The Tango Singer (2 page)

I had to pay in advance. The rate posted by the reception counter read four hundred dollars a month.
El Tucumano, true to his word, got Enriqueta to accept three.

It was four in the afternoon. The place was empty and peaceful and I was ready for a sleep. El Tucumano had been renting a room on the roof terrace for the last six months. He was dead tired as
well, he told me. We arranged to meet at eight to go wander around the city. If I’d had any strength, I would have gone out then and there to look for Julio Martel. But I didn’t know
where to start, or how.

At seven I was startled awake by an uproar. My next-door neighbors were screaming at each other. I got dressed as best I could and tried to go into the bathroom. A huge woman was washing clothes
in the bidet and told me, rudely, to hang on. When I went downstairs, El Tucumano was by the reception desk sipping
maté
with Enriqueta.

I don’t know what to do about those animals, said the manager. One of these days they’re going to kill each other. I wish I’d never let them have a room. I’d no idea they
were from Fuerte Apache.

I thought
Fort Apache
was a John Ford movie. From Enriqueta’s tone of voice it sounded like she was summoning up some pit of hell.

Have a wash in my bathroom if you want, Cagan, said El Tucumano. I’m going to the
milongas
¹
at eleven. We’ll get something to eat on the way and then, if you feel like it,
I’ll take you.

That evening, ten days before the Twin Towers were destroyed, I saw Buenos Aires for the first time. At seven-thirty an other-worldly pink light fell on the façades of
the buildings. Despite El Tucumano’s insistence that the city was in ruins and that I should have seen it a year ago, when its beauty was still intact and there weren’t so many beggars
on the streets, I saw only happy people. We walked down an enormous avenue, lined with flowering jacarandas. Every time I looked up I discovered baroque palaces and cupolas in the shape of parasols
or melons, with purely ornamental turrets. I was surprised that Buenos Aires was so majestic from the second or third story upwards and so dilapidated at street level, as if the splendor of the
past had remained suspended in the heights and refused to descend or disappear. As the night wore on, the cafés became ever fuller. I’d never seen so many in a single city, and all so
hospitable. The majority of the clients sat there reading with an empty cup on the table for ages – we passed the same places several times – without being asked to pay up and leave, as
would have happened in New York or Paris. I thought those cafés were perfect for writing novels. Reality didn’t know what to do there and wandered around loose, hunting for authors who
would dare to tell it. Everything seemed very real, perhaps too real, although I didn’t see it like that then. I didn’t understand why Argentines preferred to write fantastic or
unbelievable stories about lost civilizations or human clones or holograms on desert islands when reality was so intense you could feel it burning up, and burning, stinging your skin.

We walked for ages and nothing seemed to be where it belonged. The cinema where Juan Perón had met his first
wife, on Santa Fe Avenue, was now a record and video
store. In some of the box seats there were artificial flowers; in others, big empty shelves. We ate pizza in a place that looked like a haberdashery and still had buttons, edging and lace in the
window. El Tucumano told me the best place to learn tangos wasn’t the Academia Gaeta, as the tourist guides all said, but a bookstore called El Rufián Melancólico
²
or the
Melancholy Pimp. I’d found out from the internet that Martel had sung there for a while after they rescued him from a humble trattoria in Boedo, where his only pay had been tips and a free
meal. El Tucumano thought it strange he’d never heard that story, especially in a city abounding in experts on all sorts of music – from rock and shanty-town
cumbias
to bossa
nova and John Cage sonatas – but especially in tango experts, able to distinguish the subtlest nuance between a 1958 quintet and one from 1962. For him not to have heard of Martel was
ridiculous. For a moment I thought he might not exist, maybe Jean Franco had merely dreamed him.

On the top floor of El Rufián there was a dance practice going on. The women had slim waists and understanding eyes, and the guys, though they wore their sleepless nights on their
worn-out sleeves, moved with a marvelous delicacy and corrected partners’ errors by whispering in their ears. Downstairs, the bookstore was full of people, like almost every bookstore
we’d seen. Thirty years earlier, Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez had been surprised that Buenos Aires housewives would buy
Hopscotch
and
One Hundred
Years of Solitude
as if they were noodles or lettuce
and take the books home in their grocery bags. I noticed that
porteños
³
still read as avidly as they
had back then. Their habits, however, had changed. They didn’t buy books any more. They’d begin a book in one shop and continue reading it in another, ten pages in one, ten pages in the
next, or a chapter in each, until they finished it. They’d spend days or weeks on a single book.

