The Prettiest Milonga in Málaga...and an unexpected encounter

My last evening in Málaga

Milonga "El Jardín" by the Cathedral in Málaga

Before heading to Málaga I checked online for milongas, and threw a pair of tango shoes into my bag just in case, since I saw that there was a regular one on Thursdays. I almost didn't go out Thursday evening, since I was tired, and very tempted to just stay in and watch TV. A desire to eat dinner propelled me out, but I decided (after further reading online) that I would just bring along my tango shoes as a backup, but would not change my clothes into the dress I had brought and the alternate shoes instead of my sneakers. So I wandered back to Málaga's Cathedral, and its pedestrianized city center....which is completely dead at 10:00. Seriously, it's weird, even the restaurants looked more like restaurants at 10:00 PM in other countries....open, but with people finishing dinner, and few people arriving. I've noticed generally that out of season things tend to close early in Málaga (the Alcazaba and the Roman Amphitheater at 6:00 – which is ridiculous since it's light until 7:00 and a bit after now), and the side effect of being so completely set up for tourists is that the hours are very un-Spanish. (Mind you, the Cien Montaditos in the food court at the railway station outside of the tourist center was packed and jumping at 10:15 on Wednesday when I managed to squeeze in and find a seat, and the food court in the station is open until 1:00 AM though there aren't trains after midnight, but that's different.)

Anyway, I wandered through the beautifully lit but eerily still pedestrian zone, wondering if I was making a mistake, and if I would find the restaurant where the milonga was supposed to be dark and silent, as has often happened when I've searched for milongas in the past.

Picture tango music spilling out the open door...

Imagine my surprise and happiness when I came around the side of the silent Cathedral gardens and found the Restaurante El Jardín exactly where it had been advertised, with music spilling out into the street, and couples dancing clearly visible through the French doors that in the summer are doubtless open to tables on the sidewalk. I headed in without another qualm, and was overjoyed to see a bar with tapas, which was (at that moment) exactly what I was looking for. A waiter immediately asked me ¿qué te pongo, guapa? and I cheerfully settled for a media ración of meatballs, which came with sauteed vegetables including stringbeans and eggplant. And it was good.

There were people sitting at the tables around the (smallish) dance floor, and I didn't want to disturb them with food, so I sat at the bar. As my first priority was eating, I just took off my coat and draped it over the stool, and then changed my shoes and left my sneakers underneath the stool. I ate my lovely and substantial dinner, and was halfway through my drink and watching the dance floor when a new tanda came on and I received a cabeceo from an older gentleman in a black t-shirt whose name was Antonio and who is a malagueño, as I later found out. (For non-dancing blog readers: Cabecear – to nod – is a way of wordlessly inviting someone to dance at a milonga. You make eye contact with someone, and smile, and then the inviter nods at the invited and then tilts his head toward the dance floor and looks questioning. Then the invited nods to accept the invitation. After that the partners approach each other and the dance floor. It's a very convenient way of asking someone to dance in international situations, because no words are necessary so there's no language angst.) 

The bar, tables, and a bit of the dance floor at El Jardín

Naturally I wasn't going to turn down the opportunity to dance (at a strange milonga you should never turn down your first invitation), so I left my coat and shoes where they were and danced a lovely set of tangos with Antonio, and chatted a bit. When I headed back to my tonic I found that my place at the bar had been occupied by three people (two men and a woman) who were speaking what sounded to me like German, and were drinking (beers for the men, and what looked like an amontillado for the woman). The woman was sitting on my stool on top of my coat.

After sliding an arm sideways to retrieve my tonic (I got warm dancing and I was thirsty), I stood and looked hopelessly at my coat for a while. Finally, given the language they were speaking, I decided that Spanish would be useless at worst and pretentious at best, so I asked politely in English if I could retrieve my things. They apologized immediately, of course, and I got my stuff, and put it in the pile where the other coats and shoes were.

Unfortunately, on my return for my drink, one of the men, fair and florid faced and wild haired, asked me if I was English. I replied that I was American (no point in lying), and said politely that by ear I guessed he was German. He replied with considerable offense that he was NOT German but rather Danish (it sounded like German to me, I don't care what he said, and while I don't often hear Danish I can tell German from Dutch, so I'm suspicious) and then went on to explain that Danes disliked Germans and why. (Having said that I was American I was accustomed to being taken for an idiot, so I let him explain that Denmark was invaded during the Second World War.) Then he asked me where I was from in the states. This is usually a safe question, so I said New York, and he said “New York. That is where your president is from.”

“Unfortunately,” I said.

“I like him,” he replied. “I think his tax plan is very good.”

It was probably fortunate that my drink was on the bar at that point, because if it had been in my hand it would have shattered on the floor.

