A tango life is full of rejection.
This is why we use the cabeceo. To protect ourselves and others from the unavoidable, pervasive rejection which is utterly inextricable from tango. Consider that tango can be done without shoes, without music, without a ronda. It can escape Argentina, clichés, and even gender, but two things it can never escape are mutual concentration, and unrequited desire.
This rhythmic rejection, which is the sharp edge of desire, is one of tango’s many silences. Silences which isolate us in our suffering while holding and protecting us.
In an age where honest, authentic communication is prized over nearly every other aspect of human relations, I increasingly notice the power of silence. In silence we may fume, but we also reflect, reorganize, redirect. We let others correct themselves in their own dignified solitude and by their own method without the violence of a condemning “confrontation”. In silence we share the responsibility. At least we do no harm. According to the academic study of it: “Communication is irreversible.”
Popular culture has decided on communication as the solution to every problem, proposing honesty as the key to corporal and relational health. Meanwhile we are obsessed with the restraint of Victorian dramas, where emotion seethes in the construction of every phrase. What has changed that people no longer guard every word? How has honesty transformed from risky to redemptive? What dangers no longer adhere to an excess of language or sentiment? Duels?
That we tanguera/os are so silent is anachronistic.
• • •
The rejection never knowing why is a vicious breath on our necks, uniting all followers in our waiting, impervious to our successes. And yet we only survive to the next tanda by keeping our heads very high, our vulnerable necks most extended above our surging, magnetic cleavage.
This happens at milongas. I must go there to enter this game of ecstasy and rejection. Only there must I extend my neck in this way, for hours on end, withstanding the brutal existential threat of not being chosen.
I do not live this way at home, in my friendships, in my own studio. There the rules are different. There, if a tanguero enters, there is an economy, expectations of exchange. My guestroom or classroom, mailing list or table shared gaily. He is to pay with the flattery of his desire. I may never know if it’s real, but he is supposed to pay. Indeed our etiquette protects us both from the explicit calculus of his flattery. A Victorian-style honor protects us both from any implication that his gentlemanly desire is not authentic. Because it would shame him to consider he can be bought no less than it would shame me to receive false flattery.
Such a tanguero, a “friend”, apparently does not feel this obligation. This positions me somewhere very, very low, innately below his endowments, imaginary or not.
Exhausted, infuriated, out of control. I broke the complex, protective silence of tango. I told him that I suffer his rejection.
I stand ready to do my part, to be the wind under his wings, but I cannot give that gift without his desire to express himself with and through me.
At first, having let these forbidden words escape, I felt calm and free.
He blamed me.
I didn’t react. My open fury was a new floor. Unfamiliar. Blank. I don’t know if it is a dance floor. What have I done?
The anger quickly melted, sad and tender.
A loss I couldn’t name. Not him.
Everyone suggests talking about it. I know deeply that will not help.
I care for the emptiness with toast, butter, jam, then cookies, and wine and chocolate and water, searching for the sadness.
Why do I feel that in finally, daringly, bravely, egalitarianly giving voice to my experience I have destroyed something forever?
Because unspoken desire is the fuel for the fire that is tango.
And now I have poured it out.
