The Tango Singer (7 page)

I only want to remember what I’ve never seen, Martel had said that very afternoon, according to what I was later told by Alcira Villar, the woman who’d fallen in
love with him when she heard him sing in El Rufián bookstore and who would stay with him till his death. For Martel, remembering was the same as invoking, Alcira told me, recovering what the
past put out of reach, which is what he did with the lyrics of the lost tangos.

Though not a real beauty, Alcira was incredibly attractive. More than once, when we met to talk in La Paz café, I noticed men turning to look at her, trying to fix in their memories the
strangeness of her face, which had nothing special about it except an unusual charm that made people stop. She was tall and tanned, with thick dark hair and black inquisitive eyes, like Sonia Braga
in
The Kiss of the Spider Woman.
From the moment I met her I envied her voice, grave and sure of itself, and her long, elegant fingers, which moved slowly, as if requesting permission. I
never dared ask how she could have fallen in love with Martel, who was almost an invalid and devoid of charm. It’s shocking how many women prefer intelligent conversation to solid
muscles.

As well as being seductive, Alcira was selfless. Although she worked eight to ten hours a day as a freelance researcher for publishers of technical books and news magazines, she spent the rest
of her time being a devoted nurse to Martel, who behaved – she herself would later tell me – erratically, childishly, sometimes begging her never to leave his side, then paying her no
attention for days at a time, treating her as if she were a misfortune.

Alcira had done some research for books and leaflets written about the Waterworks Palace, completed in 1894, on Córdoba Avenue. She had learned about the details of the baroque structure
thought up by Belgian, Norwegian and English architects. The exterior design was by Olaf Boye – she told me – a friend of Ibsen’s who met him every afternoon in the Grand
Café in Christiania to play chess. They would sit there for hours without speaking, and in the intervals between one move and the next, Boye completed the arabesques for his ambitious
project while Ibsen was writing
The Master Builder.

At that time, engineering works located in residential areas of cities would have the outsides of the buildings wrapped in sculpted designs to hide the ugliness of the machines. The more complex
and utilitarian the inside, the more elaborate the exterior should be. Boye had been entrusted with encasing the pipes, tanks and siphons that would supply Buenos Aires with water in limestone
mosaics, cast iron caryatids, marble plaques, terracotta tiled roofs, doors and windows with so many carved folds and glazes that each of the details was rendered invisible in the jungle of colours
and shapes that overwhelmed the façade. The function of the building was to cover what was inside behind so many scrolls that it disappeared, but also the sight from outside was so
unbelievable that the inhabitants of the city had finally forgotten that the palace, intact for more than a century, still existed.

Alcira took Martel in his wheelchair to the corner of Córdoba and Ayacucho, where he could see that one of the attic roofs, the southeastern one, had a slight lean, just a couple of
centimeters, perhaps due to the architect’s momentary distraction or because the angle of the street produced this optical illusion. The sky, which had been crystalline all morning, turned a
leaden grey at two in the afternoon. A thin fog drifted up from the sidewalk, warning of the drizzle that was ready to start falling at any moment, and it was impossible to know – Alcira told
me – if it was cold or hot, because the humidity created a deceptive temperature, which sometimes felt suffocating and then, a few minutes later, chilled you to the bone. This obliged the
inhabitants of Buenos Aires to dress not according to what the thermometers revealed but to what the radio and television stations mentioned all the time as the ‘thermosensation
factor,’ which depended on the barometric pressure and wind direction.

Even at the risk of the impending rain, Martel insisted on observing the palace from the sidewalk and stayed there, absorbed, for ten or fifteen minutes, turning to Alcira every once in a while
to ask: Are you sure this marvel is only a shell to hide the water? To which she replied: There is no water anymore. Only the tanks and pipes for long-departed water are left.

