The Tango Singer

by Tomás Eloy Martínez

  The pink water of the river gradually changed as it flowed from one canal to the next, detaching itself in the locks from the urine, semen, scandals of the city and frenzies of the birds, purifying itself of the savage past, life’s toxins, and returning to the transparency of its origins until eventually cloistering itself in those tanks criss-crossed by streamers and joists, but awake, even in memory, always awake, because water was the only thing that could find its way through the ins and outs of that labyrinth.

  The central patio, which Boye earmarked for public baths, but the overblown construction of which had reduced to an area of three hundred square meters, was covered in mosaics whose extravagant designs obsessively imitated the geometry of kaleidoscopes. At that time of the afternoon when the light coming in through the skylights hit them directly, vapors of colors more vivid even than rainbows rose from the floor, forming shimmering arcs that broke up when the slightest sound vibrated in the cavern. Martel went over to one of the banisters that separated the tanks from the abyss and sang: Aaaaaaa. The colors waved madly, and the echo of the sleeping metals repeated the vowel infinitely: aaaaaaaa.

  Then, he stood up so straight and tall that he resembled another being, handsome and supple. Alcira thought some miracle had restored him to health. His hair, which Martel always combed with brilliantine, slicking it down and straightening it to look like that of his idol Carlos Gardel, sprang up in rebellious ringlets. His face was transfigured by an astounded expression that conveyed both beatitude and wildness, as if the palace had put a spell on him.

  I heard him sing an other-worldly song then – Alcira told me – with a voice that seemed to contain thousands of other bereaved voices. It must have been an antediluvian tango, because he phrased it in a language even less comprehensible than that of the works in his repertoire; it was more like phonetic sparks, random sounds in which you could detect feelings like sorrow, desertion, lamented lost happiness, homesickness, to which only Martel’s voice could give any meaning. What do brenai, ayaúú, panísola mean? Because that was more or less what he sang. I felt that it wasn’t just one person’s past flowing through that music, but all those pasts the city had witnessed as far back in time as you could go, to the time when it was just useless scrubland.

  The song lasted two or three minutes. Martel was exhausted when he finished it, and struggled back to the iron girder. There had been some subtle change in the premises. The immense tanks still reflected, now very quietly, the last waves of the voice, and the radiance from the skylights brushed the damp mosaics of the patio and lifted smoky figures as distinct as snowflakes. It wasn’t those variations that caught Alcira’s attention, however, but an unexpected awakening of the objects. Was the handle of some valve turning? Was it possible that the water, though cut off since 1915, was stretching in the locks? Things like that never happen, she told herself. Nevertheless, the door of the tank in the southeast corner, sealed by the rust of its hinges, was now ajar and a milky brightness marked the fissure. The singer stood up, driven by another flow of energy, and walked towards the place. I pretended to lean on him so he would lean on me, Alcira told me months later. It was me who opened the door all the way, she said. A stench of death and damp took my breath away. There was something in the tank, but we didn’t see anything. Outside it was covered by a decorative mansard, with two skylights letting in the three o’clock afternoon sun. From the floor, as shiny as if no one had ever touched it, rose the same mist we’d seen in other parts of the palace. But the silence was thicker there: so absolute you could almost touch it. Neither Martel nor I dared speak, although we were both thinking then what we didn’t say out loud till we’d left the building: that the door of the tank had been opened by the ghost of the adolescent who’d been tortured in that space a century before.

  The disappearance of Felicitas Alcántara happened on the last afternoon of 1899. She’d just turned fourteen and had already been a famous beauty since childhood. Tall, with an indolent manner, she had astonishing iridescent eyes, which instantly poisoned anyone who looked into them with inevitable love. Many had asked for her hand in matrimony, but her parents felt she was worthy only of a prince. At the end of the nineteenth century princes didn’t come to Buenos Aires. It would be twenty-five years yet before Umberto of Savoy, Edward Windsor and the Maharaja of Kapurtala appeared. The Alcántaras lived, therefore, in voluntary seclusion. Their Bourbon residence, in San Isidro, on the banks of the Río de la Plata, was adorned, like the Waterworks Palace, with four towers covered in slate and tortoiseshell. They were so ostentatious that on clear days they could be seen from the coast of Uruguay.

  On December 31st, just after one in the afternoon, Felicitas and her four younger sisters were cooling off in the yellow water of the river. The family’s governesses were all French. There were too many of them and they didn’t know the customs of the country. To keep themselves occupied they wrote letters home or talked of their romantic disappointments while the girls disappeared from view, in the reed beds by the beach. From the stoves in the house came aromas of the turkeys and suckling pigs roasting for the midnight meal. In the cloudless sky birds flew in untidy gusts, pecking at each other viciously. One of the governesses commented that in the village she came from in Gascony there was no worse omen than the wrath of birds.

