She arrived a few days before the festival had started because that's when the ticket is cheapest. Still, it was very expensive, especially for someone who's self-employed and had just started her business a few months ago, and she can tell you that starting a business is very taxing on the savings account and even more on the mind and emotions. But still, she decided to burn herself out with a lot of dancing.
Why not? Dancing takes energy from the physical body, the shell, and replenishes the soul protected by the shell that is, in the end, driven by that soul.
That was over New Year's Eve, two weeks ago. But now she's back on the dance floor, crossing the country to be with those she had danced many times with and new faces she would love to make acquaintances with. She stayed with one of her dance friends, as part of her effort to minimize the cost of this dance experience. She told me that as sort of a compensation she had been executing her culinary skills in his kitchen and dishing out yummy treats for him. She spoke this, as always, with a genuine smile. In fact, even when she's not speaking, she has a smile, latent in her face, ready to be dispensed to anyone who wants to enjoy it. Some people are always pensive, their faces laden with some other thought even when talking to someone else, and if you have some sort of psychic hand you can feel the craggy, rocky surfaces of their souls through their cheeks. But not her. She seems present whenever I see her; perhaps that's one benefit of dancing so much, of opening your heart, or maybe the other way around.
She was sitting there in her dark, silver dress, her face lit with a certain liveliness that escaped words. With anyone else I would have thought something special had happened, but with her I knew that it was simply because she was there, being there was special enough. I made myself known, me, one of her tango friends, and she gave me a strong embrace straight from her heart. I was a little nervous, as always in a tango setting, in a milonga. I was going to ask her to dance, and although she had always been generous with her acceptances, I was never without some noticeable degree of anxiety. Her smile was unmistakably sincere. There is something to be said about being with someone who offers sincere smiles; it puts your unnecessary guards down, it inspires you to be sincere, to be true to yourself as well as to others. Her eyes aren't terribly large, but when she smiles, even though they get a little smaller, they sparkle with an exuberance your fears can't help but succumb to. And she spoke, with her Montreal accent, with a frank and caring attitude. She isn't repeating some lines that you do when you meet someone or bump into someone to make conversation, to break ice. She doesn't seem to need that. And she didn't at that moment after she rose up to give me that disarming embrace.
I, on the other hand, didn't know what to do. There's always a part of me that wants to get to know her more, but when I am at a milonga, I have only one goal, which is dancing. I allow myself to believe that it's a legitimate goal. Nevertheless, this goal always makes me nervous; perhaps because tango makes me nervous, reminds me constantly that I am being tested, evaluated, and to some extent it's a performance for the woman rather than a partnership. It's complete folly, of course, especially with someone who appears far from being judgmental, and whose goal there was simply to have a good time.
Which is how she danced with me. It was second nature to her to show me how much she was enjoying herself, how attentive she was with the music and with me. And my armor quickly unbuckled and left me, and with that I felt my heart opening up. I felt I wanted to have her with me for each heartbeat of the time that we would be dancing. Her face, her Aguilar nose, her thin lips, her prominent cheeks, her smiling eyes, all touching the right side of my face. My face could feel her smile, the aura around my thoughtful head fused with her aura around her carefree presence. And her torso around which I wrap my right arm felt at times fused with mine, that in those moments we were just one and one moving along the music. I could feel the strands of her hair tickling, almost, my right ear, my right temple. And when we pause between songs and chitchat, she never seemed tired, or absent-minded.
Where did she get all this energy, not only to dance but to be present? Is it really the dance? I couldn't figure out. But for sure after we were finally done and I thanked her profusely, I was left feeling happy, optimistic, as if I were infected.
