The Tango Singer

by Tomás Eloy Martínez

  Besides, my hands were tied. I couldn’t help anyone. I’d idiotically spent two hundred dollars on a single night in the Hotel Plaza Francia and I couldn’t get the tiny bit of money I had left out of the bank. And they might as well stop depositing my grant payments, because the banks were seizing all remittances. On Sunday I’d tried to recover a few pesos, standing in the enormously long lines in front of the automatic teller machines. Three of the machines ran out of cash before I’d advanced four feet. Another five were empty but people refused to admit it and kept punching in their requests, in the hope of some miracle.

  Towards midnight, the neighbors from the next-door room told me jubilantly that they were going to take refuge in Fuerte Apache, where some relatives lived. When I told Enriqueta, she reacted as if to a tragedy.

  Fuerte Apache, she said, separating the syllables. I wouldn’t go for love nor money. I don’t know how they can take those poor children there.

  I was tormented by guilt and, nevertheless, I had nothing to feel guilty about. Or perhaps I did: after all, I had been malicious and cowardly enough to send that useless letter to the Acassuso misers accusing Bonorino, taking advantage of his confessions to me in the cellar. In Buenos Aires, where friendship is a cardinal and redeeming virtue, as can be deduced from tango lyrics, every informer is a bastard. There are at least six scornful words: snitch, stoolie, grass, nark, squealer, fink. I was sure El Tucumano considered me a despicable person. He’d asked me more than once to write the letter, thinking I’d cut off my hands before doing so. For someone like me, who believed that language and deeds were linked in a literal way, my friend’s attitude was difficult to understand. Informing hadn’t been easy for me either. However, the aleph had mattered more to me than the indignity.

  I saw the gigantic woman who was washing a blouse in the bidet the afternoon I arrived again. She was going down the stairs with a mattress on her back, gracefully avoiding the obstacles. Her body was dissolving in sweat, but her makeup remained intact on her eyes and lips. Life sings the same for everyone, she said when she saw me, but I don’t know if she was talking to me or herself. I was standing in the middle of the hallway, feeling like another piece of furniture on the set. At that moment I realized that sing could be another synonym for betray.

  Bonorino’s bald head peered out of the half-light of the stairway. I tried to get away, so I wouldn’t have to look him in the face. But he’d come out of the cellar to talk to me.

  Come down here, Cadon, please, he said. I was getting used to the mutations of my surname.

  The index cards had disappeared from the stairway, and the gloomy dwelling, with its street-level windows barely letting in a miserly light, reminded me of the principal passage of the cave that Kafka described in ‘The Burrow,’ six months before he died. Just like the rodent of the story piling his provisions against one of the walls, taking pleasure in the diversity and intensity of the odors they emitted, Bonorino leaped around in front of the fruit crates that had served as his bedside tables and which now, stacked on top of five or six more, blocked off the minuscule bathroom and kitchenette. He was keeping the possessions he’d saved in them. I managed to make out the thesaurus, the shirts and the gas heater. The walls held the shadows of the papers that had been stuck on them for so many years, and the only piece of furniture that remained in place was the bedstead, although now stripped, with no sheets or pillows. Bonorino clutched to his chest the accounts ledger where he’d noted down the diverse information from the colored index cards. The ashen lamp with its twenty-five-watt bulb barely illuminated his hunchbacked body, upon which the world’s ills seemed to have fallen.

  Sad news, Cadon, he said. The light of knowledge has been condemned to the guillotine.

  I’m sorry, I lied. You never know why these things happen.

  Whereas I can see all that has been lost: the squaring of the circle, the domestication of time, the act of the first founding of Buenos Aires.

  Nothing will be lost if you’re well, Bonorino. May I pay for your hotel for a few days? Allow me this favor.

  I’ve already accepted the invitation of other outcasts, who’ve offered me shelter in Fuerte Apache. You’re a foreigner, there’s no reason for you to take responsibility for anything. We serve our Lord in possible things and content ourselves with desiring the impossible ones, as Saint Theresa said.

