2023-05-16 18:38:00
“I started out as a model with Jean Cartier, I wanted to be a doctor or a scientist and I ended up dancing the tango around the world,” she explains, THE NATION, Mónica Crámer Ayosactress and excellent dancer of the two-by-four rhythm since she fell in love with Víctor Ayos -choreographer and dancer of exception-, both parents of Monica Ayosthe Argentine artist with a great presence in Mexico, where she lives with the actor Diego Olivera and their children, Federico and Victoria.
Hernan Zenteno – THE NATION
“I miss you so much, but at my 78 years I can’t go to live there because I have COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease)”, he details regarding his present and immediately goes through his beginnings with more than joy: “It had never occurred to me to be on stage. A friend took courses with Cartier and I accompanied her. She was in high school I always wanted to be a surgeon, an investigator, a forensic doctor. Today I continue reading on the Internet, I even took CPR courses, I know how to give injections, I love all of that”.
But show business had a page prepared for her: “We paraded with Jean Cartier on Santa Fe Avenue, we accompanied the floats on Spring day back in 1962. Later I worked a lot as a model, until I got married at 18. He was studying law, he was not very sociable, the opposite of me. I played the guitar and sang. I learned to play watching TV. He sang with a deep, powerful voice and good diction. My mother taught me movements and gestures, she had done vocational theater, she was Italian, her name was Giovana, but here, for everyone, she was Juanita. I considered myself a hippie, exotic. And my boyfriend was conservative, until I caught it with another and left it. Then I started going out bowling because he had me tied up, I didn’t know anything. My friend took me to the discos and I would read Kafka if he bored me, always wearing glasses, that’s why they gave me a nickname telescope”.
She was not even twenty years old when she met Juanito Belmonte, who was vital for the first step in a career that was looming, although she still did not perceive it, she was only amused: “I met him in the atmosphere of the night; he wanted me to enter the revue theater. My name is Susana Mónica Cabezón Granatathat is my real name and Juanito changed it to me Monica Cramer, because he called me to play a character in a fotonovela. At that time we were friends with the players from San Lorenzo and Racing, it was not said ‘botineras’. We stopped at the Rex bowling alley, where the Gran Rex is today. The boys escaped from the concentrations. youI also made friends with Cacho Castaña when he was not famous and with great stars like Pochi Gray and Susana Rubio”.
Mónica laughs and tells details of those nights in Buenos Aires in the 60s and 70s. “I danced well, I set trends, wherever I went, people gathered. I was going to Mar del Plata in December and I had a friend, Patricia de la Vega, also a model, with whom we would meet in the little bars of Bristol where all the artistic atmosphere stopped. They called me to do parades, I danced in La Cueva; I met the great figures of rock like Luis Alberto Spinetta when he started writing girl paper eyes. We would all get together at the house of Amadeo Álvarez, a great musician, with Roque Narvaja, who started with his group La joven guardia and El extraño del pelo largo. There was also Lito Nebbia, with whom I was awarded an affair because we made the movie The stranger… I remember they made a note in TV Guide o Antenna with the title a trapped catfor his band The cats. It made a lot of noise, it served to promote the movie that is cult today: Lito and Liliana Caldini were the protagonists”.
Of course, this was not Mónica’s only experience in the cinema: “I also did cameos in Boy you’re singing with Palito Ortega; I worked with Sandro in Gypsy; I participated in regarding fourteen films playing small roles. The summer of ’71 was very good: he was doing shows for Jean Cartier at the Hermitage and competing for Miss 7 days. I think that Teté Coustarot won that time”.
At that time, Mónica spent every summer in Mar del Plata because her grandparents and uncles had a hotel in the city: “We would start the night in Constitución and the coast and we would tour all the nightclubs because there was no entrance fee. I met Víctor because I met Julio, a friend, who proposed me to go out with another couple; he introduced me to him and suggested that I try to dance tango. He had been divorced for seven months and was missing a dancer. That’s where it all began: my career with tango and the love between us. He told me: ‘Come tomorrow at three in the followingnoon to see me, we’re going to do a test.’ because he told me regarding you. I was 24 years old and he was 32″.