Boye had altered the plans hundreds of times, Alcira told me, because as the capital grew, the government ordered tanks and pools of greater capacity, which required sounder metal structures and
deeper cement foundations. The more water that was to be distributed, the more pressure was needed, which meant the tanks had to be raised in a perfectly flat city whose only slope was the banks of
the Río de la Plata. More than once it was suggested to Boye that he neglect the harmony of style and resign himself to an eclectic palace, like so many other buildings in Buenos Aires, but
the architect demanded that the rigorous French Renaissance symmetry of the original plans be respected.

The associates of the firm Bateman, Parsons & Bateman, in charge of the work, were still dismantling and reassembling the iron skeleton of the plumbing, in a frenzied race with the voracious
expansion of the city, when Boye decided to return to Christiania. From the table he shared with Ibsen in the Grand Café he sent the drawings of the pieces that would make up the
façade by post, which took a week to get to London, where they were approved, before traveling on to Buenos Aires. Since almost every piece was drawn to scale, and placing one anywhere other
than its specified destination could have disastrous consequences for the symmetry of the whole, it was imperative that the designer – whose sketches numbered more than two thousand –
have the precision of a player able to dominate several simultaneous games of chess blindfolded. Boye was not only concerned with the beauty of the decorations, which represented botanical images,
crests of the provinces of Argentina and fantastical zoological figures, but also with the materials each one should be made from and the quality of the enamels. Sometimes it was difficult to
follow his directions, which were written in tiny letters – and in English – at the bottom of the drawings, because the architect expanded on the details of the grain of the marble from
Azul, the temperature the ceramics should be fired at and the chisels that should be used to cut the pieces of granite. Boye died of a heart attack, in the middle of a game of chess, on the 10th of
October 1892, when he had yet to complete the sketches for the southeast attic roof. Bateman, Parsons & Bateman assigned the task of finishing the last details to one of its technical
draughtsmen, but a defect in the granite used for the base of the southeastern tower, in addition to the last eighty-six terracotta tiles being broken on the voyage from England, delayed the
construction and produced the almost imperceptible deviation in the symmetry that Martel noticed the afternoon of his visit.

On the top floor of the palace, overlooking Riobamba Street, the water company has a small museum where it exhibits some of Boye’s drawings, as well as the original chlorine ejectors,
valves, lengths of pipe, late nineteenth-century sanitation fixtures and scale models showing how Bateman and Boye had tried, unsuccessfully, to make their palace into something useful to Buenos
Aires but, at the same time, something which would somehow become unfaithful to the city’s lost grandeur. Since Martel insisted on seeing the most insignificant traces of that past before
going up to the monstrous galleries and tanks that took up almost the whole of the interior of the building, Alcira pushed his wheelchair up the ramp leading to the entrance hall, where customers
still paid their water bills at a string of windows, at the end of which was the entrance to the museum.

Martel was dazzled by the virtually translucent china of the lavatories and bidets on display in the two adjoining rooms, and by the enamel of the moldings and sheets of terracotta displayed on
felt-covered pedestals, as shiny as the day they’d come out of the kiln. Some of Boye’s drawings were framed, and others were kept in rolls. Two of them had notes by Ibsen about the
play he was writing. Alcira had copied a phrase,
De tok av Forbindingene uken etter,
which maybe meant ‘They removed the bandages after a week,’ and chess annotations indicating
the moment the match was interrupted. Martel replied to each of his companion’s explanations with the same phrase: ‘God, imagine that! The very hand that wrote
A Doll’s
House
!’

It was impossible to get up to the interior galleries by wheelchair, much less pass along the narrow aisles that overlooked the great interior patio, fenced in by one hundred and eighty cast
iron columns. None of those obstacles intimidated the singer, who seemed possessed by an
idée fixe.
‘I’ve got to get up there, Alcirita,’ he said. Perhaps he was
driven by the idea that some of the hundreds of workers – who labored for sixteen hours a day on the construction of the palace, not even having Sundays off or lunch breaks, spending their
brief nights in brothels or tenements – would have whistled or hummed on the scaffolding the first of the city’s tangos, the real ones, because they knew no other happiness than that
produced by that hesitant music. Or maybe, as Alcira believed, what motivated him was a curiosity to see the little tank in the southeast corner, under the attic skylight, which could have been
used to store water in times of extreme drought or as a place to deposit unusable bits of pipe. After studying the plans of the palace, Colonel Moori Koenig had chosen that cubicle to hide the
mummy of Evita Perón in 1955, after taking her away from the embalmer, Pedro Ara, but an uncontrollable fire in the neighboring houses prevented him when he was very close to achieving his
objective. In the same place, more than a hundred years earlier, a crime so atrocious had been committed that it was still spoken of in Buenos Aires, where unpunished crimes abound.

