My Tango With Barbara Strozzi

  To Dr Michael D. Feher

  ‘So there was the problem set for the sawyers – in a curved tree (butt or top it didn’t matter) to find that one aspect of it which was not curved – that one direction in which it could be sawn into two practically equal and similar halves from end to end.’

  The Wheelwright’s Shop – George Sturt

  Contents

  1 Phil Ockerman

  2 Bertha/Barbara Strunk

  3 Phil Ockerman

  4 Bertha Strunk

  5 Phil Ockerman

  6 Barbara Strunk

  7 Phil Ockerman

  8 Barbara Strunk

  9 Phil Ockerman

  10 Barbara Strunk

  11 Phil Ockerman

  12 Bertha Strunk

  13 Phil Ockerman

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  1

  Phil Ockerman

  When she told me that her name was Bertha Strunk I said, ‘Is Bertha’s trunk anything like Pandora’s box?’

  ‘That isn’t something you can find out in five minutes,’ she said. This was at the Saturday evening tango class for beginners in the crypt of St James’s Church, Clerkenwell.

  Why the tango? Are you sitting comfortably? It began with Mimi, my ex-wife, coming round with some things that I’d left at the house. ‘Your latest effort got terrible reviews,’ she said by way of greeting.

  ‘The Irish Times and the Jewish Chronicle liked it,’ I countered.

  ‘I think you may be running out of ideas,’ she said.

  I backed away from her and made a cross with my fingers. ‘Don’t say that!’

  ‘It happens,’ she continued. ‘Hope of a Tree does not develop organically from its original impulse; it’s a put-together thing trying to pass itself off as a novel. I have to go now. See you.’

  ‘Please,’ I said, ‘be a stranger.’

  When she left I had an awful dropped feeling in the pit of my stomach because I knew she was right. Altogether it was a delicate time for me; even before her visit I’d been uneasy about Pluto coming over my Sagittarian ascendant. ‘This a major mega astrological event,’ says Catriona, my astrologer. ‘Your quest for a new theme could take a long time, with retrogradation and the slow moving of the outer planet. Euphemisms such as transformations, deaths and resurrections of the spirit and cleansing with reference to depth psychology are often used in connection with this; also crisis, power struggles etc. Definitely a time for the shedding of habits, feelings, emotions or whatever which have lost their vitality or relevance.’ Thanks very much, Catriona. Most of my habits, feelings, emotions or whatever, probably all of them, have lost their vitality or relevance. ‘Your Pluto is in house (8th) area which is its own, death, loss of individual etc.,’ she goes on but I didn’t.

  I couldn’t face the word machine and it was too early in the day to get drunk, so I went to the Royal Academy to look at the Face the Music exhibition: portraits of composers from all places and periods. Looking at various faces of those long dead I wondered how they’d feel about what’s happened to some of their music. Here’s Mozart, apparently without a care in the world. His Piano Concerto 21 was taken over by the film Elvira Madigan, the story of two doomed (by their own idiocy) young lovers, and will forever be associated with them by people ignorant even of the composer’s name. The slow movement must by now be his most widely recognised composition. I’d recently acquired the DVD of the film and I sat patiently through it. Unmoved. Films go out of date like bacon on the supermarket shelf. I doubt very much that Elvira Madigan would win prizes if released this year even though Pia Degermark has (as film critic Roger Ebert has noted) beautiful calves.

  Tchaikovsky now, magisterially bearded but looking doubtful – whatever his sins he didn’t deserve what Ken Russell did to him with The Music Lovers. Did Russell hate the composer or what? Not that the film has much to do with Tchaikovsky, von Meck and the other famous names under which the actors perform as directed. The film is some kind of a lunatic thing with a life of its own that has little to do with any reality, not even Ken Russell’s, whatever that may be. Pyotr Ilyich has suffered other indignities as well: some years ago his Romeo and Juliet Overture was mawkished into ‘Our Love’ and ‘The Story of a Starry Night’ and sung by various and sundry.

  Vivaldi! He looks frail but he very aggressively put me on hold and kept me there while I trudged through as much of Le Quatro Stagioni as I could remember. Vivaldi, at a switchboard near you for how many more seasons?

