The Tango Singer

by Tomás Eloy Martínez

  He had obviously discussed the subject with Sabadell, because the guitarist interrupted me with the prelude to Como dos extraños (Like Two Strangers). The lyrics of that song conjure up a spell against the pure past that Martel was trying to resuscitate, Alcira told me. That afternoon, however, a past that was not dead flowed through Martel’s voice, the way something cannot be dead when it has only disappeared and remains and endures. The past of that afternoon kept tenaciously in the present while he sang: it was the nightingale, the first lark from the world’s beginnings, the mother of all songs. I still can’t understand how he could have breathed, where he got the strength to keep from fainting. I found myself crying when I heard him sing, for the second time: And now I stand before you / we seem like two strangers / a lesson I’ve learned at last. / How the years do change things! I myself was remembering things I’d never lived.

  With the last word of Como dos extraños Martel collapsed, while the people of Parque Chas asked for yet another tango. When he fell into my arms I heard him say, with the last of his strength: ‘Get me to the hospital, Alcira, I’ve nothing left. I’m dying.’

  I don’t remember if Alcira told me that episode the last time I visited her in the Fernández Hospital or weeks later, in the Café La Paz. I only remember that midnight in December with the sky in flames, and Alcira by my side, exhausted, standing before the nurse who was trying to console her and didn’t know how, and the silence that passed over the waiting room, and the smell of rotting flowers that took the place of reality.

  SIX

  December 2001

  During those insane days I bought some maps of Buenos Aires and drew colored lines on them joining the places where Martel had sung, in the hope of finding some picture that might decipher his intentions, something like the rhombus with which Borges solves the riddle in ‘Death and the Compass.’ The imperfect geometric figures varied, as we know, according to the order in which the points connect. Starting from the boarding house where I’d lived, on Garay Street, I could uncover the outline of a mandrake, or a slightly twisted Y that resembled geomancy’s Caput Draconis, or even a mandala similar to Eliphas Lévi’s magic circle. I saw what I wanted to see.

  I carried my maps around everywhere and sketched new drawings when I got bored of reading in cafés. I traced lines between the places where, according to Virgili, the bookseller, Martel had sung before I arrived in Buenos Aires: the lovers’ hotels on the Azcuénaga Street, next to Recoleta Cemetery, the subterranean tunnel under the obelisk in the Plaza de la República. In the newspaper archive in the National Library – the one where Grete Amundsen had got lost months before – I looked for evidence of why Martel might have chosen those spots. The only stories I found were of a couple murdered in the act in a hotel that rented rooms by the hour, towards the end of the sixties, and that of an execution by firing squad at the obelisk during the first months of the dictatorship. There didn’t seem to be any connection between the events. The murderer in the hotel was a jealous husband whom the police had alerted by phone, back when adulterers were denounced. He wasn’t even tried: three doctors certified that he’d been temporarily deranged and the judge absolved him a few months later. And the death at the obelisk was one more of so many between 1976 and 1980. Despite being a ferocious exhibition of impunity, not a single Argentine daily paper registered the fact. I found the piece of information by chance in the Economist, where the Buenos Aires correspondent wrote that one Sunday in June 1976 – the 18th, I think – a group of men in steel helmets arrived at the Plaza de la República slightly before dawn in an unmarked car. An unidentified young person was dragged across the plaza, leaned up against the white granite of the enormous obelisk and shot with a burst of machine-gun fire. The murderers left in the same car, abandoning the corpse, and nothing more was known.

  I gradually began to realize that, as long as I didn’t know where else in Buenos Aires Martel had sung, I would never manage to complete the pattern – if there was any pattern – and I didn’t dare bother Alcira with something that might only be a crazy idea. When I asked if she knew where else Martel had performed for himself, apart from the places we already knew, she, upset about what was going on in the intensive care unit, just mumbled a few names: Mataderos, the tunnels, the Waterworks Palace, and left. I’m trying to remember, she answered me once. I’ll write down a list of places and give it to you. She didn’t do so until much later, when I was about to leave Buenos Aires.

