The Tango Singer (18 page)

I don’t know if you ever read any stories about Aramburu’s death, Alcira said. It would be impossible. Pedro Eugenio Aramburu. Why would you know anything about that, Bruno, in your
country, where no one knows anything about the outside world? Aramburu was one of the generals who overthrew Perón in 1955. For the next two years he was the de facto president, allowing the
execution without trial of twenty-seven people and ordering the corpse of Eva Perón to be buried on the other side of the ocean. In 1970, he was preparing to return to power. A handful of
young Catholics, brandishing the cross of Jesus Christ and the flag of Perón, kidnapped him and condemned him to death at a country estate in Timote. The ochre house was one of the safe
houses where the plot was hatched. Mocho Andrade, who had been Martel’s playmate, was one of the conspirators, but no one knew that. He fled leaving no trace, no memories, as if he’d
never existed. Four years later he showed up at Martel’s house, told his version of events, and the next time he disappeared, it was forever.

It was hard to follow Alcira’s tale, interrupted by the singer’s sudden relapses in the intensive care unit. They kept him going with a respirator and continuous blood transfusions.
What I’ve written down in my notes is a puzzle, the clarity of which I’m not sure.

Andrade, el Mocho, was sturdy, enormous, dark like the singer, but with unmanageable hair and the high-pitched voice of a hyena. His mother helped Señora Olivia with her sewing work and,
when the women got together in the afternoons, Mocho had no choice but to play with the invalid Estéfano. They usually played cards or shared the novels they borrowed from the Villa Urquiza
municipal library. Estéfano was a voracious reader. While Mocho spent two weeks reading
In Search of the Castaways
, Estéfano would take one to read
The Mysterious Island
and
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
, which were double the number of pages. It was Mocho who investigated the kiosks in Parque Rivadavia and on Corrientes Street where back issues of
20th-Century Songbirds
were going moldy and it was also he who convinced his mother, Señora Olivia and a neighbour to take another ride on the ghost train while Estéfano was
recording
El bulín de la calle Ayacucho
in the electroacoustic cabin at a funfair.

Just as one of them dreamed of being an elegant, seductive singer, the other wanted to be a heroic photographer. The invalid was discouraged by his stunted legs, his lack of a neck, his
embarrassing hump. Mocho’s voice was his ruin, still leaping about crowing and cawing at the age of twenty. In November of 1963, along with two other conspirators, he dragged a bust of
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento down Libertad Street in the very center of Buenos Aires, shouting through a megaphone: ‘Here goes the barbarous murderer of Chacho Peñaloza!’ The scene
was meant to be insulting: Mocho’s voice made it ridiculous. Although he had his camera on a cord around his neck to capture the indignation of the passersby, he was the one whose picture got
taken, and printed on the front page of the evening paper
Noticias Gráficas
. By that time, Estéfano was starting to sing in clubs. His friend showed up in the middle of a
performance, walked toward the stage and took a couple of flash photos. Then he disappeared. In early autumn 1970, they crossed paths in the Sunderland and sat at a table in the back drinking to
old times. Martel was Martel by then and everyone called him that but to Mocho he was still Téfano.

One of these days, he said, I’m going to Madrid and I’ll come back in the black airplane with Perón and Evita.

The Generals won’t let Perón in, Martel corrected him. And no one knows where Evita’s body is, if they didn’t just throw it in the sea.

You’ll see, insisted Mocho.

Months later, Aramburu was kidnapped by some young men who went to find him at his house. They put him on trial for two days and at dawn on the third day they executed him with a bullet to the
heart. For weeks, a vain search for the conspirators went on, until one morning in July the Córdoba branch of this little army, which called itself the Montoneros, decided to take a mountain
village called La Calera. The Aramburu kidnapping had been a masterpiece of military strategy; the attack on La Calera, on the other hand, revealed an insurmountable clumsiness. Two of the
guerrillas died, others were wounded, and among the documents the police discovered that afternoon were the keys to the Aramburu kidnapping. All the names of the conspirators were deciphered except
for one, FAP. The army’s investigators assumed these letters to be the acronym of another organization, the Fuerzas Armadas Peronistas, or Peronist Armed Forces, which had invaded the
mountains of Taco Ralo, south of Tucumán, two years before. They were, however, the initials of Felipe Andrade Pérez, alias Magic Eye, alias Mocho.

