The Tango Singer (11 page)

I didn’t know any of this when I went to the arcades of the Liniers market at eleven-thirty the next morning, the day after my encounter with Valeria. Among a sea of cables, beside two
trucks loaded with spotlights and sound systems, I made out the two young actors from La Brigada in patent leather high-heeled shoes. The filming had finished and I didn’t approach them. The
place was lit by the soft November sunlight and, despite the cracks of humidity and age, it still had a severe beauty. Behind the arcades were glimpses of entrance halls and stairways to the
offices of a union, a pottery class and the neighborhood committee, while across the street was a sign for a Creole Museum I didn’t care to visit. In the center, a sixty-foot-high tower
topped with a clock threw its shadow across the Plazoleta del Resero, where a few tipas trees grew, like in Parque Lezama.

Although the street’s hustle and bustle was incessant at this time of day as heaving buses went past, leaving a wake of asthmatic sounds, the air smelled of cows, calves and wet grass.
While I waited for noon, I went into the market. An intricate web of corridors surrounded the corrals. Despite the late hour, two thousand head of cattle were waiting to be auctioned. The
consignees executed an inimitable minuet in those galleries, one step of which was discussing the livestock prices among themselves, at the same time as writing hieroglyphics in their electronic
appointment books, talking on their cell phones and exchanging signals with their colleagues, without getting confused or missing a beat. On one occasion I heard the cathedral-like bell ringing in
the distance announcing the auction, while the drivers moved the cattle from one corral to another. After having seen
Faena
, knowing the fate that awaited each one of these animals –
an inevitable fate that, nevertheless, had not yet happened – filled me with an unbearable despair. They’re already in death’s grip, I said to myself, but death will arrive
tomorrow. What difference was there for them between the non-being of the present and the non-being of the next day? What difference is there now between what I am now and what this city will make
of me: something that is happening to me right now and that, like the cows about to be sacrificed, I cannot see? What will Martel make of me while making something else of himself?

It would soon be midday and I sped up to arrive in time at the arcades. If the singer had reserved the whole place all to himself, maybe he would be accompanied by an orchestra. The thundering
of trucks and buses would drown out his voice, but I would be right there to hear it. I would drink it if necessary. He could only get around in a wheelchair by then and couldn’t stay in the
same place for more than an hour: he was having convulsions and fainting fits, couldn’t control his sphincter.

At quarter to one, however, he had still not arrived. The aroma of stews being cooked in the neighborhood converged on the Plazoleta de Resero and made me hungry. I hadn’t slept and all
night I’d had nothing but a couple of coffees in the Británico. From the beveled doorway of the Oviedo bar office workers and housewives emerged with packages of food, and I was
tempted to cross the street and buy a bite to eat myself. I felt a bit light-headed and would have paid all the money I had for a plate of any old stew, though I didn’t know if I’d
really be able to enjoy it. I was worried, with an inexplicable anxiety, and had a vague premonition that Martel wasn’t coming.

I never saw him arrive, in fact. I left the arcades about two-thirty. I wanted to be far away from the market, far from Mataderos and far from the world as well. A bus dropped me off a couple of
blocks from the boarding house, beside a cheap restaurant where they served me a disgusting bowl of noodle soup. I got to my room just before five, hurled myself into bed and slept straight through
till the next day.

When he alluded to a place, Martel was never literal, but each time I deceived myself thinking he was. If the little actors from La Brigada had told me he was going to evoke
the Zwi Migdal’s white slaves, I would have looked for him in any one of the brothels that association of pimps had operated around Junín and Tucumán Streets, in that block now
purified by bookstores, video stores and film distributors. It wouldn’t have occurred to me, for example, to go to the corner of Libertador and Billinghurst, where at the beginning of the
last century there was a clandestine café, with a platform at the back, where women who’d been brought like cattle from Poland and France were auctioned off to the highest bidder. And
I would much less have imagined that Martel might sing in the big house on Avenida de los Corrales where in 1977 the ex-prostitute Violeta Miller sent her nurse Catalina Godel to her death.

