"My dear young lady, there is a great deal of truth, I dare say, in what you said, and you looked very pretty while you said it, which is much more important."
"Mi querida señorita, había mucha verdad, creo, en lo que decíais, y estabais muy bonita mientras lo decíais, lo cual es mucho más importante."
No, I was mistaken before. This is Buenos Aires. This place, San Telmo. Not Villa Urquiza, not Retiro... Not Palermo, not Barrio Chino, not Porto Madero, not even La Boca, but this place. San Telmo. The old heart through which all the city's blood flows through. It's pumping here in San Telmo. Always. And at all hours and late into the night.
It's by chance that I come upon these small enlightenments and maybe some could say, "Well, of course it is, everyone knows that. I didn't need you to tell me. I read it on the Internet. I know. That's no great enlightenment."
And they wouldn't be wrong. Not entirely. But I said nothing about some grand enlightenment. Some monstrous clairvoyant clarity. I said it was a something small. A subtle thing. A thing twenty-watt bulb turned on, recessed lighting. An open eye blinking to see everything in focus. It's no atom bomb.
But if you haven't lived here, if you've just passed through for a day or two or a week in this city, I don't think you do know really. Maybe you know the Sunday markets and the outdoor tango and the street food and the meat and the ice cream and the antiques, and you say, "This place is bustling! It's so alive!"
That's like praising good taxidermy. It's just the skin of the morcilla, as I think I'm now going to start saying. Morcilla is that smooth dark sleek blood sausage. It's tight and refined and served nice. The inside's not so clean cut. It doesn't slice like chorizo. When you cut through, no matter how smooth, morcilla explodes. Into everything. Coagulated blood like guts, and spices, and anything else thrown in. The flavor's strong. It's absolutely delicious.
It was a Thursday that I arrived at Andrea's. A gracious host, she had a pullout bed under her's. She asked me if I wanted to go out for the night.
I was tired, but I obliged. After all, I'd been here a month and hadn't really gone out yet, not at night, so why not. "Sure, why not," I said.
"Have you seen any tango yet?"
"Yeah, sure. They were dancing in the streets on Sunday."
She gave me a look like, "really, bitch?" and said, "I have a surprise for you. Tonight's going to be a fantastic night. And you can bring your camera if you like."
So I did. After the rest of Solange's joint, of course. Andrea split it with me, and then she took me to a milonga around 23:00.
You know you can't hear a heart in the day light. No, outside in the sunshine everything's much too loud to hear something as soft as a heartbeat. Too many cars really. Nights are lighter on traffic. Weeknights even more, and the later the better. That's when you hear the heart pounding. And to be honest you usually don't hear it so much even then. Not as much as you feel it.
A milonga is a tango bar, and if there's ever a time to feel a heartbeat, it's in a place like that. The beat's in the footwork and the passion in the face and the embrace. It's in the heat of the mild winter and the humidity that grips the floors and the tables and crevasses and the seats and the very skin of the place, the old walls, the wet mirrors and the seltzer water. It's draped on all the cobblestones outside so that the lights reflect a glow off the street and my hands feel damp.
All the girls move like scorpions.
I knew a scorpion once.
Blonde hair, fair skin, and blue eyes.
It wasn't the way she moved so much that made her a scorpion though. It was the way she pricked you with the sting in her words, or more the way she used them. With the stinger in, she had an unnerving gift of being able to get whatever she wanted. It was her eyes, I think. The way they balanced over the top end of her button nose and her smile.
