The Tango Singer (17 page)

You’re dizzy, was the first thing the woman said to me. Sit down and don’t move till you feel better.

I just want a drink of water, I said. My tongue was completely dry and I couldn’t say anything else.

From out of the darkness emerged a tall, pale man, with two or three days’ growth of very dark beard. He was wearing a tank top and pajama bottoms, and he fanned himself with a piece of
cardboard. He approached me with short little steps, avoiding the blinding light from the street.

I don’t have a permit to sell water, he said. Only soft drinks and soda water.

Whatever, the woman said to him.

She spoke with such authority it was impossible not to obey her. Perhaps confused by the sunstroke, at that moment she seemed a woman of irresistible beauty, but when I knew her better I
realized she was merely striking. She had something in common with those film actresses one falls in love with for unfathomable reasons, women like Kathy Bates or Carmen Maura or Anouk Aimée
or Helena Bonham Carter, who aren’t anything out of this world but who make anyone who looks at them feel happy.

She waited while I slowly drank the soda the man in the undershirt offered me, at an exorbitant price, ten pesos, which the woman forced me not to pay – If you give him two pesos,
that’s already three times as much as it’s worth, she said – and then, in an offhand way, asked for a walking stick with a mother-of-pearl handle that must have been left there
over a week ago. The man retrieved the object from one of the shelves, where it was hidden behind the trophies. The handle was curved and shiny. Beneath the mother-of-pearl inlays I noticed the
traditional image of Carlos Gardel, which adorned the buses in Buenos Aires, wearing a gaucho outfit and white scarf at his throat. It looked like such a unique piece that I asked if I could touch
it.

It’s not going to wear out, said the woman. The owner almost never uses it anymore.

The walking stick was as light as a feather. The wood was well carved and the image of Gardel could only be the work of a master craftsman. My pondering was interrupted by the man in the
undershirt, who wanted to close the club – he said – and go get some sleep. I was feeling better now and asked the woman if she wouldn’t mind if we walked out of the labyrinth
together as far as a bus stop.

I’ve got a taxi waiting at the corner of Triunvirato, she said. I can lead you that far.

Although a map with several spots marked on it was sticking out of her handbag, she didn’t seem to need it. She didn’t make a single wrong turn. As we started walking she asked me my
name and what I was doing there.

It’s strange to see someone in Parque Chas who’s not from the neighborhood, she said. In general, no one ever comes here or leaves.

I repeated what Bonorino had told me about the unexpected Julio Martel recital on one of the corners. I told her how I’d been passionately searching for the singer for months.

It’s a shame we didn’t meet earlier, she said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I live with Martel. I could have introduced you. The cane I came to pick up is
his.

I looked at her beneath the scorching light. I realized then that this was the same woman I’d seen on México Street getting into a taxi with the singer. As incredible as it seemed,
I had found her in a labyrinth, where everything gets lost. I thought she was tall, but she wasn’t. Her stature increased when compared with Martel’s negligible size. She had thick,
dark hair and the sun didn’t affect her: she walked through the elements as if she too were made of light, without getting out of breath.

You could introduce me now, I said hesitantly. I beg you.

No. He’s ill now. He came to sing in Parque Chas with an internal hemorrhage and we didn’t know it. He sang three tangos, too many. When we left, he fainted in the car. We took him
to the hospital and he’s had complications. He’s in intensive care.

I need to speak with him, I insisted. Whenever he can. I’m going to wait in the hospital until you call me. I’m going to stay right there, if that’s all right.

You can do what you like, as far as I’m concerned. It could be weeks, or months, before they let anyone see Martel. It’s not the first time it’s happened. I’ve lost count
of the number of days I’ve spent without sleeping.

The curved streets went on monotonously. If someone had asked me where we were, I would have said we were in the same place. I saw the identical curtains in the windows and the same dogs poking
out their muzzles. When we turned a corner, however, the landscape changed and straightened out again. During that short walk, I told her what I could about myself, trying to interest the woman in
Borges’ reflections on the origins of the tango. I told her I’d come to Buenos Aires to work on my dissertation and that, when my money ran out, I’d have no choice but to return
to New York. I tried to worm out of her – in vain – how much Martel knew about the original tangos, from singing them and, in his way, composing them all over again. I told her that I
couldn’t resign myself to all that knowledge dying with him. By then we’d come to Triunvirato Avenue. The taxi was waiting in front of a pizzeria.