  So many names, so many faces, so much music! But wait, who’s this? What does the card say? Barbara Strozzi, the seventeenth-century Venetian singer and composer who was known as La Virtuosissima Cantatrice. What a woman!

  Not a beauty but she had a slightly sluttish look that was irresistible. Her eyes, so languorous, so not caring, so haunting after three centuries and more! She leans back in her chair, her blouse well off her shoulders, her bodice lowered to expose her breasts, her left hand grasping the neck of a viola da gamba. Barbara Strozzi! Dead for so many years but she reached out of the frame and clasped me to her opulent bosom and opened her mouth to my tongue. OK, it was all in my mind but so is everything else. Perhaps I fainted, I don’t know. I didn’t fall down but it was a Road-to-Damascus kind of thing. A girl of twelve or thirteen and her mother approached as I stood there. ‘That man has an erection,’ said the girl.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said the mother as they moved on. ‘It’s probably his iPod.’

  I didn’t want to see any more pictures so I left. When I got home I dug around in my CD stacks until I found my Barbara Strozzi discs. The tracks were mostly lamentate, lamentations. I played some of them but they didn’t give me the Strozzi I’d seen in the portrait; they all had a downward spiral of sadness. OK, life is sad but the look in Barbara Strozzi’s eyes had a whole lot more than sadness in it. I wanted other music for her. What kind of music?

  When I think of Venice I think of Francesco Guardi. There is a page of his macchiete in The Glory of Venice catalogue from the Royal Academy. These quick sketches done in brown ink, almost calligraphy, show gaggles of men and women like brown leaves hurried on by the winds of time. Guardi’s gondoliers, workmen and pedestrians in the oil paintings such as The Giudecca with the Zitelle are also full of movement, but of a stagey sort, as if they might be in an opera. It is particularly evident in pictures where chiaroscuro is exaggerated that Guardi is a precursor of Daumier: he paints gestures and peoples them, all of his figures moving through time. The buildings too, though solid and full of detail, are in motion through time. Sometimes this motion is slowed down, as in the wonderful Capriccio with an Arch in Ruin. Here Guardi’s imagination is measured and reflective: even the dogs pause for thought and the boatmen are in no hurry. Although Barbara Strozzi was painted by Bernardo Strozzi (whose illegitimate daughter she probably was) there was something of a Guardi capriccio in the look she turned upon me through the transparent centuries. There was music in that look – not her own lamentate but something more coarse and sexual and a rhythm of controlled passion. I don’t know the dances of Guardi’s time and Strozzi’s, but for me the music and the dance became tango.

  I looked at her portrait in the catalogue again and words came to me, from where I couldn’t remember: ‘I faced up to life and … what?’ My hand went to the CD stacks and came up with Tita Merello, Arrabalera. The little brochure quoted her as saying, ‘I faced up to life and it left its mark on me.’ It sounds better in Spanish: ‘Le di la cara a la vida y me la dejo marcada.’ I put the disc in the player and went to track 12, ‘El Choclo’. Her voice! It wound itself around me like the tanguera that she was, like her body t
ouching mine and leaning away, her leg gripping my waist and releasing in the skirmishing of the dance. Barbara Merello, Tita Strozzi!

  So there it was: it was time for me to learn the tango if I wanted to follow the Barbara Strozzi thing wherever it might take me. A little googling brought me to Totaltango on the Internet and I sent away for Dancing Tango, a beginner’s course by Christine Denniston on CD-ROM, with animations and video clips.

  From the text of the CD I learned that at the end of the nineteenth century in Buenos Aires, a city with a huge influx of men from Spain, the best chance for a man to get his arms around a woman other than a prostitute was to learn the tango. The men attended practicas in which the learners danced with experienced men and with each other, alternately taking the part of the follower and that of the leader. They had to be able to dance as women before they could become good enough leaders to make a woman want to dance with them. When they were ready for their first time out their instructor would take them to a milonga where he would ask a woman friend to dance with the novice. I imagined the music snaking through a blue haze of cigarette smoke, sweat and pheromones as the women assessed the men whose hands were upon them. If the novice tanguero wasn’t good enough he would have to go back to the practicas for months more of practice, patience and frustration.

