Tale of Two Tangos (2)
(see Chapter 1, and Chapter 3)
MOSTLY TRUE TALES OF CONFLICT AND PEACEFUL REVOLUTIONS
CHAPTER 2, in which:
• Nureyev vanishes.
• Van Tango steps in.
• Ocaramia asks What is casual sex, What is love?
• The gods send signs, sages, and emails; they answer her in strange ways.
You met Nureyev, a tempting blend of god-sent emissary, rabble-rouser, and sand-your-pants guy in Part I. Now meet Van.
Nureyev, my multi-media maven, has vanished. Hence, I bring you only words, hand sewn, as my surname translates in English. The video Nureyev made of me dancing with David Mendoza, zipping around the cosmos like an Aleph, did not record. For some reason, this reminds me how phantoms have no reflection in mirrors. (Is it possible, then, to record the connection that occurs in a tango moment?)
One door closes, another opens.
One rainy night, I’m parked on Valencia Street, in San Francisco’s hip, multi-ethnic Mission District when a small door opens in the back of a camper. Out steps Van Tango, a dapper-dressed dancer from another country. “Get in,” I say, “quick, before you get your duds wet.” He locks up his traveling home and slides into the passenger seat of my ’96 RAV4. And we’re off for dinner, then dancing.
Van and I met just two weeks ago at El Valenciano, a small tapas bar that on Tuesday nights turns into a milonga hosted by Julian Ramil. Van told me he was on his way to points south to any place where a tango community thrived. But when I said, “Portlandia,” he pointed his truck north. I wasn’t tempted to feel I had become his True North. It was the ValenTango festival there, not I, that was the magnetic attraction. Even though Portland swelled with hundreds of tango aficionados, local and from around the world, it was easy to spot Van in a Portlandia crowd where casual or grunge attire prevails. Van is always the elegant dresser with the bare dome of a scalp, and the dancing frame of Gene Kelly.
I have met enthusiastic tangueros before. But I’ve never met one like Van. He snorts and makes barnyard sounds between dances. Declares himself a “Tango Pig,” feeding at the trough of tango. “Please,” I interject, pulling away. “Call yourself a Tango Pilgrim.” More farm animal sounds. Van can’t control his exuberance; he also likes to blurt things out as we dance. So, after a bit of familiarity has been established, I simply say, “Shut up and dance.” To which he lets out a long sigh and says, “Thank-you, I needed that.”
If Van’s dancing were a glass of wine, I’d describe it as full-bodied with surprisingly intimate notes and a smooth photo finish—he ends his dance precisely on the last beat of each song. He’s a “good ride,” to use a vernacular I learned from an American transsexual in Buenos Aires. And he always treats every partner like a goblet made of fine crystal balanced perfectly in his hand. Perfect, after having had my abandonment issues “spilled” by one Nureyev.
This rainy eve, Van is taking me to dinner at a Thai restaurant on Clement Street, one of San Francisco’s several Asian-towns. He is new to the city, so I told him, you’ll never, ever, park that camper in the Richmond District. “I’ll drive us in my RAV4, which fits in my back pocket if no spaces are available.” I was touched by the fact that he asked if I would allow him to treat me or did I prefer Dutch? Treat me, treat me. This tanguero IS from out of town. Somehow, I knew there were no strings attached, only sincere generosity.
And as we take our seats at the restaurant, Be My Guest, I realize it is the first time in our two-week platonic relationship that we have more than the few minutes between dances to chat. We are able ask the questions most people would have asked before they let their bodies fuse as tightly as ours already have. Not what you’re thinking: Van and I have explicitly told each other in an email that we have no interest in that sort of romance. “Only, tango, friendship, and kindness,” I wrote. We meant it. We are having a wonderful time.
But, is the erotic a requisite for a tango moment to come alive, and is there one in the offing, or is this dinner just satisfying one appetite?