  At one-thirty, the girls were supposed to go home for their siesta. When the governesses called them, Felicitas did not appear. They could see a few sailboats on the horizon and clouds of butterflies over the stiff, scorched puddles. For a long time the governesses searched in vain. They weren’t afraid she’d drowned, because she was a strong swimmer who knew all the river’s tricks. Boats filled with fruits and vegetables passed by on their way back from the markets and, from the shore, the desperate women shouted to them asking if they’d seen a distracted girl in the deeper waters upstream. No one paid them any attention. They’d all been celebrating the new year since first thing and were rowing drunkenly. Three quarters of an hour went by.

  That loss of time was fatal, because Felicitas didn’t appear that day or the following ones, and her parents always believed that if they’d been informed straight away, they would have found a trail. Before dawn on January 1st 1900, several police patrols were combing the region from the islands of the Tigre Delta all the way down to the banks of Belgrano, marring the summer tranquility. The search was under the command of the ferocious colonel and commissioner, Ramón L. Falcón, who would become famous in 1909 when he dispersed the crowd gathered in Plaza Lorea to protest the electoral fraud. Eight people died in the skirmish and another sixteen were gravely injured. Six months later, the young Russian anarchist Simon Radowitzky, who had miraculously emerged unscathed, blew the commissioner up in revenge by throwing a bomb into his carriage as it passed. Radowitzky expiated his crime for twenty-one years in the Ushuahia prison. Falcón is today immortalized by a marble statue two blocks from the scene of the attack.

  The commissioner was known for his resolve and perspicacity. None of the cases he’d been assigned had ever been left unsolved, until the disappearance of Felicitas Alcántara. When no guilty party was available, he’d invent one. But on this occasion he lacked suspects, a body and even an explicable crime. There was a single obvious motive that no one dared mention: the disturbing beauty of the victim. A few boaters thought they’d seen, on the last afternoon of the year, a well-built, older man with large ears and a handlebar moustache, scouring the beaches with binoculars from a rowboat. One of them said the onlooker had two enormous warts beside his nose, but no one attached much importance to this claim, since Colonel Falcón had precisely the same identifying marks.

  Buenos Aires was then such a splendid city that Julet Huret, correspondent for Le Figaro, wrote that when he disembarked it reminded him of London with its narrow streets lined with benches, Vienna with its two-horse carriages and Paris with its wide sidewalks and terrace cafés. The central avenues were lit with incandescent lamps that often exploded when someone pas
sed by. They were excavating tunnels for the subway system. Two lines of electrified streetcars circulated from Ministro Inglés Street to the Portones de Palermo and from the Plaza de Mayo to Retiro Station. The racket cracked the foundations of some houses and made their residents think the end of the world was nigh. The capital opened the doors of its palaces to its illustrious visitors. The most praised was the Waterworks, in spite of how, according to the poet Rubén Darío, it imitated the sick imagination of Ludwig II of Bavaria. Until 1902, the palace was unguarded. Since the only treasure in the place were the water galleries and there was no danger of anyone robbing them, the government considered paying for security a useless expense. The disappearance of some terracotta decorations imported from England resulted in security guards being hired.

  Buenos Aires’ water was extracted by huge siphons in the river a mile off the coast of the neighborhood of Belgrano, and taken through underwater tunnels to deposits in Palermo, where the excrement was filtered out and salts and chlorine added. After the purification, a network of pipes propelled it towards the palace on Córdoba Avenue. Commissioner Falcón ordered all the pipes to be drained and checked for evidence, which left the poorer quarters of the city without water that torrid February of 1900.

  Months passed with no news of Felicitas. In early 1901 pamphlets appeared before the Alcántaras’ front door with insidious messages about the victim’s fate. None gave the slightest clue. La Felicidad was a virgin. Not anymore, said one. And another, more perverse: Ride Felicitas for a peso in the whorehouse at 2300 Junín Street. That address does not exist.

  The adolescent’s body was discovered one morning in April of 1901, when the night watchman arrived at the Waterworks Palace to clean the living space assigned to him and his family in the southeast wing of the palace. The girl was covered in a light tunic of river grasses and her mouth was full of round pebbles that turned to dust when they fell to the ground. Contrary to what the authorities had speculated, she was as immaculate as the day she came into the world. Her beautiful eyes were frozen in an expression of astonishment, and the only sign of mistreatment was a dark line around her neck left by the guitar string used to strangle her. Beside the corpse were the remains of a fire the murderer must have lit and a fine linen handkerchief of a no-longer identifiable color, with the still discernible initials RLF. The news of the initials was profoundly upsetting to Commissioner Falcón, because those were his initials and it was a given that the handkerchief belonged to the guilty party. Till the end of his days he maintained that the kidnapping and murder of Felicitas Alcántara was an act of vengeance against him, and came up with the impossible hypothesis that the girl had been taken by boat to the deposit in Palermo, strangled there and dragged through the pipes to the palace on Córdoba Street. Falcón never ventured a word on the motives of the crime, even less fathomable once sex and money were ruled out.

