The Tango Singer

by Tomás Eloy Martínez

  They preferred The Son of the Bride, where they’d cried their eyes out. I hadn’t seen the most recent movies and couldn’t contribute. I liked works soaked in time. In Buenos Aires, just like in Manhattan, I frequented art house cinemas and film clubs, where I found wonders that no one remembered anymore. In a little room in the San Martín theater I saw in a single day The Flight, an Argentine gem from 1937 that was believed lost for six decades, and Chronicle of a Lone Boy, which was comparable to Les Quatre cents coups. A week later, in a series at the Malba, I discovered a short from 1961 called Faena (Slaughter), which showed cattle being knocked out with hammers and then skinned alive in the slaughterhouse. I then understood the true meaning of the word barbarous and for a whole week could think of nothing else. In New York, an experience like that would have turned me into a vegetarian. In Buenos Aires it was impossible, because there was nothing to eat but beef.

  Shortly after eleven, Valeria and her students asked for the bill and stood up. They had to start filming tomorrow morning at dawn, and they still needed two or three hours of practice. When they left, I was expecting nothing more from the night, but one of the little actors surprised me:

  We have to go to the ends of the earth without even sleeping, che. The Liniers Arcades, imagine. They’d told us to be there at noon, but then they found out it was reserved. Some deformed singer got in ahead of us. That asshole, what’s his name, he said, snapping his fingers.

  Martel, the other matinee idol said.

  Julio Martel? I asked.

  That’s the one. Who’s ever heard of him?

  He’s a great singer, Valeria corrected him. The best since Gardel.

  You’re the only one who says that, insisted the little actor who wasn’t turned on by her. No one understands what he sings.

  The anxiety wouldn’t let me work or sleep. For the first time fate had allowed me to anticipate the place where Martel was going to give one of his private recitals. After seeing Faena, I could surmise why he had chosen the arcades, three two-story buildings, with a succession of cloister-like archways at the front, the construction of which had begun on the very same day as that of the Waterworks Palace. The northern gate was used in the past for access to the slaughter lots and the old livestock market, where at daybreak they auctioned the cattle to be eaten that day. In 1978, the dictatorship had closed down and demolished the slaughterhouse. On the forty hectares they built a pharmaceutical lab and a recreation park, but the cattle still came into the adjoining market by the trailer-load, emptied into the corrals and sold by lot, at so much a kilo.

  The street the arcades were on had changed its name so many times that everyone called it whatever they wanted. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when the place was known as Chicago, and the slaughtermen used only knives imported from that butchers’ city, those who ventured down that street called it calle Décima. In the parish records it was inscribed as San Fernando, in memory of a medieval prince who ate nothing but beef. The auctioneers who got together behind the blue and pink chamfer of the Oviedo bar, right across the street from the arcades, were still calling it Tellier until recently, in homage to the Frenchman, Charles Tellier, who was the first to transport frozen meat across the Atlantic. Since 1984, however, it was called Lisandro de la Torre, after the senator who exposed the illegal meat-processing monopoly.

  There are no reliable maps of Buenos Aires, because the street names change from one week to the next. What one map affirms, another denies. Directions guide and at the same time disturb. For fear of getting lost, some people never go more than ten or twelve blocks away from home in their whole lives. Enriqueta, the manager of the boarding house, for example, had never been west of 9 de Julio Avenue. ‘What for?’ she’d said. ‘Who knows what might happen to me.’

  When I finished eating at La Brigada I went to the Café Británico without stopping off at my room, like I usually did. I urgently needed to revise my notes on the film Faena to see whether I might find something in the rituals of the slaughterhouse that could explain Martel’s presence in the arcades at noon the next day. According to the short, every morning seven thousand cows and calves ascended a ramp toward death. First, they’d waded through a pool and then been hosed down to complete the washing. At the top of the ramp, a hatch shut behind them and separated them into groups of three or four. Then they were each struck a brutal hammer blow on the back of the neck by a man naked to the waist. The blow rarely missed. The animals collapsed and were almost instantly thrown two meters down onto a cement floor. That none of them felt the imminence of death was essential to the meat’s tenderness. When a cow sensed danger, it would stiffen with terror and the muscles would be permeated with a bitter flavor.

