Free Heart of Tango by Elia Barceló Page B

us like a silk handkerchief. For a moment I felt his breath against my cheek, and suddenly the hall and the couples around us and even the very floor we danced on ceased to exist. Never before had I felt such passion for the dance. All my experience, all my years of dancing tango, all the courses I had taken in Buenos Aires dissolved in his presence. I was simply a soul, dancing, dangling from a sorcerer’s spell, flying and sinking, following his light like a nocturnal butterfly. In his arms my body grew supple and submissive, yielding to his desires before my mind consciously picked up on them. It was like being in another world, like being both alive and dead, and at the same time yearning that it would never end, that this state of grace might never be broken.
    I don’t know if I closed my eyes. I remember the texture of his waistcoat, the play of his shoulder muscles, the warmth of his hand against my back. I don’t know if we danced for hours or minutes or centuries. I know that at some point he took off his hat and I saw his black hair glistening with brilliantine, his tanned young face with deep, vertical wrinkles like razor cuts down his cheeks, and his half-closed eyes watching me with such passion as I shall never encounter again.
    We danced. Danced the music, danced the stories I had told myself, danced memories of a time gone by that I had never known. We danced nostalgia and grief and madness and the only words between us were the words of the songs we danced. What could we have said to one another? When two people speak without words, what needs to be said aloud? Should I have told him about my nomadic life, about the hotels and the contracts and the envy of my colleagues? Was he going to tell me about his nostalgia, about his underpaid work in some dance studio, about the European women who saw in him the fiery and temperamental Latin lover they had been searching for, someone who would take them briefly out of their comfortable routines until they grew frightened of what they were doing and dropped him?
    A cheery, playful milonga had just started playing when a rose peddler came up to us, an African teenager with a dazzling smile. He waved over the peddler without thinking, then grimaced and returned his hand to my back. But the boy pulled out a rose andoffered it to us, happy to be selling one flower after so many tries, so many polite refusals, so many eyes avoiding his. He shook his head as if it pained him to disappoint the African vendor, but then, a second before the boy caught on, he quickly took off his watch and handed it over in exchange for the flower. The boy smiled again and gave him the flower without accepting the trade, then slapped him on the shoulder, uttered a few words I couldn’t hear, and wandered away amongst the tables.
    He then snapped off the stem and placed the flower in my hair, viewing me with pride, as if I were his and he were decking me out for a ceremony. I pulled my handkerchief from the cut in my dress, not knowing why, and held it to his lips. He kissed it with a smile, his first smile of the night, and folded it in his breast pocket like a magician’s prop, fanning its lace edge against the black cloth of his coat.
    Perhaps it lasted only a few seconds, but this scene is so deeply engraved in my memory that when I close my eyes I can see it like a film, all in black and white except for the red rose. Then a milonga drew us back in, and then another tango, and then some songs by Pugliese—“Yuyo verde”, “Farol”, “Recuerdo”, especially “Recuerdo”—that made him close his eyes and grit his teeth, as if he were recalling something painful and distant.
    At some point I reluctantly noticed a general movement in the hall. I held on to him as if he would otherwise dissolve into air. Time was up. Couples started separating and saying their goodbyesto acquaintances. Others blew out the candles and gathered up the