The Tango Singer

by Tomás Eloy Martínez

  Insomnia weakened me. I had hallucinations in which photos of early twentieth-century Buenos Aires would superimpose themselves on images of reality. I would lean out the balcony of my room and, instead of the vulgar buildings across the street, I’d see the terrace of Gath & Chaves, a shop that had disappeared from Florida Street forty years ago, where gentlemen in straw hats and ladies in starched collars drank cups of hot chocolate before a horizon bristling with spires and empty balconies, some of them crowned with Hellenic statues. Or I’d see the absurd dolls that used to advertise analgesics and aperitifs in the 1920s. The unreal scenes went on for hours, and during this time I didn’t know where I was, because the past installed itself in my body as strongly as the present.

  I met El Tucumano almost every night in the Británico. We argued over and over again about the best way to get Bonorino out of the cellar without ever agreeing. Perhaps it wasn’t a problem of means but of ends. For me, the aleph – if it existed – was a precious object that couldn’t be shared. My friend, on the other hand, was intending to degrade it, turning it into a fairground attraction. We’d found out that, at the death of the Bulgarian aristocrat, the boarding house was sold to some investors in Acassuso, who owned another twenty rented houses. We decided that I should write them a letter denouncing the librarian, who hadn’t paid any rent since 1970. It would be detrimental to the finance manager and perhaps also to poor Enriqueta. None of this bothered El Tucumano.

  Towards the end of November, NYU sent me an unexpected remittance of money. El Tucumano suggested we forget the bohemian scrimping of boarding-house life and go spend a night in the suite on the top floor of the Hotel Plaza Francia, where we could look out over the Libertador Avenue and some of its palaces, as well as buoys of the north shore that twinkled above the unmoving waters of the river. Although it wasn’t a first-class hotel, that room cost two hundred dollars, more than my resources would allow. I didn’t want to say no, though, and I paid for a reservation for the following Friday in advance. We thought we’d have dinner first in one of the restaurants in Recoleta that served signature cuisine, but that day an unforeseen misfortune occurred: the government announced that people could only withdraw a minuscule percentage of cash from their accounts. I was afraid of being left with nothing in my pocket. From the very moment of the sudden decree – too late to cancel the hotel – no one wanted to accept credit cards and the value of money became vague.

  We got to the Plaza Francia around midnight. The air was the color of fire, as if a storm were brewing, and the streetlights all seemed muffled in watery hoods. Every once in a while a car drove down the avenue, slowly, bewildered. I thought I saw a couple kissing at the foot of the statue of General Alvear, under our balcony, but everything was shadowy and I’m not sure of anything, not even the peace with which I took off my clothes and lay down in bed. El Tucumano stayed outside for a while, scanning the profile of the Río de la Plata. He came back into the room in a bad mood, bitten by mosquitos.

  The humidity, he said.

  The humidity, I repeated. Like in Kuala Lumpur. Less than a year before I had confused the two cities. Maybe, I told him, it was because I’d read a story about mosquitos that was set here in February 1977. An irritating stink of fish invaded Buenos Aires then. Millions of dorados, pejerreyes and catfish, poisoned by the factories the military protected, lay rotting on the drought-enlarged shores. The dictatorship had imposed an iron censorship and none of the newspapers dared publish anything about this, despite the fact that the inhabitants, through the unavoidable use of their senses, received constant confirmation. Since the water from the taps had a strange greenish color and looked infected, those who were not extremely poor emptied the stores of soda water and fruit juice. In the hospitals, where they expected an epidemic from one day to the next, they dispensed thousands of vaccinations against typhoid daily.

  One afternoon, a cloud of mosquitos rose up from the swamps and blackened the sky. It happened all of a sudden, like a biblical plague. People got covered in welts. In the forty blocks north of the Cathedral, where the banks and bureaux de changes were clustered, the smell of the river was intolerable. Some rushed pedestrians who had to conduct some financial transactions covered their faces with white masks, but the police patrols forced them to remove them and show their identity documents. On Corrientes Street, people walked along with lit mosquito coils, despite the furious heat, bonfires were lit on some corners in an attempt to disperse the insects. The plague receded as suddenly as it had arrived. Only then did the newspapers publish, on inside pages, brief articles that all had a similar title: ‘Inexplicable phenomenon.’

