This is my Tango

This is not THE tango, it’s simply my tango. And everyone has their story, their joys and pains, their ruptures and betrayals, their dead, their loves. Their own tango.

Most of these photos were tucked away for more than a decade. It hurt too much to look at them. In them, I could remember my old man, Doctor Julito, on the last trip of his life. I saw him walking the streets of Buenos Aires, sweet and absent-minded. In them, I saw Eulalita, my mother, with all her anguish clenched in her chest: the certainty that this journey was a farewell.

I didn’t want my parents to visit me in Buenos Aires. I knew that if they did, my tango, that sweet tango into which I had poured so much devotion, would forever be marked by my family history.

When I remember the final months of 2002, I think of my garret in the Plaza Hotel. I was staying on the ninth floor, above the tree tops. From my balcony, I could see the rain, the Retiro station, the Río de la Plata in the distance.

The River has a life of its own. Even though the city turns its back on it, its telluric presence marks the life of Buenos Aires. Sometimes it turns a chocolate color, and you can see the dark clouds swirling in the distance. When these low-pressure systems form over the River, there is something, a dark, ancient sadness, that invades everything. No, it’s not rain that falls, it’s a fine sadness that you can touch, a sadness that floods the soul.

I remember sensations, images. I remember one of those whirlwind afternoons, my father lying in my garret, sick. The doctors didn’t know what he had. My mother on the balcony, soaked in the rain, bowed, without hope. And the fine sadness that fell, invading every nook and cranny.

That was the beginning of the darkest phase of my life. All the bricks with which I had built my identity were crumbling. My parents died, my savings were stolen, I lost the woman I loved, I lost my job. I was poisoned and came very close to losing my life. The successful, young, triumphant National Geographic photographer had disappeared, swept away by a dark whirlwind. Swept away by an exaggerated, capricious tango. My tango.

When I was in intensive care due to the poisoning, the only thing that seemed to alleviate the pain was music. I listened to music all the time, especially Bach. I remember one night, my roommate had died, and his family was weeping inconsolably. I knew I was closer to the other side than here, it was hard for me to breathe, I just wanted to close my eyes and get lost. A doctor approached. I recognized him immediately. He was the one who brought me into the world, a doctor who had died many years before. Why did I see him that night? Was it a second birth?

How little I knew of pain, how little I knew of sorrows, how little I knew of betrayal. How little I understood of the tango.

Can you imagine the bone-deep pain, bare like a dry blow? Can you imagine it standing before you, stern, in eternal and absolute silence? Can you imagine a pain that only hurts? And that hurts also without life, without affections, without tenderness, without beauty? A brutal, cold, cruel pain.

Such pain would be unbearable, incomprehensible. We humans need to embellish pain, to dress it in music, poetry, friends and hugs, memories. We need to humanize the pain, to wrap it up, to welcome it, to adorn it, to dance it with devotion and tenderness.

I believe it was there, in that hospital bed, that I first approached Discépolo’s definition of tango: “Tango is a sad feeling that is danced.” Yes, it also speaks of a dry, bony sadness, one of those sadnesses that life imposes on us. We humans have the possibility, the power to even beautify that pain with music, with an embrace, with movement, with poetry.

My Reunion with Tango

A few months ago, I was in Camogli, a small village in Italian Liguria. There was a group of people dancing tango, a simple and improvised milonga by the sea. What were the rhythmic and melancholic orchestra of Aníbal Troilo, the lyrics of Pascual Contursi doing there? Why did the sweet rhythm of the great Pugliese resonate that afternoon, across the seas and years? It was a bright, blessed afternoon. The children played, imitating the adults’ dance. The dancers closed their eyes and let themselves be carried away by the music and the sound of the sea. There was the hustle and bustle, life unfolding, laden with sweetness and nostalgia, rich, complex, confusing, full of loves and heartbreaks. There was the tango, my tango.

I’m not Argentine or Uruguayan, but that tango I heard in Italy was mine. I had earned the right to call it mine through work, tears, silences, abandonments, sadnesses. I recognized myself in it, I felt proud of it. There, I knew I had to publish this book, to close the circle that was left incomplete.