  Many of my afternoons were empty, poisoned by indifference. As Christmas approached I kept telling myself it was time to go home. I’d received a few cards from friends regretting my absence at Thanksgiving, at the end of November. Busy trying to imagine how to get Bonorino out of the cellar of the aleph, the holiday had passed me by unnoticed. My head was all over the place and it was starting to worry me. At this rate, I thought, my grants will run out before I’ve written even a third of my dissertation.

  I read that they were going to show Tango!, billed as ‘our first talkie’, on the smallest screen at the San Martín, where I’d seen some of the masterpieces of Argentine cinema. The work dated from 1933, when six years had already gone by since Al Jolson sang in The Jazz Singer. I guessed the information was probably incorrect. And it was. In the two years before a couple of talking melodramas had been filmed, like Buenos Aires Baby Dolls, with records that attempted in vain to synchronize the dialogues with the images. What matters, however, is that when I saw Tango! I was convinced that it had been Argentina’s farewell to the silent era.

  The plot was innocuous, and the only interesting thing was a succession of duos, trios, quintets and orchestras, which stopped playing every once in a while so the actors could recite their lines. The Jazz Singer had contributed an immortal phrase to the cinema, You ain’t heard nothing yet. In the first scene of Tango!, a robust female singer, disguised as a bad guy, opened fire with a line that instantly unleashed a storm of meanings: Buenos Aires, cuando lejos me vi, when I’m far away. So, the first sound uttered in Argentine cinema had been that pair of words, Buenos Aires.

  While I distractedly watched the film – the dialogues of which I couldn’t follow, I’m not sure whether due to the actors’ blurred diction or because the soundtrack must have been very primitive – I was afraid the city would pull away from me one day and nothing would be as it had been anymore. I held my breath, in the hope that the present wouldn’t move out of its frame. I ended up feeling nowhere, without a time to cling onto. What I used to be had got lost somewhere and I didn’t know how to find it again. The film itself confused me, because it had a circular structure in which everything returned to its starting point, including the fat lady disguised as a bad guy, who reappeared in the final minute, singing a milonga that referred – I think – to Buenos Aires: I don’t know why they mention her to me / when I cannot forget her.

  When I left, as I waited for the 102 bus, which dropped me near the Fernández Hospital, I noticed that something was changing in the city’s atmosphere. At first I thought that the afternoon light, always so intense, so yellow, had turned to a pale pink. It seemed like dusk had got ahead of itself. It always got dark at nine in the evening at that time of year. And it was six-thirty. I had the impression that Buenos Aires was changing its mood, and at the same time it seemed absurd to say that about a city. I’d walked through Plaza Vicente López a few days earlier and I didn’t recognize it the way I was seeing it at that moment: with some of its trees bare, flat, and others full of flowers that fluttered and fell in slow motion. The municipal gardeners must have sawn off some of their branches from birth, I thought. I didn’t understand that cruel and useless custom, which I’d observed in other tree-lined streets and even in the Palermo Forest, where I saw a palo borracho murdered by the violence of the pruning.

  On one side of Recoleta Cemetery, six living statues were crossing the street with cases in their hands. I thought it strange that they were walking so quickly, unconcerned with the astonishment they were provo
king. The illusion of immobility, which was all the grace of their negligible art, vanished with every step. They looked ridiculous in their golden and granite costumes, and with thick layers of paint in their hair and on their faces: an inconceivable carelessness among those who always hid to remove their makeup. Maybe they’d been moved on from the area surrounding the Church of Pilar, where they usually worked, though that had never happened before.

