The Tango Singer

by Tomás Eloy Martínez

  The night before the contest, in the funeral parlor waiting room, he found an old supplement from the newspaper La Nación devoted to the author of a single novel who had died very young of tuberculosis. The novelist’s real name, José María Miró, meant nothing to him. His pseudonym, however, had such assonance with the phonemes of Carlos Gardel, that he decided to appropriate it. Calling himself Julián Martel, like the unfortunate writer the supplement was about, might cause confusion; choosing Carlos Martel would practically be plagiarism. So, he opted to be Julio Martel. When he entered the competition he’d left off his ridiculous surname, calling himself simply Estéfano. Now he asked to be introduced under his new identity.

  At seven in the evening one Saturday in November, the master of ceremonies introduced the young tenor for the first time. He’d been preceded by seven singers with mediocre voices. The hall’s attention was suspended in anticipation of Antonio Rossi, who was going to repeat, by popular request, En esta tarde gris (On This Grey Evening), by Mores and Contursi. The dance floor was a basketball court they’d taken the hoops out of, which would be used the next day for a children’s soccer tournament. It had a platform at the back with music stands for the two accompanying violinists. The singers usually sang too close to the microphone and their interpretations were interrupted by screeches of discouraging static. Some impatient fans preferred to chat or wait out on the sidewalk. Most of them were only interested in Rossi’s entry, the invariable result of the competition, and the dance that would follow, with recorded music by the big orchestras.

  Before going on stage, Estéfano, who was now definitively Julio Martel, knew he was going to lose. Standing in the corridor, looking at his shiny suit, the oversized collar of his shirt and the clumsy bow tie in a mirror, he grew disheartened. His brilliantined hairstyle, which had gleamed at four o’clock in the afternoon, had dissolved into a fog of dandruff by seven. In the hall he was greeted by the timid clapping of Señora Olivia and three neighbors. As he walked towards the stool, he thought he could discern a murmur of pity. When the violins struck up Mano a mano, he took courage by imagining himself on the prow of a ship, irresistible like Gardel.

  Perhaps his gestures were a parody of those seen in the immortal singer’s films. But the voice was unique. It took off by itself, unfurling more emotions than fit into an entire lifetime and, of course, far more than Celedonio Flores’ tango modestly hinted at. Mano a mano told the story of a woman who left the man she loved for a life of riches and pleasure. Martel turned it into a mystic lament on mortal flesh and the solitude of the soul without God.

  The violins were out of tune and out of time, but they were masked by the density of the singing that advanced like a fury, transforming everything it touched into gold. Estéfano’s diction was defective: he left off the final s’s of the words and simplified the sound of the x’s in exuberance and examine. Gardel, in the version of Mano a mano with José Ricardo on guitar, says carta instead of canta and conesejo instead of consejo. Martel caressed the syllables as if they were glass and poured them out intact over an enchanted audience, silent since the first verse.

  They gave him a standing ovation. Some enthusiastic women, breaking the rules of the competition, shouted for an encore. Martel left the stage in a state of confusion and had to lean on his stick. From a bench in the corridor, he listened to another singer imitating the neighing of Alberto Castillo. Then he shuddered at the round of applause that greeted Rossi as he took the stage. The first lines of En esta tarde gris, which his rival let fall with his colorless voice, convinced him that something worse than defeat would happen that night. He would be forgotten. The vote confirmed, as usual, Rossi’s overwhelming supremacy.

  Mario Virgili was fifteen years old then and his parents had taken him to the Sunderland Club to instill in him a love for the tango. Virgili supposed that Rossi, Gardel, Troilo’s orchestra and that of Julio De Caro embodied all that the genre had to offer. In 1976, the atrocious dictatorship forced him into exile, where he remained for a little over eight years. One night, in the city of Caracas, while he was in a bookstore on the Sabana Grande Boulevard, he heard in the distance the opening bars of Mano a mano and felt an invincible nostalgia. The melody buzzed around Virgili’s memory for hours in an infinite present that didn’t want to give way. He’d heard it hundreds of times, sung by Gardel, by Charlo, by Alberto Arenas, by Goyeneche. Nevertheless, the voice that settled in his head was that of Martel. For Virgili, that fleeting moment one November Saturday in the Sunderland had been transfigured into a breath of eternity.

