I already knew that. I’ve been on your trail all these months. I waited in vain one day at noon under the arches in Mataderos, and I found out too late that you’d sung on a corner in Parque Chas. I would have been happy to hear just one line. But there are no traces of you anywhere. No recordings. No videos. Only a few people’s memories.
Soon there won’t even be that, he said.
His body gave off a chemical smell, and I would have sworn it smelled of blood as well. I didn’t want to tire him with direct questions. I felt we had no time for anything else.
More than once I thought your recitals followed some sort of order, I told him. However, I haven’t been able to figure out what lies behind that order. I’ve imagined many possibilities. I even thought the points that you chose were drawing a map of the Buenos Aires that nobody knows.
You were right, he said.
He made a barely perceptible sign to Alcira, who was standing at the foot of the bed, with her arms crossed.
It’s late, Bruno. Let’s let him get some rest.
I thought Martel wanted to raise one of his hands but I realized they were the first parts of him to have died. They were swollen and rigid. I stood up.
Wait, young man, he said. What are you going to remember about me?
I was so surprised by the question that I answered the first thing that came into my head:
Your voice. What I’ll most remember is what I’ve never heard.
Bring your ear close, he said.
I sensed that he was finally going to tell me what I’d waited so long to hear. I sensed that, if only for that moment, my journey was not going to have been in vain. I leaned over gently, or at least I meant to. I have no idea what I did because I was no longer inhabiting myself, and in my place was another body bending toward Martel, trembling.
When I had got close enough, he let the voice loose. In the past it must have been an extremely beautiful voice, unscathed, full as a sphere, because what was left of it, even thinned by illness, had a sweetness that didn’t exist in any other voice in this world. He only sang:
Buenos Aires, cuando lejos me vi.
And he stopped. They were the first words to ever have been heard in Argentine cinema. I didn’t know what they meant to Martel, but for me they encompassed all that I’d gone to search for, because they were the last words to come out of his mouth. Buenos Aires, when I’m far away. I used to think it was his way of saying goodbye to the city. I don’t see it like that anymore. I think the city had already dropped him, and he, desperate, was only asking it not to abandon him.
We buried him two days later in Chacarita cemetery. The only thing Alcira could get was a niche on the first floor of a mausoleum where other musicians lay. Although I paid for a funeral announcement in all the newspapers hoping that somebody might come to the funeral chapel, the only ones to sit by his body the whole time were Alcira, Sabadell and me. Before leaving for the cemetery, I hurriedly ordered a spray of camellias, and I still remember walking towards the niche with the spray, not knowing where to put it. Alcira was so heartbroken that nothing mattered to her, but Sabadell complained bitterly about people’s ingratitude. I don’t know how many times I prevented him from calling El Club del Vino and the Sunderland, before the burial. He did it when I fell asleep in a chair, at three in the morning, but no one answered the phone.
A series of vicissitudes came together to turn Martel’s death into a joke of fate. Only days later, when I paid the funeral parlor bill, I saw that the newspapers had announced his death under his real name, Estéfano Esteban Caccace. No one must have remembered that the singer was called that, which explained the solitude of his funeral, but it was too late to repair the damage by then. A long time later, in the summer in Manhattan, I ran into Tano Virgili on Fifth Avenue and we went to have an iced coffee at Starbucks. He told me that he’d seen the announcement and the name had rung a bell from somewhere, but the day of the funeral they were swearing in the fifth president of the Republic, expecting the currency to be devalued and no one could think of anything else.
At the moment Sabadell and I were placing the coffin in the niche, fifteen or twenty wild-looking people burst into the mausoleum, stopping a few steps away from us. Leading the group was a young guy with chipped teeth and a woman with thick makeup plastered on her face waving a little stick. He was carrying a little girl with skeletal legs, who was wearing a lace skirt and a crown of plastic flowers.
Oh my Saint, a miracle, the girl can walk! the woman shouted.
The one with the teeth set the little girl down in front of one of the niches and ordered her:
Walk, Dalmita, so the saint can see you.
He helped her take a step and also shouted:
Have you seen the miracle?
I tried to get close to see who they were venerating, but Alcira stopped me, taking my arm. Since we were waiting for Martel’s tomb to be sealed, we couldn’t leave at that moment.
They’re devotees of Gilda, the laconic Sabadell explained. That woman died seven or eight years ago in a car accident. Her cumbias weren’t very popular when she was alive, but look at her now.
I would have liked to ask her devotees to be quiet. I realized it would have been useless. A huge woman, with a tower of blonde hair and lips broadened with purple lipstick, took something that looked like a deodorant out of her purse and, holding it like a microphone, urged the faithful:
Come on girls, everyone sing to our Gilda!
She then embarked on an out-of-tune cumbia, which began: I don’t regret this looove / though it cost me my heeeart. The singing went on for five interminable minutes. Long before the end, they accompanied the chorus with hand clapping, until one of the devotees – or whatever they were – shouted: Grand Wild Lady!
We left fifteen minutes later with a greater desolation than the one we’d arrived with, feeling guilty for leaving Martel in an eternity so saturated with hostile music.
