The Tango Singer

by Tomás Eloy Martínez

  One of the dance instructors came over and asked me if I’d like to try out a few figures.

  Go on, give it a try, Tano said. Everyone learns with Valeria.

  I hesitated. Valeria aroused an instinctive trust, a desire to protect her, and tenderness. Her face resembled my maternal grandmother’s. She had a clear, high forehead and almond-shaped brown eyes.

  I’m very clumsy, I said. Don’t make me embarrass myself.

  Okay then, I’ll come and find you later.

  Later, another time, I answered and meant it.

  Each time Tano Virgili got up from his barstool to observe the couples coming and going across the floor, I was left open-mouthed with something halfway uttered. The word would drop off my lips and roll out between the dancers, who would crush it under their heels before I could pick it up. Finally I managed to get him to answer my question about Julio Martel in such detail that when I got back to the boarding house I had trouble summarizing. ‘Martel,’ he told me, ‘was actually called Estéfano Caccace. He changed it because with a name like that no one would ever have been able to give him a serious introduction. Imagine: Caccace. He sang here, near where you’re sitting, and there was a time when people in the know spoke of nothing but his voice, which was unique. Perhaps it still is. I haven’t heard anything of him for ages.’ He put a hand on my shoulder and came out with the predictable acclaim: ‘If you ask me, he was better than Gardel. But don’t repeat that.’

  After that night I took a swarm of notes that might perhaps be faithful to Virgili’s tale, but I’ve a feeling I’ve lost the tone, the atmosphere of what he said.

  I barely remember the long walk El Tucumano and I took later. We went from one part of the city to another, on what he called ‘the milonga pilgrimage.’ Despite the scenery and cast changing at a pace my senses couldn’t keep up with – going from pitch dark to psychedelic lights, from dance halls for men to others where they projected images of a past and perhaps illusory Buenos Aires, with avenues that echoed those of Madrid, Paris and Milan, from retired violin trios to orchestras of young ladies – my spirit had stopped at some point where nothing was happening, like dawn on the morning of a battle that was about to break out elsewhere, perhaps due to the fatigue of the trip or because I expected the intangible Martel might appear at any point during the endless night. We went to the vast warehouse of El Parakultural, and to El Catedral, to La Viruta and El Beso, which were almost empty because the milonga ritual changed according to the day. There were places for dancing between one and three in the morning on Wednesdays, or Fridays from eleven to four. The spiderweb of names added confusion to the liturgy. I heard a couple of German aficionados would arrange to meet in the Parakultural calling it the Sociedad Helénica, although I later found out that this was just the name of the building, located on a street that for some was called Canning and for others Scalabrini Ortiz. That night I had the impression that Martel could be in two or three places at once, or in none. I also thought he might not exist at all and was just one more of the city’s many fables. Borges had said, quoting Bishop Berkeley, that if no one perceived something, that thing had no reason to exist, esse est percipi. For a moment I felt the phrase could define the whole city.

  Around three in the morning I saw Valeria again in a huge hall called La Estrella, which the previous Saturday had been called La Viruta. She was dancing with a Japanese tourist who was dressed in tango attire straight out of a manual: gleaming shoes with heels, tight pants, a double-breasted jacket that he unbuttoned when the music stopped, and a brilliantined sculpture on top of his head that looked as if it had been drawn on with a ruler and compass. I was struck by how Valeria looked just as fresh as she had five hours earlier, in El Rufián, and how she led the Japanese man with the dexterity of a puppeteer, obliging him to spin on his own axis and cross his feet over and over again, while she remained still on the dance floor, concentrated on her body’s center of gravity.

  I think that was the last vision I retained of the night because the only other thing I remember is being on a late bus, getting out near the boarding house on Garay Street and throwing myself onto the blessed darkness of my bed.

  I read in an old issue of Satiricón that Julio Martel’s real mother, ashamed that her newborn baby resembled an insect, put him in a wicker basket and threw him into the waters of the Riachuelo, where his adoptive parents rescued him. That tale always seemed to me a religious diversion from the truth. I tend to believe the version Tano Virgili told me is more accurate.

  Martel was born towards the end of the torrid summer of 1945, on a number 96 streetcar, which in those days ran between Villa Urquiza and the Plaza de Mayo. At about three in the afternoon, Señora Olivia de Caccace, seven months pregnant and short of breath, was walking along Donado Street. One of her sisters had the flu and she was on the way to her house, with a basket of poultices and a bag of fudge pieces in cellophane wrappers. The flagstones of the sidewalk were loose and Señora Olivia was walking very carefully. Along the whole length of the block, all the houses shared the same monotonous appearance: a potbellied, wrought-iron balcony on the right-hand side of a hallway giving onto an inner glass door with beveled edges and monograms. Beneath the balcony a grilled window opened, occasionally revealing the silhouette of a child or an old woman, for whom the landscape of the street, seen from ground level, was the sole entertainment. None of those houses now resemble what they were half a century ago. The majority of families, in the struggle to survive, must have been forced to sell off the glass of the doors and the iron of the balconies to building yards.

