The following morning, I meet my friend, the writer Federico Pensado, for café con leche with medialunas (the Argentine answer to the croissant). “You don’t understand,” he tells me. “Nobody goes to a milonga to talk. You go there to chase an intangible myth: the perfect dance partner. To find a girlfriend, a wife—that’s easy. To find a tanguera to exchange the magic, to exchange the emptiness of the night, it’s virtually impossible.”
That said, if the time is right, Argentines don’t need any coaching in the art of the spoken word. That they can’t shut up is in fact part of their abiding allure. It is, I suspect, their effusiveness, their love for melodrama, their “Hand of God,” that has seen them through so many dark days, from the military repression
of the ’70s and early ’80s to today’s monetary meltdown. It’s certainly what seemed to keep one San Telmo antiquarian amused when I asked for his opinion on two restaurants in the area.
“I couldn’t tell you which is better,” he said, palms pressed to the heavens. “All I can tell you is that if today you have the means to eat out, enjoy it. Because tomorrow—who knows—maybe God will take everything away again!”
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