Tag Archives: Buenos Aires

Taking the “A” Train

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By Cherie Magnus

What is it about trains?

We all love them–the waiting, the leaving, the whistles. Who can hear the distant “woo-woo” of a train without feeling something’s longing, nostalgia, the urge to hop on and leave your old life behind? Literature abounds with romantic train symbols: The Polar Express, Streetcar Named Desire, Train to Nowhere, The Last Train Home.

The same for tunnels, which can be passages to somewhere mysterious and unknown. Aren’t the words, “secret tunnel” exciting? Tunnels are a metaphor of life and death? Mystery and secrets? The birth experience, with light and life at the end?

And when there are trains in tunnels, well, in the old movies Hollywood movies during the moral censorship days of the Hayes Code, when a train went into a tunnel, the audience knew the stars were having sex.

Most people don’t find the subway so romantic. But taking the A line of the Buenos Aires subway is usually an opportunity for me to be transported to realms other than the stations of Peru, Piedras and Pasco.

The “A” line is the oldest in the Buenos Aires subway system, or Supte. Construction began in 1911 and opened to the public in 1913. It’s a short line of only 13 stations, beginning from the Plaza de Mayo. There the President’s Pink House and the Cathedral sit at right angles around a plaza full of history, monuments, protests, and souvenir stands hawking blue and white Argentine flags.

A couple of cars have been replaced, but generally when I ride to my Castellano class or to church, I take one of the original wooden cars. At times it’s almost a mystical ride, especially early in the morning or late at night. As I sit on the wooden slat benches, the train rocks me from side to side, the rings hanging from the ceiling swing hypnotically. The original incandescent lighting is still in use in old-fashioned glass shades, and the light glows on the wood, brass and beveled mirrors. These original cars have windows at both ends so you can see right through to the next car or to the black tunnel you have just left or into the one you are entering. The world up top seems so far away.

During the day, cars passing over the grills on the street above, make daylight come and go as the train rumbles along in the dark tunnel.
Light in tunnels is a strong metaphor. During a series of site-specific dance performances in Los Angeles by Collage Dance Theater in the year 2000, abandoned subway tunnels from the 20′s were used in the work, SubVersions. A brilliant idea full of symbolism, dancers dug through rubble for lost hope, and waltzed as phantoms through the elegant art deco Terminal building. Finally they built a makeshift boat full of happy passengers waving goodbye, which was borne on shoulders, down the dark tunnel until its light disappeared.

Because tunnels are so appealing, wise businessmen around the world put the lure of exploring history underground to good use. In Seattle, Washington, a popular tourist attraction is a walking tour of the subterranean tunnels under Pioneer Square, once the main roadways and ground-floor storefronts of old downtown.

The abandoned silver mine shaft in Zacatecas, Mexico, was turned into an amusement park-type of attraction with an underground disco. Patrons take the old mine train from the entrance and pass the centuries old chapel with flowers and burning candles still honoring the miners who lost there lives there underground.

In Paris, tourists line up to explore the Catacombs, and not too long ago they also went on underground sewer tours. Here in Buenos Aires are forgotten old tunnels as well. El Zanjón de Granados, on Defensa in San Telmo, is 150 meters of tunnels, 4 meters wide, dating from the beginning of the 19th century. And under the Manzana de las Luces are Jesuit tunnels even older.

I’m not a spelunker, or cave explorer. I don’t belong to any narrow gauge or steam train club. I don’t search out the roller coasters of the world. I’m not about to climb into an old well or abandoned mineshaft.

I’m just going to keep on taking the A Train. It’s not hard to imagine, as the train appears from nowhere in the station, that the next stop is somewhere ethereal and strange. I take my seat and vanish into history.

Cherie Magnus (left, back to camera) now lives in Buenos Aires. She has written many articles and has contributed to the-vu for many years, from California, from Cuba, from Europe, from Mexico and now from Argentina. Follow her blog at http://tangocherie.blogspot.com/

The Church of Tango

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By Cherie Magnus

It was known as La Cat’dral. Not easy to find in Buenos Aires’ dark side streets at three in the morning–no signs, no cars, no people in front. But once I climbed the stairs to the second floor of the old warehouse, I could hear the siren call of music. It was eerie and scary, mounting those stairs alone, but I was helpless to do otherwise, a pilgrim drawn to the altar of Tango.

