Tango

by Mike Gonzalez

  Sunday – the day of pleasure / dancing, poker and champagne / when even someone who’s skint / can play the rich man for 10 minutes./ Came sad Monday / My dreams went to the devil / the Yankee fell at the first fence / And I have to get to work.

  But what does it matter that in this game / the calendar says it’s Monday? / On the turn of a card it’s back to the pit / until Sunday when we climb out / Nothing evil lasts a hundred years / And maybe we’ll get laid / Maybe we’ll win an eight-way accumulator / Maybe that’s the day we make it, dear heart!

  (‘Lunes’, Monday – José Luis Padula, 1927)

  Tango too had turned a corner – though it would encounter many more crossroads in its progress.

  6 THE DYING OF THE LIGHT

  Cuando la suerte qu’ es grela,

  fayando y fayando

  te largue parao;

  cuando estés bien en la vía,

  sin rumbo, desesperao;

  cuando no tengas ni fe,

  ni yerba de ayer

  secándose al sol;

  cuando rajés los tamangos

  buscando ese mango

  que te haga morfar . . .

  la indiferencia del mundo

  – que es sordo y es mudo –

  recién sentirás.

  Verás que todo es mentira,

  verás que nada es amor,

  que al mundo nada le importa . . .

  ¡Yira! . . . ¡Yira! . . .

  Aunque te quiebre la vida,

  aunque te muerda un dolor,

  no esperes nunca una ayuda,

  ni una mano, ni un favor.

  Cuando estén secas las pilas

  de todos los timbres

  que vos apretás,

  buscando un pecho fraterno

  para morir abrazao . . .

  Cuando te dejen tirao

  después de cinchar

  lo mismo que a mí.

  Cuando manyés que a tu lado

  se prueban la ropa

  que vas a dejar . . .

  Te acordarás de este otario

  que un día, cansado, ¡se puso a ladrar!

  When fate, who is a woman / fails you time and again / and leaves you on your uppers / when you’re set on your way / aimless and in despair / when you have nothing to believe in / nor even mate leaves / drying in the sun; / when you wear out your shoes / looking for cash / so that you can eat / you’ll feel / the indifference of a world / that hears and says nothing.

  Everything’s a lie, you’ll see / there’s no love anywhere / the world doesn’t give a damn / it just turns . . . and turns . . . / Your life can fall apart / the pain can eat into you / but don’t expect anyone to help / to give you a hand, to do you a favour.

  When there are only dead batteries / in every bell / you press / looking for a fraternal breast / to embrace before you die; / when they just leave you lying there / after all your efforts / like they did with me. / When you realize that they’re standing next to you / trying on the clothes / you’ll leave behind . . . You’ll remember this fool / who, one day, exhausted / began to scream!

  (‘Yira, yira’, Turn, turn – Enrique Santos Discépolo, 1930)

  Of all Santos Discépolo’s lyrics, ‘Yira, Yira’ came to summarize what in lunfardo was called la mishiadura, loosely, ‘the breadline’. For the people who gave birth to tango, the 1930s were hard times; unemployment rose dramatically and although Argentina did not suffer the world recession to the same depth as the United States, for example, there was hardship nevertheless, and ‘la mishiadura’ was a reality for many. The bitterness of Discépolo’s commentary strikes at the very heart of the notion of community on which the national imaginary was founded; a community based not so much on collective experience and solidarity as on a shared past. The implication was that the harsh life alluded to in every tango had not passed, but that its characteristic egoism and alienation had resurfaced in the face of the economic realities of the decade. That was why some called the Thirties in Argentina la década infame.

  Gardel, of course, had sung all of Discépolo’s lyrics. Yet his voice and the framing of the songs on screen in these early days of sound cinema attenuated the anger they contained. Gardel had come to occupy the pinnacle of the star system at this time of hardship and economic crisis and had offered a kind of consolation in the nostalgia that suffused his songs. The past recaptured provided perhaps an explanation of present difficulties. And at the same time, paradoxically, it offered a flawed utopia on which to look back with longing.

