The Tango Singer

by Tomás Eloy Martínez

  One of these days, he said, I’m going to Madrid and I’ll come back in the black airplane with Perón and Evita.

  The Generals won’t let Perón in, Martel corrected him. And no one knows where Evita’s body is, if they didn’t just throw it in the sea.

  You’ll see, insisted Mocho.

  Months later, Aramburu was kidnapped by some young men who went to find him at his house. They put him on trial for two days and at dawn on the third day they executed him with a bullet to the heart. For weeks, a vain search for the conspirators went on, until one morning in July the Córdoba branch of this little army, which called itself the Montoneros, decided to take a mountain village called La Calera. The Aramburu kidnapping had been a masterpiece of military strategy; the attack on La Calera, on the other hand, revealed an insurmountable clumsiness. Two of the guerrillas died, others were wounded, and among the documents the police discovered that afternoon were the keys to the Aramburu kidnapping. All the names of the conspirators were deciphered except for one, FAP. The army’s investigators assumed these letters to be the acronym of another organization, the Fuerzas Armadas Peronistas, or Peronist Armed Forces, which had invaded the mountains of Taco Ralo, south of Tucumán, two years before. They were, however, the initials of Felipe Andrade Pérez, alias Magic Eye, alias Mocho.

  For six months, Andrade had stayed in a room in the ochre house on Bucarelli Street. In meetings that lasted till dawn, he discussed the details of the kidnapping of Aramburu there with the other conspirators. His mission consisted in helping the owner of the house, blind in one eye and partially sighted in the other, to draw the plans of the apartment where the ex-president lived and to photograph the adjacent garage on Montevideo Street, El Cisne bar – that was on the square – and the magazine stand on Santa Fe Avenue, where there were always people. They memorized the photos, took notes and then burned the negatives. Two weeks before the date chosen for the kidnapping, Mocho designed the escape route. It was he who found the clearings where the prisoner should be transferred from one vehicle to another; he was also the one who decided that the second vehicle, a Gladiator truck, would carry a hollow load of alfalfa bales, inside which the captive and his guards would travel. The most important part of that adventure for him was to register with his camera each and every step: Aramburu leaving the building on Montevideo Street guarded by two fake army officers; the terror on his face in the Gladiator; the interrogations at the farm in Timote, where they took him for trial; the pronouncement of the death sentence, the moment of the execution. At the last minute, however, he was ordered to stay in the house on Bucarelli Street, to command the eventual withdrawal. The conspirators recorded every word Aramburu stammered or spoke during those days, but they didn’t take photographs. The head of the operation, who was an amateur, tried to get an image of him silhouetted against a white wall, but the film broke as he pressed the shutter for the fifth time and the shots were lost.

  Being left at the margin of the operation so disappointed Mocho that he disappeared from Parque Chas without telling anyone, like so many other times. The conspirators feared he might denounce them but he was not by nature a traitor. He stayed in a grotty boarding house, and a week later went back to Bucarelli Street to pick up his clothes. The house was empty. In the photography lab, above the developing tray, he found three photos taken, undoubtedly, by the clumsy and blind owner of the place. He recognized the images instantly, because his comrades had sent them to all the daily newspapers, and some of them were printed on the front page. One showed the two Parker pens, small calendar and tie pin Aramburu had with him when he was captured; another showed his wristwatch; the third, a medal he’d been given by the 5th Infantry Regiment in May of 1955. He thought it was a grave error not to have destroyed the negatives, and burned them on the spot, with his lighter. He didn’t notice the small rectangle with the image of the medal that dropped between the almost invisible crack between the developing tray and a rough stone wall. The army’s investigators found it there forty days later, when the disaster of La Calera had already given away the keys of the kidnapping.

  The story I’ve told you should have ended at this point, Alcira said, but that’s where it actually begins. The day after the episode in Córdoba, when all the newspapers published the names and photos of Aramburu’s kidnappers, Mocho showed up at Martel’s house and asked for shelter. He didn’t say what he was fleeing from or who was after him. He just said: – ‘Téfano, if you don’t take me in, I’ll kill myself.’ He was completely changed. He’d dyed his hair blond, but since it was like steel wool, towering over his head, instead of passing unnoticed, he startled people. His fingernails were a suspicious rusty colour from the acid in the developing fluids, and above his lip he had a thick mustache, which resisted the dye. His voice was still unmistakable, but he barely spoke. When he did, it was in a whisper: still high-pitched, piercing like a dying dog.

  At that time, Martel was running the pools at the funeral parlor, and living at the edge of the law, worrying that some slighted gambler might turn him in to the police. So he didn’t want to know anything either. Señora Olivia hid Mocho in the sewing room, isolated him from the world by keeping the radio on all the time, and waited, calmly, for the arrival of some tragedy, though she didn’t know why. Nothing happened. During the following days, Mocho woke up punctually at seven, did some exercises in the patio and shut himself up in the sewing room to read The Brothers Karamazov. He must have read it at least twice, because nothing else distracted him, aside from the news on the radio. When Estéfano came back from the funeral parlor, they played cards, like when they were teenagers, and the singer let him read the lyrics of the prehistoric tangos he’d restored. One night, at the beginning of August, Mocho disappeared without any explanation, as he always did. Estéfano expected him to reappear that Christmas Eve, when Señora Andrade had a massive heart attack and was admitted to the intensive care unit in the Tornú hospital, but even though the television station’s solidarity service spread the word, he didn’t come to see her or show up for the funeral, two days later. It seemed like the earth had swallowed him up.

