Learning to Tango

1.

All I wanted was a haircut.

It was a sweaty day in Buenos Aires, and I thought a haircut would be refreshing. The problem wasn't finding a barber shop, but selecting one, the city's economy being largely based upon the repair of nails, skin, and hair. I wandered down a sun-blinded street in the Belgrano district assessing the hairdressers on offer.

I settled on a relatively modern-looking establishment, modernity being a good thing in the realm of personal hygiene. It was one of those places with shiny equipment and, I imagined, highly trained hair care professionals. My hopes were dashed when I opened the door to find exactly no customers and a lone, mustachioed barber who seemed to be lacking that indefinable something that makes the rest of us human.

As I made some introductory chit chat (one doesn't rush into things in Argentina), the mustachioed man jerked his head up from his magazine and asked where I was from.

"An American!" he exclaimed. After six months in the country, I knew exactly what would come next: "An American in Argentina! How loco! What are you doing here?"

"Working," I said, and then a little defensively: "I like it here."

"Argentina!" the barber scoffed as I lowered myself into the chair. "Me, I'm from Uruguay."

I froze. For some reason, I always had terrible luck in Uruguay, that tiny, obscure, seemingly harmless republic across the river from Buenos Aires. Uruguayan customs officials hassled me when I went there to renew my visa, and then their merchants ripped me off. I once got food poisoning in a restaurant there. And now, I convinced myself, I was facing the Uruguayan Sweeney Todd.

"Everything okay?" said the barber.

"Hmmm? Oh yeah, fine." I settled into the chair. Pull yourself together, I thought, it's only a haircut.

Soon the barber was talking, mainly to remind me of my role as The Guy Who Listens to Other People's Life Stories. As stories go, the barber's was rather melancholy. He had come to Buenos Aires in search of the fame and fortune which had, quite evidently, continued to elude him.

Years ago, a relative had offered the barber a job in Miami, but for some complicated reason beyond my powers of Spanish comprehension, he had turned it down. The upshot was that he missed Uruguay, resented Argentina, and constantly dreamed of the life he could have had in the US. Yes, his life had all the elements of a good tango: failure, longing, and nostalgia. All this, by the way, I learned in the first five minutes.

"Tell me about life in the US," he implored.

I told him a little about my life, about growing up in Chicago, and working in New York. At first, the barber remained bent over my head, giving the occasional nod of the polite listener. Then, he started asking me questions – nothing personal, mind you ("how much money do you make?"). Eventually, he was carrying on a full-fledged conversation with my reflection in the mirror and not even bothering to look at my hair which, incidentally, he was still cutting. That was when I felt a sharp pain in my left ear.

"Uh-oh!" said the barber.

I looked at my reflection with a strange sense of disinterest. In the mirror, the panicked barber was dabbing a tissue to the tip of my ear which was, as it were, oozing life. "Paula!" he called to his assistant. "Bring some cotton!"

In my lap, there was a bit of ear – tiny, but I had been quite attached to it. I jumped up in shock and the piece of skin fell to the floor, lost forever in a tangle of hair. "I'm so sorry," said the hairdresser. "This has never, ever happened to me before. Paula! Bring the cotton!"

In time, he managed to stanch the flow of blood. As I was walking out, holding a piece of cotton to my ear, the barber called after me, "No charge for the haircut! See you next time!"

I took myself to the only private clinic I knew in Buenos Aires. An earnest young doctor with wavy, movie-star hair attended to me. After some preliminary words ("An American in Argentina! How loco! What are you doing here?"), he declared that the cut was nothing serious. "The skin will grow back. But it's important that you get a tetanus booster right away." He paused. "How did it happen?"

I told him.

"Seriously? What a son of a bitch!" The doctor stood there displaying a popular brand of imported Italian hand gesture. Then he summoned one of his colleagues. "Look at this guy's ear – a barber did that."

"What a son of a bitch!" said the second doctor, also gesturing. An orderly stopped by to have a look and I was beginning to wonder whether I'd get my injection before or after lockjaw set in. But then the first doctor instructed a nurse to prepare me for an injection. When I told the nurse what happened, she summoned another nurse. "Hey, look at what a barber did!"

The second nurse looked. "A barber did that?"

"Can you believe it?" said the first doctor.

"Que barbaridad!" said the second nurse – "what barbarity!"

"Barber-ity?" I ventured, but nobody laughed. I could never quite accept the fact that English puns didn't work in Argentina.

"It's typical," said the first nurse.

"No it's not," said the second doctor, "I've never seen anything like it."

"Me neither," said the first doctor.

"I did, once," said the orderly.

The group erupted into a flurry of hand gestures and raised voices as they discussed the problems of barbers, ears, manners, and foreigners. Each of them wanted to apologize to me, on behalf of all Argentines. And then they began to compete to see who could deliver the most stinging criticism of Argentina. Finally, one of them said, "what a shit country this is!"

"Actually," I said, "the barber was from Uruguay."

"Yeah? Well that's a shit country, too."

* * *

At times like that, I had to remind myself that moving to Argentina had been the answer to a prayer.

For many years I had wanted to try living in Latin America. The desire began in the summer of my sophomore year of college when my roommate, Humberto, invited me to visit his family in Mexico. I was thrilled; not because I knew the slightest thing about Mexico, but because college students are forever looking for something interesting to do with their summers. I didn't expect a life-changing experience, just something that might look good on a graduate school application.

