Iguazú of the bleeding heart

The floor was almost empty. She noticed him coming in as she finished dancing with another man. He hesitated in the doorway a moment, seeing a man and a woman going wild to the cortina. A tango started up again. Hugo Díaz. Then he got himself a drink and sat down at an empty table close to the entrance, illuminated by the red fire exit light, sipping his tinto in profile to her. Genteel. Princely. Elfin. Pass, she thought.

He took his time. He looked her way. Did she want to dance? Not really. She had hoped to be next to dance with her beautiful teacher. Still, there was something about him. She gave him a smile and rose to meet him.

‘Are you gay?’ she asked.

‘No. But why are you asking?’

‘Well, it’s a gay milonga here on Tuesdays. I come here to learn to lead. What about you?’

‘I didn’t know. I came because it’s near where I’m staying.’

Little by little. The face, the embrace. Nice. Very nice. They danced another and then another. Tango minimalism. The line of beauty. Perfect balance. German. Danced schön. Vorsprung durch Technik.

She wanted him to see her dance with someone else. Someone who would make her legs fly, like her tango teacher. She danced with her teacher, but he didn’t seem impressed. He was only interested in one thing: perfection.

When they danced again, he shared the lead with her, keeping the traditional embrace. He made her lead him with her torso on her forward steps. It worked very well. His face changed. His breathing changed. Sighs and whispers. She luxuriated in the approval.

‘Would you like to meet again? May I give you my email address?’

Of course. If he hadn’t asked, she would have done the asking.

He mailed her the next morning asking her out to lunch or at least coffee at the Plaza Dorrego. No, she thought.

'Thank you, but it’s a milonga or nada. I don’t do lunch or coffee. I’m only in BsAs for one thing: tango. I’m sure you understand. Weren’t you just the same when you first started dancing?'

He answered, 'Women are all the same. They only want one thing from me.'

That’s our line, she thought and forgot about him.

Friday was a día feriado, so everywhere was closed. On finding her afternoon class at Torcuato Tasso cancelled, she started to walk home along Defensa and as she came into Plaza Dorrego thought she’d stop for coffee. It occurred to her to call H to share with her this freak outbreak of normal life. Good deed for the day, she thought. Give a dog a bone.

He was down in a matter of minutes and she was surprised at how pleasant it is to look at the face of someone who likes you. He invited her to come and see his flat and as she had a couple of hours to kill before her class in La Boca, she did.

It was a bachelor flat in Bolívar on the tenth floor, with a stunning view through walls of plated glass. The front door of the apartment opened onto a spacious, white tango salon, invisibly lit, with a mirrored wall, marble floors and chic leather furniture. A shag pad. He showed her around. He put on some music, took her in his arms and they danced.

Later, she reflected on what really happened. Of course it depended on how you conceptualised it. Weltanshauung. At some point, something shifted in her perception of him. As a proud and independent woman, it shocked her to consider she might have been seduced by her surroundings. As a pragmatist, she reflected she might well have been. A conditioned reflex. Pavlov’s dog. The dog hears the bell, the dog salivates. You enter a shag pad and well, there you go. It’s the reason people spend vast sums of money on marble, mirrors and leather and why women waste hours getting ready to go out, time and money which could be spent on improving the mind, seeing as that is where reality occurs. The paradox bothered her and she bothered the paradox: the mind moulds the experience of reality, yet here was an experience of reality blatantly moulding the mind. His mind, as much as hers. He seemed to become a different person there.

Nothing happened. She had her class to get to in La Boca, but later, The Process began.

He wanted to undress her and dance in the mirrored room and she said okay, but only by candlelight. One candle. In another room. They made each other laugh. Así se baila el tango.

Later, they were children again. Open. Trusting. They gambled, laying chapters of their lives on the table, face up. The more they knew each other, the more there was to know. She could never have guessed what he was like. He had seemed so strict and restrained in his taste in music and style of dancing. He wouldn’t dance to Pugliese. Yet he was a free spirit. Curious, sensitive, intuitive. She thought he had the most lovable face. And the most beautiful legs in the world. Sometimes, she wrote to his legs. Runners’ legs.

She loved it when he whispered to her in German and she found his German English strangely endearing: he said intimothy for 'intimacy'and When do we see us tonight? He said ‘please’ in bed. You don’t say ‘please’ in bed, do you? His German Spanish was even more incomprehensible and he always texted her in Spanish. Todas el día. No hace gente. Quiero de llamaste. ¿Quieres verte me?

Very quickly, they grew to want each other intensely, but love was hard work. They were both demanding and had clear ideas of how things should be. Not the same ones. They were both control freaks. One by demand, the other by omission. One was for communication, the other for silence. It didn’t work. There was agitation, aggravation, argument. One step forwards, two steps back. A tango of frustration. And still they longed for each other.

