The Tango Singer

by Tomás Eloy Martínez

  They muddle them up with all kinds of gimmicks, El Tucumano told me. One of the excursions went to all the big soccer stadiums simulating a day of classic matches. They get a hundred tourists together and go from the River Plate stadium to Boca’s, and from there to Vélez’ ground in Liniers. By the gates of each they have people selling chorizos, t-shirts, pennants, while the stadium loudspeakers reproduce the roar of a non-existent crowd, which the visitors imagine to be there. They’ve even written articles about this fakery, El Tucumano said, and I wondered who the authors might have been: Albert Camus, Bruce Chatwin, Naipaul, Madonna? They were each shown a Buenos Aires that doesn’t exist, or maybe they could only see the one they’d already imagined before their arrival. There are also tours of the meat processing plants, El Tucumano went on, and another one for twenty pesos of the famous cafés. At around seven in the evening they take the tourists for a walk down the Avenida de Mayo, through San Telmo and Barracas, to see the cafés. In the Café Tortoni they set up a show for them with dice players who flourish their shakers and threaten each other with daggers. They listen to tango singers in El Querandí, and in El Progreso on Montes de Oca Avenue they chat with novelists working away on their laptops. It’s all a front, all a set-up, as you can imagine.

  What I didn’t know then was that there was also a municipal excursion devoted to Borges’ Buenos Aires, until I saw the tourists pull up at the boarding house on Garay Street, one November day at noon, in a bus with the lurid McDonald’s monogram on each side. Almost all of them were from Iceland or Denmark and they were on their way to the southern lakes, where the landscapes might surprise them less than the endless solitude. They spoke in a guttural English, which permitted intermittent conversations, as if the distance might leave the words hanging in mid-air. I understood they’d paid thirty dollars for a walk that began at nine in the morning and ended just before one. The pamphlet they’d been given to help find their way was a sheet of newsprint folded in four with lots of ads for masseurs who did home visits, rest clinics and euphoria-producing pills freely for sale. In the midst of this typographical jungle, one could just make out the points of the itinerary, explained in a peculiar English twisted by Spanish syntax.

  The first stop on the route was Borges’ birthplace, the house at 840 Tucumán Street, at a time when the Saturday morning traffic is tangled and short-tempered. There, the tour guide – a short young woman with her hair in a bun and the gestures of a primary school teacher – read an extract from the ‘Autobiographical Essay’ that described the place at breakneck speed: a flat roof; a long, arched entranceway called a zaguán; a cistern, where we got our water; and two patios. God knows how the Scandinavians imagined the cistern, or rather the well, with a pulley at the top and a water bucket hanging from it. In any case, none of that was still standing. On the site of the original house stood a building with three names: Solar Natal, Café Literario and Fundación Internacional Jorge Luis Borges. The façade was glass, and gave a view of wrought-iron tables and chairs, with unbleached fabric cushions tied onto the seats. At the back, in the open-air patio, you could make out more tables with parasols and several colored balloons, perhaps left over from a children’s party. Across the façade, like a blindfold, stretched a painted strip of dusty pink. The building on the right, which belonged to the YWCA, at number 848, also claimed the right to be considered the site of the birthplace. It sported a shiny bronze plaque, which protested against changes to the numbering of the street and maintained that, since 1899, the buildings had shifted from their original locations and the whole street was slipping down the slope of the river bank, even though the river itself was at least three-quarters of a mile away.

  The tour’s itinerary was thrifty. It cut out the poor sections of Palermo and Pompeya, where Borges had walked till daybreak when those places ended suddenly in open countryside, in a vast empty horizon after alleyways, cigar shops and vegetable gardens. It omitted, most of all, the block from the poem ‘The Mythical Founding of Buenos Aires,’ where the writer had lived from the age of two until he was fourteen, before his family moved to Geneva, and where he had the intuition, later confirmed by the idealist philosopher Francis Herbert Bradley, that time is an incessant agony of the present disintegrating into the past.