The room was huge, like the inside of a barn, all wood. It was barely lit by large candelabra with most of the candles melted into pools of silky wax, some votive flames, and a few strings of fairy lights. It smelled of cat piss and dusky marijuana. A bar ran the width of the room in back, with gigantic paintings hanging over it all the way to the rafters. Shadowy figures were sitting around the room on the lumpy funky old couches and broken chairs, their conversations punctuated by the smoldering ends of their cigarettes moving in the dark.

At first I could only see the silhouettes of dancers through the smoke. Three or four couples on the warped, uneven wooden dance floor, moved, not to Pugliese or Tanturi, but to Louis Armstrong’s “Kiss of Fire.” A tall figure approached out of the gloom. “Quieres bailar?” He was young, muscular, handsome, with black rimmed glasses framing eyes that sparkled with cocaine excitement. He was so tall I had to reach up very high to wrap my left arm around his neck. He held me tight and led me with brute machismo, so unlike the subtle leads of the old milongeuros I had danced with at Club Almagro earlier that night. When I leaned against him in the traditional tango pose of female trust, he dragged me across the floor, lifted me back on my feet, turned and twisted me, giving me no opportunity to embellish or decorate his steps. I simply obeyed the movements his body ordered. It was different, exhilarating, exhausting.

“You don’t really need to work out at the gym, do you?” I asked during a break in the music. “No, I eat red Argentine beef full of blood! Blood! To make me strong!”

His eyes glittered, muscles rippled under his tight tee shirt, testosterone energy creating an almost visible aura around him. Breathless, I had to sit out the next set and recover on an old velvet sofa. I watched people arriving and leaving in the candlelight, with their high heeled tango shoes and backpacks. The informality of the setting and the dancers’ attire and attitude clashed with the formal tango they danced so seriously. It was like watching a play: pure mesmerizing theatre.

Armed with two years of tango experience in Los Angeles, New York and Amsterdam, and with knowledge gleaned from a trip to Argentina last year, I had flown off to Buenos Aires alone. I had no plans to connect with a group or to take any lessons. I simply went to dance tango.

I rented a room in the middle-class neighborhood of Caballito. Three other rooms in the apartment were rented to dancers, and the vivacious landlady, Maria Teresa, was a tanguera too. So whenever we met up with each other in the kitchen or the lone bathroom, we had plenty to talk about.

You can dance in Buenos Aires from after lunch until five in the morning. In the afternoon, the tables in the Confiteria Ideal–an elegant Belle Epoque ballroom of marble and mirrors–are littered with the cell phones of businessmen and housewives, also frosty ice buckets with bottles of sparkling sidra, the Argentine apple-cider champagne. Evenings you can go to practicas or take lessons until midnight. Then everyone hits the tango halls until the sun comes up. Repeatedly I went to bed with birds chirping and sunlight brightening the curtains of my room.

Every day, my friends and I discussed who danced where and with whom as if tango were the most important subject on earth. If I lived in Argentina, I would never work. I surmised that the dancers of Buenos Aires don’t keep a 9-5 schedule. Either that or they never sleep.

One night Maria Teresa drove us to Sin Rumbo. The historic milonga is far out of town, but famous as the “birthplace of tango.” Maria Teresa called it the “church of tango,” the genuine tango cathedral.

It was very different from La Cat’dral The harsh overhead florescent lighting illuminated a dozen people seated at tables and a few couples on the small, black and white checkered floor. The dancing style was more open, less crowded than in the packed town clubs. One couple caught my eye: a middle-aged pair a foot apart performing complicated figures with bored faces. “Married too long,” observed Maria Teresa, whose day job was as a psychologist.

Torquato Tasso was another small, cramped, inelegant tango hall, yet famous nevertheless. At first I couldn’t see why. Jetlagged and tired, I wanted to leave by two a.m. But when twelve white-haired portly men in tuxedos took the small stage, I hung around. Luckily for me, because they were the original members of the famous D’Arienzo Orchestra. With five bandoneons (Argentine accordions), a piano, violins, and double bass, they recreated the fabulous music of the 40′s and 50′s that all tango aficionados cherish.

