Ana Toader

I turned my eyes back to the miserable ones because they cried for me. The heels on parquetry, the table cloth stained with wine, the pairs lost in themselves, each interpreting and reinterpreting the music to their own experience.

This is despair.

“Other music exists to heal wounds; but the tango when sung and played is for the purpose of opening them, for the purpose of sticking your finger in the wound and to tear them until they bleed.”

Whoever said that? Piazzola cries his Balada para un loco and we are all a little mad, emotion confined to the straight geometry of the dance. My back is completely bare and under leopard skin, my spine glows ruby, glows human. It speaks of all the passions and sadnesses raking our flesh like hurricanes, skinning our souls, crushing our chests.

Cheek to cheek, hand in hand, we spin faster to precise rules. The tango has turned chaotic, the madman is running around. Looking for, never finding, eventually growing tired. So this tango ends and my colleague in despair, my disciplined fellow soldier of tango moves lets go of me. I am unglued from him like an open wound. Exposed like a naked battlefield.

And then Gardel starts A Media Luz and suddenly things are not so desperate anymore, only filled with regret. Lips that once kissed me and now kiss someone else. It isn’t that I am unhappy now, it never is about that.

Meditatively, I fill my mouth with wine and smile, listening to Cambalache.

“Que el mundo fue y será una porquería, ya lo sé,
en el quinientos seis y en el dos mil también”