The Tango Singer

by Tomás Eloy Martínez

  I, Bruno Cadogan, knew then that the camellias Sabadell left in the Plazoleta del Resero weren’t to commemorate the barbarous butchers of Echeverría’s story and the film Faena, but some more recent, more ruthless ones. Alcira Villar said in the Café La Paz that, if they’d only stayed a few minutes in that corner of death, it was because Martel wanted to honor Catalina Godel not at the final point of her misfortunes but at the house where she’d hidden for almost six months, after having escaped from the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada. What I don’t understand, I said to Alcira, is why Martel reserved the arcades for a recital that he never gave. If you’d known him, she answered, you would have realized that he was no longer singing in public by then. He didn’t like to be seen so haggard and weak. He didn’t want to be bothered by anyone and while Sabadell was placing the bouquet off lowers he recited a tango under his breath for Catalina Godel. Maybe he’d initially intended to get out of the car and walk over to the clinic, I don’t know for sure. Martel’s plans were as hard to fathom as those of a cat.

  FOUR

  Catalina Godel left home at the age of nineteen, when she fell madly in love with a rural school teacher who was passing through Buenos Aires. Her mother’s weeping, her father’s lectures on the unhappiness she could expect from a man of another religion and lower social class, her older brothers’ curses were all to no avail. She went to work at her lover’s remote school in the deserts of Santiago del Estero. There she found out that he was a militant in the Peronist resistance and unhesitatingly embraced the same cause. After a few months she’d learned how to make Molotov cocktails quickly and became skilled at cleaning weapons and shooting targets. She discovered she was brave, ready for anything.

  Although her companion sometimes disappeared for weeks at a time, Catalina didn’t worry. She got used to not asking, to dissembling and to talking only when strictly necessary. The silence only weighed on her on New Year’s Eve 1973, when she stayed alone in the little school, besieged by a dust storm while the earth seemed to burn beneath her feet. She heard on the radio, days later, that her companion had been taken prisoner while attempting to capture a traffic police post on General Paz Avenue, in Buenos Aires. She thought the action foolish and rash, but understood that the people were fed up with the abuses and it was necessary to act however possible. She packed her few items of clothing, her childhood photos, and a book by John William Cooke, Peronism and Revolution, which she knew by heart, in a canvas suitcase. She walked to the nearest village and from there took the first bus to Buenos Aires.

  You can’t imagine how much effort Martel and I put into finding out every detail of that life, Alcira Villar told me in the Café La Paz twenty-nine years later, just before I was to return to New York forever.

  I used to see her as the evening began, around seven. For two months I’d been living in an airless little hotel, near Congreso. The heat and flies kept me from sleeping. As I walked towards the café, the asphalt melted beneath my feet. Although the air conditioning kept the La Paz at an even seventy-five degrees, the heat and humidity took hours to peel off me. More than once I stayed there, taking notes for this story, until the waiters began to pile up the tables and wash the floor. Alcira, on the other hand, always arrived looking radiant, and only occasionally, as the night wore on, would she get bags under her eyes. If I pointed this out, she’d touch them with the tips of her fingers and say, without any sarcasm: It’s the happiness of getting old. She told me that she and the singer had discovered the story of Catalina while reading the minutes of the trials of the commanding officers under the dictatorship, and, although it wasn’t much different from thousands of others, Martel was bewitched and for months could think of nothing else. He insisted on searching for witnesses who’d known Catalina on the Avenida de los Corrales or during her years of activism. A minor anecdote would lead to another, Alcira said, and gradually Violeta Miller’s past emerged onto the scene. One of her Polish nephews traveled to Buenos Aires in 1993 to dispute the ownership of the big empty house. We learned how it had all started in Lodz from the nephew.

