dark tangos books by lewis shiner novels Dark Tangos (2011) Black & White (2008) Say Goodbye (1999) Glimpses (1993) Slam (1990) Deserted Cities of the Heart (1988) Frontera (1984) collections Collected Stories (2009) Love in Vain (2001) The Edges of Things (1991) Nine Hard Questions about the Nature of the Universe (1990) dark tangos a novel by lewis shiner subterranean press 2011 © 2011 by Lewis Shiner. Interior design by Lewis Shiner Set in Bembo First edition isbn 978-1-59606-396-9 Subterranean Press PO Box 190106 Burton, MI 48519 www.subterraneanpress.com www.lewisshiner.com For Orlita: Vamos a bailar I have used «guillemets» throughout to indicate dialogue originally spoken in Spanish. A glossary of Spanish and tango terms appears at the end of the book. he first time I saw her was in the chrome and cracked- Tplaster lobby of Universal’s Buenos Aires office. From where I stood, on the other side of the glass wall that separated our servers from the noise and dirt of the city, I got an impression of power and grace from the way she held herself, saw long dark hair and a flash of gold at her ears and wrists. She was one more beautiful woman in a city full of beautiful women, and young, not much past thirty. Yet something made me look again. Maybe her nose, which was long and slightly crooked, as if it had been broken in the distant past and never properly set. She was deep in conversation with the receptionist, a young guy with a dark suit and a permanent five o’clock shadow. It seemed like he was not giving her what she wanted, though I couldn’t hear their words through the glass. She glanced up at me and I thought she would look away, bored or even annoyed by another wistful male gaze. Instead she let me see something else, a question, an urgency. I found myself, to my surprise, mouthing words to her in Spanish: «Can I help?» She gave me a rueful smile and a small, tilted shake of the head that said no, thanks. Then she turned back to the receptionist and I forced myself to walk away. It was my first full day on the job. I’d been in the city for a week, moving into my tiny apartment, opening a bank account, putting a local chip in my cell phone, contacting old friends. I also called my favorite of the tango teachers I’d worked with on previ- ous trips and scheduled some private classes. I drifted from one thing to the next as if in a dream, sometimes looking up to realize I didn’t remember the last ten minutes. In terms of time zones, Buenos Aires is only an hour ahead of North Carolina. What I was feeling was not jetlag but culture lag, 1 2 lewis shiner life lag. I could focus my brain on no more than one thing at a time, and my feelings had shut down entirely. There had been too many shocks in a row, more than I could bounce back from. The Buenos Aires office existed in another era from Universal’s vast campus in Research Triangle Park. My cubicle had gray metal walls instead of taupe fabric. Bare fluorescent bulbs hummed from stained fixtures on tile ceilings instead of being tucked away in recesses. The background sounds came from cars and buses six floors below and not from piped-in white noise. I’d lost most of the morning tracking down a laptop and a port replicator, a mouse and monitor and keyboard, and I spent the af- ternoon getting my email id and installing software. By suppertime I had managed to connect to the repositories in our upstate New York headquarters, check out my programs, and write exactly three lines of new code. I felt as pleased with myself as if I’d won a mara- thon, and about as exhausted. But that night, on the edge of sleep, I thought of her again. My first trip to Buenos Aires had been in 2003, three years be- fore. Universal had flown me down to meet the local programmers assigned to the governance software project. They would report to me in North Carolina, and I would get my choice of the most interesting parts to write myself. I arrived at the end of September, as spring was lighting up the monochrome streets. In what spare time I had, I wandered the city and let the strangeness settle on my skin like the dust and grit in the air. It reminded me of Paris, but a younger Paris, sprawled across wide avenues dotted with plane trees and purple jacarandas and the swollen trunks of palos borrachos. Most of the grey stone buildings had gone up between 1875 and World War II, when Argentina was one of the ten richest nations on the planet. The architectural style was massive and European, with wrought-iron grilles and balconies full of flowering plants, arches and domes and the occasional red- tiled roof that gave everything a Spanish accent. And now primary- colored storefronts erupted from the ground floors, even as sprays of black graffiti on the endless corrugated metal security doors provid- ed a reminder that the days of first-world status were long gone. The sidewalks swarmed with pedestrians, men in dark suits and women in black dresses and heels. Despite the formality of the Dark Tangos 3 clothes, it was a city where both sexes greeted each other with a hug and a kiss on the cheek. It was a city with one of the highest literacy rates in the world, where newspaper kiosks sold the novels of Borges and Cortázar, and bookstores lined Avenida Corrientes. It was also a city where the homeless slept in doorways and the weight of 13 million people stretched the city’s resources to the breaking point. Cartoneros went through the trash on the streets for scrap cardboard and plastic to recycle, and crafters in the plazas made stunning art from cans and bottles and folded subway tickets. And it was a city of tango music, bandoneones and violins and pianos, the heart-wrenching melodies that evoked the giant, echoing ballrooms of the 1930s, and the insistent rhythms that whispered of seduction. My first morning in the city, groggy and stale from ten hours on an airplane, I wandered into the flea market at Plaza Dorrego and saw an older man dancing tango, not in the clichéd fedora and ascot, but bareheaded in a loose white shirt, his long gray hair slicked back, a dark-skinned and eagle-beaked son of indigenous Americans named Luis Ortega, though everybody called him Don Güicho. I saw the joy in his dancing and the pleasure in the eyes of his partner and I was hooked. Back in the States, I found out that there had been tango all around me without my knowing it. I convinced Lauren to take classes with me, and while the first months were frustrating, there were milongas once or twice a week where I could glimpse the grace and sensuality that had spoken to me in Buenos Aires. Like all principiantes, we started with open embrace, looking like teenagers at a junior high school prom. But it was close embrace that held the magic for me, where tango became a three-minute love affair, in- tense, passionate, hypnotic—if I could get past my self-consciousness enough to enjoy it. I took Lauren with me to Buenos Aires the next September. We went directly to Plaza Dorrego, where we found Don Güicho and convinced him to give us private lessons. Unfortunately, the second life it gave our marriage didn’t last. Lauren dropped out of the classes, though she came to Buenos Aires again with me in 2005. After that she was through with dancing entirely and by the next summer she was through with me. That had been in June, three months before I arrived in Buenos Aires to stay. She came home from work one day and informed me 4 lewis shiner that she was putting our marriage “on hiatus.” I was reasonably sure she was having an affair, though somehow that issue failed to come up in the polite negotiations that followed. Lauren was the director of Durham Regional Hospital, making twice what I did, so logic dictated that she keep the house and the mortgage payments while I found a place over a friend’s garage. I took only a few favorite pieces of the furniture I had repaired and refinished over the years because that was all I had room for. I kept half the savings in case of emer- gencies and she agreed to pay for Sam’s last year of college. The rest of what was mine, including my books and my woodworking tools, went into storage. The dislocation had been profound. I’d been moving all my life, and when we’d bought that house I’d sworn that this was it, that the only way I would leave would be feet first. Some days I missed the house more than I missed the marriage. I was three weeks into the separation when my manager at Universal called me into her office to tell me that my job had “relocated” overseas. It was as if she’d come in that morning and been unable to find it, or discovered a farewell note next to the cof- feemaker. I had the option of moving to Buenos Aires with it, or I could quit, which meant I couldn’t even collect unemployment.