  While we slept in the hotel, a fierce wind began to blow at about two in the morning. I had to get up to close the suite’s windows. El Tucumano woke up then, and asked me who I was looking at from the balcony.

  No one, I said. And I told him about the wind.

  Don’t lie, he answered me. You lie so much, I don’t know if you’ve ever told the truth.

  Come over here, look at the sky, I said. It’s clear now. You can see the stars over the river.

  You’re always changing the subject, Bruno. What do I care about the sky? The only thing I care about is your lies. If you want the alé all for yourself, tell me. I’ve had enough. It’s all the same to me now if I get stood up. But don’t string me along, big guy.

  I swore I didn’t know what he was talking about, but he was still anxious, hyper, as if he’d taken an overdose. I knelt down beside him, next to the bed, and stroked his head, trying to calm him down. It was useless. He turned his back on me and switched out the light.

  El Tucumano’s moods were incomprehensible to me. We didn’t have any commitment to each other and each one was free to do as he liked, but when I stayed up till dawn working in the Británico, he’d come and find me and make jealous scenes in public that embarrassed me. He asked me to do difficult things for him, or for gifts, to put me to the test, and as soon as I began to satisfy his desires, he’d pull away. Not really knowing what he expected of me was maybe what most attracted me.

  Exhausted, I slept. Three hours later I woke up with a start. I was alone in the suite. On the table in the hall El Tucumano had left a note scribbled in pencil: ‘I’m off, Titan. I leave the alé to you as an inheritance. One day you can pay me back.’ I went over the events of the previous night to understand what could have bothered him and couldn’t think of anything. I wanted to leave the hotel right then, but it was crazy to go downstairs and ask for the bill without any explanation. For half an hour or more I was sitting in the suite’s little living room with my mind a blank, submerged in that state of despair that makes the simplest movements impossible. I didn’t dare close my eyes for fear that reality might desert me. I saw how the grey glare of the morning advanced over me and how the air, which had seemed so humid the night before, thinned to transparency.

  I stood up after an effort, feeling like someone had laid the body of a sick man across my shoulders, and went to the balcony to watch the sunrise. The globe of the sun, huge and invasive, rose above the avenue, and its golden tongues licked the parks and sumptuous buildings. I doubt there has ever existed a city as beautiful as Buenos Aires at that moment. The traffic was heavy unusual for so early on a Saturday morning. Hundreds of cars moved slowly along the avenue, while the light charged the bronze of the monuments and burned the crests of the towers before falling bloodlessly through the leaves of the trees. The cupola of the Palais de Glace, beneath my balcony, was suddenly split by a blazing sword. In some of its salons in the 1920s, and other decades – when it was known as Vogue’s Club – they’d danced the tango to Julio de Caro’s sextet and Osvaldo Fresedo’s orchestra. As the sun rose and its disk became smaller and blinding, a purple light washed the façade of the Bellas Artes Museum, where I’d contemplated scenes of the Battle of Curupaytí that Cándido López had painted with his left hand between 1871 and 1902, after the right one was blown off in a grenade explosion.

&
nbsp; I had the impression then that Buenos Aires was hanging weightless in that icy clarity, and I feared that, pulled by the sun’s attraction, it would disappear from sight. All the bad omens of an hour earlier vanished. I didn’t feel I had the right to unhappiness while watching how the city blazed within a circle that reflected others above it, like the ones Dante saw at the center of paradise.