For six months, Andrade had stayed in a room in the ochre house on Bucarelli Street. In meetings that lasted till dawn, he discussed the details of the kidnapping of Aramburu there with the
other conspirators. His mission consisted in helping the owner of the house, blind in one eye and partially sighted in the other, to draw the plans of the apartment where the ex-president lived and
to photograph the adjacent garage on Montevideo Street, El Cisne bar – that was on the square – and the magazine stand on Santa Fe Avenue, where there were always people. They memorized
the photos, took notes and then burned the negatives. Two weeks before the date chosen for the kidnapping, Mocho designed the escape route. It was he who found the clearings where the prisoner
should be transferred from one vehicle to another; he was also the one who decided that the second vehicle, a Gladiator truck, would carry a hollow load of alfalfa bales, inside which the captive
and his guards would travel. The most important part of that adventure for him was to register with his camera each and every step: Aramburu leaving the building on Montevideo Street guarded by two
fake army officers; the terror on his face in the Gladiator; the interrogations at the farm in Timote, where they took him for trial; the pronouncement of the death sentence, the moment of the
execution. At the last minute, however, he was ordered to stay in the house on Bucarelli Street, to command the eventual withdrawal. The conspirators recorded every word Aramburu stammered or spoke
during those days, but they didn’t take photographs. The head of the operation, who was an amateur, tried to get an image of him silhouetted against a white wall, but the film broke as he
pressed the shutter for the fifth time and the shots were lost.

Being left at the margin of the operation so disappointed Mocho that he disappeared from Parque Chas without telling anyone, like so many other times. The conspirators feared he might denounce
them but he was not by nature a traitor. He stayed in a grotty boarding house, and a week later went back to Bucarelli Street to pick up his clothes. The house was empty. In the photography lab,
above the developing tray, he found three photos taken, undoubtedly, by the clumsy and blind owner of the place. He recognized the images instantly, because his comrades had sent them to all the
daily newspapers, and some of them were printed on the front page. One showed the two Parker pens, small calendar and tie pin Aramburu had with him when he was captured; another showed his
wristwatch; the third, a medal he’d been given by the 5th Infantry Regiment in May of 1955. He thought it was a grave error not to have destroyed the negatives, and burned them on the spot,
with his lighter. He didn’t notice the small rectangle with the image of the medal that dropped between the almost invisible crack between the developing tray and a rough stone wall. The
army’s investigators found it there forty days later, when the disaster of La Calera had already given away the keys of the kidnapping.

The story I’ve told you should have ended at this point, Alcira said, but that’s where it actually begins. The day after the episode in Córdoba, when all the newspapers
published the names and photos of Aramburu’s kidnappers, Mocho showed up at Martel’s house and asked for shelter. He didn’t say what he was fleeing from or who was after him. He
just said: – ‘Téfano, if you don’t take me in, I’ll kill myself.’ He was completely changed. He’d dyed his hair blond, but since it was like steel wool,
towering over his head, instead of passing unnoticed, he startled people. His fingernails were a suspicious rusty colour from the acid in the developing fluids, and above his lip he had a thick
mustache, which resisted the dye. His voice was still unmistakable, but he barely spoke. When he did, it was in a whisper: still high-pitched, piercing like a dying dog.

At that time, Martel was running the pools at the funeral parlor, and living at the edge of the law, worrying that some slighted gambler might turn him in to the police. So he didn’t want
to know anything either. Señora Olivia hid Mocho in the sewing room, isolated him from the world by keeping the radio on all the time, and waited, calmly, for the arrival of some tragedy,
though she didn’t know why. Nothing happened. During the following days, Mocho woke up punctually at seven, did some exercises in the patio and shut himself up in the sewing room to read
The Brothers Karamazov
. He must have read it at least twice, because nothing else distracted him, aside from the news on the radio. When Estéfano came back from the funeral parlor,
they played cards, like when they were teenagers, and the singer let him read the lyrics of the prehistoric tangos he’d restored. One night, at the beginning of August, Mocho disappeared
without any explanation, as he always did. Estéfano expected him to reappear that Christmas Eve, when Señora Andrade had a massive heart attack and was admitted to the intensive care
unit in the Tornú hospital, but even though the television station’s solidarity service spread the word, he didn’t come to see her or show up for the funeral, two days later. It
seemed like the earth had swallowed him up.