  I remembered how desperate Carlos Argentino Daneri was when they announced the demolition of the house on Garay Street, because if he was deprived of the aleph he would never be able to finish his ambitious poem called ‘The Earth.’ Bonorino, who had invested thirty years in the laborious entries of the National Encyclopedia, seemed indifferent. I didn’t know how to ask tactfully about his treasure. I could allude to the polished space under the last step, to the sketch of the Stradivarius I’d glimpsed on my first visit. He himself provided the solution.

  Count on me if there’s anything I can do, I told him, hypocritically.

  Indeed. I was going to ask you to look after this notebook, which is the distillation of my sleepless nights. You can give it back to me before you return to your country. I’ve heard that rats and robbers live side by side in Fuerte Apache. If I lose the cards, I lose nothing. They just contain drafts and copies of other imaginations. What I have truly created is in the notebook and I wouldn’t know how to protect it.

  You don’t even know me, Bonorino. I could sell it, betray you. I could publish the work under my name.

  You would never betray me, Cadon. I don’t trust anyone else. I have no friends.

  That candid declaration revealed the librarian could not have the aleph. He would only have had to look at it once to know that El Tucumano and I had betrayed him. Carlos Argentino Daneri hadn’t been able to prevent the demolition of his house either, in Borges’ short story. In the luminous point that reproduced Dante’s Paradise, you couldn’t see the future, therefore, you couldn’t see reality either. The simultaneous and infinite facts it contained, the inconceivable universe, were only residues of the imagination.

  I believed you at least had the aleph, I risked.

  He looked at me and started to laugh. There were only five or six teeth left in his huge mouth.

  Lie down under the nineteenth step right now and see for yourself if I have it, he said. I’ve spent hundreds of nights there, in a supine position, hoping to see it. Maybe in the past there was an aleph. Now it’s vanished.

  I felt dizzy, lost, loathsome. I took the ledger, which weighed almost as much as me, and I didn’t want to take the volume on labyrinths I’d lent him.

  Keep it as long as you want, I said. You’re going to need it more than me in Fuerte Apache.

  He didn’t even thank me. He looked me up and down with a brazenness that contradicted his habitual unctuousness. What he did next was even more extravagant. He began to recite, with a rhythmic and well-modulated voice, a shantytown rap, while clapping his hands: In the Fort there’s no place to run / Life gets blown to kingdom come / If I live, it’s where it smells like dung / If I die, it’s a bullet from a stranger’s gun.

  That’s not bad at all, I said. I didn’t know you had such talents.

  I’m no Martel but I get by, he answered.

  I’d never thought he might know Martel.

  What? You like Martel?

  Who doesn’t? he said. Last Thursday I went to visit a colleague at the library in Parque Chas. Someone told us he was on a corner, singing. He arrived out of the blue and knocked out three tangos. We got to hear two. It was supreme.

  Parque Chas, I repeated. I don’t know where that is.

  Right here, on the way into Villa Urquiza. Strange neighborhood, Cadon. The streets are circular and even the taxis get lost. It’s a shame it doesn’t appear in Prestel’s book, because of the many labyrinths in the world, that’s the biggest of all.

  FIVE

  December 2001

  When they closed the boarding house on Garay Street I went to stay in a modest hotel on C
allao Avenue, near Congreso. Although my room overlooked an interior patio, the traffic noise was enough to drive you crazy at any hour of the day or night. I tried to resume my work in the nearby cafés but people rushed in and out of them all complaining about the government at the tops of their voices. I preferred to return to the Británico where at least I knew the routine. There I found out from the waiter that El Tucumano was exhibiting his little mirrored aleph in the cellar of a union office, sharing the proceeds with the night watchman who let him in. Ten or twelve tourists attended the first show, but the second and third had to be canceled due to lack of interest. I supposed that, ignoring my advice, El Tucumano had omitted the reading of the fragment of Borges I’d pointed out to him: I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a tattered labyrinth (it was London). Exposed without this text, the illusion the aleph created must have been precarious, and the tourists undoubtedly left disenchanted. To deceive even just ten tourists was a colossal success in those uneasy weeks. No one had any money in Buenos Aires (including me), and visitors fled the city as if the plague were approaching.

