June is a month loaded with emotions for many tango fans around the world. Not that tango requires a special month to deal with emotions. It happens that in the tango lives the sweet sadness that affects most Argentines. In those songs of affection, which we dance with premeditated laziness and listen with reminiscence, we can recognize our cradle; we can visualize patios covered with wisteria. Somehow we can recall the feeling of falling asleep while the soothing voice of a mother hummed our first tango lullaby.
This is more than tango itself can say about its origins. It can’t remember where it was born. Maybe it was on some street corner of the old Buenos Aires, the offspring of a yellow moon of the arrabal and a gray, grumpy old bandoneon. These thoughts popped into my mind when Maria Cieri whispered in my ears while we danced, “Let’s thank God for being Argentines and having the tango.” Moments earlier the host of the milonga had described simply and eloquently Rodolfo and Maria Cieri’s command performance as the flavor and taste of Buenos Aires. Yes, I could taste it. For the bad rap that the men of the tango get for sins of the past, we certainly are a weepy bunch. That, and the way we walk is perhaps what always will tells us apart.
It doesn’t mean that foreigners aren’t capable of dancing or understanding good tango music. That was what impressed Rodolfo and Maria the most. They’ve been around the world but they have never seen anything like the Bay Area tango scene. But it takes the ability and the courage to cry a tango to be in that upper echelon that everybody seems to talk about but very few understand or accept.
So, returning to June being a month full of sadness. Carlos Gardel, who took the tango to France and made it chique and brought it back with an air of importance, burned to ashes in a pile of debris on the tarmac of the Medellin, Colombia airport 61 years ago this month. For a musical expression that lacks parental figures, the brothers and sisters of tango did well adopting Gardel as the father figure they never had. In many homes the portrait of Gardel will get special attention. Flowers and votive candles will keep his smile eternally young.
So here it goes. Last Saturday at the milonga, Valorie, who in a short time has learned to cry a tango or two, and I cried into each other’s arms as Rodolfo and Maria danced in almost an ethereal way. We imagined how our parents dancing that way. Sadly, we both knew that to be impossible. She lost her mother and I lost my father oddly enough in the month of June. Who knows, maybe behind a cloud, with a full moon as a witness, they may meet at a tango lesson. I wonder if they’ll even get to understand Gardel.