  When Señora Olivia passed in front of the house at number 1620 Donado Street, a hand grabbed one of her ankles and threw her down to the ground. Later they found out that a mentally handicapped man in his late thirties lived there; he’d been left by the cellar window to get some fresh air. Attracted by a glimpse of the fudge, the imbecile could think of no better ruse than to trip the woman.

  Hearing her cries for help, a well-meaning soul managed to get Señora Olivia seated in a number 96 streetcar, which was providentially stopped at the corner. There were several hospitals along that route, so the conductor was asked to drop her off at the nearest one. She didn’t make it to any of them. Ten minutes into the journey, Señora Olivia felt herself losing a torrent of liquid and was suddenly in the last stages of labor. The vehicle stopped and the conductor desperately called up to the houses in the neighborhood for scissors and boiling water. The premature baby, a boy, needed to be put into an incubator. The mother insisted he be baptized as soon as possible with the name of his father who’d died six months earlier, Stéfano. Neither the parish nor the Civil Register would accept Italian spelling, so he was finally inscribed as Estéfano Esteban.

  Although he was allergic to cats and pollen, suffered frequent bouts of diarrhea and headaches, the child grew normally up to the age of six. He loved playing soccer and seemed to have a gift for quick attacks from the wings. Every afternoon, while Señora Olivia toiled away at her sewing machine, Estéfano ran around the patio behind the ball, dodging imaginary opponents. On one of those occasions he tripped on a loose brick and fell. An enormous contusion immediately formed on his left leg. The pain was atrocious, but the incident seemed so trivial his mother didn’t think it was significant. The next day the bruise had spread and turned a threatening purple.

  At the hospital they diagnosed Estéfano as a hemophiliac. It took him a month to recover. When he got up, brushing against a chair caused another hemorrhage. They had to put him in a plaster cast. He was thus condemned to such constant stillness that his muscles wasted away. Since then – if there is such a thing as then for something endless – he’s had continuous misfortune. The child developed a huge torso, out of proportion to his stunted legs. He couldn’t go to school and saw only one friend, Mocho Andrade, who lent him books and resigned himself to playing innumerable games of cards. He learned to read fluently from private teachers who taught him as a favor. When he w
as eleven or twelve he’d spend hours listening to tangos on the radio and, when one interested him, he’d copy the lyrics down in a notebook. Sometimes, he wrote down the melodies, too. Since he couldn’t read music, he invented a system of lines with dots of ten or twelve different colours and circumferences that enabled him to remember chords and rhythms.

  The day one of Señora Olivia’s clients brought him a copy of 20th Century Songbirds, Estéfano was struck by an epiphany. The magazine contained tangos withdrawn from the repertoires at the beginning of the twentieth century, songs recounting the raunchy goings-on in brothels. Estéfano didn’t know the meanings of the words he was reading. His mother and her clients were no help either, because the language of those tangos had been invented to allude to the intimate behavior of people who had died many years earlier. The sounds, however, were eloquent. Since the original scores had been lost, Estéfano imagined melodies that imitated the style of El entrerriano (The Man from Entre Ríos) or La morocha (The Brunette), and applied them to lines like these: As soon as I snap your snuggle / my blangle starts to blong / inside you’ve so much tuggle / that if I waloop, I’ll walong.

  By the age of fifteen, he could repeat more than one hundred songs reciting them backwards, with the imaginary music reversed as well, but he only did it when his mother left the house to deliver her sewing work. He’d lock himself in the bathroom, where the neighbours couldn’t hear him, and unleash an intense, sweet soprano voice. The beauty of his own singing moved him to such an extent that unnoticed tears would spill down his cheeks. He so scorned and mistrusted himself that he found it incredible this voice could belong to him, rather than to Carlos Gardel, to whom all voices belonged. He looked at his weedy body in the mirror and offered to God all that he was and all that he might one day become in exchange for a glimpse of the slightest gesture reminiscent of his idol. For hours he stood in front of the mirror, with his mother’s white scarf wrapped around his neck, pronouncing a few phrases he’d heard the great singer say in his Hollywood movies: ‘Ciao, chickeeadee,’ ‘Look, what a luvally dawn.’

  Estéfano had thick lips and curly, wiry hair. Any physical resemblance to Gardel was out of the question. He imitated the smile then, slightly twisting the corners of his lips and stretching the skin across his forehead, with his teeth shining brightly. ‘Good morning, my good fellellow,’ he’d say. ‘How’s life terreating you?’

  By the time they removed the cast, when he was sixteen, his legs were stiff and weak. A physiotherapist helped him to strengthen the muscles in exchange for clothes for his entire family. Estéfano took six months to learn how to walk with crutches and a further six to learn how to get around with walking sticks, terrified at the thought of another fall and being laid up again for a prolonged period.