We order the dish custom-made for us, called Mango Tango Shrimp. It’s pretty good. More than the food, I love the quiet of the restaurant, a rarer and rarer find in San Francisco where most decent eateries require you to resort to sign language or reading lips. At a refreshingly normal decibel level of speech, we exchange vital stats. It occurs to me that I would have been just as happy not knowing a thing about Van other than what I gleaned from his pulsing torso during tango. The dance often brings to mind a sanitized version of that famous scene in Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris. You enter this piece of vacant real estate, or the warm envelope of dance, fill it with two bodies, yet remain strangers, never needing to know names or anything about the other person you’ve just toured the cosmos with. (Question: does knowing too much about your partner take the cosmos tour off the table or dance floor?)
I grow fond of Van as we get acquainted. In his pre-tango past, he tells of a standard-issue marriage, children, divorce. Like many of us tango-obsessed, his love life is now less conforming to convention and, I sense, more fulfilling. I sum up my own love life with a patent referral to Chapter 23 of my book, Tango, an Argentine Love Story, where I identify with Doña Flor, the Brazilian film character who loves two men. (OK, things have evolved since I wrote that, but I’ll save it; it’s worth another whole chapter.)
I nibble at the food and wish it had more fire even as I wonder how to describe the fire that drives this Tango-pilgrim to measure his body lengths across the many polished floors in this world. And what led him to me? Or, is it me, Ocaramia, on my pilgrimage, that has led me to Van? Or, Tango-gods forbid, am I having with Van what that elusive Nureyev once suggested: “It is not relationship we dance to make, but free, intense moments. String enough of them together and you have an intense relationship.”
Even as I calibrate what separates a relationship from an affair, Van tells of someone who took a lover he met in tango on the rebound from his last long relationship. He cared about her, thought the world of her, but after the two weeks or so of the fling (my word), he was ending it – tying things up. In prosaic terms, she (x) wanted a committed relationship, but he (y) did not. (x +y X 69 ÷ 2 ≠ same goal). But what did x want? I sense that it was > sex.
I stabbed one of those mute tango shrimp with my fork screeching across the plate and told Van in no uncertain terms, “I am no good at “casual sex.” I did not reveal the many ways that I figured that out. But, a lively debate ensued, in which he protested that his friend’s affair was not a case of casual. But by my definition—hasty, carnal, and short-lived—it was.
Am I right? Or am I wrong? Maybe one woman’s casual is another man’s meaningful involvement? Back in my twenties when I was still learning about the way heart strings and meridians connect and intertwine with sex organs, hasty, carnal, and short-lived was a common happenstance. And, I might add, I’ve been on both sides of that eternal equation, sometimes x, sometimes y.
It was not a question or morality but one of true happiness and true love, something I would probe more over the next week, but off the dance floor.
Meanwhile, Van and I head to Bollywood, a small, friendly milonga hosted by Glenn Corteza, a dedicated tango dancer and teacher. The milonga is in Bollyhood Café, which functions as an Indian restaurant when events are not occurring there. It’s my first time at Bollywood and I like its offbeat feeling, reminiscent of those word-of-mouth milongas locals led me to in Buenos Aires, in sports club of the city’s outer barrios like Villa Urquiza.
I dance many more tandas (those sets of three or four like-themed tangos) with Van. I admire that he makes the rounds, inviting nearly every other woman in the club to dance. Not something all tango-dancing men do. He tells me of attending a festival once, where he was turned down a dozen times in a row. I picture him in his satin vest, pressed dress shirt, and tailored pants drawing bewildered, “No” after, “No.” When a woman finally said, “Yes,” he was disappointed. He was going for a record. A less stout-hearted dancer would have quit and licked his wounds after the third rejection or sooner. Van claims to have been born knowing tango and refers to his trunk as his Gavito (a beloved tango legend who died about six years ago). Van is a true milonguero with a big heart, and seductive (Gavito-like) way of shaping your body and his to the music. So what’s a little snorting between numbers? When silent, he could easily pass for a laughing Buddha.
By the time Van drives his camper out of town, we have leaned into the tango embrace for three consecutive nights of milongas, tallying four solid nights for me. I don’t know when I might see him again, though it is a good bet, tango will find us united some place, some time, some where. Not that it matters. Our time together has been full and complete, perfect in and of itself with no loose ends, no dangling participles or misplaced modifiers. It was true connection, which happens because you let it. I am not convinced you can make it happen. Though we have pondered that question of cultivating it in Chapter 1.
Next day . . .