And so, on a dusty June day in 1985, I arrived at the airport in Monterrey, Mexico with a suitcase and some dimly remembered high school Spanish. Humberto picked me up.

Little did I know that I was about to start a life-long love affair with Latino culture. The infatuation was not a gradual thing, it possessed me that very first day in Mexico. Arriving at Humberto's family's place, a ranch house built around a plant-filled courtyard, was a little like stepping into a Fellini film. Humberto's mother – middle aged, voluptuous, glamorous – was talking to her husband on the phone while simultaneously giving orders to a maid, cook, and gardener. When she saw us, she dropped the phone, jumped up, and gave me a big hug.

"Adam, how wonderful to meet you!" she said, or words to that effect, in Spanish. "Come and have lunch!"

She led us to the dining room, where the maid began to set down salads, cheeses, mounds of fresh avocado, and a pitcher of – this was new to me – mango juice. Humberto's mother spoke in long, un-interruptable paragraphs: "I'm afraid nothing's ready – the new maid is very slow. Maria Elena! Bring us more tortillas! How was your flight? How do you like Mexico? What do you want to do? Humberto, you should show Adam the Plaza. Oh, and the casino, too! Maria Elena! More tortillas! But you must be exhausted. Would you like a shower? Do you want salt with that? Maria Elena!!!"

My eyes wandered. Amongst the blue-and-white Spanish tile of the kitchen, the cook chopped and grilled. The maid and gardener scurried about among reproduction Aztec pieces and Diego Rivera prints. The tortillas finally arrived, together with mounds of shredded chicken, more avocado, and wedges of lime. Humberto and his mother showed me how to put together my own soft-shell tacos. The conversation evolved into a kind of Spanglish so that the three of us could communicate.

Everything came together perfectly in a lunch that stretched lazily through that first afternoon. It was agreed that there was much for me to see and do in Mexico; and it was agreed that it could all wait.

I don't think a single afternoon of my life has ever left such an indelible impression on me. The sunlight pouring into the patio, the sense of leisurely haste, the staccato cascade of Spanish syllables, the enthusiasm – the joyful chaos of Latin America hit me all of a piece. I was hooked.

Alas, I was only a college lad. At the end of the summer, I had to go back and finish up college. After that, my life followed a fairly conventional path. I became a lawyer and ended up working for a big firm in Manhattan.  But Latin America never left me. Whenever possible I took vacations there: Costa Rica, Peru, Venezuela and, of course, Mexico. Given my lawyer's schedule, I could never spend more than a week or two abroad; the trips only made me hungry for more. Meanwhile, my Spanish reverted to junior high levels.

* * *

One day, while I was sitting in my office in mid-town Manhattan, minding my own business, a colleague told me about a lawyer in Buenos Aires who was looking for an American attorney. The Argentine lawyer was handling a big international arbitration and he needed a US lawyer to spend a year in Buenos Aires.

Before my colleague had finished speaking I was already fishing through my desk for my resume.  I had never been to Buenos Aires, but it was reputed to be the most beautiful city in South America. A year in Buenos Aires! That would give me what I had been looking for since that long-ago visit to Mexico: the chance to know some corner of Latin America intimately; to know its rhythms and its passions. Naturally – I explained to my parents – it would also be a great career move, putting me on the cutting edge of international law.

But who was I kidding? My real motivation was simple: I wanted to chuck the life of a New York lawyer. Like so many of my contemporaries, I had stumbled into my profession with the vaguely reassuring thought that a law degree would "open up doors." After six years of drafting motions and affidavits, of hovering nervously in partners' offices, and measuring my time in six-minute increments, I finally realized that those doors were not going to open by themselves. It was time for me to figure out what I wanted to do with my life.

Would a change of place do the trick? I couldn't say, but one thing was for sure. If ever there was a place to transform one's life, Argentina would be that place. I had a long-standing fascination for Argentina as a country that somehow inspires people to remake themselves. Eva Duarte had started life as an illegitimate peasant girl and made herself into Saint Evita. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid arrived as fugitives and became respectable Patagonian farmers (before turning back to crime – some things never change). At the turn of the century, thousands of East European Jews came to Argentina, ascending from serfs to wealthy landowners in one generation. A few years later, the Nazis came, in search of their own, more discreet, make-overs.

Argentina was where you went to start over again. And that's what I wanted to do, even though I wasn't sure what I was going to do once I started over. The thought of resetting the odometer of my life back to some earlier stage promised to bring happiness. Of course, "happiness," as my father used to warn my siblings and me, "is a fool's paradise." Perhaps. Then let's just say that I wanted to have an adventure. 

And – to be fair – this didn't even seem like adventure with a capital "A." It's not as though I was proposing to go kayaking around the world, or star in a "reality" TV show, or something really crazy like that. I would still be practicing law, right?  Just 5,200 miles from home.  And in a city I'd never seen. On second thought, maybe it would be an adventure, but all the more reason to do it while I was still young and unattached. It would be my last tango, so to speak.

Not that one makes such a move lightly. Change is tough under any circumstance, and I had reasons to stay put. I had a job that paid well, parents, siblings, and a tight group of friends, all in the US. I even possessed that Holy Grail of New York real estate, a spacious below-market apartment on the Upper East Side. Had I sufficient time, I would probably have talked myself out of moving to Argentina, given my head a small, bemused shake, and buried my head in a good novel.

Fortunately, I did not even have that much time. The firm in Buenos Aires needed somebody immediately, so I had to decide. What would you have done? Argentina beckoned me like a train chugging out of the station. I jumped on.