It’s my third class that week and we’ve moved gratifyingly quickly. We learn walks, rock steps, crosses, and ochos. Gianluca’s partner, Angelina, teaches most of his classes alongside him, walking around the class with the teaching assistants correcting our form, often stepping in to follow or lead. She’s a good lead, but it feels bizarre to be in an embrace with her, held by her delicate, bird-boned arms. The moves are simple enough: there’s no quick, explosive choreography, no hard-to-remember patterns. The difficulty comes, I soon realize, when you’re not given instructions on which moves to do. Turned loose, you had to rely on your ability to pick up the directions from your partner’s body, the signals translated to you via their embrace. When you manage it, it feels like witchcraft; when it goes badly, it feels as discordant as bad sex.

“What’s tomorrow?”

“The social!”

“Oh yes,” I say, now remembering from the website. “Social” brings to mind grandparents and Dixie cups of ice cream. “Should I come?”

“Of course! You need to practice. It will be fun, and you can meet the rest of the team.”

I’ve learned about “the team” by now—in every class, we’re joined by teaching assistants who are also team members, dancers handpicked by Gianluca to represent the studio locally and internationally at dance conferences.

“I’ll be there.”

I begin my new job and quickly realize that I’m plenty prepared. The job is a cakewalk. Most of my tourists are from the United States; some are from Japan or Canada. On my first tour, all eight tourists are from the States, and I feel a trill of fear that they’ll recognize me, but I learn quickly that people mostly see what they’re expecting to see. I needn’t have worried about my shallow knowledge of the city: people want to see the beautiful Spanish-style facades, the elegant ramshackle villas, the faded Belle Epoque glamour of the place; they don’t want to look closely enough to see the bullet holes that mark the side of the Casa Rosada, the bloodstains on the sidewalks, the ghosts of young people that linger outside the cafés they were snatched from. On my second tour, I have a backpacker kid who is fresh out of the Peace Corps. He wears his manky hair in a preposterous bun that bobs in time as he explains the city to me, even though, according to him, this is his first visit. After that, if ever I’m feeling self-conscious about leading a tour, I try to embody his know-it-all energy.

Between classes I think about Gianluca more than I’d like to admit. It’s a greedy crush, and he’s more an idea than a man: a living embodiment of tango and this beautiful dark city, the hope for something beyond the wreckage of my old life.