Dark Tangos Page 2
«I was just a secretary when I started here,» Isabel said. «Somehow Jim noticed me. He paid attention to everyone. He saw something in me, I don’t know what. God knows I wasn’t that cute, but he helped me get promoted. I still hear from him now and then. I think he would take an interest in everybody in the company if he could, but with half a million people, what can you do?»
I smiled and nodded. I suspected you couldn’t be that selfless and still claw your way to the top of a global giant like Universal Systems, though I liked Isabel’s loyalty.
Isabel had sat down with a large chunk of bread stuffed with ham and cheese, and she had worked at it with steady concentration while she listened to us, to the point that she was finished and drinking off the last of her Diet Coke while Bahadur and I were still eating.
«Hope you guys write code faster than you eat,» she said, standing up.
«No one can keep up with you, mi reina,» Bahadur said. «This is well known.»
She laughed again and put both hands on my shoulders as she squeezed past. «Believe everything everyone tells you, this has always been my philosophy. See you.»
When she was gone, Bahadur said, “She’s a ball of fire, yes? Always has been.”
“With Jim behind her, I would think she could transfer to the States and really move up.”
“She doesn’t seem to want it. She gets offers sometimes, but she doesn’t want to leave Buenos Aires.”
I looked outside again. The scruffy trees on the median showed new leaves, the hands of the people on the sidewalks danced as they talked, and the very air seemed to glow.
“I can understand that,” I said.
Bahadur shook his head. “Then you are as crazy as she is. It’s just a big, dirty city. Finish up and let’s go back to work.”
*
Office hours in the city run from nine in the morning until seven or eight at night. People take long lunches, sometimes go home for a nap and work into the evening. Dinner is anywhere from eight to eleven PM, and then the fun starts.
I once asked Don Güicho when people were supposed to sleep. He smiled happily and said, «Nunca.» Never.
At 7:30 I locked my desk, slung my bright orange shoe bag over my shoulder, and left for my class.
Bahadur was right that Buenos Aires was dirty, but wrong about it not being special. The animated neon signs surrounding the Obelisk hung from old buildings by flimsy scaffolding, yet the effect at night reminded me of the energy and excitement of Times Square—except for the way the wide avenue made everything feel so open and spacious, and the warmth and sociability of the crowds that was the antithesis of New York.
I turned my back on el Obelisco and walked south through the cool evening. The air smelled of car exhaust and the spiced peanuts the vendors sold on the street, of perfume and grilling meat. I heard laughter and sales pitches and music pouring out of the brightly lit stores, tango and electronica, ballads and rap and the Rolling Stones.
I took the stairs down into the Subte and shoehorned myself into the crowd on a hundred-year-old car on the A line. I rode three stops to El Once, an older neighborhood west of the central business district, where Don Güicho taught classes in the Saverio Perre studio.
When I got back to street level it was fully dark. I walked south past a park full of barking dogs to Avenida Belgrano, turned right through a neighborhood of high-end furniture stores to a corroded metal door in the middle of the block, and rang the bell. A motorcycle roared past, trailing rapid-fire Spanish from its radio. After a second the buzzer sounded and I climbed a flight of steep, worn marble steps to the studio.
Saverio himself greeted me at the top, porteño style, with a hug and kiss on the cheek. I’d been a little nonplussed the first time it happened, despite warnings in the guidebooks, and then I’d quickly taken to it. There hadn’t been a lot of physical affection in my family and a part of me hungered for it.
Saverio was small, aristocratic, with long white hair and a neatly trimmed goatee. He had a kind of radiance that made his age impossible to guess. He asked after my health in Italian, the second language of the city, a language I only wished I spoke, and offered me the same cup of coffee that I always refused. He had these sorts of running jokes with everybody. There had apparently been some back sacada that he’d tried to teach Don Güicho twenty years before and Saverio would ask him how it was coming along, or whether he planned to teach it to me that day.
