Tango Read Online Free Page B

and obscene. 11 It might also have found those same movements in the tango of Andalusia. The elegant and complex footwork could have come from the fast tarantella of Northern Italy. But the embrace belonged to the habaneras that brought the European contredanse to Latin America via Cuba, brought perhaps by sailors who gave it its other name, the marinera . And the native addition to the mix was the milonga , the country dance that accompanied the rural exiles of the arrabales and the compadritos who claimed it for their own in the city.
    The tango was simultaneously a ritual and a spectacle of traumatic encounters between people who should never have come together. 12
    These dramas of challenge and transgression had their own very particular cast of characters. The theatre was the street – the ill-lit, unpaved streets of the dockland districts, or the lanes around the slaughterhouses, where the cattlemen came and went in their squeaking carts. The dance, at this first moment of its birth, was a wary meeting, its signs mute at first, though it would soon develop a language of its own, both a language of gesture and a new speech – lunfardo – which was itself a meeting, a fusion of languages and codes that were both inclusive (of this new riverside population) and exclusive (of the other Buenos Aires growing up in the centre and the north of the city). Lunfardo was a secret language shared bya new community whose members were linked only by their marginality and their vulnerability. It is hard at this distance to know to what extent it was a spoken language, an authentic argot spoken to conceal and challenge the Spanish (or French or English) of bourgeois city folk. What we know of it is its second life, as the expression of an authentic experience viewed retrospectively, nostalgically, by the first generation to create a poetry in lunfardo that aspired to speak to an audience beyond the world of the docks.
    In its early manifestations, lunfardo was a functional code that made possible the first interactions between immigrant communities that remained to a considerable extent isolated and enclosed to themselves. It arose and was forged at first in the spaces of social interchange and shared experience. It was also the language of the street, the brothel and the criminal underclass. A basic lunfardo vocabulary list provides several alternative words for prostitutes, pimps and brothels; it offers several variants for confidence tricksters and silver-tongued persuaders; it provides a number of ways to describe knives and the scars they leave on the face ( feite , barbijo ). The fraternity of thieves is divided by its particular skills; the culatero , for example, specializes in stealing from the back pockets of his targets. And this assortment of spivs, con men and flyboys has names for all its victims from the wealthy bacán who pays well for his mistress (his mina ) whom he keeps in a bulín , to the soft fool and easy touch boludo or gil . And in permanent attendance are the corrupt police, moneylenders and fences who oversee this network of mutual small-scale exploitation.
    When men danced together, they would mimic the pimp’s promises or reenact an actual or imagined knife fight with the country boys who strolled the streets as if they owned them – and took very little persuasion to demonstrate their skill with the short knife – the facón – that was part of the uniform of the gaucho . Like the malevo (the criminal), the pimp restrains himself until the prettiest girl in the dance hall provokes him to fight.
    Se cruzó
    un gran rencor y otro rencor
    a la luz
    de un farolito a querosén
    y un puñal
    que parte en dos un corazón
    porque así
    lo quiso aquella cruel mujer .
    Cuentan los que vieron
    que los guapos
    culebrearon
    con su cuerpos
    y buscaron
    afanosos
    el descuido
    del contrario
    y en un claro
    de la guardia
    hundió el mozo
    de Palermo
    hasta el mango
    su facón