  I was struck by the psychology of the tango, that by learning the woman’s role as follower the man could develop the empathy that would give a woman the confidence to be led by him in a dance in which nothing is set and there are no words. Reflecting on my marriage I thought it might have worked out better if I had been able to empathise with Mimi more than I had. I tried to imagine us learning the tango together but it would have brought out the worst in both of us very quickly.

  The contents of the CD were almost poetic, with such titles as ‘The Hunger of the Soul for Contact with Another Soul’. After a while I reached ‘Before the Embrace’ and from there I went to ‘The Hold’ with its overhead diagram of two upper bodies heart to heart. I thought of myself and Barbara Strozzi, bosoms touching, heart to heart. Then came the animated footsteps forward and back, this way and that, giving me the eerie sensation of looking up through a glass floor at disembodied feet. The video showed the legs and feet of leader and follower, going through their steps as often as I clicked on rewind. It was difficult to practise the steps while sitting at the computer and watching the monitor screen so I sent away for a set of three CDs in which Christy Cote and and George Garcia, appearing full-length, would show me how to dance the Argentine tango. It was a treat to watch them: Christy, smiling all the time, and George, smiling less, made everything wonderfully clear, and I did the lessons in front of the TV with the remote control in hand to repeat and pause the action as necessary as they took me through the Embrace, the Basico, the Cambio de Peso en el Lugar, the Paso al Costado, the Cadencia, the Caminada, and so on down the line. That was all very well as far as it went but doing it alone was not giving me much satisfaction. I was learning the names of the steps and how they looked when danced by professionals but I knew I wasn’t actually going to be learning tango until I had a partner to embrace.

  So it was that on a Saturday evening in May I found myself on a Circle Line train watching the stops unreel towards Farringdon. The carriage was full of young people and vernal expectation but I am a November sort of person, and I thought of the big rain that always comes in November to leave the trees black and bare next morning and the ground covered with brown leaves. I’m only forty but I’ve got November inside me with grey skies, rain, brown leaves and bare black trees.

  The Circle Line is some kind of metaphor: from South Kensington you can get to Farringdon eastbound via Victoria and Embankment on the lower part of the loop or you can do it westbound via Paddington and King’s Cross on the upper part of the loop. I took it eastbound.

  My Underground book was The Dybbuk, a play by S. Ansky. In it Leah says, ‘If one of us dies before his time, his soul returns to the world to complete its span, to do the things left undone and experience the happiness and griefs he would have known.’ Barbara Strozzi died at fifty-eight in Padua in 1677. Had she left things undone, had she had enough happiness and griefs? In Google I found a Barbara Strozzi site where I learned that, although some have theorised that she was a courtesan, this, despite the look of the portrait, seems unlikely. She had four children, three of them with Giovanni Paolo Vidman. They never married but he provided dowries for two of their daughters to enter a convent and an inheritance for one son; the other became a monk. Barbara Strozzi left a body of work that is widely performed by recording artists but I have never seen notices for a live concert. She never gained the patronage she hoped for. And yet! such is the aura of this woman that something of her travelled with me on the Circle Line.

  At Victoria three young women got on the train and began to speak Swedish to one another. One of them, a blonde with long straight hair, was a beauty; she couldn’t help knowing it and her awareness of it showed in the beautiful way she turned to speak to her companions or inclined her head to listen. They got off the train at Westminster, the beauty leaving a phantom self behind.

  I was going to EC1, to St James’s Church, Clerkenwell. I’d never been to that part of town before, it seemed remote and dangerous. Might I fall off the edge of the world? Might there be wyverns, cockatrices, anthropophagi, muggers? Was it wise to go there with Pluto coming over my Sagittarian ascendant?