  As the cattle fell from the ramp, six or seven men went along wrapping their legs with a steel wire and fitting them onto a hook while a counterweight hoisted them up off the ground, head hanging down. The movements had to be swift and precise: the animals were still alive and, if they awoke from the blackout, they put up a hell of a fight. Once hung, they advanced along an endless conveyor belt, at the rate of two hundred an hour. The slaughtermen awaited them by the waterwheel, with their knives raised: the sure point in the jugular and that was it. The blood gushed out into a canal where it would coagulate for later use. What happened next was atrocious and it seemed unthinkable to me that Martel would want to sing to that past. The cows were skinned, slit open, disembowelled and handed over, now headless and legless, to the quartermen, who chopped them in half or in pieces.

  That’s how it was in 1848 as well, when Esteban Echeverría wrote El Matadero (The Slaughterhouse), the first Argentine work of literature, in which the cruelty to the cattle is a metaphor for the barbarous cruelty inflicted on men in the country. Although the slaughterhouse is no longer behind the arcades and has been scattered among dozens of meat processing plants outside the city limits, the rites of the sacrifice haven’t changed. They’ve only added another step to the dance, the prod, consisting of two copper poles through which an electrical charge is generated. When it is applied to the animal’s flank, the prod herds them towards the sacrificial ramps. In 1932, a police commissioner named Leopoldo Lugones, son of the great national poet – his namesake – realized the instrument could be useful in torturing human beings, and ordered tests of electrical charges on political prisoners, choosing soft areas where the pain would be most intolerable: the genitals, the gums, the anus, the nipples, the ears, the nasal cavities, with the intention of annihilating all thought or desire and converting the victims into non-persons.

  I made a list of those details in the hope of finding a clue as to what had led Martel to sing in front of the old slaughterhouse, but although I went over it time and time again, I couldn’t see it. Alcira Villar would have given me the key, but I didn’t know her then. She later told me that Martel tried to recapture the past just as it had been, without the disfigurations of memory. He knew the past remained intact somewhere, not in the shape of the present but of eternity: what was and still continues to be will be the same tomorrow, something like Plato’s Primordial Idea or Bergson’s crystals of time, although the singer had never heard of them.

  According to Alcira, Martel’s interest in the mirages of time began in Tita Merello’s cinema, one June day, when they went to see two movies Carlos Gardel had filmed at the Paramount studios in Joinville, Melodia de arrabal (Suburban Melody) and Luces de Buenos Aires (Lights of Buenos Aires). Martel had observed his idol with such intensity that he felt at certain moments – he said then – that he was him. Not even the terrible condition of the prints had disappointed him. In the solitude of the theater, he sang softly, in a duet with the voice on screen, two of the tangos, Tomo y obligo (I’ll have a Drink and so will You) and Silencio. Alcira couldn’t hear the slightest difference between one singer and the other. When Martel imitated Gardel, he was Gardel, she said. When he strove to be himself, he was better.

  They went back to see the two films again the nex
t day at the matinee and, on the way out, the singer decided to buy copies on video that they sold in a shop on Corrientes at the corner of Rodríguez Pena. For a week he did nothing but watch them over and over again on the television, sleeping now and then, eating something, and watching them again, Alcira told me. He’d pause them to look at the rural landscape, the cafés of the day, the greengrocers’ shops, the clubs. Gardel, on the other hand, he listened to spellbound, without pauses. When it was all over, he told me that the past of films was an artifice. The tones of the voices were conserved as clearly as in the recordings they retouched in the studios, but the surroundings were painted cardboard and, even though what we saw was the very same cardboard as the day it was filmed, the gaze degraded it, as if time contained a force of incorrigible gravity. Not even then did he stop thinking, Alcira told me, that the past was intact somewhere, maybe not in people’s memories, as we might suppose, but rather outside of us, in some uncertain point in reality.

