Greetings and salutations

I’m back. I arrived exactly one month ago, yet I haven’t blogged at all. There are two reasons for this: one physical, one psychological.

I couldn’t access the blog’s dashboard because I had forgotten my username. Not only that, I was unable to have it mailed to the second named email address because I couldn’t remember that either. It turned out to be one I had forgotten existed, ha! ha! Never mind. What I lack in brainpower, I make up for with resourcefulness, patience and perseverance. I used up valuable tango time trying ever more intricate methods to recover said data until I succeeded. That was the physical side dealt with.

The psychological reason was trickier. For a start, I have been completely riveted by the unfolding story of the Chilean miners all month. I could not bring my mind to bear on tango trivia with this urgent call on my attention. Besides, it’s easy to hold forth when you are having a good time. My last two visits to Buenos Aires had been unabashedly blissful. I could hardly stop myself. Now, here was I in Paradise, all malaise and misgivings, within a couple of days of arrival, after an unsatisfactory work-related encounter with a woman who had been a good friend, last year. I didn’t feel like writing until I had cleared my head for fear that my perceptions would be tinged with the wrong kind of light. So I stalled and stalled.

Now I think it’s time to move on. I have much to be glad of. I am staying at Paula’s once again. A home with buena onda makes all the difference. Almagro is a central barrio with transport links to everywhere and our street is home to the flower market. How lovely to be greeted daily by Buenos Aires with fresh flowers! The flat has wooden floors and exposed brickwork, a vast salon containing amongst other things, a piano and a (what’s the opposite of fun-sized?) flatscreen television, unusually high ceilings, gigantic windows, plants, clever lighting and, my favourite, a disco ball. No fussy ornaments here as in many other places I’ve visited, just the accoutrements of her work and interests: scripts, storyboards, camcorders, guitars, sheet music and books, mostly Spanish, though there are some in English including, I was well pleased to discover, Sylvia Plath and Doris Lessing.

One of the things I love about being back in Argentina is the way people greet each other. A person will enter a room and greet or introduce themselves to each and every person with a kiss, be it friend, acquaintance or total stranger. There is no need for an icebreaker or conversations about the weather. One is immediately related. That is beautiful, and even more so, when one is far from home. The tango teachers, all of them, greeted me with embraces of warmth and pleasure after nearly a year. In London, I didn’t score so much as a smile, never mind a “Welcome back”, much less a kiss, from my regular teachers, when I’d been away for a year. One of them greeted me with, “Twelve pounds, please.” I like this Maya Angelou quote: “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

By extension, the abrazo of tango is a physical greeting. That first instant when you step into each other’s arms, can make a woman feel beautiful, appreciated, cherished and in Buenos Aires, as if she is his dream come true. And this causes her to dance as if she is. She can even safely fall in love for the duration of the tanda, without any of the fear of a messy divorce. Or it can make her feel, as it often does in London, like a wheelbarrow, a shopping trolley or if she’s lucky, an articulated lorry. It may not be as much fun, but it is character-building.

Warm and passionate though it is, nothing is perfect, not even the Argentinian psyche. I have discovered that the primitive practice of stonewalling is to be expected here among men who have failed to pull. It is a most frustrating thing when men one would love to dance with again and again, take it to mean that you want them and then punish you when you don’t. I guess the tango culture includes types of personality that men and women are expected to project. If smiles and laughter mean ‘yes’, banter needs to be rationed and the safest expression to wear is a blank.