I come across a passage that underscores my above conviction.
“Love happens. It is a miracle that happens by grace. We have no control over it. It happens. It comes, it lights our lives, and very often it departs. We can never make it happen nor make it stay.”
The above quote, not from some New Age guru, came to me in my bedtime reading, Knowing Woman, published in 1973. Jungian analyst Irene Claremont de Castillejo, born in 1896, is the author.
[Hence if TM (Tango Moment) or TC (Tango Connection) ≈ L (Love), then they are subject to the same universal rules.]
I took myself to the Mountain. Not Olympus, after all the gods had me kicked me off, recall (see Chapter 1). Mount Tamalpais it would be. Let the gods laugh up on Oly, I thought as I strode up Tam, green and lush with its ready-to-bloom willow, fiery manzanita, pine, oak, and aromatic chaparral. I was startlingly alone. But the Mountain, a ridge that bends like an elbow and looks like a sleeping maiden or reclining tanguera, sang to me, gushing and pouring its heart out in streams and rivulets after our hard winter rains.
Shut up and dance, I said to the Mountain. In a few weeks, I’d hike its Cataract Trail on the north side, and find my favorite wildflowers, fetid adder’s tongue and rain orchids. I heard a creature crunching in the brush—this is mountain lion country. What if my well-honed catwalk invited a stalking cat? I raised my arms and switched to the stance of the chacarera, an Argentine folk dance in which you shape your body like a lobster with snapping claws in the air, as if playing castanets.
I savored the views out to the Pacific, Angel Island, to Mount Diablo and beyond. And the City, small and distant, rising Oz-like with its diamond-cut skyline. For all its Emerald City aura, it’s a place where people live, suffer, and die; love, long, and lose; have casual and/or meaningful sex, and Tango Moments; find or reinvent themselves; and dream, find enchantment, or disenchantment.
From this vantage in time, too, I could clearly see the gifts of tango. There is always a Van, a good ride, and I mean that in the most exalted way. You just have to show up. I find it all miraculous. That in such “casual” relationships no trace of desire remains, all is burned in the bonfire of our living in the moment. I can’t help but recall a shining pearl of wisdom from my friend, Jimmy Stewart, “The tango floor [or Tango Moment] may be a kind of Shangri-La. Its gifts may not travel well.”
In exalted tango, and perhaps in whatever activity you favor—running, tennis, cycling, driving, traveling, cooking—you don’t long for any other moment or place during that activity. But as sure as we live and breathe, longing does arise again. It always returns. And this seems OK to me. Do you agree?
I think of a term, limerence, coined years ago by psychologists. Limerence is a state of infatuation in which the very sense of longing is so pleasurable. In the ancient romantic tale of Tristan and Isolde, I suspect it was a rabid case of limerence (perhaps chemically induced) that infected and doomed those star-crossed lovers. One of the most romantic and true love stories, also from Medieval times, is that of Heloise and Abelard. What is so romantic, I find, is the longing (just barely consummated) that fuels their Love. (Footnote: Someone in academia might consider a thesis on Tango and its parallels to courtly love, which came into vogue in the Middle Ages in the south of France.)
Maybe I was experiencing limerence (fueled by unburned desire) in regard to my missing Nureyev, but it had been easy to ignore this state because we focused our energy on creating the ultimate piece of Tango Literature ever to dazzle your senses—all ten of them. I imagine in Freudian terms, it’s called sublimation.
Between the pinnacle and fleeting states of Love and Tango Moments, we are destined to long and dream. Both are life-giving. Even Oscar (72), my wise curmudgeon back in Argentina endorses this. He told me recently on a Skype call, “I still have dreams; everybody has to have dreams.” I recalled hearing a black man sing the blues, A man without a dream is like a ship without a rudder, in a crushed velvet voice that still stirs me deeply.
Perhaps what defines “casual” is when the longing is tamped out as part of a vicious cycle. A viral sort of longing that never ends. The Buddhists term this state Bardo, a lackluster between-zones where hungry ghosts hang out, ravenous, never satisfied. Casual sex perhaps is akin to an eating disorder. You binge on a “junk” state. Your soul is perpetually overfed and undernourished.