The owner of El Rufián, Mario Virgili, was at the bar on the top floor when we arrived. While keeping an eye on everything that was going on, he moved outside of events, looking both
contemplative and agitated. I’d never imagined those two qualities could blend in the same person. When I sat down beside him nothing seemed to move but I could tell that everything was in
motion. I heard my friend call him Tano and I also heard him ask if I planned on staying in Buenos Aires for very long. I answered that I wouldn’t leave until I’d found Julio Martel,
but his attention was already elsewhere.

One dance finished and the couples separated as if they had nothing to do with each other. I’d found that ritual disconcerting when I saw it in films, but in reality it was stranger still.
Between one tango and the next, a man would invite a woman to dance with a nod that seemed indifferent. It wasn’t. The disdain was feigned to protect their pride from any slight. If the woman
accepted, she would do so with a distant smile and stand up, so the man would come over to her. When the music began, the couple would stand waiting for some seconds, one in front of the other,
making small talk without looking at each other. Then the dance began with a somewhat brutal embrace. The man’s arm encircled the woman’s waist and from that moment she began to back
away. She was always on the retreat. Sometimes, he arched his chest forward or turned sideways, cheek to cheek, while his legs sketched tangled figures that the woman would have to repeat in
reverse. The dance demanded great precision and, most of all, a certain talent for divination, because the steps didn’t follow a predictable order but were either up to the one who was
leading to improvise or choreographed from infinite combinations. With couples who understood each other best, some of the dance’s movements mimicked copulation. It looked like athletic sex,
tending towards perfection but with no interest in love. I thought it would be useful to incorporate some of these observations into my doctoral thesis, because they confirmed the brothel origins
Borges attributed to the tango in
Evaristo Carriego.

One of the dance instructors came over and asked me if I’d like to try out a few figures.

Go on, give it a try, Tano said. Everyone learns with Valeria.

I hesitated. Valeria aroused an instinctive trust, a desire to protect her, and tenderness. Her face resembled my maternal grandmother’s. She had a clear, high forehead and almond-shaped
brown eyes.

I’m very clumsy, I said. Don’t make me embarrass myself.

Okay then, I’ll come and find you later.

Later, another time, I answered and meant it.

Each time Tano Virgili got up from his barstool to observe the couples coming and going across the floor, I was left open-mouthed with something halfway uttered. The word would drop off my lips
and roll out between the dancers, who would crush it under their heels before I could pick it up. Finally I managed to get him to answer my question about Julio Martel in such detail that when I
got back to the boarding house I had trouble summarizing. ‘Martel,’ he told me, ‘was actually called Estéfano Caccace. He changed it because with a name like that no one
would ever have been able to give him a serious introduction. Imagine: Caccace. He sang here, near where you’re sitting, and there was a time when people in the know spoke of nothing but his
voice, which was unique. Perhaps it still is. I haven’t heard anything of him for ages.’ He put a hand on my shoulder and came out with the predictable acclaim: ‘If you ask me, he
was better than Gardel. But don’t repeat that.’

After that night I took a swarm of notes that might perhaps be faithful to Virgili’s tale, but I’ve a feeling I’ve lost the tone, the atmosphere of what he said.