In his long life, Saverio had been an actor, singer, and dancer, and taught all those things. The walls were covered with posters and photos of him and the celebrities he’d taught and the films and festivals and shows and awards they’d all been part of. Some of the biggest names in tango were on those walls and Don Güicho’s was among them.
It was one more thing about Buenos Aires that moved me, the sense of history that the US so badly lacked. There were a few modern shopping centers in the city, including the massive Abasto mall that literally cast a shadow over the childhood home of Carlos Gardel, the world’s most famous tango singer. But there was not much new development, and even renovations of existing buildings were likely to provoke storms of protest, especially in my San Telmo neighborhood.
As usual, Don Güicho was late and I was early. I changed my shoes and talked to Saverio, and at ten past eight Don Güicho came running lightly up the stairs, followed by Brisa, his latest in a long line of dance partners. Though Don Güicho himself must have been past 60, his energy seemed infinite. He was my height, six feet, thinner even than I was, with a wiry strength I’d never had. I felt it in his abrazo there at the top of the stairs.
«One of my students saw you at Salon Canning last night,» Saverio said to Don Güicho. «He very much admired your sacada por atrás.»
«You should teach it to him,» Don Güicho said.
Saverio shook his head sadly. «Apparently I lack the skill to teach that step.»
There was a sense of haste even in Don Güicho’s small talk. Saverio pointed us to the nearest studio and Brisa led the way in. The floor was a worn, intricate parquet, a hundred years old. The high walls were powdery white stucco, covered with still more posters and photos. Two battered steel and black vinyl chairs were pushed against the wall, and a small triangular shelf in one corner held a vintage boom box. Brisa sat down to change into her four-inch heels.
She was a college student, smart and ambitious, with fair skin and dark brown hair, the sort of Northern Italian good looks that had prompted then-President Sarmiento to flood Argentina with Italian immigrants in the 1880s. It was part of a policy that included the elimination of virtually the entire black population. Blancificación, Don Güicho had called it when he explained it to me. The results were obvious walking down any street in Buenos Aires. Many blacks had been cannon fodder in a bloody war with Paraguay and there were rumors of concentration camps and forced marches across the Brazilian border. By the 1920s, the few remaining blacks in Argentina had simply stopped having children.
Don Güicho shrugged out of the backpack that he carried everywhere, opened a set of French doors that let onto a tiny balcony, and folded back the ubiquitous steel shutters to let in the night air and the sounds of traffic. He put on a CD of D’Arienzo tangos, spare and staccato, and as soon as Brisa got to her feet, he wiggled his fingers at us and said «dale,» the all-purpose Argentine equivalent of “let’s go.”
Brisa smiled. I reached behind her with my right arm, gripping her lightly outside her right shoulder blade and drawing her gently into me. Her left arm went around my neck and she sighed—anticipation, pleasure, acceptance—a thrilling sound. We breathed together for a moment and I felt the warmth of her body against me. Then I reached for her right hand with my left and pointed our forearms upward. I found my place in the music, shifted her onto her left foot, and led a slow step to my left.
I had been rehearsing in my mind the move he’d shown me in our last class and as I thought about it, I felt my shoulders start to creep up around my neck. I forc
ed them down, breathed again, focused on the beautiful woman in my arms and tried to think about the steps I wanted her to take and not my own.
Tango, at some level, is simple. There are only three steps: forward, backward, and the so-called open step to the side. The lead comes from the torso. The arms, relaxed, merely extend the torso and add clarity. The hands are still.
The steps come only at specific intervals in relation to the music. On the beat, or tiempo. Double time, or doble tiempo, and half time, or medio tiempo. Then there is contratiempo, the skipping heartbeat of the habanera rhythm, the African ancestor who will not be denied, da-DUM dum dum.
Yet for every rule, tango finds a loophole. The leader can pivot the follower, or himself, before taking any of those three steps. Leader and follower do not have to step at the same time, or in the same direction, or take the same number of steps. The complexities multiply exponentially until hope of mastering even the bare essentials of the dance recedes into an improbable future.
