile that reminded me of a turkey turned to me and said hello. He wore a black t-shirt and suspenders, and his right hand intermittently adjusted himself between his legs.

"How are you?"
"Fine."
"Where are you from?"
"The states. I'm here to learn tango"
"I thought you were from here."
"No. Do you dance?"
"Oh no," he said. "I just enjoy the music."

I spied the new issue of the tango magazine, listing all events for the coming month being circulated at the far end of the room and jumped up to grab one. My conversation companion begged me to bring him one, and I did, under the condition that he save my seat. When I returned, he thanked me profusely, pushed the man away who had taken my chair, and flipped the magazine to one of the last pages. He gestured towards a full-color photo that occupied a third of the page, featuring his mug with a raised eyebrow. The ad read: "BACK FROM BARCELONA: THE LION ATTACKS! PRIVATE LESSONS ONLY."

He leaned towards me and said: "I invite you, for free, to take a class with me. At night. You give me your information and I tell you where to meet."

I laughed and said, "But we're here. At a milonga. We can dance right here."

"No, no, no. I'm on vacation. I dance twelve hours a day. I offer you a free class at night. Give me your information."

I slapped him affectionately in the arm and replied "Nothing is free." Then I burst out laughing. I couldn't stop.

He looked me in the eye and asked "Estas contenta?" Are you happy? "Que queres?" What do you want?

What did I want? Didn't I want to first and foremost improve my dance? Didn't I want to be invited to dance by the natives? Didn't I want to improve my Spanish? Didn't I want an opportunity to dance with professionals, regardless if it was under unprofessional circumstances? Didn't I want desperately to find, to have the dance? The transformative dance I could look on forever after as the three minutes that changed my life? Had I already had it and not even known it? Didn't I want to find someone, to not be alone? Didn't I want to discover some connection between parts of myself that remained estranged, something in my heart disconnected, like my hips from the rest of my body? Didn't I want to be whole, to find love, to patch whatever hole in my heart it was that led me here? Or was the drug of the Tango, of constantly seeking the lush drunkenness of the milongas enough? What did I want? Why was I here?

I leaned forward, met his gaze and said, "I want nothing. I have everything I need." And with those words, I collected my shoes and my water bottle and moved to stand at the far side of the room.

After returning from Buenos Aires in June of 2005, Lara Triback found herself headed for Portland, OR, epicenter of Argentine Tango in the US. During her first seven months in a new city, she worked at two major tango festivals, helped organize a weekly tango event, began working as a professional middle eastern percussionist, and put her Master's in Education to use by developing a rhythm-and-movement-based music curriculum that she teaches to young children. She continues to seek ecstasy in the realm of world music and dance.

Three Minutes of Freedom, an excerpt of these journal entries, will be published in a travel anthology of writings by solo women travelers entitled: Go Your Own Way.
www.sealpress.com

If you would like to say hi to Lara, drop her a line at rhythmandmuse@yahoo.com.

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