  People disappeared by the thousand during those years, and the singer also faded into the routine of the funeral parlor, where he worked seventy hours a week. The pools had been legalized, so the owner set up baccarat and poker tables in the back, on top of the empty coffins. Martel had the gift of knowing which cards would turn up in each hand, and signaled to the dealers by a system of gestures how they should play. Many unemployed workers and technicians turned up, and at each table there was so much tension, such desire to domesticate luck, that Martel felt pangs of conscience for accentuating the ruin of those desperate men.

  In the spring of 1981, a colonel ordered a raid on the gambling den. The owner of the funeral parlor was tried but acquitted due to procedural errors. Martel, however, spent six months in the notorious Villa Devoto prison. That misfortune left him even thinner and smaller. His cheekbones stuck out, his eyes looked darker and bulged from his gaunt face, but the voice remained intact, immune to illness and failure.

  Virgili, who had been an encyclopedia salesman in Venezuela, went into business with two friends when he returned from exile and set up a bookstore on Corrientes Street, where there were already twenty or thirty others and lots of shoppers. It was an instant success. People stayed to chat until the early hours between the tables of special offers, and he soon felt obliged to add a café, which encouraged spontaneous guitarists and poets.

  The months flew by in a blur, not knowing where they were headed, as if the past were innocent of the future. One night in 1985, in the bookstore, someone mentioned a marvelous tenor who was singing in a little place over in Boedo for whatever they felt like paying him. It was difficult to understand the lyrics of his tangos, which reproduced an ancient and now meaningless language. The tenor had a refined way of pronouncing them, but the words wouldn’t let themselves be caught: You donked the little strumple / up against a bamp in the creamery. They were all like that, or almost all. Sometimes, among the six or seven tangos he sang a night, one or two would come up that the oldest of his listeners could identify, though not without effort, like Mucked up with Yeast or I got Gut Rot from your Manger, of which there are no records or sheet music.

  In the first appearances, when a flutist accompanied the tenor, the songs revealed mischief, sexual happiness, perpetual youth. Later the flutist was replaced by an impassive, serious bandoneón player, who darkened the repertoire. Fed up with songs they couldn’t decipher, the more conventional clients stopped coming. Instead, more imaginative listeners began to frequent the place, amazed by a voice that, rather than repeating images and stories, slid from one emotion to another, with the clarity of a sonata. Like the music, the voice had no need of meaning. It expressed itself alone.

  Virgili had a hunch this was the same person who’d sung Mano a mano in the Sunderland twenty-two years earlier. The following Saturday he went to the place in Boedo. As he watched the slight and spidery Martel move towards the platform beside the counter, and listened to him sing, he realized that this voice eluded any description because it was itself the tale of the past and future of Buenos Aires. Suspended by a tenuous thread of Cs and Fs, the voice hinted at the massacre of the Unitarians4, Manuelita Rosas’ passion for her father, the Revolution of the Park5, the overcrowding and despair of immigrants, the slaughter of the Tragic Week6 in 1919, the bombing of the Plaza de Mayo7 before the fall of Perón, Pedro Henríquez Ureña8 chasing death down the platforms of Constitucíon St
ation, the dictator Onganía10 censoring Bach’s Magnificat and the enchantment of the artists Noé, Deira and De la Vega in the Di Tella Institute9, the failures of a city that had every possible advantage yet had nothing. Martel let all this pour out like thousand-year-old water.

  Come and sing in El Rufián Melancólico bookstore, Virgili proposed to him when the show finished. I can pay you and your bandoneonist a fixed salary.

  Fixed salary, imagine that. Didn’t know there was such a thing anymore.

  His speaking voice bore absolutely no relation to the voice he sang with: it was reticent and uneducated. The man it came from seemed different from the one who sang. He wore a ridiculous signet ring glittering with gemstones on the little finger of his left hand. The veins of both hands were swollen and had needle marks.