  The woman with the bun had informed the passengers that the spot where Buenos Aires had been founded was in the Plaza de Mayo, because it was there that Juan de Garay, from Vizcaya, planted a tree of justice on June 11th 1580, and cleared the land with his sword, chopping away the pastures and reeds as a sign of his taking possession of the city and the port. Forty-four years earlier Pedro de Mendoza, from Granada, had done the same thing in Parque Lezama, another square half a league to the south, but then the city had been evacuated and burnt, while Mendoza was dying of syphilis on his ship.

  Since Buenos Aires was born, a strange series of calamities tormented her founders. Mendoza’s crews mutinied twice; one of his ships strayed off course and ended up in the Caribbean; his soldiers were starving to death and resorted to cannibalism; and almost all the forts he left along his course were destroyed by sudden fires. Garay also faced rebellions in his garrisons on land, but the worst disturbance happened in his head. In 1581 he set off in search of the illusory City of the Caesars, which he imagined in dreams as an island of giants guarded by dragons and griffins, in its center a temple made of gold and garnet that shone in the darkness. He traveled more than a hundred leagues down the pot-bellied coast of Samborombón and the South Atlantic without finding a trace of what he’d imagined. On his return, he could no longer find his way through reality and, to recover his reason, he had to find it in his dreams. In March of 1583, while traveling in a brigantine toward Carcarañá, he stopped after dark in a network of streams and canals with no apparent exit. He decided to camp on dry land and await the morning with his crew of fifty Spaniards. He did not live to see it. A party of Querandí scouts attacked before dawn and tore his dream to shreds with their spears.

  From the birthplace, the visitors were taken to the house on Maipú Street, where Borges lived in a monastic room, separated from his mother’s bedroom by a wooden partition wall. It was such a narrow cell that it barely held a bed, a nightstand and a desk. Examining this now faded privacy was not part of the excursion. The tourists were allowed only a brief stop in front of the house, and a more generous visit to La Ciudad bookstore, which was across the street, where Borges went in the mornings to dictate poems his blindness wouldn’t allow him to write down.

  In spite of the rush, up till then the walk had been calm, upset only by the rage of the drivers obliged to stop behind the bus, and the hell of honking horns, which more than once had convinced Borges that he should move to a silent suburb. Until that point in the morning, when it was not much past ten, nothing had yet disconcerted the passengers. They recognized the spots on the itinerary because they figured, although in less detail, in the Scandinavian guidebooks. The first breach of the routine struck when, at the request of the municipal tour guide, they ventured on foot down Florida Street, from the intersection with Paraguay Street, following the route Borges took almost daily on his way to the National Library. Everything was different from what the thirty-year-old stories suggested, and even from what the detailed guidebooks from Copenhagen said. The street – which at the end of the nineteenth century had been an elegant promenade and, later, during the 1960s, the vanguard space, the place for madness, for challenges to reality and order – on that Saturday morning was a reproduction of one of those clamorous, open-air Central American markets. Hundreds of peddlers had stretched out blankets and cloths to the middle of the road where they displayed objects as useless as they were eye-catching: gigantic pencils and combs, stiff, straight belts, china teapots with the spout raised up towards the handle, charcoal-sketched portraits that looked completely different from the model.