«Don’t think so much,» Don Güicho said. «Just dance.»
I gave up on replaying the move I had not quite learned and tried instead to dance the music. Brisa was a marvelous partner, needing only the smallest cues to execute anything I asked for, but my brain was floodlit with self-consciousness, straining for something appropriate to lead for each new phrase of the music, to keep the leads subtle and clean, to keep my feet close to the floor without dragging, to keep my posture straight yet relaxed, to make my arms and shoulders a perfect circle from my eje, my axis, my center.
After less than a minute, Don Güicho said «bueno,» not as praise but as a signal to stop.
I stepped away from Brisa and said «gracias,» and Don Güicho stepped in. He took her through a sequence of moves that involved two changes of direction, blocking her right foot in a parada, and swinging her left leg around the back of his right in a gancho, and we were off.
For the next hour I struggled to keep up, to stay focused, to take the same steps he took without losing the fundamentals of the dance. Brisa gave me a gentle correction or a nod of encouragement here and there, while Don Güicho stayed impassive and intent, with an occasional «ahí va» or «eso» when I got something right, and more often a «¡no!» with a wagging finger, followed by a demonstration—sometimes he would take me by the arm and walk me through it side by side with him, sometimes he would take me by the elbows or into close embrace and lead me through the follower’s part. Only at the very end did I get a «Muy bien, Beto, bien hecho.»
I used my cell phone to film Don Güicho going through everything we’d done, then Brisa had to rush off for a dinner date. I paid Don Güicho for the class and Saverio for the room and changed my shoes, feeling deeply tired.
Don Güicho walked me down to the street and said, «Can we change your lesson to Thursdays? My class at the Sexto Kultural starts up again next Wednesday.» It was a public cultural center in a run-down building across from the Federico Lacroze railway station. I’d been to a few of his classes there on previous trips.
«Sure, no problem.»
«Bueno,» he said, about to take his leave, and then he said, «Where are you going now?»
«Back to my apartment, I guess.»
«A friend of mine is opening his new café tonight. I’m going over there now if you’re interested. Good food, tango music, there’s a little dance floor. I’m teaching a beginner’s class there later.»
«Sure.» I hadn’t spent a lot of time with him outside of class, so I was flattered by the invitation.
He took off at a fast pace and I had to hurry to keep up. After a block or so he said, «Do you know this neighborhood? El Once?» I shook my head. «It used to have a big Jewish population, lots of stores, synagogues, textiles. During the Crisis there was a lot of emigration to Israel, so it’s different now.»
The Crisis started in the late 1980s with hyperinflation and ended in 2002 with a staggering devaluation that wiped out most people’s savings. Though the peso had been stable since 2003, the resentment and protests continued.
Carlos Menem had been President for most of the Crisis years. Menem had pushed the so-called “neoliberal” program of privatization, cutting social programs and letting the IMF and World Bank set the agenda for foreign investment.
«Everything changing,» Don Güicho said, «so much of it not for the better.» He stopped to look in the window of a stationery store. Though it was closed and dark, we could see wooden cabinets and floors and wainscoting through the iron bars. «There are still a few old stores like this one. We lose more of them every year.»
«It’s beautiful,» I said. «You don’t see anything like this in the US anymore.»
We were walking a zigzag course, north then east then north again. As we turned right onto the avenue that would eventually take us past El Congreso, the National Congress building, I heard the noise of a crowd. The closer we got to El Congreso, the louder and angrier the voices got.
I looked at Don Güicho. «What’s going on?»
«Una manifestación,» he said. A demonstration. «Over Jorge Julio López.»
I shook my head. «I think I heard the name somewhere. Did I miss something?»
*
I had.
