The Tango Singer

by Tomás Eloy Martínez

  I was the driver, I said, but I wasn’t as desperate as the one in the novel to stop at an inn.

  It would have been better if you’d got out and stayed quiet. I spent the time writing a poem by flashlight. If we take a monotonous route, I’ll read it to you.

  When we got back on the road, I chose the most monotonous route I know: General Paz Avenue, the northern and western border of Buenos Aires.

  Barely enough light to see, said the poet, from the tank. The batteries are going. Any moment now I’m going to go blind. I spy / boasting and apocryphal / humility and much / hidden suffering. I spy the shared / light of unknowing, I spy, / with my little eye, a branch, what color: I couldn’t say.

  It went on like that. He read the whole poem and then read some others until the flashlight was dim and dying. I spy and I want to rest / a little, it’s understandable. I can’t see very well, he said. About six in the evening we went to fill up with gas at the operations house, we got out for a moment to have a coffee and I felt the weight of the day on my body. I wasn’t tired or feeling or wanting anything and I could even have said I was no longer thinking. Only time moved within me in some direction I don’t know how to express, time backed away from the childhood without childhood we shared – Mocho Andrade said to Martel, and Alcira repeated to me later, in the first person as it had been passed from one person to the next – and somehow went missing in what was perhaps my old age; we were all so very old in one of time’s lost gusts that day.

  I watched the poet climb out of the tank looking as old as his father. The proximity of death had unhinged him: a lock of hair fell, as usual, across his forehead, but it was faded and dull, and his wide, ox-like jaw was collapsing. That night we camped in Centenary Park and at dawn the next day I started to drive around Parque Chas where the residents weren’t surprised when the truck passed over and over again down the same streets with their names of European cities: Berlin, Copenhagen, Dublin, London, Cádiz, where the landscape, though always the same, had seams of mist or port smells, as if we really were crossing those remote places. Once I got lost in the tangle of streets but this time I did it on purpose, to use up time as I searched for a way out. I followed the curve of Londres Street and without knowing how I was suddenly in Jimmy Joy’s dear dirty Dublin, or the truck frolicked in the Tiergarten on its way to the Berlin Wall, waving to the neighbors who remained indifferent, because they were well used to the vehicles becoming disconcerted in Parque Chas and being abandoned by their drivers.

  After I left the truck I slept for two days solid, and when I took the wheel again, a week later, the poet had vanished from the tank. I realized that the rounds of the dance meant we wouldn’t coincide again until the end, when it was my turn to look after the corpse. At the beginning of November an incandescent sun shone over Buenos Aires. I was waiting to be called in as relief, sleeping in ruined hotels in the Bajo under a false name. Every five hours I phoned the operations house, to let them know I was still alive. I would have liked to see the poet, but I knew it wasn’t prudent. I heard that the truck was in motion almost always around the port, blending in with the hundreds of other trucks that came and went from the docks, and that life inside the tank was getting intolerable. Perhaps Aramburu had also found another hell in that perpetual voyage.

  Early one morning, around three, they came to get me so I could serve my sentence of eight days inside the tank. I had already packed my backpack with two cameras, twelve rolls of film, two strong lamps with replacement batteries and a thermos of coffee. They had warned me not to take photos at night, and if the sun stopped shining through the breathing holes at any point during the day I was to interrupt any work immediately. I tried not to retch as I entered the tank. Even though they’d just cleaned and disinfected it, the smell was venomous. I felt like I was in one of those caves where moles collect insects and worms. As well as the gravitational force that death imposed on the air, there was the organic smell of the bodies that had preceded me and the memory of the excrement they’d expelled. The ghosts did not want to withdraw. How had the poet been able to find his voice in that darkness? I am about to open the doors, he’d written, to close / my eyes and not look / further than my nose, not smell, not take the name of God in vain.

  I lay down, prepared to sleep until daybreak. The mattress had formed humps and ravines, the surface was slightly sticky, I didn’t want to complain, I didn’t feel that it was the end of youth. I woke up a short while later because the truck was bumping around, as if the comrade at the wheel was driving carelessly over a muddy road. I approached the ventilation slit and said:

  Do you want me to sing to amuse you? I have a unique voice. I was a soloist in choir at school.

