The Tango Singer

by Tomás Eloy Martínez

  When we turned onto 9 de Julio Avenue and saw the obelisk in the center, I felt sad thinking we’d be leaving in two days’ time, Grete said. If I could be born again, I would choose Buenos Aires and I wouldn’t move from this place even if they stole my purse again with a hundred pesos and my Helsingør driver’s license in it, because I can live without those but not without the light of the sky I saw this morning.

  She’d arrived at Borges’ National Library, on México Street, almost at the same time as her tired companions. There too they had to settle for the façade, inspired by the Milanese Renaissance. When the guide had the group gathered on the sidewalk in front of the building, among broken flagstones and piles of dog shit, she informed them that, completed in 1901, it was originally destined for the lottery draws and that’s why there were so many winged nymphs with unseeing eyes, which represented chance, and large bronze drums. The spiderweb of shelves rose through circular labyrinths that emerged, if you knew your way, into a corridor of low ceilings, adjacent to a cupola open over the abyss of books. The reading room had been stripped of its tables and lamps more than a decade earlier, and the premises were now used for symphony orchestra rehearsals. ‘National Music Center,’ read the sign at the entrance, beside the defiant doors. On the right-hand wall, there was a slogan written in black aerosol paint: ‘Democracy lasts as long as obedience.’ An anarchist wrote that, said the guide disparagingly. See how they signed it with an A inside a circle.

  That was the penultimate stop before they arrived at the boarding house where I lived. The bus drove them through potholed streets to a café, at the corner of Chile and Tacuarí, where – according to the guide – Borges had written desperate love letters to the woman who turned down his marriage proposals over and over again and who he tried in vain to seduce by dedicating ‘The Aleph’ to her, while waiting to see her come out of the building to approach her if only with a look. I miss you unceasingly, he told her. His writing, ‘my dwarf’s handwriting,’ ran in lines that sloped further and further downwards, in a sign of sadness or devotion, Estela, Estela Canto, when you read this I shall be finishing the story I promised you. Borges could only express his love in an exalted, sighing English, he was afraid of tarnishing with his sentiments the language of the tale he was writing.

  I’ve always thought the character of Beatriz Viterbo, the woman who dies at the beginning of ‘The Aleph,’ was a direct descendent of Estela Canto’s, I told the Scandinavians when they were gathered in the front hall of the boarding house.

  During the months he spent writing the story, Borges was passionately reading Dante. He’d purchased the three small volumes of Melville Anderson’s translation in the Oxford bilingual edition, and at some moment must have felt that Estela could guide him to Paradise just as Beatriz, Beatrice, had allowed him to see the aleph. They were both in the past by the time he finished the tale; both had been cruel, haughty, negligent, scornful, and to both, the imaginary and the real, he owed ‘the best and perhaps the worst hours of my life,’ as he’d written in the last of his letters to Estela.

  I don’t know how much of this could have interested the tourists, who were anxious to see – impossible though it was – the aleph.

  Before the guided tour of the boarding house began, El Tucumano took me by the arm and dragged me into the closet where Enriqueta kept the keys and the cleaning supplies.

  If the Alé isn’t a person, then what’s with it? he asked me with a touch of impatience.

  ‘The Aleph,’ I said, is a short story by Borges. And also, according to the story, it’s a point in space that contains all points, the story of the universe in a single place and a single instant.

  How weird. A point.

  Borges described it as a small iridescent sphere of blinding light. It’s down in a cellar, when you get to the nineteenth step.

  And these characters have come to see it?

  That’s what they want, but the aleph doesn’t exist.

  If they wanna see it, we’ve gotta show it to ’em.

  Enriqueta was calling me and I had to go. In Borges’ story the façade of Beatriz Viterbo’s house is not mentioned, but the tour guide had already decided it was like the one we were looking at, of stone and granite, with a tall wrought-iron door and a balcony on the right, plus two more balconies on the upper floor, one spacious and curved, which belonged to my room, and another paltry one, almost the size of a window, which was undoubtedly the scandalous neighbors’. The small cluttered drawing room mentioned in the story was just past the threshold of the entrance hall and then, at one end of what had been the dining room and was now the reception area, was the way to the cellar, to which one descended down nineteen steep steps.

