”La música me dijo”

These were the days when milongueros started to notice me at the milongas 🙂

The night that I got Chiche’s “cabeceo” is unforgettable to me. I remember that driving back home I shouted in the car: Yeah!! I’ve danced with Chiche!! What a great night!!

Since that night, we danced everytime we met at the milongas. Over the years, “Chiche” chose me as his partner.

One night, at “El Beso”, after dancing a tanda of milonga, Chiche came to my table with a man. Chiche said to me: “Moni, este gringo me habla pero no le entiendo” (Moni, this “gringo” talks to me but I don’t understand him).

The man was from the US, he had loved our dance and wanted to take lessons with Chiche. When I translated that for Chiche, he said, okay, you organize it, but tell him that only I can teach him with you, not alone. He didn’t want to dance as a follower.

The student agreed. I rented a studio and the three of us met there the day of the class on time.

It wasn’t my class, so I asked Chiche: “Chiche, how are you going to teach him?”

Chiche: It is easy, we will dance and when he sees something that he likes, I will show him.

I said, okay. So we started to dance. The student said, “stop!, please teach me what you have just done!” I translated that to Chiche. He looked at me and said: “No tengo idea de lo que hice. Hice lo que la música me dijo que hiciera” (I have no idea what I did. I did what the music told me to do)

Can you imagine the situation? I couldn’t translate that to the student! I thought: what Chiche answered is the BEST reply at the WORST moment! I breathed and I said to the student that we would have to try again, but I knew that we could be the whole class trying without success. So, I immediately decided to focus ALL my attention and sensitivity to get in my body and in my mind what Chiche made me do during the dance.

I was very concentrated on that when the student said: “That! what you just have done! Repeat please”. Sooo, I said to Chiche: look, you led me to do an ocho cortado and then to enter with my right…, Chiche interrupted me and said, “Oh si, ya se!, fue esto?” (Oh yeah, I know, was this?) At the second try, Chiche was doing what the student wanted and he repeated that several times. Finally, everybody was happy, especially me 🙂

I didn’t know, but that class was the beginning of my decode of the milongueros’ dance.

Further on, after interviewing some milongueros and starting being closer with them, during our tandas, I asked some of them to repeat what they just have done because it had been so beautiful, but they always gave me the same reply as Chiche in that class: They didn’t know! Music told them what to do.

Chiche’s knee was really bad, he had a surgery. I remember he used to go to the milonga in pain. He told me that in the mornings he used to go to the farmacy to buy painkillers to be able to dance at night. The worst were the steps at “El Beso”. I helped him go down, that used to be the hardest from him. If you had seen him on the stairs, you couldn’t have believed that he was the same person that had been dancing a few minutes before.

He used to LOVE to dance. I used to LOVE to dance with him. On February 3, 2020 he left the terrenal dances floor. But his teachings through his dance remain on me forever.

¡Gracias Chiche!

The music I’ve selected are three milongas and a vals , the songs that remind me more of Chiche. At the bottom you will find the tanda!

And a couple of dances we had 🙂

Un abrazo,

Monica