So far the conversation had gone without a hitch. There was the usual initial pleasantry that takes place when a Spanish-speaking gringo is encountered. I sometimes feel that those of us who do speak Spanish at all well are like romantic birds or lush floating butterflies. We seem to be very unusual.
"You're an American, right?" Max said.
I nodded.
"But you speak Spanish."
I nodded again.
Max did not even pause. "And you care about Spanish?" she said.
"Of course. I wouldn't have spent so many years suffering through it, you know, its grammar, the vocabulary. Very difficult."
"You want to speak it well," she said.
I blathered that I lived in San Francisco, mentioning again that I was a student of the tango, that I had translated lyrics and...
"Well," she interrupted, tossing her hand to the side as though to dismiss my literary enthusiasms. "You do dance, don't you?"
The conversation stopped. Fear invaded me, the sort of fear that comes about when you feel that you are about to make a fool of yourself. I had seen tango danced many times professionally, and could not imagine that I would be able to do it in the way I had seen Nora Dinzelbacher do it, or Carlos Gavito, Juan Carlos Copes, Guillermina Quiroga, Gustavo Naveira, Orlando Paiva, Diego DiFalco or Mariela Franganillo. I did not realize then that very, very few can dance the way these do, but at that moment, they were the only references I had. I calmed my heart.
"No, I don't dance," I said finally. "You see, it's just that I, well, that I..." I waved a hand before me defensively.
"Okay," Max said. "Tango shares the same feelings as Spanish, the same laughter, the same disasters. I can't think of anything that expresses the blood, the ventricles and flow, yes? of the Spanish language better than tango."
She pointed a finger at my chest.
"And you'll never understand Spanish..." A sudden commiserating smile came onto her lips. She studied her hands, and then the crystal glass of red wine that she held in her left hand. "Forgive me, Terry, but you'll never truly understand Spanish if you don't dance tango."
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.