  Shortly after Felicitas’ body was found, the Alcántaras sold their property and emigrated to France. The security guards refused to occupy the apartment in the southeast rectangle of the Waterworks Palace, choosing instead the wooden house the government offered them on the banks of the Riachuelo, in one of the most insalubrious areas of the city. At the end of 1915, the President of the Republic personally ordered the wretched rooms to be closed, sealed and removed from the public records, which is why on all the diagrams of the palace subsequent to that date there appears an irregular space, which is still attributed to a construction error. In Argentina there is now a secular custom of suppressing from history all the facts that contradict the official ideas of the grandeur of the country. There are no impure heroes or lost wars. The canonical books of the nineteenth century pride themselves on the disappearance of the blacks from Buenos Aires, without taking into consideration that in the records of 1840 a quarter of the population still declared themselves black or mulatto. With a similar intention, Borges wrote in 1972 that people remembered Evita only because the newspapers kept committing the stupid error of mentioning her. It’s understandable, then, even if the southeast corner of the Waterworks Palace could be seen from the street, people would say the place didn’t exist.

  Alcira’s tale made me think that the Alcántara girl and Evita summoned up the same sort of resistance, one for her beauty, the other for her power. In the girl, beauty was intolerable because it gave her power; in Evita, power was intolerable because it gave her recognition. Both their lives were so excessive that, like the inconvenient facts of history, they were left without a real place of their own. Only in novels could they find the place they belonged, as always happens in Argentina to people who have the arrogance to exist too much.

  THREE

  November 2001

  The boarding house was silent during the day and noisy at night, when the tenants of the room next door became embroiled in their interminable fights and the kids started screaming. I resigned myself, therefore, to writing my dissertation elsewhere. Every day, from one in the morning till six, I was at a table in the Café Británico, across from Parque Lezama. It was just a few steps from my riotous dwelling and it never closed. Sometimes I whiled away the hours contemplating the shadows of the ruined gardens through the filleted windows and the benches now occupied by homeless families. On one of those benches, in the spring of 1944, Borges had kissed Estela Canto for the first time. Though ashamed of his uncontrollable ardor the previous day he’d sent her a passionate love letter: I am in Buenos Aires, I shall see you tonight, I shall see you tomorrow, I know we shall be happy together (happy and drifting and sometimes speechless and most gloriously silly). Borges was forty-five years old then, but he expressed his feelings with clumsy terror. That night he’d kissed Estela on one of the benches and then kissed and embraced her again in the amphitheater off Brasil Street, opposite the cupolas of the Russian Orthodox Church.

  Hugo Wast, a rabid Catholic novelist, who had just been named Minister of Justice, decided to censure everything the Vatican considered immoral – the idea of sex, in the first instance – because he believed that therein lay the origins of Argentine decadence. He went after the tango viciously, ordering obscene lyrics to be replaced by more pious ones, and sent Buenos Aires policemen out to hunt down couples who touched each other in the streets.

  Borges and Estela were easy prey. In the lonely moonlit amphitheater, their embracing silhouettes were conspicuously eye-catching. An officer from Station 14 suddenly appeared before them, ‘as if he’d fallen out of the sky,’ Estela would later say, and asked for their identity papers. They’d both forgotten them. He arrested them and left them sitting in a patio, with other vagabonds, until three in the morning.

  I learned this story from Sesostris Bonorino, who knew even the tiniest details. Only later did I imagine where he’d got them. He knew that Estela had a packet of Condal cigarettes in her handbag that night and that she’d smoked two of the nine that were left; he could describe the contents of the pockets of Borges’ jacket: a pen, two candies, several rust-coloured one-peso bills, and a piece of paper on which he’d written a line from Yeats: I’m looking for the face I had / Before the world was made.

  One night, when I was leaving for the Café Británico, I heard someone calling me from the cellar. Bonorino was kneeling on the fourth or fifth step, sticking index cards on the banister. He was squat and bald as an onion, with no neck and shoulders raised so high it was hard to tell whether he had a backpack on or was a hunchback. Not long before, seeing him in the light of day, I’d been shocked by his yellow, almost translucent coloring. He seemed affable, and treated me with deference, perhaps because I was there temporarily and because I shared his passion for books. He asked if I’d lend him a book for a few hours, Through the Labyrinth, the thick volume edited by Prestel I’d brought in my luggage.

  I don’t need to read it, because I already know everything it says, he bragged. I just want to study the figures.

  I was quite taken aback and it was several seconds before I could even answer him. No one
had seen Prestel’s book, which remained unopened in my suitcase. It also seemed improbable that he could have read it, since it had been published less than a year earlier in London and New York. Furthermore, he pronounced each letter of the word Through as if it were a Spanish word. I wondered whether Enriqueta, when she cleaned my room, also went through my things.