I’ve been delirious about the music of Astor Piazzolla since I first heard it in the mid-1970s, a combination of tango, jazz, symphony, and chamber music. I’ve always felt his music tells my story.
Piazzolla was as extraordinary a musician as he was a composer. His principal instrument was the bandoneon, a devil of a device perched on the knee like an accordion but as mighty as an organ. Near the end of his life he said his greatest wish was that his music would continue to be heard in the year 2020. Given that his compositions are now a staple in the repertoire of many musicians from Yo-Yo Ma to Al Di Meola, it seems likely his wish will be granted.
Thanks to Piazzolla I had a longtime dream of running off to Buenos Aires and learning to dance the tango. But when I finally got there and watched the protocol of the tango halls, it took me back to the passive high school sock hops I hated as a teenager. If you were female you had to sit on the sidelines and wait for a man to pick you, and then you had to simper and smile and make him feel great-full. That’s not for me. So I gave up on that dream and just bought the shoes.
Still, I’d love to imagine I can play the bandoneon myself, make it twist and squeal and whine and howl like a fabulous orgasm. It must be wondrous to do that with an instrument, though I’m told the bandoneon takes a lifetime to conquer. Oh well, ni modo, nothing to be done about it in this life.
I think Piazzolla’s music demands you dance alone, preferably under the stars. After I’ve written and there’s no one about to make me feel silly, I like a glass of wine as plush as the menstrual wall, a cigar like the kind my grandfather el coronel smoked, and Piazzolla. This induces me to write poetry for reasons I don’t want to understand.
I delivered the following for a 2005 dinner lecture at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio. It was a story I’d told enough times out loud. But telling a story on paper is a whole other matter. Out loud you can rely on gesture and voice, facial expressions and pauses to help create a picture. When you write a story down you have no props but the words, the punctuation, and the white spaces in between. The white spaces for me are as important as the black print. They’re like the sheet music the musicians follow when they perform a composition. Everything should already be there for the reader to follow.
I met the Argentine tango composer and musician Astor Piazzolla in 1988, on a Sunday, April 24th, at the Great American Music Hall on O’Farrell Street, San Francisco. I’m sure of the date because I have a signed flyer to prove it. I needn’t have bothered. The date is engraved in my corazón. The year before I’d barely survived the thirty-third year of my life, a time when you die and, hopefully, are resurrected.
So 1988 was the year of my resurrection. I remember driving the five hours from Chico, California, where I was a guest professor, convinced Astor Piazzolla, the man who had revolutionized tango, had come to California to meet me. The year of my near death I’d lost my purpose for living. I know it sounds overly dramatic, but that’s the truth. I was tired of the nuisance of staying alive. I couldn’t understand why I was put on the planet if I couldn’t seem to do anything that would earn me my keep. I was weepy and nervous and skittish as a cat. In Texas I’d been without a job for almost a year. A friend teaching at Cal State, Chico, was taking a temporary leave, and he had recommended me for his position.
The last thing I wanted was to teach at a university. I’d never felt at home there. The truth was I didn’t feel smart enough as a student, let alone as a professor. Yet here was a job at a university being offered to me. I was so broke, I was forced to overlook my terror and take it.
I borrowed money from my family for the umpteenth time, dragged my thrift-store furniture in a trailer, and soon discovered what I had feared all along: I was a failure. The lethargy of my freshman composition students compared to the adults I’d taught at community centers convinced me I was no good, I was worthless, I was a dud. At least, that was the way I saw it then.
And if I wasn’t any good at teaching…and if I was thirty-three years old and still borrowing to get by…and so what if I’d written a book that earned me hardly enough to cover a few months’ rent…and I hated being in academia, feeling like I had to know everything when I hardly knew anything…and what if I was discovered for being the fraud I was…and if I had to borrow money from my family one more time, well…I’d lost my will to go on.
But a national writing award arrived in the nick and reminded me why I was put on the planet, and now here I was, and here he was, Astor Piazzolla, one of the greatest musicians and composers of the new tango, the greatest, in my opinion, coming to play. For me!
I’d been introduced to the music of Piazzolla in my mid-twenties by my nemesis, the Zapata of my heart, who inspired several poems and stories and my travels through Europe so that I might become exactly like him, worldly and sophisticated, instead of the naive fraidycat that I was.
Piazzolla’s music, a tempest of notes, came by way of this man, my lover, who in a sense was the same as the music. A yelp caught somewhere between pain and pleasure. A howl filled with longing and despair. The little burn a mouth leaves on the flesh. Intense, tender, comical, ferocious, faithless, and, ultimately—doomed. All of this haunts me when I listen to Piazzolla’s compositions, merging the traditional Buenos Aires tango with New York avant-garde jazz. Piazzolla taught me how to become the artist I wanted to become.
“It’s like this, you fool,” I imagined Piazzolla saying. “Listen.” And the yowl of his bandoneon, a collision of beauty and tragedy bloodied together, became my teacher. I was hungry to serve my apprenticeship.