Within days, everything came to a sudden stop. Like a plane against a mountain. He had invited a friend to stay with him in Buenos Aires for the remainder of his holiday. They would no longer be able to be alone together for more than a few hours at a time. Milongas, lunch, coffee in Plaza Dorrego, lazy afternoon in the flat, walk in the park over by Puerto Madero, nights bound and gagged by the presence of another the other side of the bedroom wall. Three is a crowd. He was torn between wanting to spend time with his friend and seeing her. He would invite her to join them, then uninvite her when the friend objected. Plans chopped and changed. She longed for him, but thought this inconsiderate. He believed he was acting in good faith and expected her to be understanding. While they were busy being right, they were not tender, just raw. Bed became a battlefield.

She needed to leave the country to get her visa renewed. She suggested going to Iguazú, where she could cross over the border to Brasil and get her passport stamped on re-entry. Ever since she had heard of it, she had thought Iguazú was for lovers. He said it was too far away and that he and his friend had planned to go to Montevideo for the weekend. Still, somehow, they ended up going to Iguazú. She wondered whether she had somehow wished the trip into existence. Thought is real.

The flight was an hour and a half long. Time enough for the three of them to bond. They talked philosophy, but there was still a palpable tension between them. Once they landed in Iguazú, they were instantly soothed by its natural beauty. There was not enough time to see the falls on the first day, so they went walkabout and loitered in a café. Iguazú is a one-horse town with low buildings, embedded in a lush, green landscape and the rich, red earth that is common to many places in the southern hemishere. The air is silent and fragrant and the water, soft. There are fruit trees everywhere, even downtown. It is a place to romance Mother Nature, to reconnect with the earth.

The atmosphere between them started easing, but still there was tension. When they returned to their hotel rooms before dinner, he was silent and withdrawn. Unable to stand it any longer, she swept out and requested a separate bedroom, but there were no singles left. She decided she’d wait and see how things panned out before accepting a double. They went out to dinner.

The restaurant had a pleasant atmosphere. Music wafted down from the jazz bar upstairs, the lighting was mellow, the food delicious and the wine, marvellous. The boys handled the conversation with their endless fund of jokes, which saw them through all three days of their trip. She was impressed. She could never remember any and when she did, she invariably bungled the punchline. By the end of the meal, the three of them were in good humour. She decided she would ask for a room when they got in, to preserve the fragile goodwill that they had finally managed to build between them. Either he would be relieved or he would object. Either way, it seemed the thing to do.

He objected.

As soon as they closed the door behind them, it was as if they met for the first time. It was the Iguazú she had always known it would be.

The next morning, after breakfast, the three of them got a bus over to the Brazilian side of the falls. They walked along the canyon on a long walkway, through the rainforest, past prehistoric rockscapes, waterfall after waterfall, until they were directly over the Garganta del Diablo (the Devil’s Throat.) She stood and stared silently, moved by the magnificence of the flow. The past hurling the present into the future. Not consecutive, but concurrent . She was present to the twin meanings of current. Now is the flow. It spoke to her. Now. Now. Now. There is nothing else. Now is the time, always. Perfect and limitless for those with eyes that see. Now. Now. Now.

As if the splendour of the falls was not enough, a vivid rainbow ringed the landscape. A flight of birds, or possibly butterflies, swung low over the falls, making exquisite shapes, like a veil, blowing in the wind. So much beauty is unbearable to human beings. This is probably why the tourists down below took endless pictures of each other, instead.

They took pictures together, too. She sat in his lap on the bus. He shared his i-pod with her and they danced tangos at the bus stop in the middle of nowhere. It was a day of kisses and caresses and being welded together in holy intimothy. She had her sparkling Iguazú. A happy day for the two of them, but also for the three of them. Another wonderful dinner. Another wonderful night.

To cut a long story short, they broke up. They started coming apart at the airport on the way back. She had meant to pay for dinner the night before, but had forgotten her purse. On an impulse, at the airport, she gave him a wad of notes “as a contribution.” For some reason, he appeared to take offence, presumed she was starting an argument, appeared to go cold on her. On the plane, he seated his friend between them. As she listened to the cello in her head, she thought, nothing is perfect because the human mind is imperfect. Original sin, Fundamental Darkness, whatever you might care to call it, will not admit perfection.

Later that day, once back in Buenos Aires, he messaged her to meet up for dinner at an address in Bolívar. When she got there, the restaurant was closed and he was nowhere to be seen. When they finally found each other, she was ratty. He couldn’t take it and left.

For two days, she tried to see him, before he left for Germany. He did not respond to her text messages or calls, but just before he left, he sent her a report on her behavior, as though she were one of his clients. He said in his German English, her model of communication was not ‘You are ok, I am ok.’ Rather, it was ‘I am not ok, you are not ok,’ that she ascribed bad motives to his behaviour and that this drove him crazy and… It made her feel very sad. We can only ever drive ourselves crazy, she thought. We believe what we choose to believe. Because. But. Now is perfect and limitless for those with eyes that see.