The maxixe was the dance craze of 1870s–1910s Rio: polka steps danced close and hip-swaying to a rhythm borrowed from the Cuban habanera. Publishers, wary of the scandalous name, sold the piano pieces as tango brasileiro, which is why Ernesto Nazareth's are called tangos. It is the direct ancestor of samba and choro.
The left hand is the habanera in 2/4: a bass note on beat 1 held for a dotted eighth, a short chord on the last sixteenth, then bass and chord on beat 2 and its "and". The right hand plays the Brazilian síncope, 16th–8th–16th, so the melody hits the second sixteenth and ties across the middle of the beat while the left hand keeps landing squarely. Bar 3 doubles the síncope across both beats before bar 4 cadences.
Listen for the two hands disagreeing on where the beat's middle is.
Practice hint: play the left hand alone until the last-sixteenth chord feels like a pickup, not a hiccup.