With the solicitude of the slightly drunk (or possibly the very drunk – I can never tell with Scandinavians, as they have hollow legs when it comes to alcohol), he proceeded to explain to me that perhaps Donald Trump should keep away from twitter, but that he was doing very good policy things, and that perhaps most Danes were not as pro-Trump as he was, but that Danes were generally very pro-American, and that “Denmark has gone into all the wars with the US.” (I am aware that the same could be recently said of Spain and the UK, and that this is a source of rage, shame, and anger for large numbers of their population, and has been the end of several politicians' careers. But perhaps the Danes are proud members of the coalition of the willing????) He added that Trump was “not a politician” but that he was doing an “excellent job” with North Korea, and “I don't mind that he likes women.” (I'm not at all sure that Donald Trump does like women – in my experience men who do don't usually have to say so quite so emphatically because...errr, it's already obvious, but I agreed with him that that is certainly the least of Donald Trump's many sins.)

I know that there is a rabidly racist and anti-immigrant far right which is very much on the rise in Denmark, and my few interactions with Danes in the past have involved some jaw-dropping statements about race that are proclaimed with innocent good nature, so I assumed that some of the “good policy” of Donald Trump was just the standard appeal to racism. I didn't challenge him on it, because I'm a coward, and I had come to dance, not to listen to patronizing tirade about how I didn't understand about how Islam is threatening Europe, with a few comments about the Master Race thrown in, which is probably what would have happened. (Danes nowadays are apparently offended by being mistaken for German because they wouldn't want to have any cosmopolitanism or diversity forced on them by their fiendish neighbors.) I did try to engage with his statement that “his economic policy is better than Clinton's” a little bit purely because I was so amused that he was Danish. After all the controversy between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton about the US being more like Denmark! I decided that since I was being treated like a completely ignorant American I would play the ignorance card for all it was worth and said sweetly that we in the US thought of Denmark as having a very strong social welfare state. “Yes, we do,” he said. “Too much! For example, my son is studying economics. At university, the government pays him $900 a month, just to study. In addition to his tuition. And next year he is going to Sydney for a year for his Masters, and that's paid for too!” With confusion that was partly feigned and partly genuine I asked him what the downside was of that. “My taxes are too high!” he replied promptly. I was irresistibly reminded of Jon Stewart's line about taxes “you do realize there's a difference between 'spend' and 'waste' right?” But instead I said seriously that it seemed like at least he was getting very good service in exchange for his taxes, so it wasn't as if they were going into a black hole. “But I could pay for him myself,” he said. “And if I didn't have an intelligent son I would get nothing, and it would be a waste.”

Aside from the general idea that perhaps a highly educated populace is good for the economy as a whole and thus contributes to everyone's quality of life, I was struck by the logic (and I don't know how many beers he had drunk before reaching this conclusion) that his taxes were too high not because he was not receiving services but because he could theoretically not be receiving services. This is rather the equivalent of complaining that a car is unsafe because you survived a crash wearing a seat belt, but that you might have not survived if you hadn't been wearing a seat belt and therefore you are a victim of the manufacturer. How on earth can you argue against a counter factual situation that might happen with the dull texture of reality?

I suggested, trying the be charming and courteous (and not throw my drink in his face) that perhaps receiving the benefit was his prize for being a good parent, and that he could take credit for virtue that way.

“But I could pay for him myself,” he replied. “And how many poor people's children do you think want to go to Sydney to study economics? So it's a waste.”

I spend much of my life being annoyed by American hypocrisy about our class system, and insisting that social class is a huge part of our society, and that social mobility is a mirage. But I must admit that having grown up with what a friend at the Complutense is calling (in the title of the class he is teaching this semester) “American mythologies” I am still sometimes a bit stunned by the casual brutality of the way Europeans treat class. (I suppose this is what shocks them about how Americans speak about race, without polite curtseys toward it not existing or being unimportant.) I didn't really want to delve into this gentleman's unpleasant brain, so I can't say whether he was offended by the idea of the government equitably distributing educational benefits because he thought it was inefficient because he could subsidize his son anyway, or because he suspected that somewhere someone was getting an education that their parents couldn't otherwise pay for, and that the mere thought of “a poor person” sending their son to university offended him. Ostensibly he was arguing the former, but at the same time I suspect he wasn't far from the latter, contradictory as that may seem.

Still shocked by his way of talking about “poor people” who didn't go to university (not that I don't trust him, since in fact I know that some of the interesting research on this indicates that in fact the percentage of first generation college students in the Scandinavian countries that provide completely free higher education and living stipends is actually about the same as in the US, where cost is usually cited as the primary obstacle), I said that perhaps there was less inequality (fewer poor people) in Denmark than in the US, and to explain added that while there were some very rich people in the US there were also very many very poor. “In Denmark no one is very poor,” he said with a smile. And then added. “If they ask for help, they get it. But they shouldn't do that. They should do something for themselves.”

