It was a madness, a whoredom, that most wonderful of cultural events, a bastardization from innumerable parents, a burst of musical languages and unusual couplings from which sprung a single, yet endlessly complicated, gorgeous flower.
Tango.
In my more self-congratulatory moments, I consider my Spanish quite accomplished. I quietly thumb my nose at the knowledge that there are moments in which I still fracture it. By the time I came to tango, I had been studying Spanish for years and I went about speaking it like some sort of Irish Hispanic dandy.
I felt that the language of tango lyrics was preparing me for Buenos Aires, a city I had never visited. I had by now mastered some of the Buenos Aires nuance that I learned from my porteño friends in San Francisco and New York - the aspirated "Y"'s and double "L"'s for which the Argentines are noted, the same breathy sound so well known in Brazilian Portuguese. Also, the Italianate enunciation, in which certain syllables are elongated well beyond what speakers from other countries would ever consider. These elongations need to be accompanied by the appropriate gesture - the index finger placed below the right eye when some unwelcome truth is about to be told. The ends of all five fingers joined and held up before the face when a frustration is being humorously described. Sometimes the fingers flying apart when the final point is made, like a firework exploding.
The night I met Max, I learned from her that simply knowing about this — being a student of tango lyrics, the Spanish language, its gestures, and a lover of the very sound of the language — was not enough. She was part of a tango troupe that the renowned maestra Nora Dinzelbacher had brought to the Casa Hispana in San Francisco for a party, at which they had done a demonstration of tango. (Actually Nora wasn't so renowned then. This was fifteen years ago, but she certainly is now.)
I had never seen anything so sensuously riveting in my life as the tango I saw that night. So I spent a few minutes afterwards rhapsodizing to Nora and Max about how I was studying tango lyrics, that they were helping my Spanish tremendously, that I could imagine the lyrics being a key to my entry to true, spoken Spanish, if only in Argentina - but an entry anyway, that could allow me to a whole new manner of conversation.
They both listened in silence. A long silence. Then Max began shaking her head, discouraging me with the news that, despite my laudable efforts, the Spanish language would elude me forever if I did not do the one thing with it that I had not yet done.
Article comments
1 - Deby
I dearly loved Max, and your article is nice...but Spanish and tango are so completely different. You could speak Spanish for years, be a native speaker, and still never understand the letras of the tango because they are in lunfardo. Lunfardo was a street language for the thieves that became part of the local dialect for Buenos Aires and Montevideo. The Rio Platense Spanish and accent is not spoken or used in any other part of Argentina.