  From Liverpool Street onward I was alone in the carriage. Why was no one else going where I was going? Moorgate appeared, Barbican, then there was Farringdon. The station, which was also a main line station, was glass-roofed, like the old Fulham Broadway. Through the glass came dimnesses of yellow light. I looked for a sign of some kind, a favouring omen however modest. FOUND, said a Yahoo ad on the wall opposite. OK, I could work with that.

  Outside the station stood a newsvendor at his kiosk. OCKERMAN UNDER INVESTIGATION was the headline on display. I’m used to this; I looked away, then looked again and the word was DONORS. Clerkenwell was full of darkness; the street lamps did what they could but were overwhelmed. Behind the newsvendor, on the opposite side of the street, a cluster of lights and colour offered FOOD & WINE, also Fruit & Veg, which were arrayed under little canopies out on the pavement. To the right was the Bagel Factory: The American Original. To the left, a doorway called Chariots displayed a telephone number and was evidently a minicab stand. Four young men stood waiting there as when the curtain goes up on the first act of a play. I was in Cowcross Street but there were no cows crossing.

  Going left, I reached the corner of Turnmill Street. golden gleamings in the dark. Next to it as I entered Turnmill was Pret A Manger with sushi and espresso, then Ember, looking warm and with a large menu on the pavement.

  Leaving the zone of conviviality I was on the left-hand side of the street. Below me on my left was the long shape of the main-line station showing dim blind lights as I was swallowed up in the visible darkness. ‘The moon’s my constant Mistrisse,’ I sang tunelessly to the colours in my mind,

  And the lowlie owle my morrowe,

  The flaming Drake and the Nightcrowe make

  Mee musicke to my sorrowe.

  There was no moon.

  Turnmill Street was tumultuous with silence, as if only a moment ago there had been voices, laughter and music not of this time. On the opposite side was Benjamin Street but I saw no left-handed slingers. Turk’s Head Yard was knot a problem. Brown leaves always. Slightly downhill on Turnmill became slightly uphill as I neared Clerkenwell Road. Turned right into Clerkenwell Road, then crossed into Clerkenwell Close where the Crown Tavern beckoned but I carried on and around a dark corner and there was St James’s Church, high above the rest of London, its spire aimed at the night sky where planets were approaching new alignments.

  Over the road the Three Kings pub glowed cosily. The church was dark; the iron gates on the steps were open. Barbara Strozzi had been with me in the Underground and she was with me
even more strongly now. The air is full of all kinds of signals, from the ghostly voices and laughter in Turnmill Street to the more powerful Strozzi presence; the people may be gone but some essence of them remains to travel where it will, unfettered by limitations of time and space. Certainly it’s a long time and a long way from Strozzi’s Venice to London, but if Venice can reach London by short wave and satellite, why shouldn’t the Barbara Strozzi signal also bounce off the ionosphere and the atmosphere to get here?

  I went a little way up the main stairs, then down the well-lit steps to the crypt. The door stood open, brightness inside. Please, I said to myself, let it happen. What? I didn’t know. A smiling Japanese woman was sitting at a table collecting the admission fee. I paid my eight pounds and crossed the floor to where there were tables and chairs.

  The crypt looked festive. The vaulted brick ceiling was partly yellow and partly red in the lighting from below. Other lights were garlanded around the walls and a large round clock hung over the centre of the dance floor. There was a table for tea, coffee, biscuits and soft drinks, with a price list and a tin for collecting coins. The place was gradually filling up with people, a murmur of voices and a quiet party atmosphere. I bought myself a tea and a couple of biscuits, sat down at a table and looked around.

  I saw a woman bringing a cup of tea or coffee to a nearby table; she was about five foot nine, very well setup, and of a commanding presence. Early, maybe midthirties I thought. Black T-shirt under a green velvet jacket, short denim skirt, purple tights, black boots, exemplary legs. Before sitting down she stared directly at me. What are you looking at? said her eyes. A long oval face with a sullen mouth and an up-yours expression. But attractive, a face that pulled the eye. Dark hair piled up in a way that was defiantly out of date. A Barbara Strozzi, yes, a Barbara Strozzi kind of look. I didn’t get where I am today by refraining from making a fool of myself, so I went over to her and said, ‘Hi.’