Martel is in the Fernández Hospital on Bulnes Street, she said, in a motherly voice. Visiting hours for intensive care are in the evening, from six-thirty to seven-thirty. I don’t
think you’ll be able to talk to him, but I’ll be there all the time.

She closed the door of the taxi and the vehicle moved off. I saw her vague profile through the glass, a hand waving goodbye indifferently, and a smile extinguished by the midday sun, or the sun
of whatever time of day it was. I smiled back and at that moment realized I didn’t even know her name. I ran down the middle of the avenue, avoiding vehicles moving at full speed, and barely
managed to catch up with her at a set of traffic lights. Almost out of breath, I told her what I’d forgotten.

Oh, I’m so distracted, she answered. My name is Alcira Villar.

Now that fate was on my side, I couldn’t let her slip through my fingers. I was raised by a Presbyterian family whose first commandment was to work. My father believed that good luck was a
sin, because it discouraged effort. I never met anyone who’d won the lottery or who felt happiness was a gift rather than an injustice. Nevertheless, good luck arrived in my life one random
morning, at the beginning of summer, six thousand miles south of my birthplace. My father would have ordered me to close my eyes and flee from that temptation. Alcira, I said, Alcira Villar. I
couldn’t think of anything else or pronounce any other name.

Starting on the following afternoon I stationed myself daily, from six o’clock, in a room adjacent to the intensive care unit. Sometimes I peered out into the corridor and watched the
swinging door that opened onto a long hallway, beyond which were the patients, on the second floor of the hospital. The place was clean and bright and nothing interrupted the dense silence of those
of us who were waiting. Through the windows we could see a patio with flowerbeds. Sometimes the doctors came in, called some relatives and stood apart speaking to them quietly. I’d follow
them when they left to ask how Julio Martel was doing. ‘Coming along, coming along,’ was all I could get out of them. The nurses took pity on my worry and tried to console me.
‘Don’t worry, Cogan,’ they said, mistreating my name. ‘People in intensive care have no reason to die. The majority move into the common wards and then end up going
home.’ I pointed out that Martel was not there for the first time and that wasn’t a good sign. Then they shook their head and admitted: ‘True. It’s not the first
time.’

Frequently, Alcira came to sit with me or asked me to come with her to one of the cafés on Las Heras Avenue. We could never talk in peace, whether it was her mobile phone ringing with
offers of research projects, which she invariably turned down, or because handfuls of demonstrators were constantly filing by asking for food. When we found an out of the way table, we were always
interrupted by beggars with babies in their arms, or droves of little kids tugging at my pant leg and the sleeves of my shirt so I’d give them a sugar cube, the rancid cookie that came with
the coffee or a coin. I eventually became indifferent to the poverty because, almost without noticing, I was turning poor as well. Alcira, on the other hand, treated them gently, as if they were
her brothers lost in some storm and, if a waiter threw them out of the café rudely – which almost always happened – she protested angrily and wouldn’t want to stay there
another minute.

Although I had about seven thousand dollars accumulated in the bank, I could only withdraw two hundred and fifty per week, after trying my luck at automatic teller machines that were very far
apart, more than an hour’s bus journey between them. I gradually learned that some banks replenished the funds in their machines at five in the morning and ran out two hours later, and others
began the cycle at midday, but thousands of people learned this at the same time as I did and, more than once, after leaving Chiclana Avenue in Boedo, by the time I got to Balbín Avenue, on
the other side of the city, the line would already be dispersing because the money had run out. It never took me less than seven hours to get the two hundred and fifty pesos the government allowed,
and I couldn’t imagine how people who worked regular hours managed.

When my diligence with the banks was successful, I’d pay off my hotel bill and buy a bouquet of flowers for Alcira. She rarely slept and her wakefulness had dulled her gaze, but she
concealed her tiredness and looked alert and energetic. Strange as it may seem, no one visited her in the hospital on Bulnes Street. Alcira’s parents were very old and lived in some tiny
village in Patagonia. Martel was alone in the world. He was a legendary womanizer but had never married, just like Carlos Gardel.

