Tango by Mike Gonzalez

Author:Mike Gonzalez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

The tone of the tango-song of the 1920s is nostalgic, plangent (just like the bandoneon), evoking a lost world within living memory. For the most part, the story is told from the margins of the barrio, its voice predominantly male and complaining of betrayal and misunderstanding, of lost love and despair. Its moral universe is conservative and masculine. The likely history of its implied narrator – obviously a recently retired compadrito – the romantic story of love and devotion misunderstood and rejected cannot hide the fact that it was the woman who was the breadwinner and he its beneficiary. The setting for this drama is urban; the light cast by the yellow street lights over the singer waiting, hopelessly, for his ex-lover to pass by, though she has deserted him for a rich man who will keep her, as long as she is young and beautiful. And when it becomes clear that he can never win her back, then all that remains is the long slide into oblivion recounted in one of Gardel’s most popular tangos ‘Cuesta abajo’ (Downhill).

Era, para mí, la vida entera,

como un sol de primavera,

mi esperanza y mi pasión.

Sabía que en el mundo no cabía

toda la humilde alegría

de mi pobre corazón.

Ahora, cuesta abajo en mi rodada,

las ilusiones pasadas

yo no las puedo arrancar.

Sueño con el pasado que añoro,

el tiempo viejo que lloro

y que nunca volverá.

Por seguir tras de su huella

yo bebí incansablemente

en mi copa de dolor,

pero nadie comprendía

que, si todo yo lo daba

en cada vuelta dejaba

pedazos de corazón.

Ahora, triste, en la pendiente,

solitario y ya vencido

yo me quiero confesar:

si aquella boca mentía

el amor que me ofrecía,

por aquellos ojos brujos

yo habría dado siempre más.

She was my whole life / Like spring sunshine / My hope and my passion. / She knew that the world wasn’t big enough / For the humble joy I felt / In my heart. / Now, sliding downhill / I can’t get rid of / Those illusions of the past / that past / I dream of, long for / The old times I weep for /That will never return.

Because I followed her trail / I drank relentlessly / From my glass of pain / But no-one understood / That if I gave everything / I left pieces of myself behind / At every turn. / Now, sad and in decline / Alone and defeated / I want to confess. / If that mouth lied / When it offered me love / I would have given anything / For those bewitching eyes.

(‘Cuesta abajo’, Downhill – Alfredo Le Pera, 1934)

But beauty fades and fate brings the arrogant mistress back to the reality of ageing and poverty. It is as if the man who sings is claiming for himself a kind of moral superiority, though he too has been the victim of passions and blind desire that led him in so many tangos to leave behind the lodestar of a moral life – the mother who is home, stability and selfless love. Many tangos evoke the place of innocence, of childhood, its location indeterminate but its role in the drama clear.

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