I asked Maria Teresa, “Do you agree that the bandoneon is the sexiest instrument a man can play?” “Ooh yes!”she laughed. “Just look where they hold it!”

Tuesday and Thursday afternoons I went to Pavadita on Avenida Corrientes. It too was upstairs, and after parting the velvet draperies at the top, I smelled the incense, burning to mask the musky stale odors of the windowless hall. At Pavadita, the men sit on a kind of stage at little tables, and the women sit in front of the bar and scattered around the room. Each time the music begins, men and women stare at each other across the empty dance floor. The women select the men they want as partners, and the men respond–or not–with raised eyebrows and inquisitive looks. After a woman nods affirmatively, the man gets up, crosses the room, and, when he’s close to her, she stands up and meets him ready to dance. These negotiations are invisible to all but the participants, and serve to prevent the embarrassment of public refusal. It’s a heady thing for us female tango tourists who are not used to it.

We catch the eye of a man who has just lit a cigarette and crossed his legs in a pose of relaxation…but suddenly he stubs it out and arrives in front of us to dance just because we looked at him.

I had already learned the infamous Code of Tango, and so I knew what was expected of me and how to behave. It’s all about invitation, wanting, rejection, needing, appearance, sensuality, attitude, sex.

I saw that young women are always invited to dance, no matter their skill levels, and old women hardly ever receive invitations, unless it is as favors from a friend or husband. And all the men wishing to dance, no matter their age, looks, or status, can tango as much as they liked.

Men wanted good-looking women; women cared more about the tango skills of their partner. That’s unfair, but it is a man’s world on the tango floor, always.

It is difficult to sit at a table with a man you like while he’s searching the room for prospective dance partners. Too, if you sit with a man, other dancers will ignore you, not wanting to infiltrate another guy’s “territory.” But the fellow at your table can catch the eye of any woman in the room and leave you to dance with her. That’s the Code.

The milongueros (tango hall habitues) of Buenos Aires are not young. They have had many years to perfect their art, are always formally dressed in wool suits and ties no matter the weather, and invariably smell of soap and French cologne. I love dancing in their traditional close embrace. For the milongueros there is only the milonguero style.

On my first trip I was absolutely petrified every time I was asked to dance. This year Carlos Gavito, Omar Vega, and other tango superstars approached me as if they were just anybody–or I was really someone.

At Club Gricel, I was afraid to look at Gavito for fear that he would think me too aggressive. I had taken a few lessons from him in Los Angeles when he was on tour with “Forever Tango,” so we knew each other a little. At the milongas, Gavito only danced with the best and the youngest women. Yet, from the corner of my eye, I saw him stand up, button his jacket, and walk around the dance floor to my table. Oh my gosh, I thought, glancing behind me in vain for the woman who was the object of his invitation. When he returned me to my table ten minutes later, the local women sitting with me were astonished. I could just hear the buzz: “Who is she?”

On my last day in Buenos Aires I danced an impromptu demonstration in the park with Antonio, a handsome milonguero who owned only the elegant suit of clothes on his back. We tangoed beneath a huge fig tree to music from a boombox tied to the bicycle of a grizzled old man. Elderly couples, young children, even a woman in a wheelchair, all cheered and threw money and candy at us while we danced. It was a miracle that I could glide so gracefully over the rough bricks in backless high wedgies with rubber soles.

Thank goodness I had prayed at La Cat’dral.

With degrees in English, Dance, and Library Science from UCLA, Cherie has published many articles in professional journals and magazines. Her solo travels to Europe and Latin America have inspired several pieces published in Skirt!, PassionFruit, Moxie, JourneyWoman, Dancing USA, GoNomad, Open Spaces, Porthole, The Cusco Weekly, the-vu, and various online magazines. She was the dance critic for the Cerritos News in Orange County, California before moving to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. She is currently at work on a novel situated in France, when she’s not out dancing. Follow her blog at http://tangocherie.blogspot.com/

Solo Tango in Buenos Aires

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By Cherie Magnus

It’s just before dawn, and our small group of Argentines and Americans are tired and filled with reverie after a night of tango. We’re drooped over cafes con leche on an old wooden table in a run-down nineteenth-century coffee shop. The large party over by the dark windows also look like they’ve been up all night having a good time. The men are wearing jackets, the women decolletage,all somewhat portly and of a certain age.

