Driving on the Rim Read Online Free

conveying the sacredness of his mission. I doubt that I shall forget the sight of him standing on a Pepsi crate and pouring out his introductory remarks in a deep and vibrant voice that seemed to make the room hum.
    “When I am fifteen in Buenos Aires, I am longing for love and suffering and, above all, success—the hope of becoming a legend of our hot and drowsy tango. I underwent numberless deprivations, but success would reward the sensual designs that I displayed in many venues. Now the money I earn is exchanged for my fatigue, but I have no other way to go, and there are days I awaken upon wretchedness. Once I converted my dancing of three weeks’ duration by a pocket ruler into three hundred seventy-two kilometers. Still, tango is all! Without tango, my face inspires doubt. Therefore, my advice is, press your tango to great advantage! And now we begin.”
    He turned on the big sound system, which had hitherto been employed to enlarge the voices of prairie politicians bent on higher office or nostalgic Scandinavian chorales with cow horns on their heads. The system had astounding capacity, and as the old tangos were broadcast by Dulce, the room was filled with the somber, inevitable cadences of this prelude to intercourse. At school, I had not only enjoyed several instances of copulation—albeit with Mr. Goodwrench staring down at me—but I had seen it explained on huge blackboards, so that there could never be any doubt about what was going on.
    We began to learn the little steps, in the chest-to-chest Argentine style. We arranged ourselves counterclockwise and concentrated on maintaining our space between the other dancers. The great power of Tessa, at first exhilarating, gave way to apprehension, as though I were riding an unruly horse, and when I failed to comprehend the crossover steps as required by Dulce, Tessa, a determined expression on her face, used her might to drag me into position. To avoid humiliation, I attached myself by my wiry grasp to her flying carcass. Her cry of alarm brought Dulce to our side and the other dancers to a dead halt just as I was beginning to enjoy myself.
    “
Señor!
Grappling has no place in our national dance!”
    “I cannot follow her movements,” I explained in an accent accommodatingly identical to Dulce’s, which I found infectious.
    “You are not to follow—you are to lead!”
    “It’s my fault,” Tessa said. “I lost patience with him during the first
abrazo
. He just seemed lost. I’ll try to do better.”
    “Perhaps, this is the time to work on our syncopation,” Dulce said sternly to both of us, “with greater respect for the movements of each other.”
    “The music is unfamiliar,” I explained. “You don’t happen to have ‘La Bamba’?” He held his head and moaned as though he’d been shot.
    The other couples had deftly caught on to the oddly triangular chests-together, feet-apart position. An older pair of bottle blonds, obviously trained in other kinds of ballroom dance, made an effort to slide past us. The woman had a fixed and toothy Rockettes smile, and at close range she caught my eye and called out, “Piece of cake!”
    I gave Dulce my word that I would syncopate respectfully, and I proceeded in earnest. At first, Tessa complimented me on my “good hustle,” but she soon proved unequal to my speed and dexterity. Whatever had been going on in my life up to that point came out in my tango, and the exultation I began to experience was interrupted only when Tessa let out a real showstopper of a screech. Then Dulce came between us and made the mistake of laying hands on me. Insofar as I retained a modicum of male pride, this quickly devolved into a dusty floor battle, with the raucous music of Argentina and the angry sounds of interference from the other students. With their help, I was flung into the street. “Good night, Doctor!” I realized that Tessa had told the others that I was already out of medical school and that she was no