  If you want to help me, don’t talk and don’t sing, came the answer. It was a girl. You don’t have the voice of a person, you screech like a bug.

  One of the other two from the cemetery had begun the journey with me. I didn’t know when the girl had replaced him. Or maybe there were two people in the cab.

  Are there two of you? I wanted to know. And the poet? Does he have a turn to drive on this leg of the journey?

  No one said anything. I felt like the last survivor on earth.

  We kept going around, without ever stopping. Every once in a while I heard airplane engines, the quick rattling of trains and dogs barking. I didn’t even know where I was when the sun came out and I fixed the two lamps on projections on opposite sides of the truck so that, when lit, the light would shine directly onto the corpse. The person who was at the wheel of the truck, whoever it might be, was not a great driver. We hit every pothole and all the uneven bits in the road. I was afraid that with so many jolts I wouldn’t be able to turn off the lamps in time if we went through any darkened areas.

  I’m going to turn on some lights back here, I warned, through the ventilation crack. Knock twice when we’re approaching a tunnel.

  There were two knocks, but sunlight kept pouring through the holes for ten, fifteen minutes. I drank some hot coffee and ate two buns. Then, I checked my pulse. I needed to keep the aperture open, without trembling, for at least five seconds. I illuminated the dingy space. Only then did I notice that beneath Aramburu’s body was another, in a wooden packing crate. It was slightly bigger and wasn’t wearing any medals or rosaries, but the shroud that covered it was almost identical. If I hadn’t seen the real remains a few weeks earlier I wouldn’t have been able to tell who was who, and even now I had my doubts. I took at least three full rolls of photos of both corpses, close-ups and long shots. When I developed them I’d be sure. After an hour and a half I went back to the mattress. Who knows how long we’d been driving without a break. It couldn’t be much longer before we’d go back to the operations house. Suddenly, we glided down a slope and I realized we were in Parque Chas. After a few circuitous laps, the truck eased into a straight line and left the labyrinth. We went on like that until night fell. I had run out of coffee and food, my legs hurt and my senses were dulled by a dense cloud inside my head. I didn’t even notice when we stopped. Since they took their time opening the door of the tank, I shouted and shouted, but no one answered. I was there for a long time, resigned to succumbing in the company of those two dead men. But before dawn they freed me. I could barely stand up in the patio of the operations house, beside the running board of the empty cab. Someone who seemed to be in charge, a short guy with a red beard I’d never seen before, pointed me towards a straw mattress in the attic and ordered me not to come down from that floor until they called me. I thought I’d fall asleep on the spot, but the fresh air woke me up and, leaning out the window, I contemplated the patio with an empty mind, as the light turned from grey to pink, and then to yellow and the glories of the morning. A girl with a thicket of dark curls approached the truck, shaking off the water from the shower like a puppy, and examined the contents of the tank. I guessed she was the one who had been traveling in the cab, and felt a flash of embarrassment because, suffocated into stupidity, I’d fo
rgotten to remove my excrement. It was mid-morning by the time a white van parked beside the tank. My exhaustion was getting the better of me but I was there, awake, unable to tear my eyes away from the patio, where the tiles looked scorching. I suppose there must have been a street or a field beyond, I don’t know. Now I’ll never know. Three men I didn’t know took Aramburu’s coffin out of the tank: I recognized it, because I’d taken a sickening number of photographs of the crucifix on the lid, with its golden halo above Christ’s open arms and, underneath, the succinct plaque with the general’s name and years of birth and death. The girl with the ringlets ordered each of the corpse’s movements: Put it on one side, on the platform, slowly, don’t scratch the wood. Uncover it. Leave what’s inside on top of the bed. Slowly, slowly. Nothing should be out of place.

