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Nostalgia, passion, magic… Tango

“…Ten cents a round, including the checkers”

And it is already tango, in the brothels of Rio de la Plata and Buenos Aires. There is already the whole heart of the tango among the gangsters and prostitutes who sink their lives and those of those who possess nothing with possessions, illusions and despair.
The real beginning is lost and blurred in the arrivals at the ‘Silver Land’, on the ports that first welcome mainly Italian and French immigrants, but also Germans, Russians, Hungarians, Slavs. People who crowd together and mix, but do not amalgamate, with the slaves freed from the pampas, with Cubans and Africans. Landless peoples in search of a future, people with nothing but hope: they live in large conventillos and look out over the courtyards of misery with an ungrammatical Castilian, mixed with the dialects of distant homelands.
It was music, only, at first. Then dances between men as an exercise in seduction for brothel queens, then a few words thrown like knives into the rhythm of anger and loneliness. Poetry, finally.
Who knows whether it matters to recognise in the present tango the signs of fate and stagnant time as in the expanses of the pampas, the movements of the Cuban and Spanish Habanera dance or the rhythm of the African Candombe.
Because all this was just water and clay in the thousand invisible hands that modelled the dance: an alphabet of symbols and remembrances that only the need for an expressive grammar could lead towards the creation of a universal language, of the profound and the hidden, of all the unspoken, of the abyss of pain, of loving communication, of proud affirmation, of joy for a hope that has just been born and is still light with a gentle breath.

Now Argentina is no longer the ‘Land of Silver’ and is trying to emerge from the long night of dictatorships, when everyone’s past was erased, affections destroyed, hopes drowned in state crimes. Then, even the tango was almost silenced, surviving abroad, like the exiles, in the myth of Gardel, in his crystalline voice and in the poetics of the wayfarer who flees, but who ” …sooner or later will have to stop / and although the oblivion that destroys everything / has killed my old illusions / I look at a humble hidden hope / that is the only fortune of my heart.”

When I met Iller Bedogni I felt that gust of wind from his walking, I felt that his Tango, as only an exile can seek, had taken him inside an ancient world that enveloped him, bringing him closer to people and then to the gestures and motions of an expressive possibility that is symbiosis of soul and body.
I know little about Iller Bedogni. I know that he is involved in commerce and that he works mainly in South America, that he travels constrained but curious. I know that the energy he transmits comes from the things he loves, from the faces and stories he has been able to tell, from the passions he has been able to give clothes and names to. I think I know what attracted him to this ritual of floating bodies, to the firm stubbornness of the guitar and singing soloists. I think it was the need for self-expression and at the same time the desire to stop the image of a crumbling and crumbling world, of the sense of surviving against all reason, with blood flowing only in the veins of the Boca, with the heart in the infamous cafés, in the ruins of the symbols of the past.
He has frequented the bars and streets of Tango without his camera and without the ‘uniform’, as he calls it, of the efficient and punctual work he is called upon to do in that country, without the haste of our bionic clocks, which beat a time that only enslaves us. He has listened to the stories of Carlito, Marianne and Indio. He spent his evenings in the Barrio Pompeya, in the Chino bar, before they demolished it with all the effigies of the most skilled and subtle tangueros, most beloved, most infamous, most crystalline, most varied of the infinite possibilities and freedoms of the tango.
“Why?” He asked himself. “I could not stay away from that world of memories, of hard and dangerous life, of threats, of songs and passions.”
When his car appeared, with him, it was none other than his dancer, a perfect seguidora for a dance within oneself, and within the city and its courtyards, for a passionate dance with watchful eyes that do not forget and stare at the impalpable nature of the dance: the gaze that pierces, the clinging of the perfect harmony, the play of intersections, the pretence, the overt rejection. Iller did not seek movement, but rather the moment, which is only that, precise and interior, of a feeling that immediately disappears and is already past history, a fire of nostalgia. An epic attempt, like the dance itself, to fix the moments that make up and break down life: the firm balance of a four-legged being, the fast run-up on pointe shoes, the bending and letting go in the sure grip of a partner, the search for a thought directed elsewhere, the leading or feeling led, the walking and the traversing for the sole pleasure of doing so, the getting lost, the finding oneself again.

Could tango be the tame, metallic La cumparsita of this mobile phone’s ringtone? I answer, anyway. And beyond a line connecting two worlds, separated by an ocean of water and many oceans of thought, I find Iller’s voice from Argentina. It is raining in Buenos Aires, yet Carlito is there, on the street with his guitar and his crystalline voice, singing, for me, his solitary Tango.

Then I see him again, as in Iller’s portraits, right under the obelisk on 9 de Julio, gazing into the distance. Firm and powerful, the stone symbol stands out against the sky; horizontal and solid, like a base, the gaze of the old tanguero. And it is still in Calle Caminito among the symbols of the great Gardel’s nostalgia: fanalito, guitar and immovable pride shielding time.

I wander with fearful respect among the bandoneon players. I observe a look of harsh firmness on the raw notes of a tango of jealousy and condemnation, among the blind alleys of abandonment, while the instrument becomes a fan and a play of light. I encounter a smile of melancholic amazement, crowned by the discreet symbols of the old everyday life of cigarillos and the loud and clear acronym of the multinational Pepsi. There is a guitarist wrapped up in the instrument and his tango, against the blurred background of a reality that is as foreign to him as a speeding train. Light and surrounded by light, the ghost of a passer-by appears in a corner. The singers, suffering from a time that has been lost, are portrayed from below, like monuments, with their hands open to the impossible defence, or clenched and full of all that has already escaped.

The dancers dance different tangos: voluptuous of sensuality or of total abandonment, which in a moment is taken back in defiance and dissent, tangos of tender embraces with their foreheads barely touching in an outpouring of profound energies, tangos of athletes and virtuosos, of irrepressible and naive joy, danced in city squares, reproducing the geometries of the perfect forms of invention and chance. Or tangos of nostalgia for a time lost and fixed on the stone bas-relief, tangos of daytime on the Caminito of history looking at that single silhouette of bodies in step as it passes through the lens.

The Tango of Indio and Marianne, finally.
A conscious look of absolute dependence. A wide and secure connection, a figure of round perfection. United in life by the tango, life itself then divided them. The tango brought them together again, but only in the perfect form of dance. In those notes, in the poem of steps and words, Indio and Marianna rediscover the intense and fleeting moment, which inebriates and then disappears to hover solitarily in the air until the next attack.

Iller had his tango. He let himself be guided, until he found his eye and his step. He found the heart of the dance and of the people, he established a warm and deep contact and, from the fragments of objects and glances, he gives us the emotion of a journey in a different rhythm, far away and perhaps lost forever.

He leaves us a chair in the shadows, empty and in good order.
Closed on the floor, but open with promise should anyone seek his tango, there is a bandoneon to play.