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given rise to the yellow fever epidemic remained. But there was one day of rest. And there would always be a good set of clothes for Saturday night – a clean white shirt, freshly laundered by some young mother, shoes cracked but shiny, trousers narrow at the ankle. Brothels were legalized in the poorer areas of Buenos Aires by 1875, but the rules were strict – they could not be within two blocks of a church or a school and the women could not be seen on the street or at the windows. But you could still hear the music from the street.
    The existence of these brothels was a paradox. Four years before their legalization a Civil Code was published which defined the proper role of women as that of marriage and procreation. The decision to seek work, any kind of work, placed them in the category of fallen women, whose existence outside the home consigned them to the demi-monde of the street, just one step away from prostitution. Against that background the existence of legal bordellos seems less liberal than might at first appear to be the case. It could be seen rather as a policy of containment in an era obsessed with the risks of venereal disease as well as yellow fever. 10 While the new immigrant labourers were indispensable for economic growth, it was imperative that they were kept away from the glistening new middle-class areas.
    Other women plied their trade outside the law; they were the waitresses in the cafés or the local music halls. They would take you to their room in a cheap lodging house, or stand against youin a dark alley. But in the brothels there were exotic women – French prostitutes with beautiful names, like the Madame Ivonne of Cadícamo’s tango – to drink and dance with for a minute or two before the brief sexual encounter in an upstairs room.
    On a busy night there would be a long wait in the edgy queues that surrounded the buildings in the darkness. There would be occasional fights over people who tried to jump the queue; sometimes the pimps, the cafishios , would emerge from the shadows to offer some quicker satisfactions in the local cafés or recommend their charges who were working inside; they might even offer a demonstration of their charges’ prowess in a dance of sometimes obscene suggestiveness to the music issuing from within.
    Only prostitutes danced in the Buenos Aires of the late nineteenth century, and they were not allowed into the street. So the men practised as they waited by dancing on the cobbles.
    This was the birthplace of tango, and these were the actors in the tango drama. It is a story of encounters in a public space that is lawless, in construction, unsafe and full of marauding men and women hovering in expectation of an opportunity to cheat, to steal, or most importantly, to seduce. For in the end, the prelude to everything else is the seduction. In this male-dominated world, the tango dramatized the struggles between men for possession of women, and (from the predominantly male point of view) the cynical way in which the women exploited the loneliness and frustration of men.
    TANGO: A DANCE IS BORN
    There is endless debate and dispute over the origins of tango; inevitably so for a dance born in the shadows. Its provocative movements and bizarre combination of sexuality and distance would seem to confirm the contention of those like the writer Jorge Luis Borges, who insisted that it was a dance exclusive tothe brothel. It was surely born in the street, in the cafés and brothels of the port city. But it is more, much more, than a sexual entertainment.
    The dance itself is a marriage – a ‘three-minute marriage’, as some have suggested – an encounter between traditions far wider than the pimp’s propaganda. The twisting of the body – the firuletes and cortes – must surely have its origins in the dances of the black communities, the tangos de negros banned by the Municipal Court of Montevideo in the 1850s as lewd