(no subject)
It was evening, when the bar housed the souls of the miserable and the lonely, the bodies of the men who had not the life nor the vigor required in a tango hall. A phonograph played an endless review of Carlos Gardel. In the months after his death the repetition would worsen, but the night went on with the promise of other tango singers, if the bartender felt like changing the records. Eva didn’t mind. She, like the rest of the youth in Buenos Aires, was wild about tango and Carlos Gardel. What she hated was being restrained to the role of a maid, cleaning when she could have been dancing.
Eva found it hard not to dance at work, even if all the bartender played were the most dour of tango songs. Closing her eyes, she would open them realizing she had been swaying, humming, dancing with the broom. She was doing it now, entranced by the music, so gone she didn’t notice when one of the men put his arm on her waist. She only noticed it when he spun her around to face him. Her eyes widened with shock. Her breath stopped in her throat. The man leaned forward and whispered into her ear, “If you dance with me, senorita, I will pay. I cannot pay much, but I will pay.”
There was nothing illicit in his request. His grip was tight from need. He was lonely and desperate for contact, but not the contact he could find on the streets. He wanted to dance. He wanted to touch happiness even if he would never be happy. Eva exhaled and looked at the bartender. He shrugged. Eva looked back to the man, ready to say no, but his eyes-the silent, steady pleading in his eyes, full of fire and despair-moved her. She placed the broom aside.
This was to become a habit long after she was fired from the bar: to sit amongst the lonely and the unhappy and wait to be asked for a dance. She made some money from it, more than she did with her fledging acting career. She would do it until she was seventeen , when her “fledging” acting career started to become a steady job.