Minima Tangalia

Parva Licet
by MC Ningùn Bobby

In an unforgettable film, whose title, directors and actors i can't remember at the moment, a mothley crowd of golden-hearted vilains pretends to be the high society, the so-called crème de la crème. Their purpose is charity. Actually, they are the gallant scoundrels you can't find anywhere but in that Broadway Damon Runyon filled with cotton candy, booze and paternalistic slugs. They have sinister faces and cooly attend to the underworld's almost virtuous jobs: they are swindlers, crooks, cheats, bookies, gamblers. They are certainly gangsters, but with a code of conduct, since living out of law means being more honest than regular people. They are all stricty illiterates and ignorant of the picturesque good manners currently in use among the bigs. After a crash course of etiquette, about which they learn the first things fast, they wear turbulent night dresses, conceal behind strings of pearls and starched collars their bull necks, and confer each other the most gratifying honours. So that transformed in as many ambassadors, entrepreneurs, high prelates, duchesses and Governors of Ohio, they prepare to welcome the aristocratic foreigners they want to impress. The party scene is an hilarious parody of the high set.
- How do you do, you scrupulously honest Viscount?
- May i dare to introduce you a real first-class Eminence?
- This champagne is better than the hospital's wine, isn't it distinguished Surgeon?
I have not seen the movie for several years, but its sequel is in full view every friday night here at the Quinta del Ñato, as my elevated position of Milonga Camerlingo allows me to see a crowded dancefloor where numberless celebrities open their ways a mujerazos, that's to say by strokes of woman, through the very few nonentities.
- Why don't you mind your way, you renowned Qualified Teacher?
- I've stepped on better, you providential Pedagogue.
- You don't like the ronda, do you perishable Milonguero?
- Actually, this is the cortina, you unheeded Demiurge.
Oh yeah. Since the tourists have showered on Buenos Aires, in the tango there are more teachers than pupils, more stars than dancers, more primadonna than extras. Now our magnificent boors are really managers of didactic kiosks, promoters of feet-clinics, wholesalers of pisadas, volcadas, colgadas and other spare parts, experts of milonga con traspié, sin traspié and with màs o menos de traspié. The most deteriorated milongueros of the bostezos a granel kind, heat up again their uneatable thin soups; even the gauchos (the folk dancers), drop out their telluric dances in order to give the tango the pre-Columbian taste of the french heel zapateo.
They all became masters without apprenticeship and without vigil at arms, by hanging a diploma on the wall like the barbers or by coming in eighth in whatever tango championship, or by spreading the rumour, as a remedy for the public distraction. Here it is the homemade trick, the porteño amendment that avoids that famous heraldry law according to which neither you ask, nor turn down, nor above all wear, a title.
In tango, like in the Damon Runyon's scripts, but with the aggravating circumstances of vile motives, you get the title of master mostly by yourself.

© MC Ningùn Bobby
Buenos Aires, 2006

Minima Tangalia