  There is, said Virgili. On Corrientes Street more people would hear you. Which is what you deserve, sir.

  He didn’t dare drop the formalities. Martel, on the other hand, answered while looking the other way.

  What comes here ain’t so bad, man. Let me hear the deal and I’ll think it over.

  He started to sing at El Rufián the following Friday. Six months later they took him to the Club del Vino, where he shared the bill with Horacio Salgán, Ubaldo de Lío and the bandoneón player Néstor Marconi. Although his tangos were more and more abstruse and remote, the voice rose with such purity that people recognized in it feelings they’d lost or forgotten, and burst into tears or laughter without the slightest embarrassment. The night Jean Franco went to El Club del Vino they gave him a ten-minute standing ovation. He would have gone on like that for who knows how long if an intestinal hemorrhage hadn’t put him back in the hospital.

  Martel’s hemophilia, caused by the lack of factor 8, was accompanied by a retinue of illnesses. He frequently succumbed to malignant fevers or pneumonia. He was often covered in scabs that he hid with makeup. None of his admirers knew that he arrived to sing in a wheelchair or that he couldn’t have walked more than three steps across the stage. Near the curtain there was always a stool screwed to the floor, which he’d lean on as he sang after bowing his head slightly. It had been quite some time since he’d been able to imitate Gardel’s gestures and, although nothing would have pleased him more, his style had gained in frugality and a certain bodily invisibility. So the voice glittered on its own, as if nothing else existed in the world, not even the accompanying bandoneón in the background.

  The intestinal bleeding put him out of circulation for a few years. Months before I arrived in Buenos Aires he had started singing again. He didn’t sing when asked anymore but only when he felt like it. Instead of returning to El Rufián or El Club del Vino, where they still longed to hear him, he would appear out of the blue in the dance halls in the neighborhoods of San Telmo or Villa Urquiza, or he offered open air concerts in some part of the city, for whoever wanted to hear him. To his repertoire of bygone tangos he began adding those composed by Gardel and Le Pera, and some of Cadícamo’s classics.

  One night he sang from the balcony of one of the hotels for furtive lovers on the Azcuénaga Street, behind Recoleta Cemetery. Many couples interrupted the clamor of their passion and listened to the powerful voice infiltrating through the windows and bathing their bodies forever in a tango they’d never heard before, in a language they didn’t understand, but which they recognized as if it came from a previous life. One of the witnesses told Virgili that a sheet of aurora borealis shone in an arc over the crosses and archangels of the cemetery, and after the song everyone there felt a guiltless peace.

  He showed up in unusual places that held no special interest to anyone, or perhaps they were points on a map of some other Buenos Aires. After a recital in Retiro Station, he announced that he would one day be going down into the canal through which flowed the Maldonado stream, under Juan B. Justo Avenue, which crosses the city from east to west, to sing a tango there that no one now remembered, whose rhythm was an indiscernible blend of habaneras, milongas and rancheras.

  However, he sang in another tunnel first: the one that opens like a delta beneath the obelisk at the Plaza de la República, at the intersection of 9 de Julio Avenue and Corrientes Street. The place is inappropriate for his voice, because sounds carry for eighteen or twenty feet and then suddenly die out. At one of the entrances is a string of chairs with footrests for the few passersby who might want their shoes shined, and tiny stools for those who serve them. There are lots of posters of soccer teams and Playboy bunnies around them. Two of the branches lead to kiosks and shops selling army surplus, second-hand magazines and papers, shoelaces and insoles, homemade perfumes, stamps, handbags and wallets, industrial reproductions of Picasso’s Guernica and Paloma, umbrellas and socks.

  Martel didn’t sing in those populous labyrinthine detours but in one of the dead-end hollows where some homeless families had set up camp. Any voice there drops like lead as soon as it leaves the throat: the density of the air forces it down. But Martel was heard in all the tributaries of the tunnels because his voice swerved around the obstacles like a thread of water. It was the only time he sang Caminito (Little Path), by Filiberto and Coria Peñaloza, a tango inferior to the demands of his repertoire. Virgili thought he’d done it because everyone around there could follow the words without getting lost, and because he didn’t want to add another enigma to an underground labyrinth where there were already so many.