  Grete Amundsen, one of the Danish tourists, stopped to buy a maté gourd made of cactus wood, which would let the boilin
g water drain out as soon as it was poured into it. While she examined the object and admired its design, which reminded her of something she’d read about the mammary glands of whales, Grete was left at the center of a circle that suddenly formed on the street around a couple of tango dancers. Since she was the tallest person on the tour – when I saw her, I estimated she was over six feet tall – she helplessly watched what was happening as if she were in a box at the theater. She felt as though she’d accidentally entered a mistaken dream. She saw her companions disappearing down the street. She called to them with all the force in her lungs, but there was no sound that could have risen above the din of that morning fair. She saw three violinists moving forward into the clearing where she was a prisoner, and heard them play a melody she didn’t recognize. The tango dancers executed a baroque choreography, from which Grete tried to escape while running from one side to the other, finding no cracks in the increasingly compact crowd. Finally someone let her through, but only to leave her enclosed in a second human wall. She elbowed and kicked her way through, uttering curses of which only the word fuck could be understood. She could no longer see any trace of her friends. Nor did she recognize the place where she was. In the jumble she’d been relieved of her purse but she didn’t have any courage left to go back and look for it. The merchants she saw when she came out of the tumult were the same; the street, however, was suddenly different. In an identical succession to that of minutes before, she saw the cloths piled with combs and belts, teapots and pendants, as well as the guy selling the maté gourds, for whom time seemed not to have moved. ‘Florida?’ she asked, and the man, lifting his chin to point out the sign above her head, which clearly read Lavalle. ‘Is not Florida?’ she said disconsolately. ‘Lavalle,’ the vendor informed her. ‘This is called Lavalle.’ Grete felt the world was disappearing. It was her second morning in the city, up till then she had allowed herself to be taken from place to place by obliging guides, and she didn’t remember the name of the hotel. Panamericano, Interamericano, Sudamericano? They all sounded the same. She still held, crumpled in her hand, the pamphlet with the itinerary of the excursion. She was relieved to cling to those words of which she understood only one, Florida. She followed, on the rough map, the course her friends would have taken: Florida, Perú until México. The Writer’s House. Ex National Library. Maybe the bus with the McDonald’s ads would be waiting for them there, at that last stop. She saw in the distance a slow procession of taxis. The previous afternoon she’d learned that in Buenos Aires there were more than thirty thousand, and almost all their drivers tried to show, at the first opportunity, that the job was beneath them. The one who brought her from the airport to the hotel gave her a lecture on superconductivity, in passable English; another, in the evening, criticized the idea of sin in Fear and Trembling, by Kierkegaard, or at least that’s what Grete deduced from the title of the book and displeasure of the driver. The guide explained that, although educated, some taxi drivers were dangerous. They drove tourists to some out-of-the-way spot, picked up an accomplice and fleeced them. How to tell them from legitimate ones? No one knew. The safest thing was to take a car that someone was getting out of, but it all came down to luck. The city was full of empty taxis.

  Knowing she had no money, Grete signaled to a young driver with tangled hair. Which way do you want to go? Through the Bajo or down 9 de Julio? These were the usual questions, to which she’d already learned the answer: ‘Whichever. Ex National Library.’ Her companions from the excursion couldn’t take more than an hour. The itinerary was strict. One of them would lend her a few pesos.

  As they went, the avenues became wider and wider, and the air, although occasionally disturbed by plastic bags that rose in sudden flight, was clearer. The taxi’s radio emitted constant orders that alluded to an infinite city, incomprehensible to Grete: ‘Federico wait at 3873 Rómulo Naón, second charlie, ten to fifteen minutes. Kika at the front door of the school, Colegio del Pilar, identify by Kika, seven to ten minutes. Let’s see, who’s near Práctico Poliza Street in Barracas, avoid Congreso, alpha four, there’s a demonstration of doctors there and they’ve closed off Rivadavia, Entre Ríos, Combate de los Pozos.’ And so on. They passed a solitary red tower, in the center of a plaza, beside a long wall that protected innumerable steel containers. Further on was a park, a heavy, dark building that resembled the Reichstag in Berlin, and then a gigantic sculpture of a metal flower. In the distance, on the left, a solid tower, supported by four Herculean columns, seemed to be the destination point.

  There it is. The Library, announced the taxi driver.

  He drove down Agüero Street, stopped beside a marble stairway and showed her the ramp to go up to get to the tower. See the sign over the entrance, he said, isn’t this where you wanted to go?

  Could you please wait just one minute? Grete asked.

  At the top of the ramp there was a terrace interrupted by a truncated pyramid, with an extractor fan on top. The fact that the McDonald’s bus had not arrived intensified her sense of emptiness and desertion. She perceived only what was not there and, therefore, didn’t even perceive herself. From one of the terrace parapets she looked over the gardens opposite and the statues that cut into the horizon. It was the Library, the sign was unequivocal. Nevertheless, she was overwhelmed by a feeling of loss. At some moment during the morning, perhaps when she went from Florida Street to Lavalle Street without knowing how, all the points of the city had got tangled up. Even the maps she’d seen the previous evening were confused, because the west was invariably in the north, and the center was tipped out over the eastern edge.

