The Tango Singer

by Tomás Eloy Martínez

  Violeta Miller was one of these women, Alcira told me. Third daughter of a tailor in the suburbs of Lodz, illiterate and without a dowry, one morning in 1914, she accepted, on the way out of synagogue, the company of a businessman with fine manners who paid her two more visits and on the third proposed. What the girl thought was the happiest moment of her life was actually the beginning of her downfall. On the ship, as she began her newlywed voyage to Buenos Aires, she found out that her husband had another seven wives on board, and that they were all destined for the whorehouses of Argentina.

  The very night they arrived, she was auctioned in a lot with six other Polish girls. Wearing a school uniform, she stepped up onto the platform in the Café Parisién. Someone ordered her to hold up her hands and count on her fingers up to twelve if they asked her in Yiddish how old she was. In fact she was already fifteen, but she had very little body hair, no breasts and had only menstruated a few times, at irregular intervals.

  The pimp who bought her ran a brothel with twelve young girls. He relieved Violeta of her virginity as a matter of course and, at dawn, when he heard her whimpering, whipped her into silence. The marks took a week to heal over. Thus, tormented and abused, she was obliged to serve from four the next afternoon until the following dawn, satiating dock workers and clerks who spoke to her in unintelligible tongues. She tried to escape, and they caught her a few meters from the house. The pimp punished her by branding her back with a cattle iron. To suffer all pains at once would be better than this purgatory, Violeta said to herself, and decided to fast to death. She lasted a week on nothing but one glass of water, and she would have let herself die if the madams who looked after her hadn’t brought her a cardboard box with the ear of another fugitive inmate, warning her that, if she didn’t give in, they’d leave her without eyes so she couldn’t defend herself.

  For five years, Violeta was moved from one whorehouse to another. She lived in Buenos Aires without knowing what the city was like: an electric light was always lit in her room so she couldn’t distinguish between night and day. The small size of her body attracted innumerable perverts, who thought she was prepubescent and mistook her lack of enthusiasm for inexperience. At the end of the summer of 1920 she contracted a tenacious fever that kept her laid up for months. She might have died if a bricklayer, who was also Polish, to whom Violeta had confided the story of her misfortunes, hadn’t taken advantage of his visits to smuggle her in little bottles of glucose and antipyretic capsules. Two months later, when the poor thing was still convalescent, one of her companions in misery whispered that they were going to put her up for sale again. It was an atrocious piece of news, because her body was in a bad way from the fevers and so much use, and in the northern province of El Chaco, where unfortunates like her ended their days, girls were worked until their sphincters ruptured.

  During the five and a half years of her martyrdom, Violeta had managed to save, centavo by centavo, the money from her tips. She had two hundred and fifty pesos, a fifth of what they’d paid for her at the first auction, and, now that she was worth nothing, it might have perhaps been enough to buy herself. That was impossible, because the women were only handed over to other men in the same business. Desperate, she asked the bricklayer if anyone he knew would be willing to pose as a pimp. It would have to be somebody bold. After many inquiries, a circus actor finally accepted the role. He introduced himself as an Italian, mentioned an imaginary brothel on the Isla Grande de Chiloé, and closed the deal in less than half an hour. A week later, Violeta was free.

  She traveled in goods trains up to the northeast of Argentina. She stayed in some tedious town for a few months, working as a maid or in shops and, when she thought they’d discovered her trail, she fled to another town. Along the way she learned the alphabet and the Catholic catechism. At the end of the third winter she disembarked in Catamarca. There she felt safe and decided to stay. She took a room in the best hotel in the city and in a couple of weeks had spent almost all her savings. It was enough, because in that time she’d seduced the manager of the hotel and the treasurer of the provincial bank. Both were God and wife fearing, and Violeta got from them more than they could afford to give: one paid for her room for as long as she wanted to stay, the other got her a couple of low interest loans, and introduced her to the ladies of the Ministry of Prayer, who met on Fridays to say their rosaries. Determined to recover the happiness and respect she’d lost in her life of forced prostitution by any means necessary, Violeta opened her heart to them. She told them she’d been born Jewish, but that her greatest desire, since she was a little girl, was to receive the light of Christ. The ladies convinced the bishop to baptize her, and acted as her sponsors at the ceremony.