I was worried about Alcira being alone and I invited her to meet me that same evening, at seven, in the Café La Paz. She arrived punctually, with that strange striking beauty that obliged eyes to turn, as if the tempest of the last month hadn’t touched her. I helped her to pour out her heart telling me how she’d fallen in love with Martel the first time she heard him sing in El Rufián Melancólico, and how she gradually overcame the resistance he put up, the fear of revealing his sickly, helpless body. He was solitary and surly, she told me, and it took him months to trust her. When she finally managed it, Martel began to develop an increasingly intense dependency. He’d sometimes call her in the middle of the night to tell her his dreams, then he taught her how to give him injections in his almost invisible, excessively damaged veins, and finally wouldn’t let her leave his side and tormented her with jealous scenes. They ended up living together in the flat Alcira rented on Rincón Street, near Congreso. The house Martel had shared with his mother in Villa Urquiza was falling to pieces and they had to sell it for less than the memories were worth.
One conversation led to another, and now I don’t remember if it was that day or the next when Alcira started to tell me in detail about Martel’s solitary recitals. She knew from the start why he chose each one of the sites, and even suggested some which he rejected because they didn’t fit exactly into his map.
A year before I arrived in Buenos Aires he’d sung on the corner of Paseo Colón and Garay Street, just three blocks from the boarding house. A few metal silhouettes clinging to a bridge were the only signs of the pit of torment that, during the dictatorship, was known as the Club Atlético. When they were going to demolish it to build the Ezeiza motorway, Martel managed to see the skeleton of the lion’s den where hundreds of prisoners had died, whether from the tortures applied on enormous metal tables, a few steps from the cages, or because they’d been hung on hooks until they bled to death.
He sang in the early hours of a summer morning in front of the Jewish community center on Pasteur Street, where in July 1994 a truck full
of explosives blew up, destroying the building and killing eighty people. More than once it was thought the killers were within reach of justice and it was even said that the Iranian Embassy had protected them, but as soon as the investigation advanced a tiny bit insuperable obstacles arose. Months after Martel’s recital, the New York Times published the news on the front page that the then president of Argentina had received, perhaps, ten million dollars so the crime would go unpunished. If it was true, that would explain everything.
He also sang on the corner of Carlos Pellegrini and Arenales, where a paramilitary gang murdered the politician Rodolfo Ortega Peña in July 1974, shooting him from inside a light green Ford Fairlane that belonged to Perón’s astrologer’s fleet. Martel had passed when the body was still lying on the sidewalk, the blood flowing toward the street and a woman with her lips perforated by a bullet begging the dead man please not to die. He didn’t want to sing a tango in that spot, Alcira told me. The only thing he intoned was a long lament, an ay that lasted until the sun set. Then he remained silent like a child beneath the fat vultures.
And he sang – but this was before all the rest – in front of the old metal works on Vasena, in San Cristóbal, where thirty striking workers were murdered by the police during uprisings of 1919 still known as the Tragic Week. Maybe he would also have sung for the dead of the fatal December in which he died, but no one told him what was happening.
Halfway through January 2002, on one of the worst days of the summer, when the people seemed to be getting used to the incessant disgrace, Alcira told me that, just before the fateful recital in Parque Chas, Martel had read the story of a crime committed between 1978 and 1979, and had kept the clipping with the intention of giving one of his solitary concerts there too. The news, censured by the papers of the day, spoke of a corpse washed up among the reeds on the Southern Shore, near the pergola of the old municipal swimming beach, with the fingers burned, the face disfigured and no identifiable marks. Thanks to the spontaneous confession of a corvette pilot it became known that the dead man had been thrown into the waters of the Río de la Plata alive, and that his body, carried by contrary current, had resisted sinking, being eaten by fish or being dragged, like so many others, to the shores of Uruguay. The clipping said that the dead man had been arrested with Rúben, Magic Eye or Felipe Andrade Pérez. Martel was desperate to sing to that unfortunate man, and if he resisted death for so long, Alcira told me, it was only in the hope of getting to the pergola at the river’s edge.
The map, then, was simpler than I’d imagined. It didn’t draw any alchemic figure or hide the name of God or repeat phrases from the Kabbalah, but followed, by chance, the itinerary of crimes committed with impunity in the city of Buenos Aires. It was a list that contained an infinite number of names and that was what had most attracted Martel, because it served as an incantation against cruelty and injustice, which were also infinite.
That atrociously hot day I told Alcira that I’d booked my plane ticket to return to New York at the end of the month, and I asked her if she wouldn’t like to come with me. I didn’t know how two of us could live on the meager stipend I got from student grants, but I was sure I wanted her by my side, no matter what. A woman who had loved Martel the way she had was capable of enlightening anyone’s life, even one as grey as mine. She held my hands, she thanked me with a gentleness that still hurts, and answered no. What would become of me in a country I have nothing to do with? I don’t even know how to speak English.
Live with me, I said, stupidly.
You have many years of light ahead of you, Bruno. And around me is only darkness. It wouldn’t be good to mix things.