  One Sunday in the summer, Señora Olivia and two friends took him to the funfair on Libertador Avenue. Since they wouldn’t let him go on any of the rides, for fear he’d hurt himself or dislocate his fragile little bones, the adolescent was bored all afternoon, licking at the cotton candy Mocho Andrade bought for him. While he was waiting beside the ghost train tent, he discovered an electroacoustic kiosk where they recorded voices onto acetate discs for the modest sum of three pesos. Estéfano convinced the women to go around at least twice on the ghost train and, as soon as he saw them disappear into the darkness, slipped into the kiosk and recorded El bulín de la calle Ayacucho (Our little Room on Ayacucho), trying to imitate the version Gardel sang with José Ricardo accompanying him on guitar.

  When he finished, the technician in the booth asked him to sing it again, because the acetate looked scratched. Estéfano repeated the tango, nervously, at a quicker pace. He feared his mother would have finished the ride by then and might be looking for him.

  What’s your name, lad? the technician asked.

  Estéfano. But I’m thinking of finding one that sounds more artistic.

  With that voice you needn’t bother. You’ve got sunlight in your throat.

  The boy hid the record under his shirt. It was the second version, which had come out worse, but he was lucky enough to get back before his mother reappeared from her third trip round on the ghost train.

  For a while he went around looking for a gramophone where he could hear his recording in secret, but he didn’t know anyone who had one, especially for 45 rpm discs like the one they’d sold him at the kiosk. The acetate was affected by heat, humidity and the dust that accumulated between the issues of 20th Century Songbirds. Estéfano thought his recorded voice must have disappeared forever, but one Saturday night, while he was in the kitchen with his mother listening to the popular program Stairway to Fame on the radio, one of the announcers said that the revelation of the moment was an anonymous singer who had recorded an a cappella version of Our little room on Ayacucho in some unknown studio. Thanks to the miracle of magnetic tapes, he said, the voice was now backed up by a violin and bandoneón accompaniment. Estéfano immediately recognized the first recording, which the technician had pretended to discard, and he went pale. Separated from his own voice, he found himself still connected to it by a thread of the kind of admiration it was only possible to feel towards something we don’t possess. It wasn’t a voice he would have wanted or sought but something that had alighted in his throat. Since it was alien to his body, it could be removed when he least expected it. Who knew how many times it had been around in the past and how many other voices fit within it. To Estéfano it mattered only that it resembled one voice: Carlos Gardel’s. So he was flattered by his mother’s comment as they listened to Stairway to Fame:

  Hey, isn’t that strange? They’re saying it’s an unknown singer but it’s not. If he was accompanied by José Ricardo’s guitar, you’d swear it was Gardel.

  At that spur to his pride, the voice slipped out:

  That little room on Ayacucho / now feels uninviting and shoddy . . .

  Estéfano stopped himself before going on to the next line, but it was too late. His mother said:

  You sound just like him.

  It’s not me, Estéfano defended himself.

  I know it’s not you. How are you going to be on the radio if you’re here? But you could be there if you wanted. Why don’t you sing in the clubs? All this sewing’s ruining my eyes.

  Estéfano went to one or two trattorias in Villa Urquiza, but he didn’t even get an audition. He wasn’t accompanied by a guitarist, like most singers, and the owners feared his appearance would scare off the clientele. Since he didn’t dare go home without having earned a bit of money, he made use of his faultless memory to take bets on the pools. He was hired by a funeral director who ran a gambling den, connected to the race tracks and the lotteries, in offices adjacent to the chapels of rest. From there Estéfano answered telephone queries about the prices of burials at the same time as he took the wagers. He remembered how much money a certain client had bet on the three final numbers of the lottery grand prize and how much someone else had placed on the last figure, as well as knowing where to find each gambler at different times of day. When the police raided the funeral parlor after an anonymous tip-off, they couldn’t find the slightest evidence against Estéfano because all the details of every stake were in his head.

  He spent several years at these mnemotechnical activities and would perhaps have kept at it all his life if the owner of the funeral parlor hadn’t rewarded him by giving in to his pleas that he enter him in the singing competition at the Sunderland Club. The prizes were decided by popular vote: each ticket holder got one vote, which turned the atmosphere in the hall into that of an electoral campaign. Estéfano had little chance and he knew it. The only thing that mattered to him, however, was that the voice, hidden for so many years, should finally flow out into the light of the world.

  The celebrated baritone Antonio Rossi had a string of ten Saturday night triumphs at the Sunderland, and he’d announced he would be participating again. His repertoire was predictable: he only sang tangos that were currently fashionable and easy
to dance to. Estéfano, on the other hand, had decided to compete with a tango from 1920, avoiding lyrics with double entendres to keep from offending the ladies.

  The funeral parlor was frequently closed due to a lack of the deceased. Estéfano took advantage of those times to practice Mano a mano (Now We’re Even), a tango by Celedonio Flores which ended on a note of unexpected generosity. After wavering between others by Pascual Contursi and Ángel Villoldo, he’d decided on his mother’s favorite. For hours among the empty coffins he imitated Gardel’s poses, with the rolled-up scarf around his neck. He learned that he could appear more elegant if he did without his stick and held the microphone while sitting on a stool.