  It took us almost a year to put together the pieces of the puzzle, Alcira continued. The two women had similar biographies. Catalina and Violeta had both been Jewish women subjected to servitude, and each of them, in their way, had defied their masters. Martel thought that, if they’d trusted each other more, told each other who they were and all that they’d suffered, maybe nothing would have happened to them. But they were both used to suspicion, and so, once separated, Violeta was overcome by fear and meanness and only Catalina could defend her dignity until the end.

  After the attack on the traffic police post, Alcira told me, Catalina’s lover was tried and locked up in the Rawson prison in Patagonia. He was released in May of 1973, but a year and a half later he had gone underground again. Perón had died leaving the government in the hands of his idiot wife and her astrologer who accumulated power by murdering enemies imaginary and real. At that time, Catalina decided to forge a fake ID for herself, that of Margarita Langman, and began to work as a teacher in Bajo Flores, where they let her use a small apartment without a bath room. She was pregnant by then, and for a few days she considered returning to her parents’ house, to be taken care of and to allow her baby to grow up in a happy domestic environment. That bourgeois weakness later struck her as a bad sign.

  Her son was born in the middle of December, 1975. Although the father had been advised of the delivery by phone by Catalina herself – who was admitted to hospital under the name of Margarita – he didn’t appear until a week later. Apparently, when the baby was born his father was submerged beneath the waters of the Río de la Plata, placing underwater mines on the Itatí yacht, property of the Naval High Command. The new family spent January and February hiding out in the house of a foreman of a ranch in Colonia, Uruguay, while they were searched for everywhere and Isabel Perón’s government was falling to pieces. In that brief summer in Colonia, Margarita experienced a lifetime’s worth of happiness. She and her companion took photographs, watched the sunset from the river’s edge and walked hand in hand through the winding streets of the old city, pushing the baby carriage. They returned to Buenos Aires when the military, who had now struck their lethal blow, were murdering everyone they identified as subversives. The former school teacher was one of the first to fall, in April 1976. As soon as she found out, she left the baby in his grandmother’s care and returned to Bajo Flores. She only left there to participate as a volunteer in the suicidal attacks the Montoneros carried out that year.

  She was caught in a trap fourteen months later in the bar Oviedo, in Mataderos, where she’d arranged another of her clandestine meetings. As she walked in, she realized that the place was surrounded by plainclothes military police. She ran toward the arcades, tried to get on a bus as it was pulling away. They cornered her, however, in the entranceway where the clinic is now and took her, blindfolded, to a cellar where they tortured and raped her, while they questioned her about her sexual activity and people she barely knew. After many hours – she never knew how many – they left the ruins of her body in a place called Capucha, where other prisoners survived with sacks over their heads. There she began to heal as much as possible, drinking tiny sips of the water they gave her and repeating her nom de guerre in the darkness, Margarita Langman, I am Margarita Langman. Months went by. She learned through the prisoners’ stealthy gossip that by pretending to break and gaining the torturers’ confidence, perhaps it might be possible to escape and tell what had happened to them. She wrote a confession renouncing her ideals, she handed it to a lieutenant and, when he suggested she read it before a television camera, did so without flinching. She thus managed to be sent to work in a forgery laboratory, where they created false ownership papers for stolen cars, passports and visas from foreign consulates. She gradually and patiently familiarized herself with the names and ranks of her captors and accumulated papers with official letterheads. She even reached the point of falsifying docum
ents for herself, some of which featured her real name. She always carried these documents with her in an envelope for photographic plates that no one would open for fear of exposing the contents.

  She’d been working in the laboratory for a while when they ordered her to point out militants prowling around the neighborhood of Mataderos. It was to be the decisive proof of her loyalty, maybe the step before being set free. She went out with a patrol at seven in the evening. She sat in the passenger seat of a Ford Falcon, with three non-commissioned officers in the back. It was winter and a cold rain was falling. Arriving at the corner of Lisandro de la Torre and Tandil, a bus crashed into the side of the Ford and overturned it. The men traveling with Margarita were knocked out. She was able to escape through a window, with slight cuts on her arms and legs. Her biggest problem was how to get rid of the well-meaning people trying to take her to hospital. She was finally able to slip away into the darkness and seek refuge in Bajo Flores, where the military had been devastatingly effective and almost none of her friends were left. The next morning, in the classified section of Clarín, she read Violeta Miller’s ad for a nurse, forged the letters of recommendation and turned up at the house on Avenida de los Corrales.