  At dusk, when the traffic roared and my intelligence was defeated by the prose of the postcolonial theorists, I kept myself occupied by leafing through Bonorino’s ledger, full of diligent illustrated definitions of words like dagger, twine, Uqbar, maté, fernet, percale, as well as including an extensive section on Argentine inventions such as the ballpoint pen, dulce de leche, fingerprinting and the electric cattle prod, two of which were due not to native ingenuity but to a Dalmatian and a Hungarian.

  The references were inexhaustible and, if I opened the volume at random, I never encountered the same page, just like in The Book of Sand, which Bonorino quoted frequently. One evening I stumbled upon a long section about Parque Chas, and while I was reading it thought it was about time I went to see the neighborhood where Martel had most recently sung. According to the librarian, the spot owed its name to some infertile fields inherited by a Doctor Vicente Chas, in the center of which rose the smokestack of a brickworks. Shortly before his death in 1928, Doctor Chas brought a fierce lawsuit against the municipal government of Buenos Aires, which wanted to close down the furnace because of the damage it was causing to the lungs of the residents of the area, at the same time as it impeded the extension of the western route of the Avenida de los Incas, blocked by the beastly smokestack. The truth was that the municipality chose this place to implement an ambitious radial-centric project designed by the young engineers Frehner and Guerrico. The design copied the labyrinth, representing terrestrial sin and the hope of redemption, which lies beneath the cupola of the San Vitale church in Ravenna.

  Bonorino speculated, however, that the circular layout of the neighborhood followed a secret communist and anarchist plan to provide themselves a refuge in times of uncertainty. His thesis was inspired by the passion for conspiracies that characterizes the inhabitants of Buenos Aires. How else to explain that the major diagonal street was called The Internationale before it became General Victoria Avenue, or that Berlín Street should figure on some maps as Bakunin, and that a short four-hundred-meter-long road was called Treveris, in allusion to Trier or Trèves, the birthplace of Karl Marx?

  ‘A colleague from the Monserrat library, who lived in Parque Chas,’ noted Bonorino in his book, ‘guided me one morning through this tangle of zigzags and detours as far as the corner of Ávalos and Berlín. To put the difficulties of the labyrinth to the test, he insisted that I go one hundred meters in any direction and then return by the same route. If I took more than half an hour, he promised to come looking for me. I got lost, although I couldn’t say whether it was on the way out or on the way back. The intolerable white sun of high noon had already become the yellow sun which precedes nightfall, and no matter how many turns I took, I could not manage to get my bearings. On an inspired impulse, my colleague tracked me down. It was getting dark when he finally saw me on the corner of Londres and Dublin, a few steps from where we’d parted. I seemed shaken and thirsty, he said. When I returned from the expedition, I developed a persistent fever. Hundreds of people have gotten lost in the deceptive streets of Parque Chas, where the interstice that divides the reality from the fictions of Buenos Aires would seem to be located. In every great city there is, of course, one of these lines of high density, similar to the black holes in space, which changes the nature of those who cross it. By reading old telephone books I deduced that the danger point is in the rectangle bordered by Hamburgo, Bauness, Gándara and Bucarelli Streets, where some of the houses were inhabited, seven decades ago, by Helene Jacoba Krig, Emma Zunz, Alina Reyes de Aráoz, María Mabel Sáenz and Jacinta Vélez, who were later turned into fictional characters. But the people of the neighborhood situate it on the Avenida de los Incas, where the ruins of the brickworks remain.’

  What Bonorino said didn’t help me to understand why Martel had sung in Parque Chas. The delirium about the dividing line between reality and fiction had nothing to do with his earlier attempts to capture the past – I never believed the singer was interested in the past of the imagination – and some of the popular stories about the adventures of the bandit Pibe Cabeza16 and other unsavory characters in the labyrinth had no links – if they were true – to the greater history of the city.

  I spent two afternoons in the Congreso library to find out about life in Parque Chas. I discovered that no anarchist or communist centers had been opened there. I searched in detail to see if some of the apostles of libertarian violence – as Osvaldo Bayer called them – had found refuge in the labyrinth before being taken to the prison in Ushuaia or before a firing squad, but their lives had been spent in more central parts of Buenos Aires.

