Kapka Kassabova leads us on a journey over time and across continents. But above all, a journey of the heart

Aminatta Forna, author of The memory of Love

This is more than a book about dancing. It is about people, places, movement, love, trouble, a journey. I was so gripped, I booked a tango lesson at one of the London clubs mentioned in this book. Read it and dance.

Monique Roffey, author of With the Kisses of his Mouth

Chapter 1

Just a Tango

read extract from Chapter 5

Chapter 5

The day that you would love me (extract)

tango lesson: disconnection

If every Tango Relationship has a soundtrack, then ours was ‘Vuelvo al sur’ by the fusion band Gotan Project. Someone in London sent Jason their album ‘La Revancha del Tango’ which is best translated as ‘Tango gets its own back’, which started a new global tango craze. It was electrifying electronic stuff based on original music, featuring Evita’s and Che Guevarra’s voices, and lyrics that attractively mangled politics and poetry. By now my Spanish was just about good enough to make sense of them. The song ‘Vuelvo al sur’ struck me especially. It was about The South – about returning to the south, ‘like I return to love/ with all my fear and desire’. We played it over and over.

Vuelvo al sur – in the psychedelic light of Pacific summer.

Vuelvo al sur – along the black-sand beaches of the West Coast where The Piano had been filmed.

Vuelvo al sur – as Jason decided to practise a giro in the outgoing ocean tide.

The South would release us from this terrible business of longing. The trouble was that we were already as far south as you could go without falling off the map.

‘I have fallen off the map.’ Jason declared one weekend, when ocean and sky were a carefree blue dotted with the specks of sails and clouds, and we were sipping cappuccinos. ‘Maybe that’s all that’s left once you turn thirty. Give up your dreams. Surrender to suburban mediocrity. Or run off to Buenos Aires.’

‘Then let’s go,’ I said.  A friend of his was getting married in Uruguay in a few weeks’ time. ‘Let’s go to Buenos Aires. Make it a month. We have the time, and we’ll find the cash.’

‘Oh Time, Strength, Cash and Patience!’ Jason quoted. He was good with quotes, and this one was from Herman Melville.
(Pausa: Poor Melville didn’t suspect that he was writing about the tango condition. But tanguidad pre-dates tango itself. Moby Dick, with the ship out at sea like a soul on a quest for the unattainable, is essentially a tango story. Trust me.

‘Do you know what’s happening to the Argentine economy right now?’ Jason said, and this wasn’t a quote. I did – it was on its last legs – but I wasn’t going to let small details like this get in the way of my happiness. So we went.

Two things were taking place in Buenos Aires when we arrived: one, the catastrophic collapse of the economy; two, the Annual Metropolitan Tango Championships. Soon, a third thing was happening which concerned only Jason and me, but first things first.

The economic meltdown was evident from the moment we arrived. The giant graffito sprayed across the Town Hall
IF POVERTY IS LAW, VIOLENCE IS JUSTICE was hard to miss. Night and day, crowds of cacerolazos – pot and pan bangers – spilled into the streets and banged their anger against, yes, empty pots and pans. Their life’s savings had suddenly disappeared into the phantom pockets of an elapsed state. They smashed the exquisitely reliefed façades, the shop-windows, even street lamp-posts. The empty banks were boarded up with metal sheets which shone in the midday sun with an accusatory glare. The homeless, zipped up in grimy sleeping bags, slept in the underpasses beneath Avenida 9 de Julio, where a dank underground city teemed with kiosks, souvenir shops, shoe repairers and fast-food joints. At nightfall, scavengers came out to sift through the rubbish bins.

Police in bullet-proof jackets stood at every corner, looking close to tears – because like everyone else, they were stuck in the hated bank corralito, penniless. The peso, divorced from its union with the US currency, plummeted further every day. The change bureaux in town were besieged by desperate citizens trying to salvage their dollars. Cash machines ran out of cash. No other currencies could be changed because the peso had no official exchange rate against the dollar. Nobody knew the real cost of things.

This was the year of bronca. Bronca is a special porteño phenomenon – a cocktail of urban rage and bad faith.           Bronca and bankruptcy – this is what greeted us on arrival. 

