bordering our life.
tango that you were and will be.
—“Somebody Tells It to the Tango,” Jorge Luis Borges/Astor Piazzolla
THE KID WASN’T THRILLED with Dad’s gift — an accordion-like contraption of mystifying buttons, unwieldy bellows and Old World nostalgia, purchased at a New York pawn shop in 1929.
Eight-year-old Astor Piazzolla, a street-smart New Yorker, wanted a baseball bat, a biographer would later recount. What he got was a bandoneón, a bulky instrument of rural German origin that crossed the Atlantic with 19th century immigrant ships and became fundamental to the tango, the emblematic musical expression of Astor’s native Argentina.