Russell Hoban - My Tango With Barbara Strozzi

So there it was: it was time for me to learn the tango if I wanted to follow the Barbara Strozzi thing wherever it might take me. A little googling brought me to Totaltango on the Internet and I sent away for Dancing Tango , a beginner’s course by Christine Denniston on CD-ROM, with animations and video clips.

From the text of the CD I learned that at the end of the nineteenth century in Buenos Aires, a city with a huge influx of men from Spain, the best chance for a man to get his arms around a woman other than a prostitute was to learn the tango. The men attended practicas in which the learners danced with experienced men and with each other, alternately taking the part of the follower and that of the leader. They had to be able to dance as women before they could become good enough leaders to make a woman want to dance with them. When they were ready for their first time out their instructor would take them to a milonga where he would ask a woman friend to dance with the novice. I imagined the music snaking through a blue haze of cigarette smoke, sweat and pheromones as the women assessed the men whose hands were upon them. If the novice tanguero wasn’t good enough he would have to go back to the practicas for months more of practice, patience and frustration.

I was struck by the psychology of the tango, that by learning the woman’s role as follower the man could develop the empathy that would give a woman the confidence to be led by him in a dance in which nothing is set and there are no words. Reflecting on my marriage I thought it might have worked out better if I had been able to empathise with Mimi more than I had. I tried to imagine us learning the tango together but it would have brought out the worst in both of us very quickly.

The contents of the CD were almost poetic, with such titles as ‘The Hunger of the Soul for Contact with Another Soul’. After a while I reached ‘Before the Embrace’ and from there I went to ‘The Hold’ with its overhead diagram of two upper bodies heart to heart. I thought of myself and Barbara Strozzi, bosoms touching, heart to heart. Then came the animated footsteps forward and back, this way and that, giving me the eerie sensation of looking up through a glass floor at disembodied feet. The video showed the legs and feet of leader and follower, going through their steps as often as I clicked on rewind . It was difficult to practise the steps while sitting at the computer and watching the monitor screen so I sent away for a set of three CDs in which Christy Cote and and George Garcia, appearing full-length, would show me how to dance the Argentine tango. It was a treat to watch them: Christy, smiling all the time, and George, smiling less, made everything wonderfully clear, and I did the lessons in front of the TV with the remote control in hand to repeat and pause the action as necessary as they took me through the Embrace, the Basico , the Cambio de Peso en el Lugar , the Paso al Costado , the Cadencia , the Caminada , and so on down the line. That was all very well as far as it went but doing it alone was not giving me much satisfaction. I was learning the names of the steps and how they looked when danced by professionals but I knew I wasn’t actually going to be learning tango until I had a partner to embrace.

So it was that on a Saturday evening in May I found myself on a Circle Line train watching the stops unreel towards Farringdon. The carriage was full of young people and vernal expectation but I am a November sort of person, and I thought of the big rain that always comes in November to leave the trees black and bare next morning and the ground covered with brown leaves. I’m only forty but I’ve got November inside me with grey skies, rain, brown leaves and bare black trees.

The Circle Line is some kind of metaphor: from South Kensington you can get to Farringdon eastbound via Victoria and Embankment on the lower part of the loop or you can do it westbound via Paddington and King’s Cross on the upper part of the loop. I took it eastbound.

My Underground book was The Dybbuk , a play by S. Ansky. In it Leah says, ‘If one of us dies before his time, his soul returns to the world to complete its span, to do the things left undone and experience the happiness and griefs he would have known.’ Barbara Strozzi died at fifty-eight in Padua in 1677. Had she left things undone, had she had enough happiness and griefs? In Google I found a Barbara Strozzi site where I learned that, although some have theorised that she was a courtesan, this, despite the look of the portrait, seems unlikely. She had four children, three of them with Giovanni Paolo Vidman. They never married but he provided dowries for two of their daughters to enter a convent and an inheritance for one son; the other became a monk. Barbara Strozzi left a body of work that is widely performed by recording artists but I have never seen notices for a live concert. She never gained the patronage she hoped for. And yet! such is the aura of this woman that something of her travelled with me on the Circle Line.

At Victoria three young women got on the train and began to speak Swedish to one another. One of them, a blonde with long straight hair, was a beauty; she couldn’t help knowing it and her awareness of it showed in the beautiful way she turned to speak to her companions or inclined her head to listen. They got off the train at Westminster, the beauty leaving a phantom self behind.

I was going to EC1, to St James’s Church, Clerkenwell. I’d never been to that part of town before, it seemed remote and dangerous. Might I fall off the edge of the world? Might there be wyverns, cockatrices, anthropophagi, muggers? Was it wise to go there with Pluto coming over my Sagittarian ascendant?

From Liverpool Street onward I was alone in the carriage. Why was no one else going where I was going? Moorgate appeared, Barbican, then there was Farringdon. The station, which was also a main line station, was glass-roofed, like the old Fulham Broadway. Through the glass came dimnesses of yellow light. I looked for a sign of some kind, a favouring omen however modest. FOUND, said a Yahoo ad on the wall opposite. OK, I could work with that.

Outside the station stood a newsvendor at his kiosk. OCKERMAN UNDER INVESTIGATION was the headline on display. I’m used to this; I looked away, then looked again and the word was DONORS. Clerkenwell was full of darkness; the street lamps did what they could but were overwhelmed. Behind the newsvendor, on the opposite side of the street, a cluster of lights and colour offered FOOD & WINE, also Fruit & Veg, which were arrayed under little canopies out on the pavement. To the right was the Bagel Factory: The American Original. To the left, a doorway called Chariots displayed a telephone number and was evidently a minicab stand. Four young men stood waiting there as when the curtain goes up on the first act of a play. I was in Cowcross Street but there were no cows crossing.

Going left, I reached the corner of Turnmill Street. golden gleamings in the dark. Next to it as I entered Turnmill was Pret A Manger with sushi and espresso, then Ember, looking warm and with a large menu on the pavement.

Leaving the zone of conviviality I was on the left-hand side of the street. Below me on my left was the long shape of the main-line station showing dim blind lights as I was swallowed up in the visible darkness. ‘The moon’s my constant Mistrisse,’ I sang tunelessly to the colours in my mind,

And the lowlie owle my morrowe,

The flaming Drake and the Nightcrowe make

Mee musicke to my sorrowe .

There was no moon.

Turnmill Street was tumultuous with silence, as if only a moment ago there had been voices, laughter and music not of this time. On the opposite side was Benjamin Street but I saw no left-handed slingers. Turk’s Head Yard was knot a problem. Brown leaves always. Slightly downhill on Turnmill became slightly uphill as I neared Clerkenwell Road. Turned right into Clerkenwell Road, then crossed into Clerkenwell Close where the Crown Tavern beckoned but I carried on and around a dark corner and there was St James’s Church, high above the rest of London, its spire aimed at the night sky where planets were approaching new alignments.