  Pure sensations tend to get mixed up with impure ideas. It was at that moment, I think, when, after deciding to write a letter to El Tucumano describing the spectacle he’d missed, I completed a different one, addressed to the Acassuso investors, in which I denounced the illegal occupation of the cellar, for more than thirty years, by the librarian Sesostris Bonorino. I don’t know how to reconcile the ignoble lines my hand was writing with the thoughts of the dazzling light I’d just seen. I had wanted to say to my friend that, since we didn’t come from Buenos Aires, he and I were perhaps more sensitive than natives to its beauty. The city had been raised at the limits of an unvarying plain, among scrubland as useless for nourishment as it was for basket-making, on the edge of a river whose single redeeming feature was its enormous width. Although Borges tried to ascribe it a past, the one it now has is also smooth, without any heroic feats other than those improvised by its poets and painters, and each time one took any fragment of the past in hand, it was only to watch it dissolve into a monotonous present. It’s always been a city where the poor were plentiful and where one had to walk with occasional jumps to dodge piles of dog shit. Its only beauty is what the human imagination attributes to it. It’s not surrounded by sea and hills, like Hong Kong and Nagasaki, nor does it lie on a trade route along which civilization has navigated for centuries, like London, Paris, Florence, Geneva, Prague and Vienna. No traveler arrives in Buenos Aires en route to somewhere else. Beyond the city there is no somewhere else: the spaces of nothing that open up to the south were called, on sixteenth-century maps, Land of Unknown Sea, Land of the Circle and Land of Giants, the allegorical names of non-existence. Only a city that had denied so much beauty can have, even in adversity, such an affecting beauty.

  I left the hotel before eight in the morning. Since I had no desire to return to the boarding house, where the Saturday morning commotion was usually maddening, I took refuge in the Británico. The café was empty. The only waiter was sweeping up the overnight clients’ cigarette butts. I took the letter to the Acassuso investors out of my pocket and reread it. It was overworked, malign and, though I had no intention of signing it, everything in it gave me away. It contained, in summary, the facts Bonorino had confided to me. Not for a single instant did I think of the damage I was doing to the librarian. I just wanted them to expel him from the cellar so I could comfortably find out if the aleph existed, as everything seemed to indicate. And so I could find out what would happen within me when I saw it.

  Just before noon I returned to my room. I stayed there for a few hours trying to make some headway on my thesis, but I couldn’t concentrate. Worry eventually got the better of me and I went out to look for El Tucumano, who was still sleeping on the roof. I was hoping that when he saw the letter, he’d show gratitude, happiness, enthusiasm. None of that. He protested because I’d woken him up, read it indifferently, and told me to leave him alone.

  For the next two days I wandered from one side of the city to the other with the same sadness I’d felt before dawn in the Hotel Plaza Francia. I walked through Villa Crespo trying to find Monte Egmont Street, where the protagonist of Adán Buenosayres13 lived. That was another novel I’d written an essay on when I did my MA, but none of the people in the neighborhood could tell me where it was. ‘From Monte Egmont Street the aroma of paradises no longer rises,’ I recited to them, in case the phrase might refresh their sense of direction. The only thing I achieved was to make them flee from me.

  The following Friday at midday, as the heat intensified, I went into Chacarita cemetery. Some of the tombs were extravagant, with large glass doors that let you peer inside at the altar and coffins covered with lace mantles. Others were adorned with statues of children struck by lightning bolts, sailors peering through a spyglass at an imaginary horizon, and matrons ascending to heaven carrying their cats in their arms. The majority of the graves, however, consisted of a headstone and a cross. Turning down one of the avenues, I came across a statue of Aníbal Troilo playing the bandoneón with a pensive expression. Beyond it, Benito Quinquela Martín’s raw colors adorned the columns that flanked his tomb, and even the painter’s coffin was covered in loud arabesques. I saw bronze eagles flying over a bas-relief of the Andes, and the poet Alfonsina Storni entering a granite sea, while the Galvez brothers’ hearses crashed next door. When I stopped before the monument to Agustín Magaldi, who’d been Evita Perón’s boyfriend and was still strumming his guitar for eternity, I heard some heartrending laments in the distance and imagined they must be coming from a funeral. I walked towards the commotion. Three women in full mourning, with veils over their faces, were weeping at the foot of the statue of Carlos Gardel. They lit a cigarette for him and placed it between his greenish lips, while other women left floral crowns before the Madre María, whose talent for miracles improved with each passing year, according to the plaques on her tomb.