I of course knew about the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. Their euphemistic “National Reorganization Process,” el Proceso, included the kidnapping, torture, and murder of tens of thousands of civilians. The victims were accused of having liberal sympathies, or being related to someone who did, of being a teacher or a student or a writer, or being pro-union. The usual estimate was 30,000 dead. It was hard to be sure because so few of the bodies were ever recovered. This was the regime that gave us the word “disappeared” as a noun.
Tens of thousands were also tortured and set free as a warning. One of them was Jorge Julio López, who spent close to three years in various detention centers.
When the regime finally fell, only nine men were tried. They were found guilty of human rights violations and sentenced to life in prison, then pardoned a few years later by Carlos Menem. The rest of the architects and henchmen of el Proceso were pardoned under what became known as La Ley de Punto Final, named for the period at the end of a sentence.
It wasn’t until June of 2005 that the Argentine Supreme Court finally declared the law unconstitutional. A year later, the first defendant, Miguel Etchecolatz, was brought to trial. Etchecolatz was 77, sick and feeble. During his year and a half as Director of Investigations for Buenos Aires Province at the start of el Proceso, he had been responsible for a record number of kidnappings and detentions. The main witness for the prosecution was Jorge Julio López.
López was ill with Parkinson’s and the experience of reliving his torture on the stand had been traumatic for him. He was to make his final court appearance on Monday, September 18, 10 days ago. On the night of the 17th, the day I’d arrived again in Buenos Aires, he had been at home in La Plata, south of the city, and that was the last anyone had seen of him.
Etchecolatz’s supporters suggested that López had gone into hiding, or that the stress of the trial had left him befuddled and that he’d wandered off into the countryside. The suggestions were demolished as fast as they were made and none of them explained the recordings of torture sessions that had supposedly been left on his answering machine before he vanished.
Etchecolatz himself denied any involvement and claimed that the trial was nothing but a political exercise, that he was being punished for doing only what was necessary to protect his country from Communism. The judges sentenced him to life imprisonment, though the verdict was strictly pro forma. Under Argentine law, convicts over 70 years old can’t be sent to prison, so he got off with house arrest.
During el Proceso, the repression had been so fierce, so absolute, so widespread, that there had been no organized attempt to fight back. The montoneros, the guerillas whose assassinations had provided the junta’s excuse for their reign of terror, had been all
but wiped out before the coup and no one emerged to take their place.
The only substantial protest had been by Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, the women who marched in front of the Presidential Palace, demanding the return of their children with the refrain, «Aparición con vida,» let them appear alive, and even Las Madres had been subjected to beatings and murder attempts.
Those years had cost the people of Argentina their tolerance for silence. During the Crisis they invented the cacerolazo, a protest march to the banging of pots and pans, pieces of metal pipe, anything that would make noise, and they attacked the bank buildings with hammers, paint, urine, and bonfires. Buildings were covered with political graffiti, from scrawled slogans to elaborate murals to something I’d never seen before: small, detailed paintings done with stencils and multiple layers of spray paint, showing a woman’s face with her mouth taped shut and her eyes bulging in fear, or an anarchist about to hurl a bouquet of flowers, or a portrait of Mexico’s Subcomandante Marcos. And when something particularly outrageous happened, they took to the streets by the hundreds—men, women, children, and grandparents.
That was what had happened in front of El Congreso.
*
The mob of protesters had massed across the street from the Palacio. They carried a twenty-foot banner that read APARICIÓN CON VIDA: JORGE JULIO LÓPEZ and individuals in the crowd held signs that showed his face and a question mark. They chanted «¡Dijimos nunca más!» again and again, and the sheer quantity of anger in those voices was both thrilling and frightening. I couldn’t imagine being on the other end of that much collective rage, or what kind of repercussions they might bring down on themselves.
Literally translated, the chant meant, «We told you never again,» but the «nunca más» was a loaded reference, deliberately evoking the title of the 1984 report published by the national commission that had investigated the abuses of el Proceso. It was nearly 500 pages of fine print that included account after firsthand account of kidnap and torture, photos of the detention centers, lists of the missing.