  Since the neighborhood seemed so elusive, I went to get to know it. Early one morning I boarded a bus that went from Constitución to Triunvirato Avenue. I headed west and penetrated into terra incognita. When I got to Cádiz Street, the landscape changed into a succession of circles – if circles can be successive – and suddenly I didn’t know where I was. I walked for two hours without getting anywhere. At every bend I saw the name of a city: Geneva, The Hague, Dublin, London, Marseilles, Constantinople, Copenhagen. The houses were side by side, with no spaces in between, but the architects had devised a way to make straight lines look curved, or vice versa. Although some had pink lintels and others blue porches – there were also smooth façades, painted white – it was hard to tell them apart: several houses would have the same number, 184 for example, and I thought I saw the same curtains and the same dog poking his muzzle out the window of more than one of the houses. I walked beneath the pitiless sun without crossing paths with a single soul. I don’t know how I came out to a plaza enclosed by a black railing. Until then I’d seen only buildings of one or two stories, but around that square were tall towers, also identical, with soccer flags hanging out the windows. I took a few steps backwards and the towers went out like a match. Again I lost my way in the spirals of low houses. I retraced my route, trying to make every step repeat the ones in the opposite direction, and thus I found the plaza again, although not at the point from which I’d left it, but diagonally across from it. For a moment I thought I was the victim of a hallucination, but the low green awning beneath which I’d stood less than a minute ago shone in the sun three hundred feet away, and in its place a business now appeared that called itself the Sandwich Palace, although in fact it was a kiosk that displayed sweets and soft drinks. It was attended by a teenager in an enormous baseball cap that hid his eyes. I was relieved to finally see a human being who could explain what point of the labyrinth we were in. I decided to ask him for a bottle of mineral water because I was dying of thirst, but before I finished the sentence the kid said ‘There isn’t any,’ and disappeared behind a curtain. For a while I clapped my hands to get his attention until I realized that he wouldn’t come back as long as I was there.

  Before leaving, I’d
photocopied a very detailed map of Parque Chas from the Lumi guide, which showed the ways in and out. On the map there was a grey area that might have been a plaza, but its shape was an irregular rectangle and not a square like the one in front of me. Unlike the narrow streets I’d walked along before, these ones had no plaques with street names or numbers on the houses, so I resolved to advance in a straight line from the kiosk towards the west. I had the sensation that, the more I walked, the more the sidewalk lengthened, as if I were moving on an endless ribbon.

  It was noon according to my watch and the houses I passed were shut and, it seemed, empty. I had the impression that time was also shifting in a capricious way, like the streets, but I didn’t care anymore whether it was six in the afternoon or ten in the morning. The weight of the sun became unbearable. I was dying of thirst. If I saw signs of life in any house, I’d knock and knock, not stopping until someone appeared with a glass of water.

  I began to see shadows moving in one of the side streets, miles away from me, and I felt so weak I feared I might faint right there, with no one to help me. I soon saw the shadows weren’t hallucinations but dogs that were, like me, looking for somewhere to get a drink and some shade, along with a woman who, at a quick pace, was trying to get past them. The woman was coming towards me but she didn’t seem to have noticed my existence, and I didn’t notice anything about her other than the sound of her metal bracelets, which months later would have allowed me to identify her even in the dark, because they always moved at the same rhythm, first a quick jangling of metal and then two slow diapasons. I tried to call her so she could tell me where we were – I deduced that she knew because she was walking decisively – but before I could open my mouth, she vanished through a doorway. That sign of life gave me strength to keep going. I walked past two other houses with no one in them and then a façade of sandblasted bricks, with a window grille in the shape of a clover. Contrary to my expectations, there was also a double door, one side of which was open. I went in. I found myself in a spacious, dark room, with a few sports trophies gleaming on shelves, some plastic chairs and two or three framed moralistic mottoes, with phrases like Quality comes from doing things well just once and Perfection is in the details but perfection is no detail.