  By mid-decade, a programme of public works launched the city into a second transformation as ambitious as the process that had taken the small town by the river and turned it into a second Paris on the River Plate forty or so years earlier. Like Brazil to the north, Argentina was announcing its emergence from the world recession and its aspirations for the future in an architectural vision. The future it envisaged would once again be based on its external trade and exports. It would remain, under the conservative governments of the time, as European in its culture and its horizons as those who launched Buenos Aires into the world. The new modernity was marked by the enormous breadth of the Avenida 9 de Julio (some fourteen lanes wide), which, like its counterparts at the turn of the century, swept away the narrow city centre streets of the past. The old church of St Nicholas fell to the bulldozers of a new age, to be replaced by Libertad Square and its emblematic central monument the needle of the Obelisk (both designed by Alberto Prebisch), which stretched its single arm into the sky and announced that Argentina was looking outside itself to a wider world. And most significantly, Corrientes Street, the main drag of the sexual city, was also widened as it had been during the city’s first metamorphosis.

  The project was imbued with a new moralism; the city’s ambiguous attitude towards its own underworld was expressed in its repeated attempts to legislate its sex industry out of existence. In 1934, brothels were once again banned – a clear sign that the very similar law of 1919 had failed in its purposes. Now the cafés and cabarets became the meeting point for the women of the night and their clientele. And their trysts would be accompanied through the Thirties by the tango ensembles and singers displaced from the theatres by the advent of talking, or rather singing cinema. The bulk of Argentine cinema’s production in its first decade were musicals,1 building on Gardel’s truncated singing career. The cast of the first national sound film, ¡Tango! (1933) would become the stars of the decade – Libertad Lamarque (until her very public falling out with Evita led her into exile and a highly successful singing career in Mexican cinema), Mercedes Simone, Tita Merello, as well as their male counterparts – Edgardo Donato, Osvaldo Fresedo and the dancer El Cachafaz, among others. Many of these early films reenacted tango stories, and their characters were certainly familiar from the lyrics of the Guardia Nueva.

  This was the era of the women tango singers. Yet Rosita Quiroga, Ada Falcón, Azucena Maizani, or indeed Lamarque and Simone, did not change the grammar of tango. It was rare for them to sing from a woman’s point of view; but there was an undoubted intended irony in their rendering of such intensely masculine feelings, feelings that Maizani ironized in her famous performance of ‘Pero yo sé’.2 But in their provocative and ironic use of words written for and by men, they offered some challenge, some instinct to transgress, some defiance against the fading of the light. Tita Merello’s performance of ‘Se dice de mí . . .’ (People talk about me) is exemplary. On screen she sways and flirts, steering her course among the men laughing, slightly awkwardly, at the challenge she is offering. People say, she says, that ‘my nose is too sharp and my figure wanting, that my mouth’s too big and I’ll always fight back’. So why is everyone so interested in this woman with nothing to offer? She might be ugly and everything that jealous women and spurned men might say about her, but they just keep coming back. ‘Se dice de mi’ (1943), though written by a man (Ivo Pelay), is a rare celebration of women’s sexual power.

  Proud and defiant, Merello’s character
remains the milonguita whose independence and scorn for the rules of bourgeois morality may well explain the enthusiasm of many Argentine women for her music, and for the tango in general. It was an answer to the moralism of the male view of the women they so easily condemned for their brief prosperity.

  Gardel’s reputation had largely been created outside the country. His early successes came in France and Spain, and later Hollywood relocated him in the artificial landscapes veiling the economic reality that it created so well. Once again, it seemed, tango returned to Buenos Aires flushed with success from Paris – and Hollywood.

  But a new generation of singers and performers were emerging in the more restricted world of Buenos Aires and Montevideo. The reality is that there were fewer new lyricists emerging in this depression era;3 Ignacio Corsini and Augustín Magaldi, and later Julio Sosa were taking to the stage, or more precisely to the corner daises of cafés and cabarets.

  Musically, too, external realities pressed in on tango. Juan D’Arienzo, for example, expanded his ensemble to achieve the bigger sound to which cinema had accustomed audiences. Osvaldo Pugliese, a key figure from 1939 onwards, assembled his first orchestra in that year, and then created a sound that drew on influences beyond tango, particularly jazz. Carlos di Sarli, for his part, largely suppressed solos in his performances to give a lush and melodic collective sound – only the piano was given an individual voice. He was building on the work of Osvaldo Fresedo, one of tango’s more adventurous musicians who experimented with new instruments, like the vibraphone. The decade ended, and the dancers were returning as the economy began to grow; Argentina’s new industries were beginning to produce the goods that no longer reached her from the factories of Europe, now devoted to war production. And the expansion drew a new generation of immigrants, this time from the interior of the country and particularly the northwest. To a conservative ruling class in Buenos Aires, this new migration was deeply problematic. Once, many years before, their predecessors had welcomed the white-skinned populations who would both labour and Europeanize the emerging nation. But those who arrived seeking work in the new wartime industries were dark-skinned refugees from rural poverty – they called them, with deep racist contempt, the cabecitas negras (‘black heads’).