  My torpor lifted as soon as I discovered what was happening. You’d have to have an iron stomach not to be horrified by those two open coffins – one luxurious, imperial; the other miserable, badly made, like the ones hurriedly assembled in cities with the plague – and by the ruins of the two dead bodies lying in the open air. The girl with the ringlets arranged something that, from my vantage point in the attic, looked like a swap, although I don’t know now if what I saw was what I think I saw or if it was just a trick of my senses, the embers of the days I spent shut up in the tank. With the fastidiousness of cabinetmakers they took the rosary and one of the military medals from one of the bodies, and put them on the chest and between the fingers of the other corpse. What had been in one of the coffins was taken to the other and vice versa, I’m not sure about what I’m saying – Mocho told him, and Alcira repeated it to me, and I am telling it in turn in a language that undoubtedly has very little in common with the original tale, none of the tremulous syntax or the unwrinkled voice that lasted a few hours in Mocho’s throat, that distant night in the Sunderland – I’m only sure that the luxurious coffin went into the white van and the miserable one went back into the tanker, perhaps with a different body inside.

  I slept the whole morning and woke up around one o’clock. There was an enormous silence in the house and, call as I might, I didn’t see anyone. At about two, the poet appeared at the door where they’d confined me. I embraced him. He was thin, shaken, as if surfacing from a grave illness. I began to tell him what I’d seen and he told me to be quiet, to forget it, that things are never what they appear to be. I’m not from here anymore, he recited: I barely feel like a passing memory. Neither you nor I are of this unhappy world, to which we give our lives so that nothing remains as it is. It’s time to go, he said.

  He covered my eyes with a black cloth and dark glasses. That’s how I left the operations house, blindfolded, leaning on his shoulder. For more than an hour I was led along paths that smelled of cows and wet grass. After that, I was surrounded by a persistent stink of gas. We stopped. The poet’s hand removed the sunglasses and black blindfold. The sun was shining straight down on us and my eyes took a long time to adjust. I made out, a hundred meters away, the tanks and towers of an oil refinery. There was a long line of tanker trucks identical to the one I knew at the entrance, while other also identical ones drove out every five minutes or so. We stood in silence for I don’t know how long, contemplating that rhythmic and tedious coming and going.

  Are we going to stay here all day? I said. I thought the work was finished.

  One never knows when something finishes.

  At that very instant our truck drove out of the refinery. It was too familiar an image not to recognize. They’d also painted an imperceptible yellow line over the door of the tank and, from where we stood, we saw the line gleaming as a ray of sun struck it.

  Should we follow it? I asked.

  We’ll just let it disappear into the distance, the poet said. Until the ashes are blown away on the wind.

  We lost sight of the imposing cylinder on the highway, laden with its small lake of gasoline. It carried a body that would disintegrate as the years went by and leave strands of itself in the subterranean tanks of the service stations and, through the tailpipes of cars, in the air without flair of Buenos Aires.

  I’ll give you a lift. Where are you going? the poet asked.

  Drop me off anywhere near Villa Urquiza. I’m going to walk.

  I wanted to think about what I’d done and what it meant, to know whether I was fleeing something or going towards something. My confidence rests on the profound disdain for this unhappy world, the poet had said to me. I’ll give my life so that nothing remains as it is. We spend our lives giving them up for causes we don’t entirely understand only so that nothing will remain as it is, Mocho said to Martel that night in the Sunderland.

  Couples danced indifferently around them. An entourage of moths fluttered around the spotlights. Some brushed against the burning glass and died. Martel was perturbed for a long time. The wings of history had brushed against Mocho and he too heard the sound of flight. It was more vehement than the music, more dominant and intense than the sound of the city. It had to embrace the whole country and the next day, or the following, it would be on the front page of the papers. He felt like saying, as his mother did when confronted with a death, ‘What tiny things we are, nothing at all in eternity,’ but he just said: ‘That’s the only reason I sing as well: so what once was returns and nothing remains as it is.’

  The next morning, Alcira told me, Mocho wanted Martel to accompany him to the house on Bucarelli Street, where the labyrinth of his own life had begun. The radios announced the return of Evita’s corpse and the discovery of the white van with Aramburu’s coffin inside. If what Andrade wanted to do was to finish one story and go back to the past to begin again – as he said to the singer in the Sunderland – he had no choice but to return to Parque Chas and hold a vigil over the ruins of his life.

