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Tango
Ferenc Bakos
For days – even in the company of our noisy vacuum cleaner or while
cracking nuts – an old honeyed melody keeps haunting me from the past. I simply
cannot get it out of my head and have to sing it aloud:
Desire trembles on the rhythm of the song
Oh carnival, oh carnival!
What is the story behind this uninvited guest? I must find out drifting
back in time and seeing myself nearly fifty years ago . . . I was a boy in the
awkward age then and at the carnival ball I managed to get the “slow dance”
with my schoolmistress. In fact, we hated each other with a passion at the
time: once I dropped my eraser at her feet so that I could check her undies.
She turned purple with anger and hissed: “You monkey-cheek!” Now, at the ball,
I was holding her tight and probably crooned into one of her shapely little,
fragrant ears:
So are hatched many odd romances
In Mexico in the middle of the night…
She blushed. “You dance tango very maturely, monkey-cheek!” She smiled
and embraced me warmly.
…But by the rising light of dawn
The hope glides away – and the love…
Many years later I happened to participate in an impromptu dance lesson:
a hundred men
back away from a hundred women
in tango steps
(the prose is translated from Hungarian by Kati Beetles)
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