Each time Martel got out of his wheelchair and decided to walk with crutches he ran the risk of tearing a muscle and suffering another of his painful internal hemorrhages. That afternoon,
however, since he had an urgent need to climb those sinuous iron staircases to get to the highest tanks, he gathered his patience and hoisted the weight of his body from one step to the next, while
Alcira, behind him, carrying the crutches, prayed he wouldn’t fall on top of her. He rested every little while and, after some deep breaths, tackled the next steps, with his neck veins
swollen and his pigeon’s chest about to explode beneath his shirt. Even when Alcira tried to dissuade him over and over again, thinking how the torment would be repeated on the way down, the
singer carried on as if possessed. When they got to the top, almost entirely out of breath, he collapsed on one of the iron girders and remained there, eyes closed, for several minutes until the
blood returned to its course. But when he opened his eyes his astonishment left him breathless again. What he saw surpassed the oneiric sets from
Metropolis.
Ceramic necking, lintels, tiny
blinds, valves, the premises as a whole gave the impression of the nest of a monstrous animal. The water had long disappeared from the twelve tanks divided between three levels, but the memory of
the water was still there, with its silent metamorphoses as it entered the pumping station’s pipes and the dangerous swells that disfigured it at the slightest onslaught of the winds. The
reserve tanks, located in the four attics, were especially susceptible to falling, when the southeasterly whipped up, breaking the subtle balance of the pillars, the horizontal panels and the
valves.

The pink water of the river gradually changed as it flowed from one canal to the next, detaching itself in the locks from the urine, semen, scandals of the city and frenzies of the birds,
purifying itself of the savage past, life’s toxins, and returning to the transparency of its origins until eventually cloistering itself in those tanks criss-crossed by streamers and joists,
but awake, even in memory, always awake, because water was the only thing that could find its way through the ins and outs of that labyrinth.

The central patio, which Boye earmarked for public baths, but the overblown construction of which had reduced to an area of three hundred square meters, was covered in mosaics whose extravagant
designs obsessively imitated the geometry of kaleidoscopes. At that time of the afternoon when the light coming in through the skylights hit them directly, vapors of colors more vivid even than
rainbows rose from the floor, forming shimmering arcs that broke up when the slightest sound vibrated in the cavern. Martel went over to one of the banisters that separated the tanks from the abyss
and sang:
Aaaaaaa
. The colors waved madly, and the echo of the sleeping metals repeated the vowel infinitely:
aaaaaaaa
.

Then, he stood up so straight and tall that he resembled another being, handsome and supple. Alcira thought some miracle had restored him to health. His hair, which Martel always combed with
brilliantine, slicking it down and straightening it to look like that of his idol Carlos Gardel, sprang up in rebellious ringlets. His face was transfigured by an astounded expression that conveyed
both beatitude and wildness, as if the palace had put a spell on him.

I heard him sing an other-worldly song then – Alcira told me – with a voice that seemed to contain thousands of other bereaved voices. It must have been an antediluvian tango,
because he phrased it in a language even less comprehensible than that of the works in his repertoire; it was more like phonetic sparks, random sounds in which you could detect feelings like
sorrow, desertion, lamented lost happiness, homesickness, to which only Martel’s voice could give any meaning. What do
brenai, ayaúú, panísola
mean? Because that
was more or less what he sang. I felt that it wasn’t just one person’s past flowing through that music, but all those pasts the city had witnessed as far back in time as you could go,
to the time when it was just useless scrubland.