Suddenly one of the men stands up and begins to sing, loudly, proudly, passionately. Heads nod with approval. A woman in gold beads joins in.

Several others, our table included, brighten with the music and begin to clap along. I don’t understand the words, but I know it is Tango–love, life, disappointment, desire, joy and sadness.

Marcello can not resist the siren call of the emotional song, even after dancing all night. He’s an Argentine. He looks at me purposefully, and we tango on the cracked black and white marble floor around the men having breakfast with their newspapers on their way to work.

It’s a normal morning in Buenos Aires.
What is tango, anyway? I had danced other dances all my life, both social and theatrical, but I really didn’t know the answer to that question. I knew Tango meant more than a dance, certainly more than a (slow slow quick quick slow) ballroom exhibition, a campy movie moment, or a Broadway show. Because I wanted to experience the legendary dancers’ dance and all that Tango meant, I made a pilgrimage to Buenos Aires.

Knowing no one in Argentina and no Spanish, I was lucky enough to hook up with a tour of dancers who I found on the Internet. But it didn’t matter, I would have gone anyway. Tango is addictive and I already was a junkie after only three months of tango dance classes in L.A.

Tango permeates the air of BuenosAires–tango art and history, the dance of politics, the music of extinct German bandoneons, a 24 hour Tango TV channel, tango dancers on the streets, tango clubs two per block, curios and postcards, altars to Carlos Gardel. The city could just as easily be called Tango Aires. For a tanguera wanna-be like me and the other American women I met on the trip, it was paradise.

Buenos Aires is often called the Paris of South America, perhaps because a lot of the city’s architecture emulates La Belle Epoque and if you squint your eyes it is possible you could be in Paris: the French windows, balconies, wrought iron, sculptures of large buxom women over doorways. Elegant cupolas pop up on rooftops all over the city’s skyline, stamping the city as somewhat European and indefinably Buenos Aires.

But the Argentines are not sitting for hours in sidewalk cafes discussing and arguing and philosophizing like the French so love. Despite the city’s mild and sunny weather, Buenos Aires has few sidewalk cafes in which to have a cafe con leche and people-watch, to observe that the Argentines are slim, stunningly beautiful, well-dressed, and have perfect posture (due perhaps to their dance-charged culture.)

Instead of sitting and talking, the people of Buenos Aires are dancing. They go to practicas and even milongas (tango clubs) by day, and fill the dance halls from midnight till dawn every night of the week.

During my stay, I didn’t shop, sightsee or sleep more than an occasional nap. I lived on caf?s con leche, little croissants called medialunas, chicken empanadas, and vino tinto, all on the run. At midnight I would wrap my feet and pad my toes before stuffing them into spike-heeled pointy-toed tango shoes, and then hobble down the hall to the elevator. I suffered until blessed numbness set in an hour later. Then once the music began, I would float on air across the hard cement and tile floors of the tango halls. After one milonga closed, I went to another one, and when it closed, I had breakfast. Then I soaked my bloody feet in the huge lavender bathtub of my room at the Hotel Continental, throwing in as much salt as I could beg from the kitchen. I fell into bed each day at 6:00 a.m., smelling of men’s cologne. I was deliriously happy.

Why is this city dancing? Tango was born a hundred years ago in Buenos Aires, its direct lineage a bit mysterious. The name may be derived from “tangle,” as the couples’ legs seem to indeed. Tango, by its nature of leading and following, could only have originated in a country of overtly macho, strong men and responsive women.

There are no real “steps” in Argentine tango, but a walk forward, back and side. It is improvised. The man leads with his mind and body, and the woman follows with hers. She does have the choice of adding adornments and embellishments, but the control and responsibility are the man’s. The couple dance as one in a tight embrace, cheek to cheek, chest to chest, but their legs do different things.