When I was lost, sad, defeated, frustrated with my writing, with my life, I had only to listen to Piazzolla’s music, and it would shine a light beam into the night, an arrow piercing a target, a guide as pure and steady as the North Star.
This explains my supreme arrogance and naïveté in the darkness of the Great American Music Hall that day in 1988. El maestro emerged onstage all in black, as black as his bandoneon, dignified, divine. Then he began. A music that rose up terrible like a knife held at one’s own heart, weepy, melodramatic, corny, wonderful all at once. Violin, bandoneon, cello, piano like rain. I had to stand up and lean against a pillar, blow my nose with a cocktail napkin. When the lights blinked on for intermission, I took off backstage.
I wasn’t drunk. How to explain the absolute confidence of my mission? I shoved the swinging doors that separated the gods from the rabble and marched right in. Surprisingly, there were no security guards, no bouncers or police. No one. Just a sad, empty corridor too shabby to shelter greatness.
Outside an open doorway I heard voices, and suddenly lost my courage. Then the outrageousness of my actions caught up with me. Astor and his musicians were probably exhausted and taking a well-deserved break. I was at a loss for what to do next.
Luckily somebody appeared to solve the problem, a young guy with the same idea of meeting his idol as me, but with more bravado. We started jabbering, loud enough so that eventually Piazzolla popped out to see why we were there.
The fan knew exactly what he wanted; he asked for an autograph and handed Piazzolla a cheap yellow flyer announcing the evening’s event. What else could I do, but get ready to do the same. But what would I say to him?
First I had to tell him. I had to tell him what I’d been holding in my heart all these years. I wanted to say, Astor, your music has buoyed me through so many disappointments, through the exploding cigars of love, through near deaths, through my own death and resurrection. I traveled to find myself when I listened to your music. It was your music I listened to for courage when I first arrived on the Greek islands in the Aegean, and on the boat that pulled me away from Greece where I finally finished my first novel, and on the cold nights in Paris, when I didn’t have any money and was sleeping on the floor of the Argentines. Astor, you don’t know. It’s been so hard to invent myself and become the writer I’ve wanted to become. I had to run away from home. I had to buy a one-way ticket to Athens because I’d never been anywhere alone before even though I was almost thirty. And when I was washing my socks in the sink on a cold winter morning in Chicago or in Tuscany, in the pre-Alps of southern France, or in South Texas, riding across town on a bicycle, or driving across country, Astor, you taught me with your music the kind of passion I wanted to reach in my work. I’m aware, Astor, you struggled to find your own voice, how your teacher Nadia Boulanger advised you to take up the instrument you had abandoned because you were embarrassed by the bandoneon. She was reminding you to remember who you are, and making you feel less ashamed and praising you for being no one but you, and sent you back to that despised part of yourself, because it was you you had abandoned, and in that monster of a box you’d been able to leap from the sentimental to sentiment, which is a fine line, and how the traditionalists wanted to murder you for what you did to their tango, and how it had been so hard for me to become a writer, but your music, Astor, your music had shown me, when I was cold and afraid, to be fearless. You made the tango yours, Astor, and it became mine the years of my twenties, and now in my early thirties, having just barely escaped the maw of death, that terror was in your music, Astor, everything was in your music, the nemesis I loved who abandoned me, and how from that open wound, I had transformed the yelp into a howl, and that howl was my work, inspired by you, Astor, do you understand?
All this I thought while the guy in front of me was getting his flyer signed. And now it was my turn, and Astor Piazzolla in his black trousers with their sharp creases, in his silky black shirt and polished black boots, Astor with only his hands and face illuminating the moment, was reaching out and taking my flyer from my hand. I stood there with my mouth open a little.
Now as he signed I needed to tell him. It was my chance, yes. I could say it now. I could tell him. Now!
“Señor Piazzolla,” I said breathlessly. “Your work. Is. My life!”
He nodded, passed my flyer on down the line to his fellow musicians to sign, and then…
My moment was gone.
I clenched that autographed flyer in one fist and wobbled back to my seat feeling foolish and weepy. Your work is my life! What was I thinking?
Then I put my head down to write. “Thing in my shoe, / dandelion, thorn, thumbprint, / one grain of grief that has me undone once more, / oh my father, heartily sorry I am for this right-side of the brain / who has alarmed and maimed and laid me many a day now invalid low.” And when I raised my head, I had a new book of poetry. Just as if I’d gone through childbirth, my body changed, startling me with flesh where I’d once had bone. I put my head down again, and again when I raised it, another book, and again my body altered, so that I was no longer myself, but a woman staring at a woman from the other side of water. Books and more books, and more changes to the house one calls the self.
Young people get in line to meet the author and have their book autographed. I am the author they’ve come to meet. Some of them barely able to talk, their eyes like ships lost at sea.
“You don’t know what this means to me,” they say, fumbling with the page they want me to sign. “You just. You just don’t know.”