  When I got off the bus across from Las Heras park, I saw packs of dogs that had rebelled against the guys who were walking them. In that place atrocious things had gone on, and the hangovers of the horror were still there. To have a break from rushing about with the dogs, their minders would get together to chat in a shady part of the park where in days gone by the courtyard of the National Penitentiary used to be. Each of them held the leads of seven or eight animals, and let one of the dogs loose, the most seasoned, to guide the pack. I don’t suppose any of them would have known that the anarchist Severino Di Giovanni was shot by firing squad in that corner in 1931, as well as General Juan José Valle, who, twenty-five years later, had taken up arms to bring Peronism back to power. And if they did know, what would it matter to them? Sometimes the wind blew harder there than in other parts of the park, and the dogs, distressed by a smell they didn’t understand – the smell of a human sorrow that came from the past – slipped their leads and ran off. More than once, in my daily trips to the Fernández Hospital, I’d seen the boys chasing them and getting them back together, but that afternoon, instead of running away, the dogs circled around and around their wardens, tangling them up till they fell. The animals who acted as guides rose up on two legs and howled, while the rest of the pack, drooling, stood a few feet off from their fallen walkers and then approached again, as if they wanted to drag them away from that place.

  I arrived at the hospital feeling like the city was no longer the same, that I was no longer the same. I feared Martel might have died while I was wasting time at the cinema and I almost ran up the stairs to the waiting room. Alcira was talking calmly to a doctor and, when she saw me, called me over.

  He’s getting better, Bruno. I went into the room a little while ago and he asked for a hug, and he hugged me with the energy of someone determined to live. He hugged me without worrying about those tubes he’s got stuck in his body. Maybe he’ll get up, like the times before, and sing again.

  The doctor – a short man with a shaved head – patted her on the shoulder.

  Let’s just wait a few weeks, he said. He still has to detoxify from all the medication we’ve been pumping into him. His liver isn’t helping much.

  But this morning he had no strength and look at him now, doctor, Alcira replied. This morning his little arms were limp, he could barely hold up his head, like a newborn. Now he hugged me. Only I know how much life he has to have to hug me like that.

  I asked if I could go into Martel’s room and sit beside him. I’d been waiting for days for them to let me speak to him.

  Not just yet, said the doctor. He’s coming around but he’s still very weak. Perhaps tomorrow. When you see him, don’t ask him questions. Don’t say anything that could make him emotional.

  Some people were walking through the corridors with headphones on. They must have been listening to the radio because, when they passed each other, they commented excitedly on news that was happening elsewhere: That’s three in Rosario now! I heard a woman leaning on a cane in the shape of a tripod say, And what about Cipoletti? See that in Cipoletti? another answered. More dead, my God! a nurse coming down from the third floor commented. I’m going to be stuck in the emergency room all night.

  Alcira was afraid there’d be a power cut. At lunchtime, on the television in a bar, she’d seen desperate people ransacking supermarkets and taking food. Thousands of bonfires were lit in Quilmes, in Lanús, in Ciudadela, at the gates of Buenos Aires. No one mentioned disturbances in the city. She asked me if I’d seen any.

  Everything seemed calm, I answered. I didn’t want to mention the signs of unease that had surprised me: the color of the sky, the living statues.

  She was too anxious to carry on a conversation. I found her odd, as if she’d left her body elsewhere. Deep circles under her eyes darkened her face, which expressed nothing, neither thoughts nor emotions. It seemed like everything in her had left with the body that wasn’t there.

  On my way back to the hotel in the bus, I saw people running through the streets in a state of agitation. Most of them were practically naked. The men had bare chests and wore shorts and flip-flops; the women’s blouses were coming undone or their dresses loose and light. At the corner of Callao and Guido an old man, his hair hardened with brilliantine, got on the bus. He would have looked out of place among the other passengers if his suit weren’t worn and shiny, the elbows wearing through. When we got to Uruguay Street, a demonstration blocked traffic. The driver tried to force his way through by honking, but the more he called attention to the bus the more the demonstrators pulled together. The old man, who up till that moment had maintained his composure, leaned his head out the window and shouted: Kick those bastards out once and for all! Kick ’em all out! Then he turned to me, on his left, and said excitedly, perhaps proudly: This morning I had the pleasure of stoning the president’s automobile. I smashed the windshield. I would have liked to smash his head.