  When the house was converted into rooms to let, the administrator had ordered that the trap door to the cellar be removed and a handrail installed by the steps. He also had them put in two rooms with a small shared bathroom, widening the pit Carlos Argentino Daneri had once used as a darkroom. Two barred windows at street level let in the light and air. Since 1970, the only occupant of the cellar, said Enriqueta, is Don Sesostris Bonorino, an employee of the Monserrat Municipal Library, who does not tolerate visitors. She’d never known him to have company. Years ago, he had two feisty cats, tall and agile as mastiffs, who scared the rats away. One summer morning, when he went to work, he left the windows half open and some swine threw a fish fillet soaked in poison into the cellar. You can imagine what the poor man found when he came home: the cats were on top of a cushion of papers, swollen and stiff. Since then he keeps himself busy writing an encyclopedia of the nation that he can never finish. The floor and walls are covered with index cards and notations, and who knows how he manages to go to the bathroom or sleep, because there are index cards all over the bed too. As long as I can remember, no one’s ever cleaned that place.

  And he alone is the owner of the alé? asked El Tucumano.

  The aleph has no owner, I said. No one’s ever seen it.

  Bonorino’s seen it, Enriqueta corrected me. Sometimes he copies onto the index cards what he remembers, although I think he gets the stories mixed up.

  Grete and her friends insisted on going down to the cellar to see if the aleph radiated some aura or signal. Beyond the third step, however, access was blocked by Bonorino’s index cards. One of the tourists, who looked exactly like Björk, was so frustrated that she stomped back to the bus, not wanting to see anything else.

  The conversations in the lobby, Grete’s tale and the brief walk through the ruins of the house, where a few fragments of the old parquet floor still coexisted with the predominant cement and two or three original handcrafted mouldings, which Enriqueta now used as ornaments, plus the interminable questions about the aleph, had all taken almost forty minutes instead of the ten anticipated in the itinerary. The tour guide was waiting with her hands on her hips by the door to the boarding house while the bus driver hurried them up with rude blasts of the horn. El Tucumano told me to keep Grete back and ask her if the group was interested in seeing the aleph.

  How am I going to say that? I protested. There is no aleph. And anyhow, Bonorino’s there.

  You do what I tell you. If they want to see it, I’ll arrange the show for them at ten. It’ll be fifteen pesos each, tell them.

  I gave in and obeyed. Grete wanted to know if it would be worth it and I answered that I didn’t know. In any case, they were busy that night, she said. They were being taken to hear tangos at the Casa Blanca and then to the Vuelta de Rocha, a kind of bay that formed in the Riachuelo, almost at its mouth, where they hoped a singer whose name they’d refused to divulge would be performing.

  It’ll be Martel, I guessed.

  I said so, although I knew it wasn’t possible, because Martel didn’t respond to any other laws but those of the secret map he was drawing. Perhaps the Vuelta de Rocha was on that map, I thought. Perhaps he only chose places where there was already a story, or where there soon would be. Until I’d heard him sing, I couldn�
�t prove it.

  I only want to remember what I’ve never seen, Martel had said that very afternoon, according to what I was later told by Alcira Villar, the woman who’d fallen in love with him when she heard him sing in El Rufián bookstore and who would stay with him till his death. For Martel, remembering was the same as invoking, Alcira told me, recovering what the past put out of reach, which is what he did with the lyrics of the lost tangos.

  Though not a real beauty, Alcira was incredibly attractive. More than once, when we met to talk in La Paz café, I noticed men turning to look at her, trying to fix in their memories the strangeness of her face, which had nothing special about it except an unusual charm that made people stop. She was tall and tanned, with thick dark hair and black inquisitive eyes, like Sonia Braga in The Kiss of the Spider Woman. From the moment I met her I envied her voice, grave and sure of itself, and her long, elegant fingers, which moved slowly, as if requesting permission. I never dared ask how she could have fallen in love with Martel, who was almost an invalid and devoid of charm. It’s shocking how many women prefer intelligent conversation to solid muscles.

  As well as being seductive, Alcira was selfless. Although she worked eight to ten hours a day as a freelance researcher for publishers of technical books and news magazines, she spent the rest of her time being a devoted nurse to Martel, who behaved – she herself would later tell me – erratically, childishly, sometimes begging her never to leave his side, then paying her no attention for days at a time, treating her as if she were a misfortune.