  The city of Catamarca was devoted to the Virgin of the Valley, and Violeta took advantage of her connections to open a business dealing in religious objects, selling medallions blessed in Rome, images of the Virgin for schools, votive offerings for the miraculously cured infirm and plenary indulgences for the dying. The pilgrims came from far and wide, and this steady stream made her a very rich woman. She was generous to the Church, supported a soup kitchen and the first Friday of every month took toys to the Children’s Hospital. Her petite frame, which had caused her such grief in the brothels, was taken as a sign of refinement in Catamarca. Several men proposed to her, and Violeta turned each of her admirers down gently. I’m promised to Our Lord, she said to them, and I’ve offered him my chastity. This was at least half true: she had never been interested in sex, much less after all she’d had to endure by force. She hated the bitter sweat and violence of males. She hated the human race. At times she hated herself as well.

  She lived like that for more than forty-five years. With inexpressible joy she read that the Zwi Migdal mafiosos had been caught one after the other thanks to the evidence of one brave victim, and she sent medallions of the Virgin to the commissioner and judge who put them in prison.

  She never heard a word from her sisters, whom she imagined murdered in some concentration camp. She never wanted to return to Lodz, and even refused to watch the few films about the Holocaust shown in Catamarca. The only place she felt a melancholy nostalgia for was the Buenos Aires she was never allowed to know.

  When she turned seventy, she decided to die as a lady in the city where she’d been nothing but a slave. On one of her rare visits to the capital, she bought a piece of land in the neighborhood of Mataderos, on the Avenida de los Corrales. She commissioned a renowned firm of architects to build a house identical to those she’d envied as a child in Lodz, with a dining room to seat fourteen guests, a bedroom with wall to wall walk-in closets, marble bathtubs big enough to stretch out in, and a library with shelves up to the ceiling, packed with leather-bound volumes chosen by color and size. When the house was ready, she moved to Buenos Aires without saying goodbye to anyone.

  Since she’d become fond of observing the constellations during her walks through the valleys of Catamarca, she stipulated that all the bedrooms of the new house should have roofs of reinforced glass, which obliged the architects to design an irregular angled structure with a complicated drainage system and very delicate waterproof covering, plus electrical mechanisms to open parts of the roof on clear days and close out the light of dawn.

  The greatest luxury was, however, a raised marble platform to the right of the dining room, beside the parlor, enclosed by carved balusters, on top of which she had them mount an astronomical telescope and an armchair that fit her tiny body like a glove. The platform was reached by a cage-style elevator, operated by machinery that stuck out from the ceiling, hidden within a Tudor arch that was painted green.

  In Buenos Aires she returned to the religion of her ancestors. She attended synagogue on Friday afternoons, learned to read Hebrew and had a ketubah written in the most elegant calligraphy certifying her false marriage of half a century ago. She mounted it in a bronze frame with symbols of the four seasons in relief and hung it in the most conspicuous place in the dining room.
She had a gold mezuzah affixed to each of the doorposts in the house, with the name of the Almighty and verses from Deuteronomy.

  Solitude, however, gave her sleepless nights. Alcira told me that two women took turns cleaning the house, but both of them had stolen lengths of silk and tried to break into her jewelry case. In 1975 shots were heard in the streets almost every night, and on television they talked of guerrilla attacks on barracks. She felt relieved when she knew the military had taken charge of the government and were rounding up everyone who opposed them. Her calm didn’t last. In the late autumn of 1978 she had two falls when getting out of the bath as well as a number of severe asthma attacks. The doctor demanded she dispense with her mistrust and hire a nurse.

  She interviewed fifteen applicants for the post, none of whom she liked. Some because they ate too quickly, others for treating her like an imbecilic child, others for expecting two days off a week. The last, who arrived when she’d given up hope, went even beyond what she’d imagined: she was diligent, quiet, and seemed so anxious to serve that she preferred – she said – only to leave the house when absolutely necessary: once every two weeks to do the shopping. Her letters of recommendation could not have been better, one written by a naval lieutenant who expressed his ‘gratitude and admiration for the bearer, who cared devotedly for my mother for four years, until her demise,’ and the other by a lieutenant commander who credited her with his wife’s recovery.

