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A Memoir
by Meghan Flaherty
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On Tuesday afternoons, I took the subte from my homestay in the Buenos Aires outskirts to meet my tenth-grade Honors Spanish II teacher in the basement café of a discount bookstore on la Avenida Corrientes. He called himself José Barretto, his alter ego, the mask behind which Joe Barrett buried every trace of his midwestern self. He'd spent ten years in the Dominican Republic and been reborn as an adopted member of his host family. Señor Barretto was robust where Joe was ordinary, open where Joe was closed, and an unmitigated dork. He devoured Argentina every bit as hungrily as I did. In Buenos Aires, at least, that required an appetite for tango. He'd found the class by chance, during his afternoon perambulations. There was no sign, no neon stiletto blinking outside on the sidewalk. Just a handful of businessmen and blue-collar workers spending their lunch break clumped around a boom box, learning how to dance.
Our instructor was a gentleman named Alfredo, with a bristly mustache and a salt-and-pepper pompadour. José took notes on scraps of paper stuffed into his breast pocket and, every few minutes, fished out a handkerchief to mop his brow. José didn't quite have what it took for tango; there was something missing that I noticed even then - some heat, perhaps, or some dark depth of pessimism. He held me gingerly, with all the anodyne sterility that his position as my septuagenarian chaperone required. He smiled every so often, as if embarrassed by his forehead sweat. Or as if waiting for tango to become more jubilant, waiting for the sound of upbeat drums.
I, however, was enchanted by the mournful music - as by any other antique treasure, intricate, threadbare. It sounded like old lace draped across the table of a century. Beautiful, but thinned from age. You had to turn the volume up to hear the old songs underneath the static and the dust. But there the tango surged - keening and crooning, darkly beckoning, and sad.
The class moved by mathematic increments, painfully precise. One, the first step, backwards for the leader, forward for the follower. Two, a side step, opening out together. Three, Four, the couple walking - him in forward, her reverse. Five, he leads a cross, left over right. Six, the exit. Seven, another side step to resolve, then back to one, the feet together, Eight. Lo básico, Alfredo called it. The basic eight. All steps were accessed from this grid, wrought from the cross and meant to lead back into it. Forward to a side step, or salida; backwards to the cross; then resolution.
After four weeks of lunchtime lessons, Alfredo took my hand to test my comprehension. "Entonces," he said, and asked in Spanish, "So, you have the basic?" He steered me from the fray. His knees were almost as sharply pointed as his sleek black polished shoes. He was all angles, but moved supplely, as if by master puppeteer. "Show me," he said.
He led me through eight steps, the box. Years later, I would learn this pattern was an arbitrary one. There are no steps in tango. But back then, as long as there were things to master, I would master them. He led. I followed.
"Good," he said. "Now close your eyes."
The old tangueros often spoke of leading this way, a transitive verb. "La bailo," they would say. "I dance her." Swallowing my nascent feminist dismay, I disregarded that paternalism and embraced, instead, the thrill of dancing without steering. The blind leap. Alfredo moved through me like a prow parting water, and the lead made sense. The follower was supposed to cultivate something called la ignorancia sagrada, her sacred ignorance, which felt a bit like flying in the dark. A leader, he told me, should give her room only to do the thing he wants. There could be no second-guessing if the lead was clear; his chest, his arms, the shapes he made would show a lady where to step, by magic alchemy. A follower must close her eyes and trust. And that's what I was doing then - sixteen and newly in the honking, vivid world: learning to trust.
Excerpted from Tango Lessons: A Memoir by Meghan Flaherty. Copyright © 2018 by Meghan Flaherty. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
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