Dürer dances tango in Chicago
Dürer dances tango in Chicago these days. And smiles. And goes over the songs in the playlist on his Macintosh laptop. He wears black flowing trousers and T-shirts of different colors.
Dürer speaks Spanish, and the closest he gets to speaking German is when he speaks English which, when he talks, doesn’t sound as a Germanic language at all, because he embellishes it with soft Spanish sounds and intonations. He wants everyone to dance in a “s-ee-rcle”, to the count of “gwan, too, tree.”
Unlike most Argentines who seem permanently attached to their yerba mate, Dürer drinks pure water, and this is how his true self gets revealed — through these small bits and pieces, which I have put together because I am the only one who knows that Dürer dances tango in Chicago.
Right now. Three feet away from me.
Tango dancing Dürer is much less melancholic than his 16th century counterpart. He isn’t interested in the Riders of Apocalypse anymore. Instead, he draws circles on the dancing floor with the tip of his black-and-white shoe. He no longer chooses among different evangelical stories. Instead, he chooses one tango orchestra over another in his smartphone. He swapped his oil paints and canvases for dancing shoes and lapiz — which means ‘pencil’ in Spanish — a movement in Argentine tango.
His contemporary name is that of a Shakespearean angel. It suits him so well, because his dancing is light. Oh so light. Aerial.
When I first saw Ariel, I knew he looked familiar. There was something very recognizable about his long wavy dark hair, big eyes, neatly trimmed moustache and beard. There was something about his dancing which wasn’t exactly dancing. And then one day, as I was watching him dance (that’s all I have been doing since he arrived, to be honest, just watching him dance), I noticed how perfect his lapizes were.
Lapiz is a movement in tango when the dancer pivots on one leg while stretching the other. With the toes of a stretched leg, as if it were a leg of compasses, the dancer draws circles on the floor.
I watched Ariel doing a lapiz, and it dawned on me. He was also an artist who could paint the most beautiful canvasses on that floor. And then I immediately knew who he looked like. No. I knew who he was.
Think of Dürer’s self-portrait where the artist sits facing the viewer, with his long wavy hair on the sides of his head, wearing a coat the fur collar of which he clasps with his right hand. That Dürer is dancing tango in Chicago right in front of my own eyes while I am writing this.
What does he think about when he thinks that no one watches him? Because, of course, I watch him then. How can I not? It’s not every day that one gets to see a famous Renaissance artist dancing the most beautiful dance in the world.
Does he remember them — them, the apocalypse horsemen, the knights, deaths, and the devils, and all other horrors he faced and engraved?
How much self-determination or even self-denial did it take him to switch from painting — which is oh so permanent — to the most transient art which can’t be frozen in time, etched or set in stone? It exists only for the three minutes while the tango song is played, and then it is over. Not a single dance is the same. It is always something entirely different. Even if one dances with the same partner.
What happened to him that made him change?
The horsemen — do they appear in his dreams? Do they ride towards him or away from him? How scary is it? Does he wake up in sweat mumbling strange words, now long-forgotten raspy German sounds that he swore off to forget forever? Or do they cut him some slack from time to time, and in his lighter dreams the Apocalypse riders wear suits and fedoras? They stop, get off their horses, and start dancing — a man with a man. Old-style tango. Is this when he smiles in his sleep? The knitted brow is smoothed, and the jumble of old German words disappears, and he says in his sleep — essa!
I am awkward and tense when I dance. I wish I could be light. Alas, my art is stringing words together, not drawing circles on the floor with my foot. He is contemporary Jackson Pollock. Kandinsky. Joan Miro. Circle. Half-circle. Point. Triangle. Line. Straight. Diagonal. Circle. One, two, free. Point. The girl he is dancing with is wearing a white dress. I imagine all these figures appear on her dress, a most beautiful canvas. Essa!
For we, the followers — the girls he dances with, are his canvases. Music is his inspiration, and his movements are his pencils, pastels, and paints, and while he leads a girl, he paints her — in the best possible way. And the girl he is dancing with thinks “Can I be that good? Oh I am so beautiful.”
Yes, honey, you are, because he painted you so. Muy linda!
Drawing lapizes on the dance floor is even more fleeting than drawing shapes on the sand of Lake Michigan where the tidal wave goes up and down the shore. Why do people choose to do something as impermanent as that? Is it the stereotyped North-South division? They, warm-blooded southerners, enjoy the present, while we, cold northerners, mourn the past?
When we dance together, I know that while he actually enjoys those three minutes with me, I am enjoying how I will remember them. Maybe the stereotype is right. I live in the past tense. He lives in the present continuous. Listening, teaching, practicing, laughing, walking, talking, flirting, hugging, and, of course, dancing.
As I watch him do all this, I know it will make a beautiful memory.
A memory of Dürer dancing tango in Chicago.
Katya Kulik is a PhD candidate in the Program for Writers at UIC. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in So to Speak, theEEEL, Embodied Effigies, CutBank Literary Magazine, Jet Fuel Review, and elsewhere. She is the 2014 winner of the Montana Prize in Nonfiction.