  I didn’t know any of this when I went to the arcades of the Liniers market at eleven-thirty the next morning, the day after my encounter with Valeria. Among a sea of cables, beside two trucks loaded with spotlights and sound systems, I made out the two young actors from La Brigada in patent leather high-heeled shoes. The filming had finished and I didn’t approach them. The place was lit by the soft November sunlight and, despite the cracks of humidity and age, it still had a severe beauty. Behind the arcades were glimpses of entrance halls and stairways to the offices of a union, a pottery class and the neighborhood committee, while across the street was a sign for a Creole Museum I didn’t care to visit. In the center, a sixty-foot-high tower topped with a clock threw its shadow across the Plazoleta del Resero, where a few tipas trees grew, like in Parque Lezama.

  Although the street’s hustle and bustle was incessant at this time of day as heaving buses went past, leaving a wake of asthmatic sounds, the air smelled of cows, calves and wet grass. While I waited for noon, I went into the market. An intricate web of corridors surrounded the corrals. Despite the late hour, two thousand head of cattle were waiting to be auctioned. The consignees executed an inimitable minuet in those galleries, one step of which was discussing the livestock prices among themselves, at the same time as writing hieroglyphics in their electronic appointment books, talking on their cell phones and exchanging signals with their colleagues, without getting confused or missing a beat. On one occasion I heard the cathedral-like bell ringing in the distance announcing the auction, while the drivers moved the cattle from one corral to another. After having seen Faena, knowing the fate that awaited each one of these animals – an inevitable fate that, nevertheless, had not yet happened – filled me with an unbearable despair. They’re already in death’s grip, I said to myself, but death will arrive tomorrow. What difference was there for them between the non-being of the present and the non-being of the next day? What difference is there now between what I am now and what this city will make of me: something that is happening to me right now and that, like the cows about to be sacrificed, I cannot see? What will Martel make of me while making something else of himself?

  It would soon be midday and I sped up to arrive in time at the arcades. If the singer had reserved the whole place all to himself, maybe he would be accompanied by an orchestra. The thundering of trucks and buses would drown out his voice, but I would be right there to hear it. I would drink it if necessary. He could only get around in a wheelchair by then and couldn’t stay in the same place for more than an hour: he was having convulsions and fainting fits, couldn’t control his sphincter.

  At quarter to one, however, he had still not arrived. The aroma of stews being cooked in the neighborhood converged on the Plazoleta de Resero and made me hungry. I hadn’t slept and all night I’d had nothing but a couple of coffees in the Británico. From the beveled doorway of the Oviedo bar office workers and housewives emerged with packages of food, and I was tempted to cross the street and buy a bite to eat myself. I felt a bit light-headed and would have paid all the money I had for a plate of any old stew, though I didn’t know if I’d really be able to enjoy it. I was worried, with an inexplicable anxiety, and had a vague premonition that Martel wasn’t coming.

  I never saw him arrive, in fact. I left the arcades about two-thirty. I wanted to be far away from the market, far from Mataderos and far from the world as well. A bus dropped me off a couple of blocks from the boarding house, beside a cheap restaurant where they served me a disgusting bowl of noodle soup. I got to my room just before five, hurled myself into bed and slept straight through till the next day.

  When he alluded to a place, Martel was never literal, but each time I deceived myself thinking he was. If the little actors from La Brigada had told me he was going to evoke the Zwi Migdal’s white slaves, I would have looked for him in any one of the brothels that association of pimps had operated around Junín and Tucumán Streets, in that block now purified by bookstores, video stores and film distributors. It wouldn’t have occurred to me, for example, to go to the corner of Libertador and Billinghurst, where at the beginning of the last century there was a clandestine café, with a platform at the back, where women who’d been brought like cattle from Poland and France were auctioned off to the highest bidder. And I would much less have imagined that Martel might sing in the big house on Avenida de los Corrales where in 1977 the ex-prostitute Violeta Miller sent her nurse Catalina Godel to her death.