And what did Jason and I do? We checked into a cheap belle époque hotel called Astoria, on Avenida de Mayo. We were the only guests. Our little balcony looked out onto the grand avenue. At the tops of buildings, the fantasy cupolas crumbled like meringues from some long-ago party, and pigeons flew out of their broken windows. Leaning over the wrought-iron railing, we watched the city’s collapse with a mix of morbid fascination and disbelief. It was the end of an era, the end of Buenos Aires as we knew it.

In our hotel room we flicked the TV channels for hours on end, from the news station, to the Modelling and Plastic Surgery channel, to the non-stop tango channel, where it was business as usual.

‘Queridos amigos del tango,’ the programme host showed us his plastic smile which revealed artificial teeth. Dear friends of tango…

That was us. Friends of tango. Wedding guests. Graham Greene characters in a troubled foreign country: decent but ineffectual, well-meaning but screwing up already, with a creaking fan overhead and failure just around the corner.
In the evenings, we walked for miles to go dancing, because traffic was blocked by demonstrators. And it was in the milongas that things between us began to fall apart. Night after night, Jason sat in the tango clubs looking like the Argentine economy.

‘We’re in crisis,’ he kept saying with his apologetic half-smile, quoting the Argentines’ favourite phrase of the day, Estamos en crisis.

He gazed at the dancing couples, and it seemed that even here, at the heart of Tangopolis, the present simply couldn’t deliver. He was stuck listening to the broken melodies of the past – his own, the city’s – and he was seized by some incurable heart-sickness.

Jason wouldn’t dance with me because his dancing was ‘in crisis’ and he didn’t want to subject me to it. But because we were sitting together, no other men were asking me either. It is against the etiquette to snatch women from their table escorts.

Now, there is something I must explain about the passing of time at a milonga. It’s a little-understood anomaly of astrophysics. When you (the woman) really want to dance and are waiting to be asked, and nothing is happening, time slows down to an arctic chill of the soul. It slows down to about the rate at which glaciers form. It’s the tango equivalent of hypothermia. You feel your pulse and respiration rate slow down, eventually resulting in death by tango neglect. Meanwhile, everybody else is literally having a ball. 

Somehow, Jason’s dancing crisis didn’t completely prevent him from dancing with other women. He would get up slowly, apathetically, and dance with another woman for a few tandas. I could only pretend for so long that this didn’t affect me, before I went into fits of jealousy which I stifled like sobs against the smoothly shaved cheeks of the men who finally asked me to dance. But I couldn’t enjoy them either, because Jason was on my mind, and worse – on my heart.

I was caught up in the Freudian cycle of hysterical tango behaviour. I was somewhere between stage 3 (rejection) and stage 4 (fall), painfully fuelled by 5 (longing). And I hate to admit it, but the psychoanalysts were right. At least that night, they were.

‘Odio este amor….’ I hummed to myself alone at my table, ‘I hate this love’ – while the song ‘Humiliation’ played and two hundred people enjoyed dancing to it in La Viruta which suddenly sounded to me like some kind of dermatological condition. This was the exact opposite of the tangasm. This was Tango Hell. 

‘This is making me unhappy,’ I said in the taxi. It was 1am and the demonstrators had gone home, while tangueros were dancing the night away.

‘I resent being responsible for your happiness,’ he snapped.

‘You should be worried about your happiness,’ I snapped back.

‘If that’s the way it is …’ he said.

‘Where are you from?’ the taxi driver interrupted in Spanish and turned down the song that was playing on the 24-hour tango station. It just happened to be ‘Rencor’.

‘New Zealand,’ I said rancorously.

‘Is it easy to emigrate to New Zealand?’ the poor man asked.

We had no idea, we were trying to get away from it, for god’s sake. But this reminder of someone else’s real – as opposed to self-inflicted – desperation shut both of us up.

Jason went back to the hotel room, and I stormed off into the darkness of the back streets, hoping that he wouldn’t let me wander by myself. But he did – why wouldn’t he, if he’d let me sit for hours at the milongas. (Pausa: to be fair, he’d let me sit on my own so that I could get dances with other men, since his own dancing was in crisis. But I wasn’t thinking rationally. I was in love with him, and I wanted to dance with him, end of story.)

The cartoneros were working their way through the garbage, and shouted half-friendly obscenities at me. It’ll serve him right if I get sexually assaulted now, I thought. I sat on a window ledge among the broken pavement stones and the rubbish, and indulged in self-pity.

