Felicidad y soledad, si no nos las ven, no las tenemos
Macedonio Fernandez

We have been waiting for one hundred years and here it is, at last: the Tango is back home again.
From the Andes to the Apennines. This time without its cardboard suitcase, but with a business class ticket, as worthy of a busy gentleman.
In our beautiful italian towns, promoted trans-plated branch offices of the lejano Buenos Aires, we hug one another like porteños with the same enthusiasm and skill; in lack of hovels, we submit to dancing in palaces along the Grand Canal or in monasteries of the Sixteenth Century; there are compadritos who ride a bycicle, rotarians with a lengue, first offenders who apply the canyengue with its typical rod motion and taxpayers who pallet themselves in the Tango Milonguero™.  Probably, in this very moment, several fellow townsmen are embracing by two in order to walk together for a three-minutes lifetime.
Tango is really everywhere.
Lucia Baldini ain't been catched off-balance by this return in full regalia: five years ago she was the first italian photographer who dedicated a whole book to the Tango or, to be more exact, to her peculiar Inside Tango, while with Anime altrove she adjusts the aim towards the outside. She now interplays with the sensitive portraits chiselled by Michela Fregona, and takes the acts of public intimacy of our artists of the embrace, right there where they happen: either on the fish market's scaly pavement at Rialto or under a catacomb. 
So Jorge Luis Borges was wasting his words in vain: "Without the Buenos Aires skies and sunsets...", because since time immemorial the relationship between environment and works, especially the works of Art, is the primary mistery that rules both the vermilion's utilization in painting and the Payador Perseguido's unremitted length. In fact, this book confirms that the Asphalt Muse from Buenos Aires visits the chosen at home, delivers the Tango kit everywhere (islands included?), takes root even on rural hamlets and under orthogonal bell-towers, and uses the most basic-reputed representatives. 
But we won't let the Flicker Institute prevail and Sociology and Psyco-geography - the Snooty Muses - confiscate our topic. The italian milongueros, in spite of their stubborn anti-virtuosity, make claims of consideration and they deserve it, starting with the imaginary amendment the book credits to them since the title: you need a soul, here or elsewhere, to dance the Tango. Whether long enough to reach the far Buenos Aires dancefloors or as short and moist as the one Giotto dared to sketch under his feet at the Scrovegni, the authors really can do nothing about it.
Once run atilt with the intention to compile something more than a simple pilot's book of ballrooms, Lucia and Michela travelled by bathyscaphe, with scubas and proper optical devices. They opted for a sentimental diver's equipment to the detriment of the entomologist's weak tools. Should we so fool to expect the insects to read Fabre?  - as Cocteau said to Proust who complained about Madame Sevignè's disregard to the Recherche.
The first approach with the dancing school, the milonga or the tanguero on duty excludes soon the candid shelter of the mutual anonymity, which instead protects the reviewer's eupepsy in restaurants and delikatessens. Then, both the authors rummage the guy with specific means, looking for a passion, a tribulation or at least a heartbreak. Strangely, the images give back a sudden and general happiness. Is that the result of the Lucia's personal and always feminine framing, of her smooth black and white or is rather the happy few's dull satisfaction? Many shots are remarkable for their evocative force and incisiveness, even though they don't show (how could they?) if the sparks of genius the characters scraped together, are true or fake. The way the Japanese polished the etiquette in so far as you can't tell the good from the bad manners, Lucia improves the subjects till a photogenic quality. The readers can take my word for it. 
Among several wonderful portraits, we point out the Cedric Postlewhite's from The usual suspects, right then in San Frediano.
On the other hand, Michela gracefully marches in like a first class flâneuse among our classical sights - she remind us of Alberto Savinio's Dico a te, Clio or Ascolto il tuo cuore, città, rather than Goffredo Parise or Guido Piovene's cynical reportage from Argentina (which will get a peppery answer from our Director on the TQR's next issue). 
Where the picture takes the fleeting moment, a glance, a detail of some face, the writing sheds light upon the premises and anticipates the consequences. Michela does not pull her interlocutor's tongue at all; nevertheless she persuades us that Tango poetry springs out from our daily actions, towns are nothing but metaphysical places whose boundaries are our dreams and Truth, as the Gospels say, often rides an ass. This won't induce us to drop our reservation about some of the interviewees. With the same trouble they had in building their autobiographies, they could have told us something about their own lives. We admit that many of these leading figures are totally unknown to us. We apologize and state that if we ignored something more about them, we wouldn't hesitate to say it in public. 
Finally, we notice that the italian tangueros are short of the bohemian component, whereas abound in well-off classes: professionals, financial adviser, hide merchants, lawyers and executives.. This unusual chart is not a surprise to us: if at one hand the Tango north of Buenos Aires grows according to these managers' ideology  - as we have always disapproved from our columns against the T-business - on the other it is also true that Tango is a wish to be someone else, a suspension of the social body on the subjective body's behalf, blood and tears, an exotic dream, an universal feeling. Argentina is still far, but Tango is all here, in these two clutched bodies that don't want to stay alone, that defend themselves from the winds of war, from misery and sorrow, from the impossibility to change their fate. Anime altrove helps us to realize that Tango never actually moved.
Now, we have nothing to do but wait the cis-plated book in trepidation.

P.S. We'd like to thank professor Goffredo Fofi who for once in his life didn't play Clever Dick in his foreward, holding his authority just out of the dancefloor. That's all we would have needed: the Fofi's ochos...

© Jean Fajean, november 2001

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