  I waited in the Plazoleta del Resero and didn’t see him, because he was inside a car that was stopped by the south corner of the arcades, with the guitarist Tulio Sabadell.

  Only at the end of January, when I was leaving Buenos Aires, did I learn what had happened. Alcira Villar told me then that the singer had vomited blood that morning. When she took his blood pressure she realized it was extremely low. She tried to convince him not to go out, but he insisted. He was pale, his joints ached and his stomach was swollen. When we got him into the car, I thought we’d never arrive, Alcira told me. Fifteen minutes later, however, he had recovered. Sometimes his illness hid away somewhere inside his body, like a frightened cat, and other times it came out and showed its fangs. Martel was taken by surprise too but he knew how to calm it down and even pretend it didn’t exist.

  That morning we were driving along the Ezeiza highway, Alcira continued, and, when we were getting to General Paz Avenue, the pains retreated as unexpectedly as they’d begun. He asked me to stop so we could buy a spray of camellias and told me that after watching Gardel’s films he’d decided to sing a couple of tangos from the 1930s. Over the last couple of days he’d been practicing Margarita Gauthier, which his mother used to sing as she washed clothes. ‘It was a reflex action for her,’ Martel had told her. ‘She’d scrub the shirts and the tango would settle into her body of its own accord.’ But that morning he wanted to start the private recital with Volver (Return), by Gardel and Le Pera.

  Sabadell and I were surprised, Alcira told me, when he burst out singing in the car, in a baritone voice, a verse from Return that reflected, or at least to me seemed to reflect, his conflict with time: I’m afraid of the showdown / with the past that returns / of confronting my life. Stranger still was that he repeated the melody in F, in a deep bass voice and then, almost without a breath, he sang it as a tenor. I’d never heard him switch his voice from one register to another, because Martel was a natural tenor, and he never played with his voice this way again, at least not in front of me. He was very alert to our reactions, especially Sabadell’s, who was staring at him incredulously. I only recall my admiration, because the transition from one to the other, far from jarring, was almost imperceptible, and even now I don’t know how he did it.

  Even before we got to the Avenida de los Corrales, Alcira told me, Martel went into one of his dark moods that worried me so much, and was completely silent, staring off into space. As we passed a house with balconies, which looked uninhabited, the only embellishment being a glass roof now in ruins, the driver of our car tried to
park, perhaps obeying an order that Sabadell and I didn’t know about. Only then did Martel emerge from his apparent apathy and ask him to continue on as far as the Plazoleta del Resero.

  We didn’t get out of the car, said Alcira. Martel asked Sabadell to lay the bunch of camellias at the entrance to a clinic, in the southern arcade, and to guard it for a moment so no one would take it. While he did that, the singer sat still with his head lowered, without saying a single word. Trucks pulling trailers, buses and motorcycles streamed past us but Martel’s will for silence was so deep and dominant that I don’t remember hearing anything, and what has remained are just the fleeting shadows of the vehicles, and the image of Sabadell, who looked naked without his guitar.

  Two months later, during one of our long conversations in the Café La Paz, Alcira told me who Violeta Miller was and why Martel had left the camellias in the place where Catalina Godel was murdered.

  I doubt you’ve heard of the Zwi Migdal, she said then. At the beginning of the twentieth century, almost all the brothels of Buenos Aires were run by that mafia of Jewish pimps. The Migdal’s envoys traveled through the poorest villages of Poland, Galicia, Besarabia and the Ukraine, in search of Jewish girls they would seduce with false promises of matrimony. In some cases these illusory weddings would even take place in a synagogue where everything was faked: the Rabbi and the ten obligatory participants of the minyan. After a brutal initiation, the victims were confined in brothels where they worked fourteen to sixteen hours a day, until their bodies were reduced to ruins.