Buenos Aires was no longer what it had been, and neither were we. Our tango relationship was born of this dance, and yet the relationship was now taking the magic and the beauty out of the tango. Just as bronca was knocking the Good Air out of Buenos Aires.

While I sat there feeling sorry for Argentina and for myself, and secretly hoping that Jason would appear and single-handedly save both, or at least one, a man appeared out of a the doorway. A red light shone on the inside. I looked at the sign above the door. It was a pornographic video joint.

‘You okay, bella?’ the man said. He was clutching some videos. He wore battered cowboy boots and his face sagged. ‘Are you waiting for someone?’

‘No,’ I said bitterly. ‘Because he’s not coming.’

‘So he’s not worth waiting for, is he,’ he turned to go, then stopped and turned to me again. ‘Nothing’s worth waiting for, if you ask me. Nothing and nobody. I used to fall in love, but after I got my heart broken a few times, I learnt my lesson. Ciao bella, go home.’

Somewhere in the night, sirens were wailing. I took the man’s advice and went home to Jason. He put a desultory arm around me, and we watched some more TV feet doing embellishments. Dear friends of tango…

Things improved when Jason went to Uruguay. I stayed behind – weddings have never been my thing, even other people’s. Besides, I couldn’t possibly miss seeing the Metropolitan Tango Championships for the Province of Buenos Aires. This was close-embrace, social tango, in which amateur couples showed off subtleties, instead of their inner thighs as they did in show tango. The initial selection happened at the regular milongas.

I went to a central city club called Porteño y Bailarin (best night: Thursday). And there, by a stroke of luck, because I was the only foreigner, I was introduced to Mercedes and her friend Mario. Mario was a car dealer in his 40s with a sharp cream suit and a matinee-idol face, and his eyes were full of something I’d never seen in a car dealer before: irony. It was an urban, porteño irony, the kind that comes after twenty years of frequenting milongas. I already liked him, and I instantly adored Mercedes who was a diminutive, septuagenarian milonga institution. She was a former ballerina and she had seen it all, which didn’t stop her from wanting to see it all over again.

She invited me to sit at her table, always at the front, in the centre of the action, always with a bottle of champagne cooling in a bucket, her thin lips immaculately lipsticked. She danced a tanda or two per night, but mostly she sat by her champagne bucket and provided a running commentary on the dancers’ styles, for the benefit of those sitting beside her.

‘Oh my god, here comes the hunchback of Notre Dame! Look at that posture. Staring at the floor the whole time – is he looking for coins? Now, see that human ruin with a rat’s tail for hair?’

She pointed towards an infamous milonguero known as el Tano, the Italian. He wasn’t Italian though, he was from here, and the tango grapevine had it that he’d been a carpenter and a family man in Milwaukee, but his thirty years of respectability were well and truly over now, and he was back in the city of sin as a single man and drug-dealer. He paraded his pregnant paunch through the milongas seven nights a week, his shirt spotted by sweat-stains. He chewed drugs, grimaced at invisible rivals, and ceaselessly lip-synched to the songs, which he knew by heart, every single one.

‘He’s a crack-head, el Tano,’ Mercedes continued, ‘But he always plucks the young birds. And they dance with him! Really, women are idiots.’

‘Oh Mercedes,’ Mario objected, but it was impossible to object to Mercedes. She was always right. Even so, when el Tano lurched my way to invite me later that night, I endured Mercedes’s withering gaze and joined the ranks of idiot women. I was curious.

The truth is, it was hard to look at el Tano when he was dancing with some long-limbed nymph, and not to believe in…well, something good. He had a blessed-out, far-away look on his grey face, and a careful arm around the nymph’s bare back, while lip-synching to, say, a waltz called ‘My soul’. Even in his own words, he was ‘un viejo de mierda’ – a shitty old man – but he embodied the tango principle: that you could be a bloated frog out in the street, but inside the magical milonga, where you knew every song, every square inch of the floor, and every beat of the compás, you could be redeemed, for twelve minutes at a time. 

After a vivid couple of milongas, during which he marked every single beat and made me sweat for a change, I asked him:

‘Why did you come back to Buenos Aires?’

The next milonga was beginning. He glanced at me with glazed eyes before he picked up my hand again.

‘Con el lungo Pantaleón/ Pepino y el Loco Juan….’ he said, and went on in the same spirit.