  You know the rest, Alcira told me. The afternoon she was going to die, Catalina Godel, Margarita, or whatever you choose to call her now, returned from the jeweler’s with the Magen David, almost at the same time as Violeta finished talking to the torturers. The old lady clung to life with tenacious fury, as the phrase in our national anthem goes. She so feared being discovered that she inevitably gave herself away. She began to tremble. She said she had a chill, that her back hurt and she needed a cup of tea. Let’s leave the pestering till later, Margarita answered with unusual disdain. I’m drenched in sweat and dying for a shower.

  Violeta then committed two errors. She had the Magen David case in her hand and inexplicably didn’t open it. Instead, she raised her eyes and her gaze met that of Margarita. She saw a flash of comprehension. It all happened in a second. The nurse walked past Violeta as if she no longer existed and reached the front door. She ran across the cobbled paving of the avenue, took cover in the arcade on the Plazoleta del Resero and there her executioners caught up with her, in the very place where she’d been captured the first time.

  They sent a Ford Falcon to pick up Violeta Miller every morning to take her to the Stella Maris church, on the other side of the city. There the lieutenant commander interrogated her, Alcira told me, sometimes for five or six hours. He dug up her past and shamed her with her double religious conversion. The elderly lady lost her notion of time. Her chronic osteoporosis was aggravated and, when the interrogation sessions ended, she could barely move. She had to resign herself to hiring nurses who treated her with the same severity as the madams of the brothels. Nothing made her suffer more, however, than the disorder she discovered when she returned each afternoon to the house on the Avenida de los Corrales. The house had been turned into the private preserve of the lieutenant commander, who set about stripping the marble fixtures from the bathrooms, the table from the dining room, the balusters from the small observatory, the elevator, the telescope, the embroidered sheets, the television. Even the strongbox where she kept her jewelry and her bearer’s bonds was ripped out of the wall. The only objects left intact were a Cortázar novel that Margarita had left half finished and the empty sewing basket in the kitchen. The glass roof was perforated one day in two central points in the library, and the rain began to fall mercilessly on the wrecked books.

  Do you remember how Sabadell left the spray of camellias at the southern arcade at noon? Alcira asked me. It was the 20th of November, of course I remember, I answered. I was there, waiting for Martel, and didn’t see him. I already told you we didn’t get out of the car, she repeated. We stayed there watching Sabadell while he set down the flowers and people came and went indifferently through the Plazoleta del Resero. The singer had his head down, without saying a word. His will for silence was so deep and dominant that all I remember of that morning are the fleeting shadows of the vehicles, and the image of Sabadell, who looked naked without his guitar.

  From there we set off for the big house on Avenida de los Corrales, Alcira continued. The property was still under litigation and was worth less than the rubble. The parquet floors had been stripped long ago, and you couldn’t take a step without the glass from the roofs crunching under your shoes.

  Martel, in his wheelchair, asked us to take him into the kitchen. Without hesitation he opened one of the larders, as if the house were familiar to him. He took out a piece of rusty tin with bits of thread stuck on it and a damp copy of Hopscotch, which fell apart as soon as he tried to leaf through it. With these remains in his hands, he sang. I thought he’d begin with Volver, as he’d told us in the car, but he preferred to start with Margarita Gauthier, a tango written by Julio Jorge Nelson12, the Widow of Gardel. Today, overcome, I invoke you, my divine Margarita, he said, lifting up his torso slightly. He carried on like that, as if he might levitate. The lyrics are sickly sweet, but Martel turned the song into a funereal sonnet worthy of Quevedo. When his voice attacked the three sugariest verses of the tango, I noticed his face was bathed in tears: Today, on bended knee by the tomb where your body rests, / I’ve paid the tribute that your soul sighed, / I’ve brought you the spray of now wilting camellias . . . I put a hand on his shoulder to get him to stop, because he could damage his throat, but he finished the song gracefully, rested a few moments and asked Sabadell for a few chords of Volver. Sabadell accompanied him knowingly, without allowing the guitar to compete with the voice: his strumming was more like an extension of the voice’s excess light.

