Hold Me Tight and Tango Me Home Read Free Page A

which layered another, slower rhythm over the 4/4. The habanera is a derivative of the French
contredanse
, which was brought to Cuba by French plantation owners fleeing the slave rebellion in what is now Haiti. Then opera arrived via Italian immigrants along with Germans toting the bulky, accordionlike bandoneón; the gauchos, or cowboys of the pampas, came to town with their folk music and foot-stomping syncopation. At the ports of Buenos Aires, tango evolved with each group of new arrivals.
    Even as the music became more complicated, the lyrics stayed ribald, chronicling sexual conquests, championing dancing skills and unfettered bravado. These early comedic bards had not yet lost their innocence and knew nothing of a broken heart. That would come later, with Carlos Gardel.
    We continued walking in a circle, and Dario instructed us.“Enter the woman,” he said, “Enter her space — keep your chests together.” He then shouted, “Beautiful Moment. Right now, this is the Be-U-Ti-Ful Moment! This is where your energies mix and you feel tango. Do you feel
tango
?”
    Here, you twist at the waist and your chests are still together. During this synchronized torque, your centers of balance, or axes, mingle, and for an instant you share the same intimate universe.
    Right then, the leader moved into my space and for a moment our legs moved at different angles, but our chests stayed connected and the effect was sublime. In that quick transition, that moment just before I conceded my axis to the leader, I felt something I had been craving my entire life. I had always thought of tango as a verb, as in “you are tangoing.” But Dario described it as a noun, a state of being. It was the most basic of intimacies, and I started to feel tango as a swelling of pleasure that started in my chest and spread through me.
    Then my partner and I realigned. Our legs, feet, and chests moved back to parallel and we faced each other once again. The final step of the eight-count basic is the “resolution.” Like an exhale, the leader merely slides to the side and the follower does the same. The salida, the beginning and end, the exit and the opportunity, start all over again.
    When class ended and we emptied into the hall to change out of our dance shoes, I realized that for one hour I had not felt bad, and it wasn’t just the absence of pain. Since finding out about my husband’s affair, I had felt like I had been poisonedand was slowly dying. But during class I had experienced a simple happiness, a reprieve from the weight of grief.
    I sat down next to a woman named Claire. Her kind, sparkling brown eyes were early indicators of her easy friendliness. While unstrapping my basic black, practical, chunky-heeled dancing shoes, I commented to her, “One lesson a week isn’t enough. I’m learning too slowly.”
    “I want to dance tango every night until I’m exhausted,” she said. She tucked one black dance shoe into a cotton bag and then pulled off the other. “Until I just drop.”
    “I think we’re going to be friends,” I said.
    In fact, Allen, the class whiz, Claire, and I went out to lunch, as we all planned to return to the studio in an hour for the afternoon
practica
. We found a little Vietnamese restaurant in nearby Chinatown, settled around a Formica table, and sipped tea. I still couldn’t really eat (my stomach had been a cluster of knots since my husband left, about two weeks earlier), but I stirred the noodles around in the bowl of soup I had ordered and inhaled its steam. Since our common interest was tango, we talked about what attracted us to it.
    “I loved that documentary with the kids dancing,
Mad, Hot Ballroom
,” Claire said. “So I signed up for ballroom dancing — the classic five. But one night I saw an Argentine tango class, and I went and asked if I could switch and start tango lessons right away. I just knew it was for me.”
    Allen went next. “I like the music. I think that’s what attracted