At that point I had missed two tandas in this discussion, and he showed every sign of monopolizing me for the next two hours and making any further dancing impossible, so I took the hint of paying one's own way and excused myself to go and pay for my dinner at the end of the bar. I then sat at the tables by the dance floor, abandoning my drink, until (to my relief) they left. (Blessings on the kind waiter who did not take my drink away assuming I was done with it, but correctly guessed that I was escaping, and left it for me to retrieve when it was safe to do so.) In the meantime, the organizer announced a birthday waltz for a gentleman I had noticed on the dance floor, so I did the unthinkable and presented myself in a line of ladies to dance with him, by means of introduction. I didn't do that well, but at least I got seen by other people, who then asked me to dance, and in fact the birthday gentleman ended up asking me to dance the last tanda when I was about to change my shoes, and we had a blast. He's from Argentina originally but living now in Málaga for fifteen years. (“So we are similar, wandering Americans in Europe,” as he put it when I explained I was from the US but living in Madrid. It was such a relief to talk to someone with normal attitudes toward immigration and emigration, and fluid identity after the European Trumper.) Between the birthday dance and the final tanda I also met a bunch of women who were sitting near me who smiled and welcomed me and said that it was a shame I wasn't staying the weekend because Saturday there's another very nice milonga by the beach, and on Sunday there's one in Torremolinos and a bunch of them are going and there would be space in one of them's car for me since they car pool. Tangueros are such generous people. (Needless to say the heavily drinking Danes did not dance. They had just come to gawk at the dancers, as if it were a “show” that the restaurant put on.)

All in all, it was a strange evening, an exceptionally nice milonga, in a picturesque setting, within easy walking distance of the hotel, excellent dancers, and really nice people (and also fun cortinas – I always appreciate a DJ who varies the genre of the cortinas a bit. For non-dancers: Cortina is the eight or ten bars of a random non-tango song played in between sets to give people a chance to clear the floor and change partner. Playing a cortina is like a Zamboni on an ice-skating rink. Thursday night's were flamenco, and Louis Armstrong's version of “Hello, Dolly” and some more recent pop, among others.) And then there was the Danish Trump fan like a bug in a really delicious salad.

He squeezed in so many cliches that perhaps he was merely playing a joke on a credulous American and really it was all satire, of the sort that seems brilliant to the slightly tipsy. But it strikes me that except for being Danish his profile is exactly that of the Trump fan: a man above middle-age (fifty at the youngest), who is fairly wealthy and enjoys a high standard of living, but seethes with resentment at the idea that someone else who doesn't deserve it might have the same things he has, and with terror that someone might try to take his (deserved) things away. In among his political musings the Dane explained that he lives in Málaga (or rather down the coast) six months a year and only goes home for the summers because he can't stand the winter there, and showed me photos from his lovely beach home of the sunrise over the Mediterranean. So this is a man who lives in a place he freely considers paradise six months a year, has a successful and intelligent son, and a standard of living most of the world would envy. But his taxes are too high because....he could have the same thing without them? Because someone else might be getting them too? There is absolutely nothing in his quality of life to suggest that he is deprived, thus there is no rational way to appeal to “self interest” because his self interest is completely fulfilled. So all that remains is the irrational.

I know that the fashionable narrative is that Trump supporters are poor, rural white men who feel “left behind” and “economically threatened.” I suppose such people exist. But of the two people who I know personally who I suspect of voting for Trump in the US, both actually fit the profile above. They are college-educated white men over fifty, who own nice houses in expensive suburbs, and drive nice cars. They have secure pensions (ironically paid for by the government), stable families, and generous incomes. This doesn't necessarily mean that they are or should be happy (as Lloyd Alexander wisely put it, even in the best realm one cannot forever escape “the pangs of rheumatism or the pangs of a broken heart”), but it does mean that as the world counts success they are at least moderately successful. The rage and the terror that Trump taps into are real (no one likes rheumatism or broken hearts, and rage and terror are the standard responses to our intimations of mortality). But objectively speaking, the people who seem most enraged and most terrified are not those who actually suffering, but rather those who either think that in some circumstance at some point they might suffer (that's the terror), or those who think that someone else is not suffering enough who should be (that's the rage). There is no real dialogue possible with such people, because their perception of themselves as victims (actual or potential) is so far removed from reality that there is no shared common experience to discuss. Windmills will always be hostile giants for them, so there's not much point in talking about renewable energy.

In any case, my apologies to all the doubtless very nice Danes out there, who are probably horrified by this, even if it was satire. But I have to say, after this interaction, I think Denmark is pretty thoroughly discredited as a model for the US. If even with their excellent health and education systems, and their vaunted social cohesion and so on, they can produce people who are so deeply enraged and fearful, then their social democracy is deeply flawed. At least the rage and fear make sense in the US because of the potentially missing safety net. In Denmark, the society itself has to be at fault somehow. (I have little use for religion, but I think the phrase I'm looking for is Corinthians I.13.3 “though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor...and have not charity it profiteth me nothing.” Ironic that this aggressively Protestant part of the world placed a lot of emphasis on faith as opposed to works in their proud Reformation, and yet seems to have done so in vain.)

But aside from all of this, the “Milonga El Jardín” is a lovely, lovely place. And when I emerged after the last tanda, the Cathedral gardens were still silent and glowing in their nighttime illumination, and I took pictures, because they were beautiful. I include them here, because it's hard to not see such beauty and feel calmed down. After all, I am so lucky to be here. What does the odd strange encounter matter?