  I thought when he finished Volver we’d leave, but Martel brought his hands up to his chest in an almost theatrical gesture, unexpected in him, and repeated the first verse of Margarita Gauthier at least four times, always in the same register. As the repetition advanced, the words gradually filled with meaning, as if they were collecting up as they went past all the voices that had pronounced them in other times. I remembered, Alcira said, having a similar experience during certain films with a fixed image that stays on the screen for more than a minute: the image doesn’t change, but the person watching it starts to become another. The act of seeing imperceptibly turns into the act of possessing. Today, overcome, I invoke you, my divine Margarita, sang Martel, and the words were no longer outside our bodies but flowing into our bloodstreams, can you understand that, Bruno Cadogan? Alcira asked me. I answered that a long time ago I’d studied a similar idea by the Scottish philosopher David Hume. I quoted: Repetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but in the spirit which contemplates it. That’s what it was like, said Alcira. That phrase clearly defines what I felt. When I heard Martel sing my divine Margarita the first time that afternoon, I didn’t think he was changing the tempo of the melody, but the second or third time I noticed that he was subtly spacing each word. It’s possible he was also spacing the syllables, although my ear isn’t sharp enough to tell. Today, overcome, I invoke you, he sang, and the Margarita of the tango returned to the big house, as if time had not passed, with her body of twenty-four years earlier. Today, overcome, I invoke you, he said, and I felt that this summons was enough to make the glass on the floor vanish and the cobwebs and dust fade away.

  December 2001

  My missed encounter with Martel in the Plazoleta del Resero disturbed me. I lost track of what I was writing and I lost track of myself. I spent several nights in the Británico observing the desolate landscape of the Parque Lezama. When I returned to the boarding house and managed to sleep, the slightest unexpected noise would wake me. I didn’t know what to do about the insomnia and, in dismay, I went out walking through Buenos Aires. Sometimes I strayed off from the ruined Constitución Station, about which Borges had written so much, towards the neighborhoods of San Cristóbal and Balvanera. The streets all looked the same and, although the newspapers called attention to the constant attacks, I didn
’t feel in danger. Gangs of boys no more than ten years old roamed around Constitución. They came out of their shelters looking for food, protecting each other, and asking for spare change. You could see them sleeping in the hollow buildings, covering their faces with newspapers and bags of leftovers. Many people were sleeping rough and, where I saw two one night, I’d find three or four the next. From Constitución I’d walk down San José or Virrey Cevallos to Avenida de Mayo, and then cross the Plaza de los Dos Congresos, with its benches occupied by destitute families. More than once I spent hours of wakefulness at the corner of Rincón and México, spying on Martel’s house, but always in vain. Only once did I see him leave with Alcira Villar at midday – although I didn’t know who she was until weeks later – and, when I tried to follow him in a taxi, a group of demonstrating pensioners blocked my way.

  Even though the city was a flat grid, I couldn’t manage to get my bearings, due to the monotony of the buildings. Nothing is more difficult than noticing the subtle changes in something unchanging, like in a desert or on the sea. Confusion sometimes paralyzed me on any given street corner and, when I emerged from the shock, it was to circle round in search of a café. Fortunately, there were cafés open at all hours, and I’d sit in them and wait until, with the first light of dawn, the houses recovered profiles that allowed me to recognize them. Only then would I return to the boarding house by taxi.