I didn’t get any of it, but I got two things. One, it was lunfardo, the urban jargon of Buenos Aires which nobody understands except old porteños like him. Two, it was the first lyric of the cheeky milonga playing now, which was called ‘A beneficial dance’. He lip-synched the entire song in my ear, which was a tour-de-force, but it was also a coup-de-grace that released me from my fascination with him, because I lost all desire to dance with him again.

(Pausa: men who lip-synch, hum, moan or make other disturbing sounds while they dance with you are a special category that knows no national borders. This unsolicited musical accompaniment delivered in your ear is always, without exception, a turn-off.)

Back at Mercedes’s table, I felt chastened, and she pointedly made no comment. Mario lifted his eyebrows at me in his ironic way. You’ll know better next time, they were both saying.

‘Mercedes,’ I asked breezily, trying to restore peace in the wake of the el Tano fiasco. ‘What are the dance rules of the championship?’

‘There’s two categories, social and performance. In the social, you’re not allowed any moves above the knee. No ganchos, no funny business.’

‘In the performance though, you don’t see any moves below the knee,’ Mario sneered. Like Mercedes, he was a passionate exponent of the close-embrace milonguero style.

‘Oh, and who do I see, hounding for fresh blood, now that he’s single?’ Mercedes’ eyes were on a glamorous dancing couple.

The man, a famous dancer called Ricardo, had a long pony-tail and in his shiny black jacket, he looked like a successful pimp. The woman was a French air-hostess with smokey make-up and the cold fire of the tango addict in her eye. She had approached me earlier, after I’d danced with Ricardo.

‘How was it with him?’ she asked.

‘Nice,’ I’d said casually, as if I danced with Ricardo every night of my life.

‘He rarely comes out to the milongas,’ she said. ‘But I guess now he’s single, he’ll come out more.’
I thought she would introduce herself but she wasn’t interested in me at all. She didn’t look at me once – her made-up eye was on Ricardo the entire time, trying to catch his eye.

(Pausa: This is why we’ve met so few women so far. A woman dances with men, and therefore meets the men. Women compete for the best dancers. Same sex friendships are only made over time, in stable tango communities.)

‘Ah, and now we’ve got a kangaroo!’ Mercedes observed. She was looking at a bespectacled dancer with a ponytail and a slight bounce to his dancing.

‘Australian tango!’ Mario sniggered.

‘I can’t decide if he is leaping or bouncing,’ Mercedes mused. ‘Either way, kangaroo tango is bad news.’
But the guy was having fun, and when he asked me to dance later, I was pleased. He had a strange way of tugging at my waist with his right hand, as if my body was a double-bass or a harp – which made sense later when I found out that he was, in fact, a professional contrabass-player. Anyway, he danced with great panache. He also looked foreign.

‘No, I’m not foreign,’ Darío  said, ‘I’m 100% Argentine. Which means 100% mongrel. I live in Brazil at the moment.’
His Brazilian psychoanalyst wife was here too, looking miserable when he danced with other women – which he kept to a minimum ‘to keep the peace’ – and just as miserable when he danced with her. I thought, guiltily, that she and Jason would hit it off straight away.

‘It’s impossible to have a good time when you’re with your partner,’ Darío  said between tandas. ‘You have to go dancing alone. It’s the nature of the tango beast.’

Next time I saw Darío at the famous Club Caning (best nights: Tuesday, Friday, Saturday), his wife had gone back to Brazil.
‘I’m relieved, frankly, cause I can’t relax when she’s around. But, Kapka, why this face? Let me guess: your man hasn’t called from Uruguay, and it’s been a week.’

I nodded. I was smoking the last of my cigarillos and teetering on the verge of tears and on the edge of my new sandals, which had 7.5cm heels and open toes, a watershed moment in a woman’s dancing life. The sandals had a mesh front made from strips of black velvet. That evening, I was being a melodramatic caricature of a tanguera, straight out of a song. Malena perhaps, because that’s the song they were playing just then – Malena who ‘sings like no one else’, Malena who has ‘the bandoneon blues.’

Malena is the classic tragic tango heroine. In typical tango grape-vine style, her story is subject to endless speculation. One of the legends is that poet Homero Manzi saw a singer called Malena de Toledo doing a tango on stage, and was so smitten with her, he imagined a story for her and wrote one of tango’s most poignant songs. Years later, when the ‘real’ Malena heard the song, she was so stunned by it, she gave up singing. Malena killed her own prototype, you might say.