  Margarita Langman also had the advantage of her faith: she was Jewish and God-fearing. Violeta began to depend on her like a parasite. No one had ever anticipated her desires. Margarita foresaw them even before she’d conceived them. Almost every night, while the elderly lady observed the constellations, the woman stood by her side, adjusting the telescope lenses and explaining the imperceptible rotations of Centaurus beneath the Southern Cross. She seemed immune to tedium. If she wasn’t with Violeta, she was putting her suitcase in order or sewing. The television and radio transmitted nonstop government warnings, which accentuated the mistrust they both felt toward strangers. ‘Do you know where your son is right now?’ ‘Do you know who’s knocking at your door?’ ‘Are you sure you don’t have an enemy of the fatherland sitting at your dining table?’ Violeta was astute and thought herself able to identify deceitfulness in a person at first glance. Although she felt an instinctive trust towards Margarita, it seemed strange that she wouldn’t give straight answers to questions about her family, and that neither of her brothers, of the two she said she had, ever visited her or called her on the phone. She was afraid she might not be what she seemed. Now that she’d known the pleasure of real company, she couldn’t imagine her life without her.

  One morning, when the nurse went out to the market for the fortnightly shopping, Violeta decided to snoop around in her room. Surreptitiously looking through the bags of other of the Migdal’s prostitutes or her employees at the devotional shop in Catamarca had allowed her to save herself in time from robberies and slander. But this time, a few minutes after she’d crossed the threshold and when she’d barely had time to look at the neat bed with its embroidered pillow slips, a few books on the nightstand and the suitcase on top of the wardrobe, she heard noises at the front door and had to leave. Now she regretted having given Margarita a set of keys, but what could she do? The doctor had said another fall could leave her confined to bed and, in that case, she would be at the mercy of her guardian. It would be better to put her to the test before that happened.

  I forgot my shawl, the nurse said. And besides, there were so many people in the market. I better go this afternoon instead. I don’t like to leave you alone for so long.

  Violeta spent the following week irritated even by hearing her washing the dishes. She paid her one hundred thousand pesos a month, and each centavo reminded her of her adolescent martyrdom. She hated the energy Margarita had even very late at night, when she’d been left with a plundered and pained body. She hated seeing her read, because she had never been allowed to have a book in her hands until she’d gotten free, at the age of twenty, when she no longer felt curiosity for any of them. She didn’t like the way she looked at her, the shape of her head, her cracked hands, the monotony of her voice. But what incensed her most was never being alone in the house to go through her secret things.

  For a long time, Alcira told me, the old lady had wanted to buy a diamond-studded gold Magen David. The need to put Margarita to the test finally made up her mind. All Jewish girls dream of having one, and when she saw her piece of jewelry, she’d be envious. Did Violeta not know the human heart better than anyone? She impatiently summoned a goldsmith from Libertad Street and negotiated, millimeter by millimeter, the design and cost of a heavy 24 carat gold star with blue-toned diamonds in each of the six points, that would hang on a thick-linked chain.

  One December morning, the jeweler announced that the Magen David was ready and offered to deliver it, but the old lady turned him down. She would rather, she said, have Margarita pick it up. It was her opportunity to get her away from the house for two or three hours. They argued bitterly about the matter. The nurse insisted that it wasn’t prudent to abandon Violeta for such a long time, while she invented excuses to make her go.

  Summer was near and it was extremely hot. Through the balcony shutters, Violeta spied on the nurse as she walked down Avenida de los Corrales toward the number 155 bus stop. She saw her cover her head with a scarf that hid half her face and take shelter in the shade of a tree. The air above the paving stones shimmered with heat. A bus came along. Once certain that Margarita had boarded, Violeta waited ten minutes and then triumphantly entered the forbidden room.

  She didn’t even leaf through the books on the nightstand. None of them looked important. A few dresses hung from coat hangers, arranged by color, two pairs of pants and two blouses. If Margarita was hiding something, it had to be in her suitcase, which she’d left on top of the wardrobe, out of reach. How to get it down? She discarded one method after another. Finally, she remembered the wheeled ladder the architects had sold her against their will.

