Music reveals a personal past which, until then, each of us was unaware of, moving us to lament misfortunes we never suffered and wrongs we did not commit. For myself, I confess that I cannot hear ‘El marne’ or ‘Don Juan’ [two tangos] without remembering in detail an apocryphal past, simultaneously stoic and orgiastic, in which I have challenged and fought, in the end to fall silently in an obscure knife -fight. Perhaps this is the tango’s mission: to give Argentines the belief in a brave past, in having met the demands of honour and bravery. — Jorge Luis Borges