‘I’ll have your cigarillo box, if it’s empty,’ Darío  tried to distract me. ‘My wife collects them and I want to keep the peace. But anyway, you know this won’t last for ever, don’t you. You won’t always be in love. The good times will come back. I know about these things. My wife has analysed me.’ He winked. ‘I kid you not. Meanwhile, we have tango, thank god, or rather thanks to Pugliese. God has never done anything for me, but just listen to Pugliese! Come on.’

As we set off around the room, I realised that Darío was right. Even though his tugging on my waist was bothering me a little, dancing made me happy. Being in love made me decidedly unhappy. Conclusion: dancing and being in love didn’t go together, against all instinct, and despite all appearances.

Tango looks like the dance of love. It feels like the dance of love. It sings of love. Love is tango’s ultimate carrot. But try to take the song outside the dance-hall, and you end up with the stick. This was my momentous and melancholy discovery of the night.

But Darío was ahead of me with his tango philosophy.

‘Tango is a product of crisis,’ he said in between dances at our table. He was mopping up his myopic face with a large hanky.

‘Crisis of identity,’ he continued. ‘In the old days, it was the identity of the nation. Now it’s masculine and feminine identity that’s in crisis. You know, how the sexes relate. That’s why it’s still a dance of the margins, because it’s subversive. The lawyers, doctors and bankers who come here often hide it from their colleagues. It’s their little dirty secret.’

‘But what about couples? Couples dance too,’ I said. We looked at each other and laughed mirthlessly.

‘Exactly,’ he said, ‘Couples dance too. And tango amplifies the couple. That’s subversive too. If one or both people are happy, the tango couple is fantastic. If one or both are unhappy, it’s a nightmare. And I don’t need to give you examples. Do you know the Spanish word desencuentro?’

I didn’t, but I should have, because it described perfectly what was taking place between me and Jason. Desencuetro is the opposite of an encounter: a mis-encounter, a disconnection.

extract introduction

The Tango Bug

From an unlikely beginning in a dance studio in New Zealand, Kapka Kassabova quickly became hooked on the tango; her new-found passion took her to New York, Berlin, Paris, Edinburgh and, of course, Buenos Aires. Along the way Kapka had fleeting moments of ecstasy but more often experienced the aching feet, heartbreak and jealousy that go with being a true tanguero. The story of the tango is also the story of Argentina. Twelve Minutes of Love examines the dance’s mixed Latin, European and African roots, its journey from the slums of Buenos Aires to the dance halls of almost every town across the globe where she meets and befriends some unforgettable people. The world of tango is rife with schisms and here Kapka is our guide to the esoteric but all too human conflicts that rage throughout every tango community.

With warmth, wit and a keen eye for the absurd, Kapka takes us behind the scenes of a global subculture and puts her own emotions, motives and 10-year long obsession with the tango under the microscope. More than a dance odyssey, this is a generation-defining story about what it’s like to be at once a cosmopolitan and a lost soul in the 21st century.

Yes, exactly. This is why tango – the international anthem of the existentially, romantically and culturally sick – sucked me in like a religious cult. The results were mixed and are told in the twelve chapters of this book. In writing this story, I wanted to write about illusions, and the price we pay for them. I wanted to write about heartbreak, hope, and the search for home and meaning in our lives. In other words, very modestly I wanted to write about the human condition - but through the story of tango music.

I hope you have fun at my expense. And I hope you recognise yourself in my story, in some way. As you'll find out, you don't have to know tango to be afflicted - and blessed - by the condition known as tanguidad.

The combination of being a lost soul and being a tango addict meant that I spent ten years travelling the world chasing my tail and the ultimate tangasm, writing travel guides, travel essays, and the novel Villa Pacifica (Alma 2011) which is about things going horribly wrong for a travel writer in South America.

And because nobody seemed to know where or what Bulgaria is, I wrote Street Without a Name (Portobello 2008) which is about that, and about the last communist childhood – mine and that of the millions of kids on our side of the Iron Curtain who came of age as the Berlin Wall came down.

These days, I spend much of my time walking the dog in the Highlands and listening to tango music which makes me feel here and there, happy and sad.