I waited in the Plazoleta del Resero and didn’t see him, because he was inside a car that was stopped by the south corner of the arcades, with the guitarist Tulio Sabadell.

Only at the end of January, when I was leaving Buenos Aires, did I learn what had happened. Alcira Villar told me then that the singer had vomited blood that morning. When she took his blood
pressure she realized it was extremely low. She tried to convince him not to go out, but he insisted. He was pale, his joints ached and his stomach was swollen. When we got him into the car, I
thought we’d never arrive, Alcira told me. Fifteen minutes later, however, he had recovered. Sometimes his illness hid away somewhere inside his body, like a frightened cat, and other times
it came out and showed its fangs. Martel was taken by surprise too but he knew how to calm it down and even pretend it didn’t exist.

That morning we were driving along the Ezeiza highway, Alcira continued, and, when we were getting to General Paz Avenue, the pains retreated as unexpectedly as they’d begun. He asked me
to stop so we could buy a spray of camellias and told me that after watching Gardel’s films he’d decided to sing a couple of tangos from the 1930s. Over the last couple of days
he’d been practicing
Margarita Gauthier
, which his mother used to sing as she washed clothes. ‘It was a reflex action for her,’ Martel had told her. ‘She’d
scrub the shirts and the tango would settle into her body of its own accord.’ But that morning he wanted to start the private recital with
Volver (Return)
, by Gardel and Le Pera.

Sabadell and I were surprised, Alcira told me, when he burst out singing in the car, in a baritone voice, a verse from
Return
that reflected, or at least to me seemed to reflect, his
conflict with time:
I’m afraid of the showdown
/
with the past that returns
/
of confronting my life.
Stranger still was that he repeated the melody in F, in a deep bass
voice and then, almost without a breath, he sang it as a tenor. I’d never heard him switch his voice from one register to another, because Martel was a natural tenor, and he never played with
his voice this way again, at least not in front of me. He was very alert to our reactions, especially Sabadell’s, who was staring at him incredulously. I only recall my admiration, because
the transition from one to the other, far from jarring, was almost imperceptible, and even now I don’t know how he did it.

Even before we got to the Avenida de los Corrales, Alcira told me, Martel went into one of his dark moods that worried me so much, and was completely silent, staring off into space. As we passed
a house with balconies, which looked uninhabited, the only embellishment being a glass roof now in ruins, the driver of our car tried to park, perhaps obeying an order that Sabadell and I
didn’t know about. Only then did Martel emerge from his apparent apathy and ask him to continue on as far as the Plazoleta del Resero.

We didn’t get out of the car, said Alcira. Martel asked Sabadell to lay the bunch of camellias at the entrance to a clinic, in the southern arcade, and to guard it for a moment so no one
would take it. While he did that, the singer sat still with his head lowered, without saying a single word. Trucks pulling trailers, buses and motorcycles streamed past us but Martel’s will
for silence was so deep and dominant that I don’t remember hearing anything, and what has remained are just the fleeting shadows of the vehicles, and the image of Sabadell, who looked naked
without his guitar.

Two months later, during one of our long conversations in the Café La Paz, Alcira told me who Violeta Miller was and why Martel had left the camellias in the place where Catalina Godel
was murdered.

I doubt you’ve heard of the Zwi Migdal, she said then. At the beginning of the twentieth century, almost all the brothels of Buenos Aires were run by that mafia of Jewish pimps. The
Migdal’s envoys traveled through the poorest villages of Poland, Galicia, Besarabia and the Ukraine, in search of Jewish girls they would seduce with false promises of matrimony. In some
cases these illusory weddings would even take place in a synagogue where everything was faked: the Rabbi and the ten obligatory participants of the
minyan
. After a brutal initiation, the
victims were confined in brothels where they worked fourteen to sixteen hours a day, until their bodies were reduced to ruins.