  Alcira had done some research for books and leaflets written about the Waterworks Palace, completed in 1894, on Córdoba Avenue. She had learned about the details of the baroque structure thought up by Belgian, Norwegian and English architects. The exterior design was by Olaf Boye – she told me – a friend of Ibsen’s who met him every afternoon in the Grand Café in Christiania to play chess. They would sit there for hours without speaking, and in the intervals between one move and the next, Boye completed the arabesques for his ambitious project while Ibsen was writing The Master Builder.

  At that time, engineering works located in residential areas of cities would have the outsides of the buildings wrapped in sculpted designs to hide the ugliness of the machines. The more complex and utilitarian the inside, the more elaborate the exterior should be. Boye had been entrusted with encasing the pipes, tanks and siphons that would supply Buenos Aires with water in limestone mosaics, cast iron caryatids, marble plaques, terracotta tiled roofs, doors and windows with so many carved folds and glazes that each of the details was rendered invisible in the jungle of colours and shapes that overwhelmed the façade. The function of the building was to cover what was inside behind so many scrolls that it disappeared, but also the sight from outside was so unbelievable that the inhabitants of the city had finally forgotten that the palace, intact for more than a century, still existed.

  Alcira took Martel in his wheelchair to the corner of Córdoba and Ayacucho, where he could see that one of the attic roofs, the southeastern one, had a slight lean, just a couple of centimeters, perhaps due to the architect’s momentary distraction or because the angle of the street produced this optical illusion. The sky, which had been crystalline all morning, turned a leaden grey at two in the afternoon. A thin fog drifted up from the sidewalk, warning of the drizzle that was ready to start falling at any moment, and it was impossible to know – Alcira told me – if it was cold or hot, because the humidity created a deceptive temperature, which sometimes felt suffocating and then, a few minutes later, chilled you to the bone. This obliged the inhabitants of Buenos Aires to dress not according to what the thermometers revealed but to what the radio and television stations mentioned all the time as the ‘thermosensation factor,’ which depended on the barometric pressure and wind direction.

  Even at the risk of the impending rain, Martel insisted on observing the palace from the sidewalk and stayed there, absorbed, for ten or fifteen minutes, turning to Alcira every once in a while to ask: Are you sure this marvel is only a shell to hide the water? To which she replied: There is no water anymore. Only the tanks and pipes for long-departed water are left.

  Boye had altered the plans hundreds of times, Alcira told me, because as the capital grew, the government ordered tanks and pools of greater capacity, which required sounder metal structures and deeper cement foundations. The more water that was to be distributed, the more pressure was needed, which meant the tanks had to be raised in a perfectly flat city whose only slope was the banks of the Río de la Plata. More than once it was suggested to Boye that he neglect the harmony of style and resign himself to an eclectic palace, like so many other buildings in Buenos Aires, but the architect demanded that the rigorous French Renaissance symmetry of the original plans be respected.

  The associates of the firm Bateman, Parsons & Bateman, in charge of the work, were still dismantling and reassembling the iron skeleton of the plumbing, in a frenzied race with the voracious expansion of the city, when Boye decided to return to Christiania. From the table he shared with Ibsen in the Grand Café he sent the drawings of the pieces that would make up the façade by post, which took a week to get to London, where they were approved, before traveling on to Buenos Aires. Since almost every piece was drawn to scale, and placing one anywhere other than its specified destination could have disastrous consequences for the symmetry of the whole, it was imperative that the designer – whose sketches numbered more than two thousand – have the precision of a player able to dominate several simultaneous games of chess blindfolded. Boye was not only concerned with the beauty of the decorations, which represented botanical images, crests of the provinces of Argentina and fantastical zoological figures, but also with the materials each one should be made from and the quality of the enamels. Sometimes it was difficult to follow his directions, which were written in tiny letters – and in English – at the bottom of the drawings, because the architect expanded on the details of the grain of the marble from Azul, the temperature the ceramics should be fired at and the chisels that should be used to cut the pieces of granite. Boye died of a heart attack, in the middle of a game of chess, on the 10th of October 1892, when he had yet to complete the sketches for the southeast attic roof. Bateman, Parsons & Bateman assigned the task of finishing the last details to one of its technical draughtsmen, but a defect in the granite used for the base of the southeastern tower, in addition to the last eighty-six terracotta tiles being broken on the voyage from England, delayed the construction and produced the almost imperceptible deviation in the symmetry that Martel noticed the afternoon of his visit.