  Around two in the afternoon I left by Elcano Avenue and walked north, with the hope of eventually arriving at a field or the river. The extension of the metropolis, however, was invincible. I remembered a J.G. Ballard short story, which imagined a world made entirely of cities joined by bridges, tunnels and almost imperceptible ocean currents, where humanity was suffocating as if it were in an anthill. Nothing in the streets I walked that day, however, reminded me of Ballard’s colossal buildings. They were shaded by old trees, jacarandas and plane trees, which protected the neo-classical and colonial mansions, and the odd pretentious aviary. When I noticed I’d arrived at José Hernández14 Street, in the neighborhood of Belgrano, I imagined I must be near the plot of land where the author of Martín Fierro had lived out his last happy years, despite the critics’ increasing contempt for the book – which, only thirty years after his death, in 1916, would be exalted by Leopoldo Lugones as the ‘great national epic poem’ – and the cruel battles to federalize the city of Buenos Aires, an idea he had championed. Hernández was a physically imposing man with such a powerful booming voice they called him ‘Matraca’15 in the Chamber of Deputies. At the gargantuan banquets he offered at his country house, several hours’ gallop from the city center, Hernández’s guests admired his appetite as much as his erudition, which enabled him to quote complete texts of Roman, English and Jacobin laws that no one had ever heard of. He was tormented by ‘fits,’ as he called his attacks of gluttony, but he couldn’t stop eating. A myocarditis laid him up in bed for five months, until he died one October morning, surrounded by an immediate family of more than one hundred, all of whom were able to hear his last words: ‘Buenos Aires . . . Buenos Aires . . .’

  In spite of walking the entire length of José Hernández Street, I didn’t find a single reference to his place. I saw instead plaques paying homage to lesser heroes of the national literature, like Enrique Larreta and Manuel Mujica Láinez, on the fronts of mansions on Juramento and O’Higgins Streets. After a few turns I came out at the Barrancas of Belgrano, which in Hernández’s time had been the city limits. There, the park designed by Charles Thays not long after the poet’s death was now surrounded by imposing apartment buildings. A fountain decorated with valves and marble fishes, and a gazebo that might have been used for Sunday concerts, were all that was left of its rural past. The river had receded by more than a mile, and it was impossible to see it. In a painting of refined beauty, Washerwomen in Lower Belgrano, Prilidiano Pueyrredón depicted the calmness usual in this area. Although the title of the oil painting alludes to women in plural, it shows only one, with a baby in her arms and a gigantic bundle of clothing balanced on her head, while an even bigger bundle is carried by a horse who comes along behind, riderless. On the gentle curve of
the hills, then lonely and wild, two ombues with their cleaving roots, in open combat with the rough water of the river, the beaches of which are trodden by the washerwoman at this early morning hour. Buenos Aires then had a green color, almost golden, and no future sullied the desolation of its only hill.

  When it started to get dark, I wearily went back to the boarding house. A cruel commotion awaited me. My neighbors were throwing mattresses, blankets and bundles of clothing down the stairs into the hallway. In the kitchen, Enriqueta was sobbing with her eyes fixed on the floor. From the cellar came the industrious rustling of Bonorino’s index cards. I went over to Enriqueta, offered her tea and tried to console her. When I managed to get her to speak, I too felt like the world was ending. A poem by Pessoa buzzed through my mind over and over again; it began: If you want to kill yourself, why don’t you go ahead and kill yourself? No matter how much I swatted it away, it would not leave me alone.

  At three o’clock that afternoon – Enriqueta told me – two police officers and a notary had arrived at the house with orders to evict all the tenants. They demanded proof of payment and gave refunds to everyone who was up to date on their rent. As far as I understood, the owners had sold the building to a firm of architects, and they wanted to move in as soon as possible. When Bonorino read the judicial notification, which granted only twenty-four hours to vacate the premises, he stood motionless in the hallway in a state of absence that Enriqueta’s screams couldn’t break through until finally he held his hand to his chest, said. ‘My God, my God,’ and disappeared into the cellar.

  Although the letter I’d sent to the investors in Acassuso had nothing to do with what was happening, I would still have liked to unwind the course of time. I found myself repeating another line of Pessoa’s: ‘God have mercy on me, who had none for anybody.’ When an author or a melody started going round in my head, it took ages to get rid of it. And Pessoa, of all people! Who, in the midst of such despair, could love a desperate poet? Poor Bruno Cadogan, who matters to no one. Poor Bruno Cadogan, who feels so sorry for himself.