  In the next few years everything happened. The military government returned Evita’s mummy – which was intact in a tomb no one had known about in Milan – to Perón. For a while, the general didn’t know what to do with her: finally, he chose to store her in the attic of his house in Madrid. Later he returned to Buenos Aires. While a million people waited for him near Ezeiza airport, rival Peronist factions attacked each other with rifles, pitchforks and knuckle-dusters. A hundred fighters died and the general’s plane landed far away from the bonfires. Perón was elected president of the republic for the third time, but he was broken and ill by then, subject to the will of his secretary and astrologer. He governed for nine months, until he collapsed from fatigue. The astrologer and the widow, a dim-witted woman, took the reins of power. In the middle of October in 1974, the Montoneros kidnapped ex-president Aramburu for the second time. They took the coffin out of its majestic mausoleum in the Recoleta Cemetery and demanded, in exchange for its return, that Evita’s remains be repatriated. In November, the astrologer traveled secretly to Puerta de Hierro in a special Aerolíneas Argentinas flight and returned with the illustrious mummy. Aramburu’s coffin appeared that same morning in a white truck abandoned on Salguero Street.

  Alcira told me that the night before the swap, Mocho Andrade showed up at Martel’s house just as if he’d never left. He didn’t have his hair dyed anymore and he’d shaved off the mustache. Just long sideburns, in the latest style, and very wide bellbottoms. He asked Señora Olivia if she would cook noodles in meat sauce, drank two bottles of wine and whenever they asked him anything he’d break into his midnight rooster voice and sing a few lines of Caminito: I’ve come here for the last time, I’ve come to tell you of my troubles. He took a shower and asked if they still had lively milongas in the Sunderland on the weekends. That night Martel should have worked a double shift at the funeral pa
rlor but Mocho wouldn’t let him go. He ironed his black evening suit and picked out a white shirt while singing out of tune: Now, on my downhill slide / all hopes gone / I can no longer root them out.

  He wanted to get the story off his chest, Alcira said. The more cheerful he seemed, the more torn up inside he felt at what he’d experienced. Martel got a table in an isolated corner of the Sunderland, away from the crowds, and ordered a bottle of gin.

  I kidnapped Aramburu, said Mocho after the first drink, in a fresh, smooth voice, as if he’d just put it on. I was involved in the first kidnapping and in the second, of the corpse. But it’s all over now. They’re going to find the coffin tomorrow morning.

  It seemed to Martel that the couples stopped in the middle of the dance floor, that the music dimmed and time froze. He was afraid the people at the neighboring tables would hear, but the tango from the loudspeakers routed all other sounds and, each time the orchestra reached a final chord, Mocho was lighting a cigarette in silence.

  They were there until five in the morning, smoking and drinking. At first, the story he told made no sense, but it gradually began to piece together, although Mocho never revealed where he’d been for the last three years nor why, after he’d left the house on Bucarelli Street, the Montoneros allowed him to take part in the second kidnapping, which was even riskier. Part of what Andrade said that night had been published by the perpetrators of the first kidnapping in a Montonero magazine, but the finale of the plot was then unknown and still seems unbelievable.

  I’m an adventurer, as you know, military discipline offends me, Mocho said to Martel, and Alcira told me. I’ve had few friends, and I’ve gradually lost them all. One of them died at La Calera; two more were lost due to a mistake in a William Morris pizzeria. The women I fell in love with left me, one after the other. Perón abandoned me too, and he left the country to unravel in the hands of a hysterical widow and a murderous wizard. All I have left is you and someone whose name I cannot repeat.

  Three months ago I met a poet. Not just any poet. One of the greats. They say I’m the best poet in the country, he’s written. They say, and it may well be true. We got together almost every night in his house in Belgrano, beside the bridge where the train tracks cross Ciudad de la Paz Street. We talked about Baudelaire, René Char and Boris Vian. Sometimes, we played cards, just like you and I used to do in the old days. I knew that, just before Perón’s return, the poet had been in Villa Devoto prison, and that he was a legendary militant, mythic: the opposite of mystic, Téfano, a devotee of food, women and gin. Petit bourgeois, I called him. Petit nothing, he’d answer. I am a grand bourgeois.

  One night, in his house, after a few drinks, he asked me if I was scared of the dark. I live in the dark, I said. I’m a photographer. The half-light is my element. Not afraid of darkness or death or enclosed spaces. Then you – he said – are one of my men. He’d prepared a perfect plan to steal Aramburu’s corpse.