  In the latter part of the 1930s, tango was stepping back into the limelight. As the decade ended, it was entering a new Golden Age. (Tango seems able to be endlessly reborn, rediscovered and reanimated by one generation after another. It is part of its magic).

  The 1940s . . . witnessed the tango at the peak of its popularity. It was the centrepiece of the cabarets, the dance salons, the ‘dancings’, the cafes, the confiterías (pastry shops), the social and sports clubs and the soccer clubs. Newspapers now reserved several pages for advertisements for tango activities.4

  Tango bands and orchestras multiplied, as did the venues where they played. Theatres were turned back into dance halls and concert stages; and many of the cafés on the iconic Corrientes Street divided their days into three or more sessions attended by different sections of the population to dance or to listen to the music.

  Musically, the era was dominated by the extraordinary bandoneonista Aníbal Troilo, El Pichuco or El Gordo (‘the Fat Man’).

  He led a large orchestra, a quartet, and accompanied some of the finest singers of the times – Francisco Fiorentino, Edmundo Rivero and others. His orchestra changed and matured, its instrumentation grew more complex, until it became ‘a kind of colloquium of several voices, at times broken like a human voice, counterpoint and conflict . . . and later an ensemble chord’.5

  Alfredo Gobbi, the son of a famous father who had been instrumental in taking tango to Paris at the turn of the century, developed a romantic style in his violin playing – and the rhythmic complexity of his arrangements moved him away from the dance-based bands like Juan D’Arienzo’s, which, with Troilo, was the most popular and most dependable for the dance enthusiasts of the day.

  This Golden Age also gave birth to a new kind of tango-song, more literary and metaphorical.

  Just as the tango of the Twenties was linked to the imaginary of its time, the tango of the Forties turned its gaze back. It was untouched by the modifications in the city or it saw them with hostile eyes, full of suspicion and doubt.6

  Anibal Troilo, ‘El Pichuco’.

  José María Contursi’s immensely popular ‘Sombras nada más’ (1948) marks a transition – a passage in the tango drama from a luminous Golden Age to a more meditative evening in which shadows fall across the urban landscape of tango. The singer is an older man whose powers were inadequate to win the love of a woman obviously younger than himself. All that he can imagine now is cutting his wrists and watching the blood flow around her, and waiting until the shadows fall finally between them. Shadows ‘between your love and mine’, ‘between your life and mine’. It is a familiar tango drama, but it may also be a metaphor for the distance that opened between tango and its origins.7

  The 1940s, the decade in which this tango was completed, were the zenith of tango’s popularity in Argentina and indeed across the world. The world it evoked and commemorated was fading from popular memory. Homero Manzi and Cátulo Castillo stand out as the poets of this era of regret for the passing of an age. Manzi’s famous ‘Malena’, so often recorded by other artists since it was written in 1942, constructs a composite image of the ephemeral woman passing through the half dark to some transitory assignation, but now ‘all the doors are closed to her’.

  It is as if tango were fading into a mist, declining into nostalgia for a world that was full of disappointment, morally bereft and socially divided, yet which possessed a still living memory of a past beyond which lay a place of peace and harmonious relationships, where the natural order of things, overseen by a solicitous mother, was never truly disturbed. In this more recent, still-remembered past, sexuality dominated everything, yet as in the dance, it was an eroticism shot through with sadness, a sense of transience and disappointment. For some tango lyricists, this reflected a chaotic, dangerous and unstable modernity; for others, like Discépolo and Flores, that sense of loss was a feeling born of exploitation and powerlessness. ‘Cambalache’ was its most complete expression. In either case, the gradual disappearance of lunfardo universalized that sense of loss.

  PERÓN BRINGS BACK THE TANGO

  In a small-town cabaret in the late Thirties, a young woman, the illegitimate daughter of a local politician, met with the famous singer Agustín Magaldi, then touring the provincial Argentina where he was enormously popular. Eva Duarte fascinated him, and he brought her back to Buenos Aires, where she sang with him and made minor inroads into film and radio soap opera. It was at the studios of Radio Belgrano in 1944, in fact, where she met Juan Domingo Perón, at that time Minister of Labour in the government of General Pedro Ramírez. She was 25 years old. By the time of her death, just eight years later, she would be a legend.8

  Evita and Perón.

