Milonga with Mattress Included

As we skyped this morning, one of my daughters remarked that I hadn’t written a sausage in over twenty days. Twenty days? Well, I was in bed for one week. No, it wasn’t swine ‘flu. I gave up smoking and my body went into shock. I did consider writing about my fever and nausea-altered consciousness. Or about staring at the wall outside my window and seeing how many faces I could see in its cracks and shadows. Or about sniffing my farts like flowers, like Jean Genet in his prison cell. But I didn’t have the energy and as soon as I did, I got straight up, Lazarus-like, and danced for seven hours.

As for the other two weeks, my life has been more or less the same everyday and I never tire of it: up around mid-day, an afternoon class at DNI, an evening class, práctica or milonga and sometimes all three. I no longer feel out of my depth in the Level 7 class and my teachers tell me my tango has come along ‘un montón’. I don’t just follow, I dance and I feel the difference in my balance, sensitivity and suppleness. But you’re only as good as your last gig and when I go back home and dance a whole lot less and with dancers of a somewhat different caliber, I imagine I’ll come back down a notch or two. Boohoo!

My faithful friend, Mabel, (pronounced as in Michelle ma belle) who is a dead-ringer for Kate Winslet, or rather a cross between Winslet and Greta Scacchi, asked me to join her at a new milonga last night, in the barrio of Balvanera. It was situated in a great big hangar-like structure on Adolfo Alsina 2764, with pink and lemon lighting, tiered seating on the entrance side and an enormous Romanesque mattress along one side for reclining upon. I bet the mattress came first. They probably acquired this mattress and thought, how can we put this thing to good use and someone said, I know, let’s build a milonga around it. That is almost certainly what happened. Anyway, it was friendly and the drinks were cheap (yes, they sold booze, even though the sale of alcohol was prohibited, it being the night before the elections.) The milonga finished at 03:00 and Mabel and friends insisted I accompany them to La Viruta, even though I was there till 07:00 this same morning. After a few feeble protests, I gave in and off we went, the five of us, all squashed into one taxi, thanks to an accommodating and fun-loving cabbie.

I had to have café con leche on arrival to kid my body into believing I still had bags of energy to burn. But not only had I danced till 07:00 in the morning, I had also been in Tango 7 at DNI at 14:00, followed by three hours of práctica and then a tango electronico class. That’s seven hours of tango on five hours' sleep, before even setting foot in the first milonga. Crazy, crazy, crazy… but isn’t life exquisite, with a capital X.

And now, it’s the night after and I’m sitting in my Sunday night favourite, the Torquato Tasso, scribbling about it all. Someone’s taco crashed into the top of my left foot and even though I murmured my trusty mantra, “Toes of steel, toes of steel!” which always seems to work, it carried on hurting , so I decided to sit out a couple of tandas and whip out my note pad, instead. But here comes another porteño stunner… I’m off. Goodnight!