  On the top floor of the palace, overlooking Riobamba Street, the water company has a small museum where it exhibits some of Boye’s drawings, as well as the original chlorine ejectors, valves, lengths of pipe, late nineteenth-century sanitation fixtures and scale models showing how Bateman and Boye had tried, unsuccessfully, to make their palace into something useful to Buenos Aires but, at the same time, something which would somehow become unfaithful to the city’s lost grandeur. Since Martel insisted on seeing the most insignificant traces of that past before going up to the monstrous galleries and tanks that took up almost the whole of the interior of the building, Alcira pushed his wheelchair up the ramp leading to the entrance hall, where customers still paid their water bills at a string of windows, at the end of which was the entrance to the museum.

  Martel was dazzled by the virtually translucent china of the lavatories and bidets on display in the two adjoining rooms, and by the enamel of the moldings and sheets of terracotta displayed on felt-covered pedestals, as shiny as the day they’d come out of the kiln. Some of Boye’s drawings were framed, and others were kept in rolls. Two of them had notes by Ibsen about the play he was writing. Alcira had copied a phrase, De tok av Forbindingene uken etter, which maybe meant ‘They removed the bandages after a week,’ and chess annotations indicating the moment the match was interrupted. Martel replied to each of his companion’s explan
ations with the same phrase: ‘God, imagine that! The very hand that wrote A Doll’s House!’

  It was impossible to get up to the interior galleries by wheelchair, much less pass along the narrow aisles that overlooked the great interior patio, fenced in by one hundred and eighty cast iron columns. None of those obstacles intimidated the singer, who seemed possessed by an idée fixe. ‘I’ve got to get up there, Alcirita,’ he said. Perhaps he was driven by the idea that some of the hundreds of workers – who labored for sixteen hours a day on the construction of the palace, not even having Sundays off or lunch breaks, spending their brief nights in brothels or tenements – would have whistled or hummed on the scaffolding the first of the city’s tangos, the real ones, because they knew no other happiness than that produced by that hesitant music. Or maybe, as Alcira believed, what motivated him was a curiosity to see the little tank in the southeast corner, under the attic skylight, which could have been used to store water in times of extreme drought or as a place to deposit unusable bits of pipe. After studying the plans of the palace, Colonel Moori Koenig had chosen that cubicle to hide the mummy of Evita Perón in 1955, after taking her away from the embalmer, Pedro Ara, but an uncontrollable fire in the neighboring houses prevented him when he was very close to achieving his objective. In the same place, more than a hundred years earlier, a crime so atrocious had been committed that it was still spoken of in Buenos Aires, where unpunished crimes abound.

  Each time Martel got out of his wheelchair and decided to walk with crutches he ran the risk of tearing a muscle and suffering another of his painful internal hemorrhages. That afternoon, however, since he had an urgent need to climb those sinuous iron staircases to get to the highest tanks, he gathered his patience and hoisted the weight of his body from one step to the next, while Alcira, behind him, carrying the crutches, prayed he wouldn’t fall on top of her. He rested every little while and, after some deep breaths, tackled the next steps, with his neck veins swollen and his pigeon’s chest about to explode beneath his shirt. Even when Alcira tried to dissuade him over and over again, thinking how the torment would be repeated on the way down, the singer carried on as if possessed. When they got to the top, almost entirely out of breath, he collapsed on one of the iron girders and remained there, eyes closed, for several minutes until the blood returned to its course. But when he opened his eyes his astonishment left him breathless again. What he saw surpassed the oneiric sets from Metropolis. Ceramic necking, lintels, tiny blinds, valves, the premises as a whole gave the impression of the nest of a monstrous animal. The water had long disappeared from the twelve tanks divided between three levels, but the memory of the water was still there, with its silent metamorphoses as it entered the pumping station’s pipes and the dangerous swells that disfigured it at the slightest onslaught of the winds. The reserve tanks, located in the four attics, were especially susceptible to falling, when the southeasterly whipped up, breaking the subtle balance of the pillars, the horizontal panels and the valves.