I remembered myself in Buenos Aires, exploring the night, dining with friends at the Undici restaurant. I remembered the joy, being in love with life. Grateful. Laughing carefree. I remembered my attic and how happy I was watching the city pass by. I remembered the nights listening to tango at Roberto’s Bar and photographing at Gricel, Sunderland, or Niño Bien. I thought of the dawns by the river, after an entire night of tango. I remembered that night at El Beso when Tito—the milonguero who became my guide in the labyrinth of the Buenos Aires nightlife—invited me to sit at his table for the first time. And I remembered when the great Gavito gave me permission to photograph him because I “had taken tango seriously”.

And I remembered that photographing is just a delightful excuse for living.

I remembered that beautiful porteñita who was the freshness, the laughter. She was a child. A delicious mixture of curiosity about the world, an unstoppable desire to live… and fear. The fear made her more beautiful. My heart danced every time I saw her.

I remembered the incomprehensible paths of the bobo or heart in lunfardo—the dialect of the tangueros. “Bobo, bobito,” I would say to my heart, “why are you so foolish! Why are you such a dreamer and lover?” And the bobo, the more foolish, was the happier.

Imperfect, deliciously imperfect. That’s how my tango heroes were and that’s how my milonguero friends were. They bet on life: “By a head, all the craziness. Her kissing mouth, erases sadness, soothes bitterness”.

The Passage of Time

It’s been exactly twenty years since the first time I went to Buenos Aires and went to a tango show. I could recognize the music, it was the same that my uncles sang excitedly at family gatherings in Cuenca or that my mother pounded on the house piano. The dance, however, was foreign to me. The short skirts, the exaggerated sensuality, the legs in the air, the orgasmic faces, seemed poor, limited to me. These people should be in an intimate, private place, not up on a stage… I thought.

Exaggeration makes sensuality trivial, it strips it of its complexity. The tango-dance had disappointed me. I couldn’t relate to it, it was a staging for tourists, a

genre bounded by falseness. But the music, oh, it still retained its soul! A centuries-old music, rich, extraordinarily diverse, full of popular poetry, the territory of great composers and performers.

The music brought me back to Buenos Aires.

On my subsequent trips, I learned that there are two genres of tango-dance: the tango show (with its legs in the air, its pirouettes, and its canned sensuality) and the floor tango, the one danced for oneself, in silence and intimacy. They are worlds apart. One is on the streets and in shows for tourists; the other is in the milongas, in closed and dark spaces.

When I look at the photos from 2001 and 2002, especially those from the parties, I feel a deep nostalgia. They were happy, fortunate times. How many tangueros have gone! Gavito is missing, Teté is missing, Pepe Libertella is missing, Pichuquito is missing, Pipa is missing, Osvaldo Zotto is missing, Carlos García is missing. Ten years have passed and the passage of time is already noticeable on the faces of my friends from the Buenos Aires nightlife. This is the last generation of milongueros who experienced the golden times of the tango from the fifties and sixties when dances were organized with the music of the great orchestras. When they are gone, tango will be orphaned, it will have lost its epic.

I have returned every year to Buenos Aires and have seen the transformation of the milongas. Now they are full of tourists and many of the old milongueros are no longer there. In this book, there are photos from 1996 to the present. A project about tango should not, could not be done in less time.

Tango is crossed by nostalgia, marked by the sharp awareness that life is slipping away, carried away by a whirlpool. The passage of time is the invisible soul of tango. There is the “Path that time has erased, which together one day saw us pass”. Or that magnificent phrase by Santos Discépolo in Uno: “If I could like yesterday, love without foreseeing…”.

In tango, there is always the yesterday that will not return. And there is the today that we cling to in vain endeavor. This tension between the past and this present destined to become nostalgia, is the essential tension of tango. The more intense life is today, the more intense the nostalgia will be tomorrow.

And yet, we make the decision to live, to feel, to love, to make mistakes. We embrace each other to save ourselves from the whirlpool that sweeps everything away. We know it will be of no use. But it doesn’t matter.

Death, abandonments, heartbreaks, illnesses, betrayals cause pain. We will have the redemptive option to humanize it, to beautify it.

Each person has their own story. From it, we have the material to build a joyful, sad, heartfelt, deep: complex tango. These pages are a simple testimony of my story, of my tango.