Done it here ever?
I do it in bed all the time. I’ve done it on planes, on my bicycle, and even in my mother’s living room. This morning, like many, after dancing tango for hours the night before, I do it to release tension.
I bend at the waist to grab my feet in paschimottanasana. My butt-end rises up like a balloon of hot air. Still, I get a great posterior stretch of my lumbar, hams, calves, and achilles. It is a pleasant feeling, this weightlessness. I breathe steadily the whole time—but only out.
Ahhh, the bearable lightness of yoga. I am doing my asanas suspended under water in the pool where I swim here in Buenos Aires—American Sport on Charcas. The water is a comfortable mid-seventies degree, but I am warmed up, having swum laps for at least twenty minutes. My lungs are expanded and elastic, so I can extend my exhalation longer and longer and slightly hold my breath at the end, remaining in each under-water p
ose for twenty seconds or longer.
I start at the deep end with the forward stretch. There, I also do a floating bow, or dhanurasana. When up, down, and sideways cease to matter in this near-zero-gravity element,
you learn a lot about your own body’s participation in a pose. Years ago, I said to a fellow yoga practitioner that I didn’t like the use of props in my yoga. He said, well, then you better get rid of gravity and the floor, too. And so, I have now. There is only the slight resistance of water pressure evenly dispersed over my whole body. I feel my joints as I never do on land and can more accurately assess from where my own res
istance to a pose emanates.
My hips open and acquiesce gently into full lotus as I float around like a celestial body in space. I come up for air, treading with my arms, then go under again on the exhalation and slight hold. I can never mistake when to exhale and when to inhale.
Also at the deep end, I do supta padagusthasana, where you grab your big toe and stretch your leg up and out, like a victory sign. The floating variations of this pose are playful.
Down at the shallow end of the pool, I slip into the eagle pose, entwining my two arms and my two legs, like serpents, easily going into the full, deep-squat position, which on land requires the added concentration of balance. I spin around freely underwater, like a pinwheel, always exhaling.
It is delicious to experience the complexity of the pose this way. My muscles and joints are loose and limber and well lubricated by the essence of a liquid environment. I never overdo a pose—as I am prone to on land.
I do an elbow stand. On land I need my props—-a block for my hands to grab, and the support 
of a wall. But here in about two-and-half-feet of water, I have just enough gravity to keep my forearms firmly planted on the pool floor and using my own muscle power, go into the pose perfectly, squeezing equally on all abdominal, thigh, and glute muscles. During my exhalation I have time to experience the asana with knees straight and bent. It is illuminating to feel the pose this way.
At the wall in the shallow water, I can do those warrior and triangle poses that give you intense side stretches. Finally, I finish up at the deep end with—what else?—matsyasana, or fish pose, then slip into savasana, corpse pose, face down. I contemplate our fixed meanings of words like prop and yoga. Tango.
From those halls of truth and knowledge . . . 
This evening in Buenos Aires, I danced at Confíteria La Ideal, the salon where Madonna was filmed performing tango in Evita. Like so much of Argentina’s capital, La Ideal with its marble stairs, Greek columns, beveled mirrors, and dark wood, is an architectural masterpiece but in a bit of disrepair. All of which adds to the romance for those of us who, like South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, believe of Buenos Aires, “It’s a great city.”
Castellano, Spain’s most widely spoken dialect. Let me also dispel the notion that Argentina is third world. It is a developed nation, rich in resources, most notably grazing land for its world-renowned grass-fed beef. Few people know that after World War II, Argentina was one of the world’s most wealthy countries. However, a bouncing back and forth between radical and military governments seems to have squandered much of that wealth. In contrast to heavily Amerindian countries like Peru and Bolivia, only about half of Argentina’s population has any indigenous blood. For better or worse, Buenos Aires is a very European city.
style. The city’s crown jewel, the Teatro Colon is closed for renovation, but another gem is the opulent and well-preserved Palace of Running Waters (Palacio de las Aguas Corrientes) on Riobamba Street. Inside, above the bland-as-water offices where Argentines pay their utility bills, is a darkly lit museum, the labyrinthine scene of a macabre crime in Tomás Eloy Martínez’s acclaimed 2004 novel, The Tango Singer. It’s perfect for lovers who wish to lose the downtown crowds—or paparazzi. The mounted pipe fittings and rows of toilet tanks and commodes are not as prosaic as they may sound—even Paris, the City of Light, has made its sewers a top tourist attraction (Le Musée des Egouts). And you can run your hands over artful chunks of the enamel-inlaid terra cotta building, also on display.
Guided day tours of this literary archetype are available (check online). But one night a month may find me climbing amid the rose marble and shiny brass from purgatory (floors 1 to 14) to heaven (floors 15 to 22) where there is a rooftop cupola. On the roof, every first Tuesday, Tango Moda clothier hosts an open house party. A defunct lighthouse, from which, on a clear day you can see to Montevideo, also graces the roof. Mark and Maria could have easily blended in with the international set of shoppers and dancers, whom fashionista and tanguero, Jorge Arias, fishes out of the dance halls for this event. Drop by—tell him I sent you.
Buenos Aires is at least as romantic as Paris. Several times a week, I stroll some two miles along Libertador, the city’s Champs Elysées, passing sidewalk cafes, plazas, and monuments. On or just off this broad axis are six museums that are free or cheap, never crowded, and full of fine art. The most romantic of them are the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes; the exquisite Museo Nacional de Arte Decorativo, a neo-classical French mansion with portico, Corinthian columns, and the Croque Madame café; and the pint-size Evita Museo, serving up the myth and magic of one immortal Eva Peron. My stroll ends at a park, Tres de Febrero, with a rose garden, pergola, lakes, stone benches, and sculptures to make the Bois de Boulogne look pale.
However, for me, a writer always living on the edge, the real siren call of Buenos Aires is how it evokes what Paris of the 1920s, with its Lost Generation, might have been like.
How could the birthplace of tango, whose music Borges loved, not be romantic? The country’s most famous folk dance has been enjoying a renaissance, a long overdue comeback. Tango was suppressed during the last dictatorship, because public meetings were forbidden. For this reason, most baby boomers didn’t learn the dance of their parents and grandparents. Democracy was restored only in 1983, and now the city boasts more than a hundred milongas, the venues where tango and only tango is danced. Some are known by mere word of mouth and it’s a joy to discover them trying to hide from us foreigners, who are desperate for the dance’s organic roots, in little sports clubs of the outlying barrios like Villa Urquiza. But there are tango dance halls all around the city heating up as early as two in the afternoon, some not cooling down until six in the morning.
I left for home without either of the suitors, having gotten exactly what I had come for—the dance, its ineffable embrace, the Zenlike satisfaction of stepping in time with another person to music that has endured seven and eight decades. Beyond romance, the whole empanada—the Obelisco that several years ago was sheathed in a pink condom (for Safe Sex Day); the macho “entertainment” at milongas; the city’s nightlife, its leafy day light; and even the broken sidewalk tiles and constant flow of traffic—is all very exciting. Perhaps in time Mark and Maria will share some of their secret haunts in this city that is sure to now be—correctly located—on any romantic’s map.