In the room next to the intensive care unit, Alcira told me fragments of the story the singer had gone to Parque Chas to recover, where he’d arrived already hemorrhaging internally.
Although I noticed he was weak – she said – he was very animated as he discussed that afternoon’s repertoire with Sabadell. I asked him just to sing two tangos but he insisted it
had to be three. The previous night he’d explained to me in great detail just what that neighborhood meant to him, he played around with the word neighborhood, ’hood, hard, hoodoo,
blood, flood, pub, hero, and I guessed these games hid some tragedy and that nothing in the world was going to keep him from the rendezvous with himself in Parque Chas. However, I didn’t
realize how bad he was until he fainted, after the last tango. His voice had flowed energetically though somehow sounding both offhand and melancholy, I don’t know how to describe it, perhaps
because the voice carried with it all his deceptions, happiness, complaints against God and bad luck for his illnesses, everything he had never dared to say in front of people. In the tango, the
beauty of the voice is just as important as the way it’s sung, the space between the syllables, the intention contained in each phrase. You’ll have noticed by now that a tango singer
is, first and foremost, an actor. Not just any actor, but someone in whom the listener recognizes his own feelings. The grass that grows over this field of music and lyrics is the wild, rugged,
invincible grass of Buenos Aires, the scent of weeds and alfalfa. If the singer were Javier Bardem or Al Pacino with the voice of Pavarotti, you wouldn’t be able to endure a single verse. You
know how Gardel triumphed with his courteous but common voice where Plácido Domingo failed. The Italian could have been his teacher but when singing
Rechiflao en mi tristeza
he’s still Alfredo from
La Traviata.
Unlike those two, Martel doesn’t concede the slightest simplicity. He doesn’t soften the syllables the melody slides over. You join the
drama of what he’s singing, as if he were the actors, the scenery, the director and the music of a tear-jerker.

It was, is, summertime, as you know, Alcira said. You could hear the heat crackling. Martel was dressed in his formal clothes for performing in clubs that afternoon. He wore a pair of pinstripe
pants, a black double-breasted jacket, a white shirt buttoned up to the collar and one of his mother’s scarves, which resembled Gardel’s. He’d put on shoes with heels that made
walking even more difficult than usual, and makeup on his cheeks and over the bags under his eyes. That morning he asked me to dye his hair black and press his shorts. I used a colorfast dye and
brilliantine that keeps the hair dry and shiny. He was afraid that when he sweated, trickles of black would drip down his forehead, like Dirk Bogarde in the last scene of
Death in
Venice.

Parque Chas is a peaceful place, said Alcira. Whatever happens in any part of the neighborhood is instantly known in all the other parts. Gossip is the Ariadne’s thread that goes through
the infinite walls of the labyrinth. The car bringing us stopped at the corner of Bucarelli and Ballivian, beside a three-story house painted a strange, very pale shade of ochre that seemed to burn
in the last of the evening light. Like so many other lots around there, the space it occupied was triangular. There were eight windows on the second floor and two at street level, plus three
windows on the terrace. The main door was sunk back into the vertex of the beveled front, like the uvula in a deep throat. Opposite was one of those shops that exist only in Buenos Aires,
galletiterias
, or cookie shops. In prosperous times, they displayed cookies of the most unusual varieties, from ginger stars to cubes filled with asphodel honey to jasmine rings, but
Argentine decadence had degraded them, turning them into places to buy soda pop, candies and combs. Past Ballivian, Bucarelli Street sloped upwards, one of the few spots that interrupted the
flatness of the city. Two recently painted bits of graffiti declared ‘
MASSACRE IN PALESTINE
’ and, under a benevolent image of Jesus, ‘
IT
’
S SO NICE TO BE WITH YOU
.’

As soon as Sabadell took his guitar out of the case, the apparently deserted streets began to fill up with unexpected people, Alcira said: bowls players, lottery ticket sellers, matrons with
curlers askew in their hair, cyclists, accounts clerks with shiny sleeves and the young Korean girls from the cookie shop. The ones who brought folding chairs arranged them in a semicircle in front
of the ochre house. Few had ever seen Martel and perhaps none of them had heard him. The few known images of the singer that had appeared in the newspaper
Crónica
and the weekly
El
Periodista
, bore not the slightest resemblance to the swollen and aged figure who arrived in Parque Chas that evening. Some applause fell from one of the windows and most of the people joined
in. A woman asked him to sing
Cambalache (Junk Shop)
and another insisted on
Yira, yira
, but Martel raised his arms and said: ‘I’m sorry. I don’t have any of
Discépolo’s tangos in my repertoire. I’ve come to sing other lyrics, to evoke a friend.’