In the next few years everything happened. The military government returned Evita’s mummy – which was intact in a tomb no one had known about in Milan – to Perón. For a
while, the general didn’t know what to do with her: finally, he chose to store her in the attic of his house in Madrid. Later he returned to Buenos Aires. While a million people waited for
him near Ezeiza airport, rival Peronist factions attacked each other with rifles, pitchforks and knuckle-dusters. A hundred fighters died and the general’s plane landed far away from the
bonfires. Perón was elected president of the republic for the third time, but he was broken and ill by then, subject to the will of his secretary and astrologer. He governed for nine months,
until he collapsed from fatigue. The astrologer and the widow, a dim-witted woman, took the reins of power. In the middle of October in 1974, the Montoneros kidnapped ex-president Aramburu for the
second time. They took the coffin out of its majestic mausoleum in the Recoleta Cemetery and demanded, in exchange for its return, that Evita’s remains be repatriated. In November, the
astrologer traveled secretly to Puerta de Hierro in a special Aerolíneas Argentinas flight and returned with the illustrious mummy. Aramburu’s coffin appeared that same morning in a
white truck abandoned on Salguero Street.

Alcira told me that the night before the swap, Mocho Andrade showed up at Martel’s house just as if he’d never left. He didn’t have his hair dyed anymore and he’d shaved
off the mustache. Just long sideburns, in the latest style, and very wide bellbottoms. He asked Señora Olivia if she would cook noodles in meat sauce, drank two bottles of wine and whenever
they asked him anything he’d break into his midnight rooster voice and sing a few lines of
Caminito: I’ve come here for the last time, I’ve come to tell you of my troubles
.
He took a shower and asked if they still had lively milongas in the Sunderland on the weekends. That night Martel should have worked a double shift at the funeral parlor but Mocho wouldn’t
let him go. He ironed his black evening suit and picked out a white shirt while singing out of tune:
Now, on my downhill slide
/
all hopes gone
/
I can no longer root them
out
.

He wanted to get the story off his chest, Alcira said. The more cheerful he seemed, the more torn up inside he felt at what he’d experienced. Martel got a table in an isolated corner of
the Sunderland, away from the crowds, and ordered a bottle of gin.

I kidnapped Aramburu, said Mocho after the first drink, in a fresh, smooth voice, as if he’d just put it on. I was involved in the first kidnapping and in the second, of the corpse. But
it’s all over now. They’re going to find the coffin tomorrow morning.

It seemed to Martel that the couples stopped in the middle of the dance floor, that the music dimmed and time froze. He was afraid the people at the neighboring tables would hear, but the tango
from the loudspeakers routed all other sounds and, each time the orchestra reached a final chord, Mocho was lighting a cigarette in silence.

They were there until five in the morning, smoking and drinking. At first, the story he told made no sense, but it gradually began to piece together, although Mocho never revealed where
he’d been for the last three years nor why, after he’d left the house on Bucarelli Street, the Montoneros allowed him to take part in the second kidnapping, which was even riskier. Part
of what Andrade said that night had been published by the perpetrators of the first kidnapping in a Montonero magazine, but the finale of the plot was then unknown and still seems unbelievable.

I’m an adventurer, as you know, military discipline offends me, Mocho said to Martel, and Alcira told me. I’ve had few friends, and I’ve gradually lost them all. One of them
died at La Calera; two more were lost due to a mistake in a William Morris pizzeria. The women I fell in love with left me, one after the other. Perón abandoned me too, and he left the
country to unravel in the hands of a hysterical widow and a murderous wizard. All I have left is you and someone whose name I cannot repeat.