By Kevin Carrel Footer

Listen:

I tend to drink deeply at a single flower but on Friday night alluring invitations lead me to visit three milongas in a single night. I traipsed joyfully across the summer city, flitting from crowd to crowd, joint to joint. I am long settled here in Buenos Aires but the night reminded me of my first giddy years here and the beauty-filled, sensually-charged promise of this generous city. Everything is available in the night, even poetry. No wonder everyone is coming to visit these days.

At Patio de Tango, I saw a woman in sweat pants sucking on a lollipop as she danced a chacarera with a grace that sprang from the dusty earth itself. At Tango Queer I met old friends ready to play who reminded me why I love that place so much. And at La Discépolo, I observed the wings of a vast butterfly extend across a dancer’s back.

The butterfly dwarfed the dancer. It was as if she were in a process of metamorphosis. The tip of the forewing reached almost to the curve of her shoulders while the hindwing disappeared suggestively beneath the waistband of the pencil skirt that hugged and sculpted every curve beneath it.

Above the skirt, she wore a tube top that revealed as much of the tattoo as decently possible. Her hair was pulled back in that severe, moussed, aerodynamic way that tango goddesses adopt in a tacit promise that the poison-tipped dart will enter the heart painlessly — and can be safely yanked out without damage to the surrounding anatomical structures.

The remarkable thing about the tattoo, beyond its size, was that it remained unfinished. The outline of the wings and some of the inner boundaries were marked in a brownish ink and patches of yellow had been added on the way to what one imagined would become a monumental lepidopteran piece of art. But for now, it resembled only an artist’s sketch projected over a woman’s back. Yet, having begun, she was now in no position to change her mind. Onward butterfly! For a butterfly forever in the making might say more than the bearer bargained for.

The butterfly moved expressionless across the dance floor in her partners’ arms. Like her, it was mostly a young crowd at La Discépolo. Her face showed no emotion. Leaning into some open arms, between songs or seated, she betrayed neither joy nor expectation nor invitation, as if the incipient butterfly were her spokes-insect.

That butterfly, I confess, left me a bit sad. It’s excessive size, overwhelming the slight woman below, replacing her, suggested a desire to take refuge under those wings, to disappear under their multi-colored scales. And the frustration! No matter how large those wings, she would never flit away but always remain an earth-bound human with our charm and our tragedy laid in equal measures upon us.

One day I hope the butterfly won’t need her painted wings to fly.