  We started at six in the evening, two days later. There were four of us. I never knew, nor will I ever know who the other audacious ones were. We walked into Recoleta Cemetery through the main entrance and hid inside one of the mausoleums. Until one in the morning we didn’t move. No one spoke, no one dared to cough. I kept myself occupied by braiding the threads of some cloths I found on the floor. The place was clean. It smelled of flowers. It was the middle of October, a warm night. When we came out of our hiding place, our legs were numb. The silence burned our throats. Twenty steps away, in one of the central avenues, was the Aramburu tomb. Forcing it open and removing the coffin was simple. We had more trouble with the cemetery locks, which made a dreadful noise when we broke them. An owl hooted and flew between the poplars; it seemed like a bad omen. Outside, on Vicente López, a stolen hearse was waiting for us. The street was deserted. The only people to see us were a couple coming out of one of the hourly hotels on Azcuénaga Street. They crossed themselves when they saw the coffin and quickened their pace.

  Remember, Alcira said, during those months Isabel and the astrologer López Rega had ordered the construction of an altar for the nation, where they planned to reunite the bodies of the adversarial national leaders. Figueroa Alcorta Avenue was cut off at Tagle, and the cars got tangled up in a detour designed by a cubist city planner. The projected building was a Pharaonic Pyramid: San Martín’s mausoleum was going to be at the entrance. Behind it, those of Rosas and Aramburu. On the top of the pyramid, Perón and Evita. Without Aramburu, the project would be incomplete. When the wizard found out one of his corpses had been stolen, he flew into a rage. He sent a mob of policemen out to comb the streets of Buenos Aires in search of the lost body. Who knows how many innocent people were murdered in those days. Aramburu, however, was right there in everyone’s sight.

  Shortly before the Recoleta operation – Mocho told Martel, and Alcira repeated to me much later – the poet had seized one of those tanker trucks they use to transport gasoline and kerosene. Don’t ask me how he did it, because he didn’t tell us. All I know is that for at least a month no one was going to notice it was missing. The truck was new, and the Montoneros’ mechanics had cut a door through which you could access the tank from below. At the top, they’d cut three invisible holes that let in air and, sometimes a bit of light. The poet had decided to hide the body there and drive it around the city, in full view of the henchmen. In case of any accidents, we were supposed to protect the trophy with our own lives. One of us would stand guard inside the tank, with an arsenal for emergencies. We planned to each take turns of eight days in the darkness, and forty-eight hours at the wheel of the truck. Sometimes we parked in secure places, other times we drifted around Buenos Aires. The one in the cab had to stay alert. The one who was in the tank had a mattress and a latrine. There were four of us, like I said. We tossed a coin to see when we took our turn in the tank. The poet got the first one. I got the last. By chance, I was to drive for the first forty-eight hours.

  The plan went along without the slightest hitch. We took the coffin to the no man’s land in between the River Plate stadium and the targets of the Federal rifle club, and there we moved it from the hearse to the tank. The poet allowed me to take photos for five minutes but, before we dispersed, he handed the camera to one of the other comrades.

  You’ll be able to take all the photos you want when it’s your turn to ride inside, he said.

  I got up behind the wheel. No one else was in the cab. In the glove compartment I had a nine-millimeter Walther and, within reach of my hand, a walkie-talkie to inform the others, at regular intervals, as to how everything was going. I crossed the city from one extreme to the other, until the early hours. The truck drove well and turned easily. I went down Callao Avenue first, then I took Rodríguez Peña again and headed for Combate de los Pozos, Entre Ríos and Sársfield. It was the first time I’d wandered around with no destination in mind, without deadlines, and I felt that life was only worthwhile like this. When I got as far as Malbrán Institute I turned onto Amancio Alcorta and then headed up north, towards Boedo and Caballito. I drove slowly, to save gas. The streets were full of potholes and it was difficult to avoid jolts. The poet’s voice startled me.

  There’s no better place to write than in the darkness, he said.

  I didn’t know the tank could communicate with the cab of the truck by way of an almost imperceptible sliver of air that slipped out through an opening behind the latrine.

  I’m going to take you to Parque Chas, I said.

  May the arrival point be the departure point, he answered. We’re always going to be to blame for everything that happens in this world. As the sky began to get light I parked at the corner of Pampa and Bucarelli and got out to buy coffee and some cookies. Then I crossed the railway lines and stopped beside the Communications Club. No one could see us. I opened the entrance to the tank and told the poet to get out and stretch his legs.

  You woke me up, he complained.

  We’re not stopping often, I said. You better get out now instead of
when you’re going crazy with claustrophobia.

  As soon as I saw him walk a few steps away, I took a look around the inside of the tank. In spite of the breathing holes, the air was thick and an acrid, dry odor that resembled no other floated at head height. Rancid remains, I said to myself, although all remains are. Limestone and flowers. I opened the coffin. I was surprised that the protective panel was detached, because when we took him out of the cemetery I hadn’t heard the sound of anything loose. The shadow lying there must have been no other than Aramburu: he had a rosary wound round what were once his fingers and, on his chest, he wore the medal of the 5th Infantry Regiment that they’d found in Bucarelli Street. The shroud was frayed and what was left of the body was very little indeed, almost the scraps of a child.

  Leaning against one of the mudguards of the truck, the poet was chewing on a cookie.

  It makes no sense to go from place to place, he said. I feel like Madame Bovary traveling all night with her lover through the suburbs of Rouen.