From there love was given. As? Not even she knows. “I don’t know how I got hookedBecause when we rehearsed he treated me badly, he was very demanding professionally, he gave me 18 hours of rehearsal. I made my debut and Víctor was already well known by then. He had won the Martín Fierro, various awards, traveled the world with tango, lived in the United States, toured America. I don’t forget that I brought my friends bar to applaud me. A week later we started dating. He told me that I looked like a mason carrying a bag of cement, that he had to drop me at the dance, just to me who thought I was a little star. But when he left the professional he called me affectionately Pitito and he told me: ‘Rest for a while, do you want to drink something, little water, soda’. I was very Barrio Norte and I entered the environment of tango, more tormenting. My old lady got angry because he was married, I got into a fight and I went to live at his house. They made me a little bed in the dining room because he lived with his parents. We got married in Mexico in ’71″, tells regarding that course in which he met love.
Víctor Ayos was, since 1957, nothing less than the choreographer of Mariano Mores’ shows and made Mónica relate more and more to the tango environment: “I treated Hugo del Carril; Tita Merello, who loved me very much and she gave me five dresses. I met Aníbal Troilo on the radio, we always went to have a drink with him and Víctor. With the Polish Goyeneche I shared the stage in Mar del Plata. once asked for a 7Up and he told me: ‘This is so that you remember me forever.’ He, who was pure bar and tin, sat at a table with me to have a soda, something unthinkable in the tango environment where alcohol was drunk”.
And add names of people who treated her. “Many dear people: Floreal Ruiz, Enrique Dumas, Colomba, Jorge Sobral. We were dancers in the Mores orchestra, later Osvaldo Pugliese called us and we were in Uruguay. With Víctor we traveled completely through America, Europe, part of Asia, Egypt, Japan, always working, with Virginia Luque, Daniel Cortés, excellent professionals. I was a good friend of Beba Bidart, Juan Carlos Copes, of the Argentine Tango dancers, who came out of Víctor’s ballet”, he emphasizes.
As a result of love with Víctor Ayos, her beloved Mónica arrived, her only daughter: “I love her so much, my two beautiful grandchildren, and Diego, her husband, they are two very talented artists who do great work in Mexico. Víctor has two more children, the eldest, Víctor Fabián died, he was the godson of Néstor Fabián, another dear friend along with Violeta Rivas, his wife. And Juan Manuel is Monica’s brother.”
In the only moment of the talk that sadness invades her is when she recalls the sad end of her stage and life partner: “Víctor suddenly fell ill; we were doing Tango cocktail in Mar del Plata in 2005 and at 40 days he died. In December we had armed the tango party in Plaza Huincul, in Neuquén, and it was fine. He put together a ballet with very good dancers from Mar del Plata, he was happy. But he began the first days of February with pain in various parts of his body: the adductors, the shoulder blade, it was difficult for him to lift his legs. In 1991, when we came from Japan, he had a pressure spike that wasn’t a stroke, it was an ischemic episode, and 48 hours later he kept dancing the same way, he hid it and got over it. I thought it might have been something like that, but no. The magnetic resonance revealed a cervical fracture, which later led to the fact that it was a terminal bone metastasis. It was March 4, two days later my grandson Federico was baptized. We celebrated the same, but he mightn’t get out of bed to go. He died on April 22. The night before he died, Monica came to see him as usual and asked him to recite At the market by the hand of Fede, his grandson. it was the farewell”.
The smile reappears on her face when she humorously recalls, true to her custom: “I gave my daughter my stage name, it belonged to her. When she was born she wanted to name her Victoria, but Víctor told me: ‘We are already many, put yours on it’”. Over time I became Crámer Ayos and that’s it. People confused us at shows: ‘Who is Monica Ayos?’, they doubted”.
-Are you still linked to tango today, Mónica?
-I like to host shows, I had been doing that until the pandemic came and I was locked up and in danger for two years. Later I gradually returned to conducting events, with a lot of panic. I confess to you that I still suffer from it. But I keep going, I always fought for it and I will continue to do so.
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