Violeta Miller was one of these women, Alcira told me. Third daughter of a tailor in the suburbs of Lodz, illiterate and without a dowry, one morning in 1914, she accepted, on the way out of
synagogue, the company of a businessman with fine manners who paid her two more visits and on the third proposed. What the girl thought was the happiest moment of her life was actually the
beginning of her downfall. On the ship, as she began her newlywed voyage to Buenos Aires, she found out that her husband had another seven wives on board, and that they were all destined for the
whorehouses of Argentina.

The very night they arrived, she was auctioned in a lot with six other Polish girls. Wearing a school uniform, she stepped up onto the platform in the Café Parisién. Someone
ordered her to hold up her hands and count on her fingers up to twelve if they asked her in Yiddish how old she was. In fact she was already fifteen, but she had very little body hair, no breasts
and had only menstruated a few times, at irregular intervals.

The pimp who bought her ran a brothel with twelve young girls. He relieved Violeta of her virginity as a matter of course and, at dawn, when he heard her whimpering, whipped her into silence.
The marks took a week to heal over. Thus, tormented and abused, she was obliged to serve from four the next afternoon until the following dawn, satiating dock workers and clerks who spoke to her in
unintelligible tongues. She tried to escape, and they caught her a few meters from the house. The pimp punished her by branding her back with a cattle iron. To suffer all pains at once would be
better than this purgatory, Violeta said to herself, and decided to fast to death. She lasted a week on nothing but one glass of water, and she would have let herself die if the madams who looked
after her hadn’t brought her a cardboard box with the ear of another fugitive inmate, warning her that, if she didn’t give in, they’d leave her without eyes so she couldn’t
defend herself.

For five years, Violeta was moved from one whorehouse to another. She lived in Buenos Aires without knowing what the city was like: an electric light was always lit in her room so she
couldn’t distinguish between night and day. The small size of her body attracted innumerable perverts, who thought she was prepubescent and mistook her lack of enthusiasm for inexperience. At
the end of the summer of 1920 she contracted a tenacious fever that kept her laid up for months. She might have died if a bricklayer, who was also Polish, to whom Violeta had confided the story of
her misfortunes, hadn’t taken advantage of his visits to smuggle her in little bottles of glucose and antipyretic capsules. Two months later, when the poor thing was still convalescent, one
of her companions in misery whispered that they were going to put her up for sale again. It was an atrocious piece of news, because her body was in a bad way from the fevers and so much use, and in
the northern province of El Chaco, where unfortunates like her ended their days, girls were worked until their sphincters ruptured.

During the five and a half years of her martyrdom, Violeta had managed to save, centavo by centavo, the money from her tips. She had two hundred and fifty pesos, a fifth of what they’d
paid for her at the first auction, and, now that she was worth nothing, it might have perhaps been enough to buy herself. That was impossible, because the women were only handed over to other men
in the same business. Desperate, she asked the bricklayer if anyone he knew would be willing to pose as a pimp. It would have to be somebody bold. After many inquiries, a circus actor finally
accepted the role. He introduced himself as an Italian, mentioned an imaginary brothel on the Isla Grande de Chiloé, and closed the deal in less than half an hour. A week later, Violeta was
free.

She traveled in goods trains up to the northeast of Argentina. She stayed in some tedious town for a few months, working as a maid or in shops and, when she thought they’d discovered her
trail, she fled to another town. Along the way she learned the alphabet and the Catholic catechism. At the end of the third winter she disembarked in Catamarca. There she felt safe and decided to
stay. She took a room in the best hotel in the city and in a couple of weeks had spent almost all her savings. It was enough, because in that time she’d seduced the manager of the hotel and
the treasurer of the provincial bank. Both were God and wife fearing, and Violeta got from them more than they could afford to give: one paid for her room for as long as she wanted to stay, the
other got her a couple of low interest loans, and introduced her to the ladies of the Ministry of Prayer, who met on Fridays to say their rosaries. Determined to recover the happiness and respect
she’d lost in her life of forced prostitution by any means necessary, Violeta opened her heart to them. She told them she’d been born Jewish, but that her greatest desire, since she was
a little girl, was to receive the light of Christ. The ladies convinced the bishop to baptize her, and acted as her sponsors at the ceremony.