  Their morning was a series of disappointments, one after the other. The conspirators’ house had been cordoned off and a patrol car stood guard by the door. In the distance, the streets opened in circles and on the sidewalks that stopped without warning there was not a soul to be seen and the silence was so oppressive it was hard to breathe. Not even the dogs stuck their noses out between the curtains. They couldn’t stop to look up at the windows of the top floor without appearing suspicious to the police in the patrol car, so they turned onto Ballivian in the direction of Bauness and back up the slope that came out on Pampa. Every once in a while, Martel turned to Mocho and detected his growing despair. He would have liked to take his arm, but he feared that any gesture, the lightest touch, and his friend would dissolve into tears.

  When they got to the bus stop, Andrade said they had to part company at this point because he was expected somewhere else, but Martel knew that somewhere else was nowhere, perdition, that he had no one left to ask for refuge. He didn’t even try to keep him from going. Mocho seemed in too much of a hurry and detached himself from his embrace as if he were detaching from himself.

  He had no more news of him until eleven years later, when one of the survivors of the dictatorship mentioned in passing that a big man with the voice of a rooster had been ‘transferred’ one summer’s night from the dungeons of the Athletic Club, that is, taken to his death. The witness didn’t even know the real name of the victim, only his noms de guerre, Rubén or Magic Eye, but the mention of the voice was enough for Martel. The name Felipe Andrade Pérez does not figure on any of the infinite lists of disappeared persons that have circulated since then, nor is it recorded in the civil actions against the dictatorship’s commanders, as if he’d never existed. The story he’d told in the Sunderland was, however, full of meaning for Martel. It represented what he himself would have wanted to experience if he’d been able to, and also – although he was less sure about this – it represented the rebel’s death he wished he could have had. That was why, Alcira said, he dyed his hair black, with the illusion of returning to his self of twenty-seven years ago, and put on his striped pants and black double-breasted recital jacket, and went out one evening
two weeks ago to evoke his friend on the corner of Bucarelli and Ballivian, in front of the house they hadn’t been able to enter the last time they’d seen each other.

  Accompanied by Sabadell’s guitar, Martel sang Sentencia, by Celedonio Flores. In spite of the makeup over the bags under his eyes and on his cheeks, he was pale, full of rage against the body that had abandoned him when he most needed it. I thought he was going to faint, said Alcira. He squeezed his abdomen tightly, as if holding up something that was falling, and went on like that: I was born, your honor, in the back streets / unhappy back streets of immense sorrow. The tango is a long one, lasting more than three and a half minutes. I feared he wouldn’t be able to finish it. The little Korean girls from the cookie shop applauded him as they would have applauded a sword swallower. Three boys rode by on their bikes, shouted ‘Encore!’ and went on. Maybe the scene seems pathetic to you, said Alcira, but in reality it was almost tragic: the greatest Argentine singer opening his wings for the last time before people who didn’t know what was happening.

  Sabadell amused himself for a while on the guitar, jumping from a fragment of La cumparsita to others from Flor de fango (Flower of Mud) and La morocha (The Brunette), until he got to La casita de mis viejos (My Folks’ Little House). More than once Martel was on the verge of collapsing into sobs as he sang that tango. His throat must have hurt, perhaps a memory was hurting him too, the memory of a dead man who didn’t want to accept his condition, like all those who have no grave. Why didn’t he cry, then? Alcira said to herself and later said to me, in the hospital on Bulnes Street. Why did he hold back the tears that might well have saved him? Quiet neighborhood of my past / like a melancholy dusk / on your corner I grow old . . .

  He was sweating buckets. I told him we should go – Alcira told me – I stupidly told him that Felipe Andrade would have surely sung along with him by now from his eternity, but he rebuffed me with a firmness or fierceness I’d never seen in him before. He said: ‘If there were two tangos for the rest of them, why should there also be only two tangos for my dearest friend.’