No sooner was I parsing this equation of casual sex = or ≠ bardo±longing, when atop the Mountain I met the only other person there, a Sage. He was born in New York City but survived seven years in India and was healthy as a newborn. That made him Sage. As we chatted and I mentioned my tango, he told me in Manhattanese, “You should be tawkin’ to my brother, not me.” His brother, he said, does nothing but dance. “Never worked, never married.” He burned his way through several relationships. “He hurt those women,” said the Sage.
“He’s married to dance,” I said, thinking, really the guy is stuck in Bardo, with his longing run amok. So, you might well ask, Is Tango a magnet for those with spiritual “eating disorders?” I doubt it. No more than the office or any community is.
If I had one piece of wisdom to impart, distilled from my Tango experience, it would be simply this—to treasure your longing, to not give it away wantonly. Hold it, feel it, observe it. Care for and feed it. Never repress it. If Tango ≈ Love, then as Claremont de Castillejo, writes, it is our task “. . . to learn how to create the conditions in which love can alight upon us and can remain with us.”
Remember TM ≈ Love.
On the way down the Mountain, I considered how we widely accept five stages to dying (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance). Why not seven stages to living, meaning our longing or dreams, or way-seeking, follow a natural progression rooted in the body and the mind. Consider them to be a function of the seven chakras, those little energy centers along the spine. From the tailbone on up, the chakras are named root, sacral, solar plexus, heart, throat, third eye, and crown. One always predominates but as we age and wise up, living more fully in the now, we integrate all of them. So, my twenties were hopelessly dominated by energy from the two lowest chakras, root and sacral (survival and sexuality). But now I am shooting for the crown chakra and it’s no coincidence that Tango, with its grounding in the body and spirit, enters my life flow.
Back home, I find a brilliant and relevant essay from tango dancing friend and wizard, Peter Esser, who lives in Buenos Aires. It’s those ancient Greeks again, who will have the last word. They must surely have danced tango. In this essay, Peter describes his Tango Moment. With his permission, I directly quote here:
“The other night I was dancing in Buenos Aires at a traditional milonga and there was this extraordinary sense of oneness with my partner and the music. There was no thinking ahead of the next step combination, nor trying to impress whomever. I was only aware of a dreamlike, harmonic moving in space. No sense of otherness, rather there was this pervasive feeling of dancing not with another person, but dancing with another part of myself. Other, yet not other.”
Even days later, this feeling, Peter said, “would revisit me.” He posed the question, “How could that be? How can two bodies move together as one, feel as one?”
Having completed his Ph.D in philosophy a few years ago, Peter revisited Plato’s Symposium, a sort of ancient Greek milonga, only more decadent and more intellectual. At this one, Plato, Aristophanes, Socrates and other, hard-to-pronounce Greek names discussed Love and it was Aristophanes who offered a hook for Peter’s experience. Originally, Aristophanes said, humans were whole and were shaped round like oranges, like globes, or like the Aleph. But leave it to Zeus. He felt threatened that humans would take over the Mountain. So he hatched a plan to cut them in half, which he did, which is why we are forever longing for the other half, be it male or female.
Peter writes that Aristophanes said, “When we are longing for and following that primeval wholeness, we say we are in love.”
It seems that the ability to long makes us human.
“We are temporal in nature,” writes Peter. All we can do is have “ . . . moments of wholeness. . [A]ll this yearning ‘is a relic of that original state of ours, when we were whole, and now, when we are longing for and following after that primeval wholeness, we say we are in love.’ ”
There was nothing left to say or do but fall back off my backless desk chair, not into the mothering plough pose. But this time, into the heart-opening backbend or bridge.
The heart is a lonely bivalve, a clam whose default pose is snapped shut and it needs to be cracked open now and then and pressed into another’s to feel that wholeness we knew before were separated. When I sat up, I noticed an email had come in from my long, lost Nureyev.
THE END BUT TO BE CONTINUED.
Here is an exercise:
Notice when you feel longing. Notice what you long for.
Notice when longing lingers and when it passes.
Notice where in your body it arises and is most poignant.
Which chakra might it be associated with?
Just hold the feeling and see if it lasts, grows stronger, or passes.
What happens if you satisfy that longing?