I barely remember the long walk El Tucumano and I took later. We went from one part of the city to another, on what he called ‘the
milonga
pilgrimage.’ Despite the scenery and
cast changing at a pace my senses couldn’t keep up with – going from pitch dark to psychedelic lights, from dance halls for men to others where they projected images of a past and
perhaps illusory Buenos Aires, with avenues that echoed those of Madrid, Paris and Milan, from retired violin trios to orchestras of young ladies – my spirit had stopped at some point where
nothing was happening, like dawn on the morning of a battle that was about to break out elsewhere, perhaps due to the fatigue of the trip or because I expected the intangible Martel might appear at
any point during the endless night. We went to the vast warehouse of El Parakultural, and to El Catedral, to La Viruta and El Beso, which were almost empty because the
milonga
ritual changed
according to the day. There were places for dancing between one and three in the morning on Wednesdays, or Fridays from eleven to four. The spiderweb of names added confusion to the liturgy. I
heard a couple of German aficionados would arrange to meet in the Parakultural calling it the Sociedad Helénica, although I later found out that this was just the name of the building,
located on a street that for some was called Canning and for others Scalabrini Ortiz. That night I had the impression that Martel could be in two or three places at once, or in none. I also thought
he might not exist at all and was just one more of the city’s many fables. Borges had said, quoting Bishop Berkeley, that if no one perceived something, that thing had no reason to exist,
esse est percipi
. For a moment I felt the phrase could define the whole city.

Around three in the morning I saw Valeria again in a huge hall called La Estrella, which the previous Saturday had been called La Viruta. She was dancing with a Japanese tourist who was dressed
in tango attire straight out of a manual: gleaming shoes with heels, tight pants, a double-breasted jacket that he unbuttoned when the music stopped, and a brilliantined sculpture on top of his
head that looked as if it had been drawn on with a ruler and compass. I was struck by how Valeria looked just as fresh as she had five hours earlier, in El Rufián, and how she led the
Japanese man with the dexterity of a puppeteer, obliging him to spin on his own axis and cross his feet over and over again, while she remained still on the dance floor, concentrated on her
body’s center of gravity.

I think that was the last vision I retained of the night because the only other thing I remember is being on a late bus, getting out near the boarding house on Garay Street and throwing myself
onto the blessed darkness of my bed.

I read in an old issue of
Satiricón
that Julio Martel’s real mother, ashamed that her newborn baby resembled an insect, put him in a wicker basket and threw him into the
waters of the Riachuelo, where his adoptive parents rescued him. That tale always seemed to me a religious diversion from the truth. I tend to believe the version Tano Virgili told me is more
accurate.

Martel was born towards the end of the torrid summer of 1945, on a number 96 streetcar, which in those days ran between Villa Urquiza and the Plaza de Mayo. At about three in the afternoon,
Señora Olivia de Caccace, seven months pregnant and short of breath, was walking along Donado Street. One of her sisters had the flu and she was on the way to her house, with a basket of
poultices and a bag of fudge pieces in cellophane wrappers. The flagstones of the sidewalk were loose and Señora Olivia was walking very carefully. Along the whole length of the block, all
the houses shared the same monotonous appearance: a potbellied, wrought-iron balcony on the right-hand side of a hallway giving onto an inner glass door with beveled edges and monograms. Beneath
the balcony a grilled window opened, occasionally revealing the silhouette of a child or an old woman, for whom the landscape of the street, seen from ground level, was the sole entertainment. None
of those houses now resemble what they were half a century ago. The majority of families, in the struggle to survive, must have been forced to sell off the glass of the doors and the iron of the
balconies to building yards.

When Señora Olivia passed in front of the house at number 1620 Donado Street, a hand grabbed one of her ankles and threw her down to the ground. Later they found out that a mentally
handicapped man in his late thirties lived there; he’d been left by the cellar window to get some fresh air. Attracted by a glimpse of the fudge, the imbecile could think of no better ruse
than to trip the woman.

Hearing her cries for help, a well-meaning soul managed to get Señora Olivia seated in a number 96 streetcar, which was providentially stopped at the corner. There were several hospitals
along that route, so the conductor was asked to drop her off at the nearest one. She didn’t make it to any of them. Ten minutes into the journey, Señora Olivia felt herself losing a
torrent of liquid and was suddenly in the last stages of labor. The vehicle stopped and the conductor desperately called up to the houses in the neighborhood for scissors and boiling water. The
premature baby, a boy, needed to be put into an incubator. The mother insisted he be baptized as soon as possible with the name of his father who’d died six months earlier, Stéfano.
Neither the parish nor the Civil Register would accept Italian spelling, so he was finally inscribed as Estéfano Esteban.