You walk down a sidewalk in Buenos Aires at your peril. Potholes, immense cracks in the cement, deteriorating curbs, and sudden whole absences of pavement can plague every footstep. This is worsened by the fact that sidewalks in this city are often very narrow as well. You must walk with your head down, watching, which is perhaps why so many Buenos Aires citizens appear lost in thought, a bit resentful, and put upon. They're afraid they'll fall, and so they have to concentrate.

It's the same in tango, which of course comes from Buenos Aires. Dancers of tango very frequently look as though they're angry with someone, which cloaks them in an ambiance of dismissive arrogance. When women in tango have such a disdainful veneer, they appear to be implying to their partners "Okay chico, show me what you can do." This look has as much to do with concentration as it does with dramatics. The difficulties of dancing tango well make it imperative that you pay attention, otherwise you'll look like a fool as you stumble through some radical misdirection. One thing you learn quickly about the citizens of Buenos Aires is that they do not want to look like fools.

Weather makes the sidewalks even more perilous. Parts of Argentina — including Buenos Aires itself — are subject to violent hailstorms and heavy rain. When this happens at night, the sidewalks become simply un-navigable because you can't see anything, you're usually running in order to get out of the tempest, and your concentration is being scattered by hailstones that are like the globules of cement missing from the sidewalks. During such storms, the rain really seems more like a driven, concentrated cataract. It bangs against the ground and soaks you coming down and going back up. Generally it makes you feel like a rat in a sewer.

This may sound like an exaggeration — and it is — but not much of one, and there are saviors in this city who, for a slight fee, will help you through just such torment.

Bea and I had been dancing tango one recent night in Buenos Aires. We'd begun around 11:00 PM, and we came out of the Viejo Correo club at about 3:00 in the morning. Sweaty, heated, and exhausted, all we wanted was a taxi and bed. It had been drizzling lightly when we'd gone into the club, bringing to mind a famous tango entitled "Garúa" ("Light Rain"), with its finely-rhymed lyrics of dark solitude:

(¡Garúa!_
Solo y triste por la acera_
va este corazón transido_
con tristeza de tapera._
Sintiendo tu hielo,_
porque aquella, con su olvido,_
hoy le ha abierto una gotera._
¡Perdido!
Como un duende que en la sombra. . .

Light rain!
Alone and sad up the sidewalk
Goes this spent heart
With the sadness of a little shack
Feeling your icy cold,
Because that, with all its forgetfulness,
Has opened a leak on this day.
Lost!
Like a ghost in the shadow. . .)