One evening we went out dancing. Tango argentino. A disaster! Jean was embarrassed and shunted me around, a little this way and a little that, practising the steps he’d learned in dance classes, but only using his hands. He was there, but he was not in control of his own body.
Impossible – not him, not this man! He wasn’t like men from the north, from Picardy, Normandy or Lorraine, who suffer from a great sterility of the soul, though there are many women in Paris who find that erotic – as if it were a sexual challenge to elicit the tiniest of emotions from a man! That kind of woman imagines that somewhere within this coldness is a blazing passion that will spur him on to throw her over his shoulder and pin her to the floor. We had to break off. We went home, had a drink and tiptoed round the truth. He was exceptionally tender as, naked, we played like a tom and his puss. My despair knew no bounds. If I couldn’t dance with him, then what?
I am my body. My * glistens when I feel desire, my chest perspires when I’m humiliated, and my fingers tingle with fear of my own courage; they quiver when I’m primed to protect and defend. When I ought to be afraid of real things, though – like the knot they found in my armpit and want to remove with a biopsy – I feel both bewildered and calm. My bewilderment makes me want to keep busy; but I’m calm, so calm that I don’t wish to read serious books or listen to grand, sweeping music. All I want to do is sit here and watch the trickle of autumn light onto the red-golden leaves; I want to clean the fireplace; I want to lie down and sleep, exhausted by all these puzzling, insubstantial, ridiculous, fleeting thoughts. Yes, when I feel afraid I want to go to sleep – the soul’s refuge from panic.
But what about him? When Jean dances, his body is a clothes stand with a shirt, trousers and a jacket hanging from it.
I stood up, he followed me, I slapped him.
A burning in my hand, a fire as though I’d reached into the embers.
‘Hey!’ he said. ‘What’s that for?’
I slapped him again; I had hot coals in my fingers now.
‘Stop thinking! Feel!’ I screamed at him.
I went over to the record player and put the ‘Libertango’ on for us. Accordion playing like the lashing of a whip, like blows from a riding crop or the crackling of branches in the fire. Piazzolla, driving the violins up into the heights.
‘No, I—’
‘Yes. Dance with me. Dance the way you feel! How do you feel?’
‘I’m furious! You hit me, Manon!’
‘Then dance furiously! Find the instrument in the piece that reflects your emotions and follow it! Grab me with the fury you feel for me!’
No sooner had I spoken these words than he seized me and pushed me up against the wall with both arms above my head, his grip firm, very firm. The violins wailed. We danced naked; he had chosen the violin as the instrument of his emotions. His rage turned to desire, then to tenderness, and when I bit and scratched him, resisted his lead and refused to take his hand – my lover became a tanguero. He returned to his body.
While I leaned against him, heart to heart, and he was making me feel what he felt for me, I saw our shadows dancing across the wall, across the walls of the Lavender Room. They were dancing in the window frame, they were dancing as one, and Castor the tomcat observed us and our shadows from the top of the wardrobe.
From that evening on we always danced tango – naked at first because it made the swaying and the coaxing and the holding easier. We danced, our hands on our own hearts. And then at some point we switched and laid our hand on the other’s heart.
Tango is a truth drug. It lays bare your problems and your complexes, but also the strengths you hide from others so as not to vex them. It shows what a couple can be for each other, how they can listen to each other. People who only want to listen to themselves will hate tango.
Jean couldn’t help feeling rather than escaping into abstract thoughts about dancing. He felt me: the fine hairs between my legs, my breasts. Never in all my life has my body felt so feminine as during those hours when Jean and I danced and then made love on the divan, on the floor, sitting on the chair, everywhere. He said, ‘You are the source from which I flow when you are here, and I run dry when you leave.’
From then on we danced our way through the tango bars of Paris. Jean learned to transmit the energy from his body to mine and to show me which tango he wanted from me – and we learned the Spanish spoken in Argentina. Or at least the quiet poems and verses that a tanguero whispers to his tanguera to get her ready for … tango. The delicious, inexplicable games we began to play: we learned to address each other formally in the bedroom – and this polite address sometimes allowed us to request some very rude things.