Free Heart of Tango by Elia Barceló Page A

white-caked sidewalk, wondering, with a glimmer ofself-irony, what I expected to find in Landsberg at midnight on a frosty Saturday.
    I arrived nearly out of breath, snow sprinkling my shoulders and my nose reddened, and passed through the door of the theater without stopping to think about it, afraid I’d find the same disappointment I had on other occasions: a poor, sad dance floor, a surplus of women leaning their elbows on the bar, pretending to be indifferent but staring daggers at the woman who had just entered without a partner to compete with them for the few unattached tangueros, men who took turns asking them to dance and made them feel for a few minutes the sweet delirium of surrender to a stranger who picks you up and carries you off and decides for you.
    The heat came rushing to my face, and an unexpected wave of nausea washed over me in an instant, leaving me feeling shaky in its wake. There were only two women talking with each other at a small table. On the improvised dance floor staked out in the middle of the Stadttheater foyer for the milonga, seven or eight couples danced with eyes closed in the dimness that was scantly lit by a couple of dozen red candles, the kind people bring to cemeteries to celebrate All Saints’ Day.
    I took off my overcoat while my eyes adjusted to the darkness. I leaned over to tighten the buckles of my shoes and felt the familiar tickling sensation of someone staring at my movements. I looked up and there he was, on the stairs, like an image ripped from an old print: black trousers, waistcoat crossed by a silver watch chain,white shirt, cravat, hat pulled jauntily low over a pair of intensely burning eyes.
    In my tango dreams he must have looked just like this. If I had been a woman of the past century in some hovel in La Boca, this man would have driven me wild. The stories I had told myself on nights spent at different hotels were interwoven with the lyrics of the tangos I knew so well: songs of desertion and estrangement, of tragic, passionate love, of tobacco smoke and rum-drenched nights punctuated by the sweet, sorrowful, rending wail of the bandoneón. But I was a woman of the twenty-first century, and I knew the difference between life and dreams, between stories made up on my lonely nights and the small-bore reality of a snow-covered town. And in this reality, I couldn’t be bought so cheap, with an intense stare, a tight waistcoat, a dancer’s slender body. Even if he were sincere, perhaps he was only trying to live out his own nighttime dream, which would dissipate like night mist at daybreak before the mirror of some drab bedroom suite.
    I felt tempted to walk over to him and try a joke about his vintage tanguero costume, but someone had just changed the music. Gardel’s muddy voice was singing the opening strains of “Volver”, and when I saw him move in bold, fluid steps toward me, my impulse to laugh at him unexpectedly vanished. His eyes were green. They flashed between long, dark lashes. He did not speak, did not smile. He stood before me, tall and straight yet languid, like a leather whip, waiting.
    I set aside my unlit cigarette on the table and stepped ahead of him on to the dance floor, sensing in my wake an indefinable aroma, a mixture of old-fashioned cologne and black tobacco. A warm sensation hit the back of my neck and spread down my icy spine.
    I’d danced before with shady characters, old-school machos, the sort of professional
porteños
who exaggerate their Argentine accents to make you understand that you’ve found the real article, what you’ve been looking for your whole nocturnal life as a single woman who loves the tango. When I turned around to let him embrace me, I was ready to hear his hoarse, languid voice asking me what was my name, where had I appeared from, what was a nice woman like me doing in a place like this.
    He didn’t say a word. He put his hand on my back and the music wrapped around