The tango it was not "a sad thought that one dances", according to the well-known definition of the Argentine writer Ernesto Sàbato, but rather the "reptile to lupanare" described decades earlier by the poet and politician Leopoldo Lugones. It was not the elegant and melancholy dance we know today but a rough and chauvinistic rite, danced in gambling dens (as was the case with jazz in the United States) by mestizos from the suburbs of Buenos Aires at the end of the XNUMXth century, and inspired by the milonga, that dance always invented by the "guappi" to make fun of the movements of the blacks, at the time - before European immigration - more numerous than now in Argentina.
To reveal the true story of tango, which in fact according to many authors is a word of African origin, as well as milonga, is none other than Jorge Luis Borges, in a posthumous book, recently published in Italian with the title "Il tango" (Adelphi) and the result of an enormous work of transcription of four audio cassettes in which as many conferences held by the writer in 1965 were recorded: "The tango - report the audios, authenticated by Borges' widow Maria Kodama - was originally a bold and happy dance , invented by men brave in their merriment. The imagery of the tango takes us back to a magical world where we all died in some brawl in the suburbs”.
“The two words that make people think of Argentina in the world are gaucho and tango – claims the writer in his series of meetings – and in some way they are connected to each other”. In fact, it was not the gauchos who danced the tango but the compadritos, i.e. the "guappi", criminals often organized in gangs, who lived on the edge of the city and who met, to chat, have a drink, play cards, dance but also challenge each other in bloody duels, in houses of ill repute. These places were brothels where women of easy virtue flocked, another central figure of the tango, who were brazenly approached by criminals, and perhaps killed out of jealousy, or gave rise to lethal duels between rivals to affirm their virility.
“And the two cuchillos taught them to dance”: “and knife duels taught him to dance”, writes Miguel Camino in a poem dedicated to the tango. Nothing to do with the "plaintive" tango from Carlos Gardel onwards, when the lyrics were almost all inspired by the desperation of the man abandoned by the woman: "A man who thinks about a woman for five minutes is not a man, he's a queer" , says Borges quoting a story by Vicente Rossi. These compadritos, almost always mestizos (criollos), a bit gauchos, however, we felt: in 1880, the year in which the Argentine writer places the birth of the tango, the peripheral areas of the city were almost one with the surrounding countryside, and even the compadritos – like those cowboys from the pampas – they worked with animals. They were usually butchers, rippers, teamsters.
People of power, however sordid and criminal, and precisely this dispels another taboo: “Unlike the kind of sentimental novel created by the cinema – argues Borges in his transcribed lectures -, tango is not born from the people. As we have seen, the tango has an indecent root, danced clandestinely by a circle of "guappi" neighbourhoods, young idlers from wealthy families, often united in brawling and turbulent gangs, and women of life”. Quarrelsome, shameless, mischievous: initially this dance was even rejected by the people we would call respectable, especially by women, who disdained its strongly macho imprint, and for this very reason the tango of the first decades, before the boom from 1910 onwards, when it arrived in Europe, it was often danced by a pair of men
Even when it was a man and a woman dancing it, the pace and especially the courteous (the pauses, marked by particularly risqué figures, different from the ones we use now) were decided and carried out only by the men: the woman complied, which she also does in the modern version, but much more in the original one. Early tango was also different from a musical point of view: he accompanied himself with piano, flute and violin; only later did the now irreplaceable bandoneon arrive. So how did such a tacky dance become the slow, voluptuous dance we know today? Precisely thanks to the aforementioned arrival in Europe, from 1910 onwards. And to be precise in France, in Paris, where the father's children idle (niños bien pateros) exported it, being able to afford long journeys already at the time.
“We Argentines – said Borges in 1965 – even if we stammered French, we were all (in our opinion, certainly not second to the French) honorary French. We knew French or pretended we did. This is why we prefer to define ourselves as Latin Americans and not as Hispanic Americans”. In Paris and then in the rest of Europe, the tango is therefore accepted and cleared through customs, but in a softer version: its excessively sinuous lines (especially for the time), just as they had been rejected by "good" Buenos Aires, were incompatible, for example, with the rigidity of German officers or with the clichés of English ladies, who instead voted in a majority vote that this presentable version was absolutely decent.
Initially condemned also by the Vatican and judged "immoral" by a court in Cleveland, Ohio, the tango thus lost its nature and effectively became that "sad thought that is danced", adored by the upper classes of society and which reached the pinnacle of success in the "whiny" version of Carlos Gardel, moreover born in France, in Toulouse. It's Italy? Although having had a great influence on Argentine culture, in particular on the language as Borges often recalls in his lessons, the enormous Italian emigration to Argentina did not have particular reasons for contact with the history of the tango. Someone, to tell the truth, tried to attribute the "sweetness" of the dance to the moment in which he progressively moved away from the infamous areas to reach the Genoese district of Boca.
In short, a more nationalist reading key considered the “plaintive” tango as a consequence of Italian immigration. A thesis that Borges deems unacceptable and returns to the sender: "There is no reason to believe that all Italians are sad or complaining, I believe that in the beginning the tango was more heroic because it was less imaginative, and it is known that fear arises from imagining misfortunes before they happen”. The author quotes a line from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: “Cowards die many times before their death; the brave taste death only once.” The brave is superficial, faces death and has no time to be afraid. The tango was originally a symbol of happiness and courage.
