Kim Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting

So Edgardo Alfonso had left Argentina behind, like so many other children of the desaparecidos, unable to live among the torturers and murderers both known and unknown who were free to walk the streets of Buenos Aires and ride the trams, who stared at Edgardo over the edges of their newspapers which held on their backsides the articles Edgardo had written identifying and denouncing them. He had had to leave to remain sane.

So of course he was at the Kennedy Center to see an evening of Argentinean tango, Bocca’s troupe out on Bocca’s farewell world tour, where the maestro would dance with a ladder and handstand his way to heaven for one last time, to Piazzolla’s “Soledad.” Edgardo cared nothing for dance per se, and despised tango the dance the way certain Scottish acquaintances winced at the sound of bagpipes; but Edgardo was a Piazzollista, and so he had to go. It was not often one got a chance to hear Astor Piazzolla’s music played live, and of course it would never be the same now that Astor was gone, but the proof of the strength of his composing was in how these new pickup bands backing the dance troupes would play their accompaniments to the dancers, tangos for the most part made of the utterly clichéd waltzes, two-steps, ballads, and church music that had been cobbled together to make old-style tango, and then they would start a piece by Astor and the whole universe would suddenly become bigger—deeper, darker, more tragic. A single phrase on the bandoneon and all of Buenos Aires would appear in the mind at once. The feeling was as accurate as if music possessed a kind of acupuncture that could strike particular nerves of the memory and immediately evoke it all.

The audience at the Kennedy Center was full of Latin Americans, and they watched the dancers against the black backdrop closely. Bocca was a good choreographer and the dances were insistent on being interesting—men with men, women with women, little fights, melodramas, clever sex—but all the while the band was hidden behind the black curtain at the back, and Edgardo began to get angry yet again, this time that someone would conceal performing musicians for so long. The itch of their absence bit into him and he began to hate the skillful dancers, he wanted to boo them off the stage, he even wondered for a second if the music had been prerecorded and this tour was being done on the cheap, like the Bolshoi in Europe in 1985.

Finally however they pulled back the curtain, and there was the band: bandoneon, violin, piano, bass, electric guitar. Edgardo already knew they were a very tight group, playing good versions of the Piazzolla songs, faithful to the original, and intense. Tight band, incandescent music—it was strange now to observe how young they were, and to see the odd contortions they had to make in order to get those sounds; strange but wonderful; music at last, the ultimate point of the evening. Huge relief.

They had been revealed in order to play “Adios Nonino,” of course, Piazzolla’s good-bye to his dead father, his most famous song out of the three thousand in his catalog, and even if not the best, or rather not Edgardo’s favorite, which was “Mumuki” for sure, still it was the one with the most personal history. Edgardo’s father had been disappeared. God knew what had happened to him, Edgardo resisted thinking about this as being part of the poison, part of the torture echoing down through the years and the generations, one of the many reasons torture was the worst evil of all, and, when the state used and condoned it, the death of a nation’s sense of itself. This was why Edgardo had had to leave, also because his mother still met every Thursday afternoon in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires with all the other mothers and wives of the desaparecidos gathered in their white scarves, symbolic of their lost children’s diapers, to remind Argentina and the world (and in Buenos Aires these two were the same) of the crimes that still needed to be remembered, and the criminals who still must face justice. It was more than Edgardo could face on a weekly basis. Now even in his nice apartment east of Dupont Circle he had to keep the blinds shut on Sunday mornings so as not to see the dressed-up, good, kindly Americans, mostly black, walking down the street to the corner church, so as not to start again the train of thought that would lead him to memories and the anger.

He had to look away or it would kill him. His health was poor. He had to run at least fifty miles a week to keep himself from dying of anger. If he didn’t he couldn’t sleep and quickly his blood pressure ballooned dangerously high. You could run a lot of anger out of you. For the rest, you needed Piazzolla.

His own father had taken him to see Piazzolla at the Teatro Odeon, in 1973, shortly before he had been disappeared. Piazzolla had five years before disbanded his great quintet and gone to Europe with Amelita, gone through the melodramas of that relationship and its breakup and a succession of bands trying to find a Europop sound, trying electronica and string quartets and getting angrier and angrier at the results (though they were pretty good, Edgardo felt), so that when he came back to Buenos Aires for the summer of 73–74 and regathered the old quintet (with the madman Tarantino sitting in on piano) he was not the same confident composer, devoted to destroying tango and rebuilding it from the ground up for the sake of his modernist musical ambitions, but a darker and more baffled man, an exile who was home again, but determined to forge on no matter what. But now more willing to admit the tango in him, Edgardo’s father had explained, he was willing to admit his genius was Argentinean as well as transcendental. He could now submit to tango, fuse with it. And his audience was much changed as well, they no longer took Piazzolla for granted or thought he was a crazy egoist who had gone mad. With the quintet dispersed they had finally understood they had been seeing and hearing something new in the world, not just a genius but a great soul, and of course at that point, now that they had understood, it was gone.

But then it had come back. Maybe only for one night, everyone thought it was only for one night, everyone knew all of a sudden that life itself was a fragile and evanescent thing and no band lasted long, and so the atmosphere in the theater had been absolutely electric, the audience’s attentiveness quivering and hallucinatory, the fierce applause like thanks in a church, as if finally you could do the right thing in a church and clap madly and cheer and whistle to show your appreciation of God’s incredible work. At the end of the show they had leaped to their feet and gone mad with joy and regret, and looking around him young Edgardo had understood that adults were still as full of feeling as he was, that they did not “grow up” in any important respect and that he would never lose the huge feelings surging in him. An awesome sight, never to be forgotten. Perhaps it was his first real memory.

Now, here, on this night in Washington, D.C., the capital of everything and nothing, the dancers were dancing on the stage and the young band at the back was charging lustily through one of Piazzolla’s angriest and happiest tunes, the furiously fast “Michelangelo 70.” Beautiful. Astor had understood how to deal with the tragedy of Buenos Aires better than anyone, and Edgardo had never ceased to apply his lesson: you had to attack sadness and depression head-on, in a fury, you had to dance through it in a state of utmost energy, and then it would lead you out the other side to some kind of balance, even to that high humor that the racing tumble of bandoneon notes so often expressed, that joy that ought to be basic but in this world had to be achieved or as it were dragged out of some future better time: life ought to be joy, someday it would be joy, therefore on this night we celebrate that joy in anticipation and so capture an echo of it in advance of the fact, a kind of ricochet. That this was the best they could do in this supposedly advanced age of the world was funny in an awful way. And there weren’t that many things that were both real and funny, so there you had to hang your hat, on how funny it was that they could be as gods in a world more beautiful and just than humanity could now imagine, and yet instead were torturers on a planet where half the people lived in extreme immiseration while the other half killed in fear of being thrust into that immiseration, and were always willing to look the other way, to avoid seeing the genocide and speciescide and biospherecide they were committing, all unnecessarily, out of fear and greed. Hilarious! One had to laugh!