  No one knew why Martel performed in such inhospitable places, without charging a cent. At the end of the spring of 2001 there were lots of clubs, theaters, bars and milongas in Buenos Aires that would have welcomed him with open arms. Perhaps he was ashamed of exposing a body mercilessly abused by illness day after day. He spent two weeks in hospital with fibrosis of the liver. Sometimes he got nosebleeds. His arthrosis was relentless. Still, when no one expected it, he showed up at these absurd locations and sang for himself.

  Those recitals must have had a meaning that only he knew, and I said so to Virgili. I proposed to find out if the places Martel went to were linked by some order or plan. Any logical device or the repetition of a detail could reveal the complete sequence and allow me to get to his next appearance ahead of him. I was convinced the outings had to do with a Buenos Aires we didn’t see and during an entire morning I amused myself composing anagrams from the name of the city, without getting anywhere. The ones I did come up with were stupid: Serious bean / Bruise a nose / Easier on bus / I sane, U sober.

  One afternoon, about two, Martel went all the way into the Waterworks Palace, where the ironwork footbridges, the valves, tanks, pipes and columns, which one hundred years before had distributed seventy-two thousand tons of drinking water to the inhabitants of Buenos Aires, were still preserved intact. I heard that he’d sung another obscure tango there and left in a wheelchair. So, it wasn’t important to him to repeat the patterns of history, because history doesn’t move, doesn’t speak, everything in it has already been said. He wanted, rather, to recover a past city that only he knew and transfigure it into the present of a city he’d take with him when he died.

  TWO

  October 2001

  As the days went by, I began to figure out that Buenos Aires, designed by its two successive founders as a perfect checkerboard, had turned into a labyrinth that occurred not just in space, as they all did, but also in time. I frequently attempted to go somewhere and found I couldn’t, because hundreds of people were waving signs protesting against unemployment and salary cuts. One afternoon I wanted to cross Diagonal Norte Avenue to get to Florida Street, and a fierce wall of indignant demonstrators, beating a drum, obliged me to make a detour. Two of the women raised their hands as if greeting me and I replied in kind. I must have done something I shouldn’t have because they spat at me, hurling insults I’d never heard and didn’t then know the meaning of: ‘You a rat, informer, faggot? Did you get a good pay-off? What’d they paid you?’ A woman tried to hit me, and they held her back. Two hours later, when I was going back along the street where
the Cathedral is, I ran into them again and feared the worst. But by then they seemed tired and ignored me.

  What happened with people also happened with places: they constantly changed their mood, seriousness, language. One of Buenos Aires inhabitants’ regular expressions is: ‘I can’t find myself here,’ which is the equivalent of saying ‘I’m not myself here.’ A few days after arriving I visited the house at 994 Maipú Street where Borges had lived for more than forty years, and I had the sensation that I’d seen it somewhere else or, which was worse, that it was a scene destined to disappear as soon as I turned my back. I took some photographs and, when I got them developed, I noticed that the entrance hall had been transformed in a subtle way and the floor tiles were arranged in a different pattern.

  Something worse happened to me with Julio Martel. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t attend any of his performances, which were extravagant and sporadic. Someone told me where he lived and I spent hours waiting outside the door to his house until I saw him come out. He was short, with thick, black hair, stiffened with hairspray and lacquer. He hopped along like a lobster, perhaps leaning on a cane. I tried to follow him in a taxi and lost him near the Plaza del los Dos Congresos, at a corner cut off by a teachers’ demonstration. I had the feeling that in the Buenos Aires of those months the threads of reality moved out of step with the people and were weaving a labyrinth in which no one could find anything, or anyone.

  El Tucumano told me that some companies organized guided hour or two-hour-long tours for Europeans who disembarked at Ezeiza airport on their way to the glaciers of Patagonia, Iguazú Falls or the inlets of Puerto Madryn, where the whales went mad as they thunderously gave birth. The buses often got lost among the ruins of the Camino Negro11 or in the quagmires of La Boca and wouldn’t reappear for days, and even then the passengers would have no memory of whatever it was that had held them up.