  What was happening wasn’t just unexpected but incomprehensible to me as well. For weeks people had been complaining about politicians in increasingly violent tones, and some had even been punched, but nothing appeared to change. The attacks on the supermarkets seemed impossible, because the police were patrolling the streets constantly, so I dismissed them as another invention by the television people, who didn’t know how to get people’s attention anymore. I’d heard only discontented voices since my arrival in Buenos Aires. When it wasn’t the weather it was the poverty – which you now saw everywhere, even in streets where you previously saw only prosperity, like Florida and Santa Fe – but it was never more than complaining. Now, the words unleashed into the air had sharp edges and destroyed whoever they named. Kick those bastards out, the people shouted and, although the bastards didn’t move, reality was so tense, so ready to crack, that the jolt of the insult pushed the politicians to their downfall. Or at least that’s how it seemed to me.

  Even the President of the Republic was getting stones thrown at him. Could it be true? Maybe the old man on the bus was boasting, to make himself feel important. If he’d stoned the car and everyone had seen, how could he be sitting there so calmly? Why had nothing happened to him? Sometimes the labyrinth of the city wasn’t only in the streets and the temporal confusions for me, but in the unexpected behavior of the people who lived there.

  I waited for half an hour and, since the traffic remained at a standstill, I decided to walk. I went up Uruguay as far as Córdoba and then turned down Callao, towards the hotel. I had no desire to return to my suffocating room but I couldn’t think where else to go. The shops were closing their shutters, the cafés were deserted, just getting rid of their last clients. Crossing the whole city to take refuge in the Café Británico would be insane. The human tides were unending. Everything was closed but the streets were teeming and I felt as lonely as a dog, if by any chance dogs get lonely. It was late by then, nine or maybe later, and the people going from place to place gave the impression of having just woken up. They were carrying old wooden spoons, pots and pans.

  I started to feel hungry and regretted not having bought anything to eat at the hospital. At my hotel they’d closed the blinds and I had to ring the bell over and over again before they’d let me in. The doorman was also wearing nothing but underpants. His enormous torso, with its thickets of hair, gleamed with sweat.

  Look at this, Míster Cogan, he said. Look at the disaster that’s happened in Constitución.

  He had a miniature television on behind the reception desk. They were showing the sacking of a market live. People were running with bags of rice, cans
of oil and strings of sausages, between columns of smoke. An ageless old woman, her face a map of wrinkles, fell with her legs straight out in front of her, by a fan. She began to clean the open wound in her head with one hand as she held her skirt with the other, so the breeze wouldn’t lift it. A hand unplugged the fan and took it away, but the old woman kept covering herself from the air that was no longer blowing, as if floating on the other side of time. In groups of six, the police advanced in semicircles, protected by helmets and visors that covered their chins and necks. Some of them beat people, others fired tear gas.

  Look at the ones behind the trees, the doorman said. They’re firing on people with rubber bullets.

  Run! Run! These wretches are going to kill us! a woman screamed at the television cameramen, as she disappeared into the cloud of smoke.

  I sat down in the hotel lobby, defeated. I hadn’t found what I’d come to find in Buenos Aires, and now I felt alien to the city as well, alien to the world, alien to myself. What was going on outside suggested a new birth, a beginning of history – or an end – and I didn’t understand it, I could only think about Martel’s voice, which I’d never heard and might never hear. It was as if the Red Sea was parting before me and the people of Moses, and I, distracted, looked off in another direction. The television repeated fleeting scenes, which lasted only seconds, but when memory bundled all the images up together, that was a tempest.

  I think I fell asleep. About eleven at night I was shaken by a vibration of metallic noises that didn’t sound like anything I knew. I had the impression that the wind or the rain had gone crazy, and that Buenos Aires was falling to pieces. I’m going to die in this city, I thought. This is the world’s last day.