  It was to be expected that tango would be identified with the period of change that ended so dramatically in 1930 with the coup against Yrigoyen. The excluded new middle class and the emerging working class had supported his Radical Party and undoubtedly voted it into power. And however conflictive the relationship between the immigrants and their children who were forging the first trade unions in the country, the alternative was always seen as a return to government by the fiercely anti-immigrant, white landowning classes. It was these sections of the population who were certainly behind the Uruburu coup of 1930, and who re-entered power with him. Their hostility towards the immigrant population, whom they relentlessly associated with moral decline and criminality, was palpable. One result of their return to the pink presidential palace in Buenos Aires was a new cultural campaign to restore a European culture of the elite. They scorned tango, with the result that the social dances which had flowered through the 1920s began to prove less popular, particularly with a middle class anxious for respectability and furthermore suffering the r
eflected impact of the Crash of 1929 and the worldwide recession that followed. These were hard times for many, with unemployment rising fast and the major social problems faced by the poorer communities – housing above all – largely unresolved. The reconstruction of the Buenos Aires city centre in mid-decade was an echo of the strategy of restarting the economy through public works. In fact, Argentina had suffered relatively less from the effects of recession than other countries. Its industries had started to grow in 1933, particularly in textiles and food.9 The United Kingdom had guaranteed the continuing import of Argentine beef in 1933, although the agreement was less positive than it might have appeared to be since the volume of imports was maintained at 1932 levels and the quid pro quo was to give privileged access to over 300 British imports into Argentina. But Argentina was nevertheless emerging from recession into an era of prosperity, with rising agricultural and industrial production. Even so, there as wide public resentment at what were seen to be excessive concessions to foreign companies, and the corruption that generally accompanied such deals.

  The growth of Argentine industry brought 700,000 rural migrants, the cabecitas negras or descamisados (shirtless ones) to the cities and overwhelmingly to Buenos Aires. When the manufactured goods previously imported from Europe or the United States were no longer available, the industrial capacity to replace them with Argentine products already existed and expanded to fill the gap left.

  At the same time, relations with the U.S. were deteriorating in an atmosphere of increasingly fervent nationalism. This did not necessarily find favour among the first or second generation immigrant communities whose cultural and ideological links with the old countries remained very strong and were sustained through community and trade union organizations. Anarchism retained its influence among them with its resolutely internationalist perspective and its deep distrust of governments. As the Second World War began, Argentine nationalism was largely a conservative force in the country. And when, in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor and the USA’S entry into the war, Argentina refused to enter into its Pan-American alliances, the U.S. government responded by withholding arms sales and increasing weapons exports to Brazil, which the Argentines interpreted as a direct threat. An agreement between Argentina and the U.S. in October 1941 offered little more than token changes, fanning anti-U.S. feelings. The German government was watching these events closely and intensifying its propaganda activities in Argentina, where it found a resonance in government circles dominated by anti-semitism, anti-communism and a deeply conservative religiosity. Washington was quick to denounce the government in Buenos Aires as pro-Nazi. This only served to provoke and intensify local nationalism. The 1943 film El fin de la noche included a performance of Discépolo’s ‘Uno’ (‘One’ or ‘You’) by Libertad Lamarque; it was banned by the military government of Ramon S. Castillo. The tango itself, with music by Mariano Mores, was also suppressed and denied access to radio. At first sight this may seem to be one more ballad of disappointed love; but it is more profound than that, as an expression of the desolation that real poverty brings. More than that, it speaks of desarraigo, the sense of not belonging that informed tango from its beginnings and that now returns against the background of a repressive and hostile government – ‘dragging yourself over thorns’, echoing the promise of utopia in the life beyond that religion offers. But the price is very high – ‘you give your life for a kiss that never comes’, a kiss that is the end of hunger, the hope of a decent life. The theme here is not just the search for one passionate encounter but for a warmth that ends ‘this cruel cold that is worse than hate’ and leads only to ‘the awful tomb where love lies’. This is more than disappointment in love – it is the betrayal of the promise that decades earlier had brought hopeful immigrants to the port of Buenos Aires.