... and Argentinian Tango

One hot summer’s day I stopped in the New York subway hypnotized by what I saw. A middle-aged couple was dancing an Argentinian tango, describing around them an invisible circle in which only the two of them existed, the man and the woman, and a dusty cassette player on the ground beside them. The man and the woman were neither ugly nor beautiful, neither young nor old. They were dressed in black, their clothes were tidy but worn, the man’s black trousers shone with a greasy sheen. They danced seriously, modestly, without emotion, without superfluous movements, with no desire to please. The crowd around them was becoming steadily larger. I wondered what it was that had made the New Yorkers, who trip over musicians, entertainers and beggars of all kinds at every step, what it was that had made the inhabitants of a city which never stops for a second miss their train and stop by the modest Argentinian tango dancers.

The reason for the hypnotic voyeurism of the crowd, and my own, seems to me to have been the truth of the scene. The dancers carried out their dance as though it were the only thing they knew, they laid out their only possession, performing the rhythm as their deepest intimate truth. The Argentinian tango was their identity card, their fingerprint, their name and surname, their selves.

(Dubravka Ugrešić, The Culture of Lies, 1995)