I had to learn not to avert my eyes from a man’s direct gaze if I wanted to dance at the Buenos Aires milongas. It wasn’t easy for me at first to stare at a man from across the room, too forward for women here in the U.S. But it is considered rude in Argentina for a man to approach a woman’s table without permission, and so a woman gives her permission silently with her eyes. Often that’s all that passes between a man and a woman before meeting on the dance floor, simply a look that says, let’s dance together.

Then after the man opens his arms and the woman walks into them, they hold each other wordlessly for a moment before beginning to dance. One of my teachers there said, “The way a woman walks to me when I ask her to dance tells me if it will be a good tango or not. And at the moment when I first embrace her, I know all I need to know.”

Argentine Eduardo Arquimbau confided, “I decided when I was young that I had to be a good dancer so that women would dance with me.” The pioneering dancer, choreographer and international stage star who gave our American group a Master class, continued, “I look at a woman in the street and compliment her and she won’t even return my gaze, but at a milonga I can ask her to dance with my eyes. Then I can hold her in a deep embrace, our breath mingling, our faces touching.”

American women, myself included, flock in droves to the romantic allure of the tango and the macho men who dance it in milongas all over the world. The deep embrace, which is the norm in Buenos Aires, both seduces and frightens us.

We are so thrilled to be held in a close embrace and led strongly around the dance floor in a dance of beauty and passion, that sometimes we confuse the dancer with the dance. It is easy for many of us to fall in love with the dancer. However the sensuous communication and intimacy of the Tango is traditionally over once you leave the floor. Argentines know this, but
Americans can be disoriented and befuddled after a sexually-charged dance.

I saw how attractive are strong men who know where they are going and what they want and who never doubt themselves–even if they are old with missing teeth (often due to dance hall brawls in their youth), or are young and skinny boys just out of their teens.

American men are different, unsure of their place in the world and with women. It’s a cultural thing. Perhaps we American women have brought it on ourselves with our race to equality.

All of this naturally in both cultures, translates to the dance floor–and perhaps the bedroom.

It’s possible that American women don’t really want a romantic relationship with a macho man, but many are starving to give up control, at least for the time it takes to dance two or three tangos. And to be held so close that your breath combines and your legs tangle and you dance as one… well, some of us lust for that in our lives, not just for ten minutes. On my trip there were a lot of tears shed by my American traveling companions in the Ladies’ Rooms of the tango halls. And I admit, even though I knew better, to having a crush on one of the teaching assistants and being disappointed that all he did was dance with me.

It’s more comfortable to have our personal space, to keep a lack of commitment that prevents our being hurt, to not press our breasts against the chest of a stranger who we may never see again and whose name is unknown.

It takes courage for Americans to be close physically, and to embrace a stranger with no expectations.

Holding someone “at arm’s length” is a lot easier, after all.

It’s just not Tango.

Juan Bruno, another Master teacher I studied with, described the physiology of Tango as “the brain sending a message to your feet through your heart.” And el corazon, the dominant phrase of tango song lyrics, is also the soul of Tango as well as the heart of its dancers.

I learned that Tango is music, a mystique, a way of life, a people, not only a dance. My dancing improved after dancing twelve hours a day with strong leaders, and now that I’m back home again, I’m haunting the milongas of Los Angeles looking for the perfect dance experience as I found it in Buenos Aires. And if I also find tremendous pleasure from a man’s deep embrace with no strings attached, well, who can blame me?

However, along with all of its other qualities, a tango can also be just a dance. At a milonga I remind myself of that each time a man takes me in his arms to dance, and before I go home, alone.

(c) Copyright 2000 Cherie Magnus

With degrees in English, Dance, and Library Science from UCLA, Cherie has published many articles in professional journals and magazines. Her solo travels to Europe and Latin America have inspired several pieces published in Skirt!, PassionFruit, Moxie, JourneyWoman, Dancing USA, GoNomad, Open Spaces, Porthole, The Cusco Weekly, the-vu, and various online magazines. She was the dance critic for the Cerritos News in Orange County, California before moving to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. She is currently at work on a novel situated in France, when she’s not out dancing. Follow her blog at http://tangocherie.blogspot.com/