The milongas are full of archetypes and caricatures; sometimes it's difficult to believe that the people you're seeing are real and not some strange dream-state characters from a David Lynch film.

There are even couple archetypes; there's the 'leggy stilletoed belle with the wizened old incubus' couple, which I see often and makes me feel like milongas are one of the outer rings of the inferno. And the 'middled aged, going through the motions but nothing bores us more than tango' couple, and the 'man having the intense, passionate, existential union with partner and music, but woman actually can't wait to escape' couple. Each couple is a coin spinning on the dancefloor, and it's both interesting and disturbing to watch the sometimes dissonant facets as they girate by - disturbing because it makes me wonder what kind of coin I make up one side of when I'm dancing.

One night I saw (I swear this is true) a couple dancing who I took, for some reason, to be German tourists. She was a slight woman with a poker face, and he, a tiny tiny fastidious man with a 'claw of death' left hand. They who doing some kind of sandwich-like move, and he stopped, released his right arm from the embrace, and gave her a little admonishing spank on her left buttock. He regained the embrace, and they danced on as if nothing had happened!

The first night we went to Ideal there was a couple who were their own archetype - both short, he had a caved-in looking face and arms like gnarled tree-trunks, she dressed for the bordello with mini skirt to maximise the wide-apertured fishnets. They were always first on the dancefloor, their dancing was the most famboyant on the floor - clearly they are mainstays of Mi Milonga (the Wednesday night Ideal milonga), and we've seen them there since.

We also saw a guy who constantly has a lip-pucker-and-raised-eyebrows expression that makes him look alot like Bill Murray. He was clearly single, and swaggered around the place with a puffed up chest and a cheery demeanor. He didn't bother with the eye-contact thing, shamelessly walking up to random women and asking them loudly out loud "¿Querés bailar?", and being equally shamelessly rejected. Impervious to embarrassment, he would raise his eyes and hands in a dramatic question to the heavens, and swagger to the next lady.

Watching him dance, it became quickly ovious why he disdained eye-contact - otherwise he'd never get dances. He's what K calls a 'rocket man', and clearly disdains other aspects of tango etiquette, like the avoidance of collisions on the dancefloor while he swoops across it with his hapless companion clasped loosely near his front. For her, I guess, this is punishment for being to embarrassed to say "no" out loud. While he dances (sometime in time with the music), he seems to look around to see who can see him, or perhaps he's scoping out hs next victim.

Whenever he was on the prowl anywhere near us, I would tense up on A's behalf, and edge closer to assert my territory - it's amazing what a bit of primate body-language can do; he never asked her, even though he seemed to have a taste for foreign blood.

I've seen him several times at Ideal, and again last night at Glorieta - an outdoor milonga we tried in Belgrano (in the North of the city). This time, in my absence, he asked A for a dance. Fortunately I was close by and she could pretend I'd already just asked her.

The more I watch him swaggering about with implacable cheeriness, desperately scanning the ranks of women on the perimeter, the more it seems like a determined facade to me; I wonder why he puts himself through this desperately amiable and bold act. I pictured him being the last person to leave the milonga, going home to a tiny, empty, dilapidated apartment, the facade slipping to the floor and the chronic loneliness rising to the surface, left only with the scents of twenty perfumes and the memory of forty rejections and truncated tandas. Is this character one of the exemplars of CD's theory that the dance appeals only to lonely hearts, who live alone and use tango to fulfil the need for physical human intimacy that's unsatisfied by their 'other' life?

Or maybe this tragi-romantic picture I've dreamed up is false. Maybe 'Bill Murray' is some corporate The Office manager type, convinced of his own charm and skill, and these frequent tango excursions are an extension of his ego, philanthropically blessing desperate foreign ladies with the indubitable pleasure of his company and guidance.

I'll probably (hopefully?) never know the truth. But 'Bill Murray' is an instance of another milonga archetype. Canning (in Palermo Soho, not as far North as Glorieta, Darío Rodríguez is the organiser on Sunday night), where possibly 'Bill Murray' wouldn't dare show his face, there's another, less obnoxious instance of this stereotype. He's another middle-aged man who's clearly installed himself at this milonga and swaggers about as if he owns the place. But instead of making a nuisance of himself to the ladies by dancing, paces up and down the bar and sings along effusively to all of the tangos.