Balance. Was something Maude did not necessarily attribute much value to. Before. One could write off a lack of equilibrium by simply claiming themselves chaotic or blaming the inner ear. If balance wasn’t a regulation of the chaos, than it was simply an acceptance of it.
Balance could mean many things. Stasis. Homeostasis. Symmetry. Stability. When it came to dancing the tango, the latter was a debutante’s backwards battle, a question of time, persistence, and metatarsus. Learning the dance was an incremental process of perfecting stability, of finding complete independence in the quest for steadiness while working towards a shared goal: abrazo, dancing cheek-to-cheek.
One day the dance instructors invited another tango teacher to give a class, a woman from Argentina who danced the tango from its motherland, punctuating her French with explanations in Spanish. At her behest, to prevent anyone from getting distracted, the followers were required to wear a scarf over their eyes. Giving over complete, if reluctant, trust to the leaders, they all moved in a circuitous loop around the room. With her vision obscured by a silk foulard, Maude listened for recognizeable cues, and beyond that, listened simply to the music, a heart-lurching melody oozing pure, melancholic delight.
The abrazo was new to all of them. Guided blindly backwards by a reassuring hand, Maude was cradled into the safe embrace of rhythm, steps, and melody. Suddenly the professor came up behind her, unseen for the blindfold, and attempted to straighten Maude’s posture. “Mira,” she said while doing it, forming Maude’s back into the proper shape to maintain her equilibrium. “Look.”
The looking without seeing sent Maude into a different sight, one that mingled with the teacher’s Spanish, its meaning decipherable even if its words were not understood. And suddenly she was home. It was not a place, nor a memory, but a fleeting certainty, a belonging to something she’d never known. And yet she did know it. Those barrios in Argentina and Uruguay where the dance took form, the smoke and sweat in those dim, crowded rooms that made it all the way to Belle-Epoque Paris via the music that replaced time with its own steady momentum.
Balance was hard-won in this eternal struggle, and Maude thought she had achieved it by joining the ebb and flow of the current. She had reached an understanding, after all, that she felt comfortable enough within her own self to forget how her feet hurt in the dance shoes she’d wear for hours at a time. But there was a great deal more to this question of equilibrium.
At a milonga outside of town, a dancer not much older than Maude picked her out from the sidelines with a mirada, that locked-eye invitation to dance. Awkwardly formal, he called her vous and transformed into a tanguero once they were swept up into the milonga’s current. Maude let him lead her through the dance, content to follow along for a fluid tanda with minimal embarrassment. She did, admittedly, enjoy following, as it demanded concentration but not authority. It was listening and agreeing, rather than coming up with a counterargument.
But her parter offered a diffrent approach. He suggested, politely, that their roles would feel more balanced if she responded with her own ideas, rather than waiting for a cue. The dance, he assured her, was a conversation, not a series of commands, though not every follower was courageous enough to assert this. The leader might decide what steps would come next, but the follower could determine the pacing and slow things down (or stop the momentum completely) in order to flourish on her own terms.
Maude didn’t quite have enough vocabulary or courage in her footwork to recognize all she could do during these pauses (during which she was at liberty to take the lead). But she understood that this person, this moment in time, had confronted her for some reason beyond the dance. It was a nudge from some altruistic starlight towards that ever beckoning grail of self-authority.
But she didn’t want to confront that just yet. She wanted only to find a way to describe the sensation of fitting into the dance, and knew she would spend a lifetime trying to do so. The sync and glide put everything aside to feel, to ripple with the melody, to make music out of the steps in a blissful abandon, shimmering with secrets. The steps were irresistible in their sinuous repetition. It was sublimely strange to feel so at home within the confines of something that still perpetually set her off-balance. But that was the profound human homeness of dancing—moving in time to music and out of time itself. In the end, life was rhythm, and dance was the chance to try a different one for a few moments. It was the invitation to be inside one’s own skin without the distractions of the outer world, to traipse through the phosphorescence of a private inner universe.
And that, that, was the deep-down descent into other times and places, as the rhythm removed time, or temporarily rewrote it, into a momentary dance with eternity. The cumulative joys and sorrows of all humankind were waiting there—tradition and trailblazing and the combination of it all into one ambrosia of persistence. It meant being everywhere at the same time, feeling everything all at once. The result was a homesickness for things that no longer existed, merged with a belonging that defied all differences. It was rippling and ancient like the silk humans had churned from leaves wormspun into silver. And that could become other textures too, as thick and velveteen as a clear night sky where the stars glimmered in that private universe and illuminated some vague sense of knowing.
Maude could muse upon the stars, but the sensation was more like a particular lust she had for sunsets. The dance was just like gulping down those last streaks of color in a dusken haze to relish that secret gladness for feeling a little sad. The end always came abruptly in tango music, a surprise that defied the inevitability of a violet crepuscule after sundown. How could Maude describe the beauty of it except through how fleeting it was?
She had run after numerous sunsets with a sudden, recurring, desperate need to see beyond the end of something. Back when she lived in the valley below the foothills for a time, there was one parking garage in the town center where Maude went to watch these feats of color. With a lookout above the train tracks that ran off to the edge of the continent, she gorged herself on the pink and orange shimmering over the valley. Sometimes she would simply stand up there and cry for the beauty of it, at the perfect tragedy of something so beautiful coming to an end, of the inevitable end rendering it so beautiful.
Once, she brought Margaret along with her. It was long before the tango would enter Maude’s life, and not long after she had discovered swing. They’d brought a radio with them and danced the Charleston to its syncopated chabada, their elongated shadows on the concrete mirroring their rollicking flails. It would be one of many moments during which she and Margaret managed to exist out of time, and which would cause Maude to suspect that the human condition, the stuff of life, might be to strive to live outside of time as often as possible. To spend time in passions or with people who made it effortless to forget the cycle. In that way, there would be no slow descent into the inevitable gloam. Like the last refrain of the bandoneon in a tango, it could all stop as vividly as it began.