  The taxi driver came over without her noticing. A slight breeze stirred up his hair, now towering, electrified.

  Look over there, to the left, he pointed.

  Grete followed the direction of his hand.

  That’s the statue of Pope John Paul II, and the other one, above the avenue, is Evita Perón. There’s also a map of the neighborhood, see? That’s Recoleta, with the cemetery to one side.

  She understood the names, Evita, the Pope? However, the figures were unconnected to the place. They both had their backs to the building and all it stood for. Could that really be the Library? She was starting to get used to words being in one place and what they meant being somewhere else entirely.

  She tried to explain, in hand signals, her disorientation and dispossession. The language was insufficient to put forward something so simple, and the hand movements, instead of clarifying things, tended to modify them. The voice of an animal would have made more sense: the emission of unmodulated sounds indicating desperation, loss. Ex Librory, Grete attempted. Ex, Ex.

  But this is the Library, the driver said. Don’t you see we’re here?

  Two hours later, in front of the entrance to the boarding house on Garay Street, while she told the story to her traveling companions and I summed it up for the manager and El Tucumano, Grete still hadn’t determined when they’d begun to understand each other. It was like a sudden pentecost, she said: the gift of languages descended and lit them from within. Maybe she’d pointed out to the taxi driver some Rosetta stone on the map, maybe he knew that the word Borges would decipher codes and guessed that the Library in question was the extinct, the exanime, the ex, a city without books that languished in the far south of Buenos Aires. Ah, it’s the other one, the young man had said to her. I’ve taken more than a few musicians to that place: I’ve taken violins, clarinets, guitars, saxophones, bassoons, people who are exorcising the ghost of Borges because, as you’ll know, he was blind musically as well. He couldn’t tell Mozart from Haydn and he hated the tango. No he didn’t, I said, correcting Grete when she repeated this detail. He felt that the Genoese immigrants had corrupted it. Borges didn’t even appreciate Gardel, the taxi driver had told her. Once he went to the cinema to see Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld, back when they used to have live acts in between one film and the next. Gardel was going to sing during the intermission and Borges got irritated, stood up an
d left. That’s true: he wasn’t interested in Gardel, I told Grete. He would have preferred one of those improvisers who sang in the local bars in the outskirts at the beginning of the twentieth century, but when Borges returned from his long trip to Europe, in 1921, there were no longer any worth listening to.

  Grete’s shipwrecks of that morning were now a cause for celebration. She’d seen another Buenos Aires from the taxi, she said: a red brick wall beyond which rose marble flowers, Masonic compasses, angels with trumpets; there you have the labyrinth of the dead – the young man with the tangled hair had told her – they’ve buried all of Argentina’s past beneath that sea of crosses, and, nevertheless, at the entrance to that cemetery – Grete told us – there were two colossal trees, two rubber trees rising out of some ageless swamp, that defied time and survived destruction and misfortune, especially because the roots braided together and the tops reached for the light of the sky. Scandinavian skies were never so crystal clear. Grete was still contemplating it when the taxi turned off down some tedious streets and came out in a triangular plaza on which stood three or four palaces copied from those on Avenue Foch, please stop here for a moment, Grete had begged, while she observed the luxurious windows, the empty balconies and clear sky above. That was when she remembered a novel by George Orwell, Coming Up For Air, that she’d read in adolescence, in which a character called George Bowling describes himself like this: ‘I’m fat, but I’m thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there’s a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there’s a statue inside every block of stone?’ That was Buenos Aires, Grete said to herself at that moment and repeated to us later: a delta of cities embraced by one single city, a myriad of tiny, thin cities within this obese unique majesty that allows Madrid-style avenues and Catalan cafés next to Neapolitan aviaries and Doric bandstands and Rive Droite mansions, beyond all of which, however – the taxi driver had insisted – were the livestock market, with the lowing of the cattle before sacrifice and the smell of dung, the evening dew, the open plain, and also a melancholy that comes from nowhere except here, from the end of the earth feeling you get when you look at maps and see how alone Buenos Aires is, how very out of the way.