  She hadn’t learned how to read in the whorehouses, but she’d picked up other skills: suspicion, robbery, lock picking. She was surprised by the ease with which, from the fourth step, leaning on the wardrobe, she managed to open the lock on the case and raise the lid. Disillusioned, she saw only a few poor quality shirts and a photo album.

  On the first pages of the album were trivial family images, Alcira told me. Someone who must have been Margarita’s father, with his shoulders covered by a tallit, hugged a little girl of ten or eleven, with an orphaned look in her eyes, defenseless against the hostility of the world. In other pictures, Margarita herself, dressed in a schoolgirl’s smock, dodged the camera, was surprised blowing out a birthday candle, played in the sea. In the last one, with a windmill in the background, she smiled beside a man who could be her brother, although his skin was dark and his features looked Indian, like the peasants in northern Argentina. She had a baby just a few months old in her arms.

  Hours later, when Violeta was being interrogated in the Stella Maris Church, she would say that, observing this last photo, she’d sensed her nurse’s double life. A chill ran up my spine, she said in her statement. I thought the man in the picture was perhaps her husband, the baby her child. I realized I was entering into her past and now I couldn’t leave it. At the edge, on one side of the photos I found a notebook I’d seen her with many times. It wasn’t a diary, as I’d often thought, but rather pages of meaningless sentences, dirty clippings of papers that said: cheese, casserole, rude, I want, I love my mummy, my name is Catalina, my teacher’s name is Catalina, and at the end of each phrase a notation in a steadier hand: Fermín, ask why they didn’t give you a glass of milk – Tota, is Daddy or Mummy active in the M? Both? Repeat the 5 times table tomorrow. Pages and pages of the same. Nothing caught my attention, Violeta would say to the officer who interrogated her. I was about to close the case and when I touched the lid I felt it was full of pap
ers, objects, I don’t know what, I was curious and scrupulous as well, because the papers were loose and the woman would know if I got them out of order. My hunches are infallible, however, and something in my heart told me she was guilty. I gathered up my courage, found the false bottom of the lid and pulled out some blank papers. All of them were stamped with embossed military letterhead and coats of arms, with the names of this admiral or that naval lieutenant. Further down I found unknown people’s identity cards and civic passbooks. Some of them, however, had the woman’s photo, sometimes with her hair dyed, and with other names, Catalina Godel, Catalina Godel, I remember that one clearly, Sara Bruski, Alicia Malamud, and some gentile surnames as well, Gómez, Arellano, who knows how many more. How could I have imagined that Margarita had been a teacher in Bajo Flores and that she’d escaped from a military prison. One doesn’t know who’s who anymore in these confusing times.

  She stepped down off the ladder and stopped to think. The nurse’s reference letters were undoubtedly forged, and she had been an idiot not to have verified them by phone. Perhaps what they said was false but all the rest was undoubtedly true: the coat of arms with anchors and the embossed names of the officers. She had no time to waste. Then, with the sangfroid she’d learned from her years of slavery, she dialed the telephone number at the bottom of the letterhead. The officer on duty answered the phone. ‘It’s a matter of life or death,’ she said, according to what Alcira told me later in the Café La Paz. The operator asked what number she was calling from and ordered her to stay on the line. Less than two minutes later the lieutenant commander was on the line. ‘How fortunate it’s you, sir,’ Violeta said. ‘Is the nurse I hired not the same one who took care of your wife?’ ‘Tell me the name that woman gave you. Name or names, the officer demanded. He had a rough, impatient voice, like the pimp who’d bought her in the Café Parisién. ‘Margarita Langman,’ said Violeta. Suddenly, she too felt hunted. The interminable past came crashing down on her. ‘Describe her,’ the captain pressed. The old lady didn’t know how to do so. She spoke of the photo with the baby and the man with Andean features. Then, she gave her address on the Avenida de los Corrales, told him discreetly that she was seventy-nine years of age. ‘That woman is a very dangerous character,’ the officer said. ‘We’re on our way over there right now. If she gets there before we do, keep her there, distract her. You’d better not let her get away, eh? You’d better not let her get away.’