She began to stand up but I begged her to stay a moment longer. I didn’t want to return to the unknown night. I didn’t know how to say what I finally said:
I still have one question. I’ve been meaning to ask you for a long time, but you probably don’t even know the answer.
I confessed my betrayal of Bonorino, told her about his death in Fuerte Apache and revealed all that I knew about the aleph. I wanted to understand, I said, why the librarian left the notebook that was also his whole life in my hands.
Because you weren’t going to betray him again.
It can’t be just that. There’s something else.
Because human beings, as insignificant as we are, always try to live on. Somehow or other, we want to defeat death, find some form of eternity. Bonorino didn’t have friends. You were all that was left to him. He knew, sooner or later, you’d put his name in a book.
I’m going to feel lost without you, I said. I’ll feel less lost if we write every once in a while.
I don’t want to write anything except my memories of Martel, she answered without looking at me.
So this is the end.
Why? There is no end. How can you know when the end is?
I went to the washroom and when I came back she was gone.
I called her ten or twenty times right up to the very afternoon of my departure. She never answered. The first day I heard an impersonal message that only repeated her phone number. After that the phone rang and rang in the void.
All the flights to New York left at night, so I didn’t take my leave of the Buenos Aires I’d imagined but of the reverberation of its lights. Before veering north, the plane lifted over the river and skirted the edge of the city. It was immense and flat and I don’t know how many minutes it took to cross. I’d so often dreamed of the layout as seen from above that the reality disconcerted me. I imagined it would resemble the palace of Knossos or the rectangular mosaic of Sousse with the warning inscribed: Hic inclusus vitam perdit. Whoever is shut in here will lose his life.
It was a labyrinth, just as I had supposed, and Alcira had got caught in one of its cul-de-sacs. The night allowed me to observe that, just as Bonorino had conjectured, the true labyrinth was not marked out by the lights, where there were only paths that led nowhere, but by the lines of darkness, which indicated where the people lived. A Baudelaire poem, ‘The Beacons,’ came into my head: Ces malédictions, ces blasphèmes, ces plaintes, / Ces extases, ces cris, ces pleurs, ces Te Deum, / Sont un écho redit par mille labyrinthes. These curses, these blasphemies, these lamentations, / These Te Deums, these ecstasies, these cries, these tears, / Are an echo repeated by a thousand labyrinths. I could no longer hear all those voices and the labyrinth had disappeared into the night. But I kept repeating the poem until I fell asleep.
A few weeks after arriving back in Manhattan, I began to receive urgent letters from the Fulbright Foundation, demanding a report on the use I’d made of the grant. I tried to explain it in formal documents that I drafted and then tore to shreds, until I gave up. I trusted that sooner or later they’d give up on my silence.
One afternoon in May I left my house and walked distractedly down Broadway. I stopped in at Tower Records with the impossible hope of finding a recording of Martel. I’d already tried before. The helpful employees looked him up on their computers and even called experts on South American music on the phone. No one had ever heard of him, there wasn’t even the slightest mention of him in any anthology. I knew all this, of course, but I still refused to believe it.
I strayed over toward University Place and, as I passed the university bookstore, I remembered that I wanted to buy Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. The volume cost more than forty dollars and I’d been resisting it for weeks, but that day I let fate decide for me. I was whiling away the time looking through the philosophy section and I found a copy of Richard Foley’s Intellectual Trust. People will say that none of this is important and maybe it’s not, but I’d rather not overlook the slightest detail. I picked up the Benjamin again and opened it at random, in a section called ‘Theory of Progress’ I read this line: ‘Knowledge comes only in lightning flashes. The text is the long roll of thunder that follows.’ The phrase reminded me of Buenos Aires, which had been a revelation to me but whose rolls of thunder, now, were impossible to turn into words.
Don’t let that get you down, Bruno, Foley said. What’s lost on one side can sometimes be recovered on another. In July, I was in Buenos Aires for ten days. I didn’t go looking for any singer but I found an extraordinary one. He was singing century-old tangos in the Club del Vino. Maybe you know him. He’s called Jaime Taurel. He’s got a moving, clear voice, so vivid you feel if you stretched out your hand you could touch it. When I left, people were saying he was better than Gardel. You should go back, just to hear him.
That night I couldn’t sleep. When dawn began to break, I sat down at the computer and wrote the first few pages of this book.
Except for Jean Franco and Richard Foley, all the characters in this novel are imaginary, even those who seem real.
NOTES
1
Milongas: Tango clubs or salons. A milonga is also an early twentieth-century Argentinian musical form, a precursor of the tango.
2
El Rufián Melancólico (The Melancholy Pimp): the bookstore is named after a character from Roberto Arlt’s 1929 novel The Seven Madmen
3
Porteños: Natives of Buenos Aires; literally, people from the port.
4
Unitarians: Progressive, liberal opponents of Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793–1877, provincial cattle baron who went on to become a so-called Federalist governor of Buenos Aires between 1829–32 and 1835–52, gradually accumulating national powers), hundreds of whom were killed, and often tortured, by the Mazorca, his secret police.
The Tango Singer Page 19