The Tango Singer (15 page)

I left the hotel before eight in the morning. Since I had no desire to return to the boarding house, where the Saturday morning commotion was usually maddening, I took refuge in the
Británico. The café was empty. The only waiter was sweeping up the overnight clients’ cigarette butts. I took the letter to the Acassuso investors out of my pocket and reread
it. It was overworked, malign and, though I had no intention of signing it, everything in it gave me away. It contained, in summary, the facts Bonorino had confided to me. Not for a single instant
did I think of the damage I was doing to the librarian. I just wanted them to expel him from the cellar so I could comfortably find out if the aleph existed, as everything seemed to indicate. And
so I could find out what would happen within me when I saw it.

Just before noon I returned to my room. I stayed there for a few hours trying to make some headway on my thesis, but
I couldn’t concentrate. Worry eventually got
the better of me and I went out to look for El Tucumano, who was still sleeping on the roof. I was hoping that when he saw the letter, he’d show gratitude, happiness, enthusiasm. None of
that. He protested because I’d woken him up, read it indifferently, and told me to leave him alone.

For the next two days I wandered from one side of the city to the other with the same sadness I’d felt before dawn in the Hotel Plaza Francia. I walked through Villa Crespo trying to find
Monte Egmont Street, where the protagonist of
Adán Buenosayres
¹³
lived. That was another novel I’d written an essay on when I did my MA, but none of the people in the neighborhood
could tell me where it was. ‘From Monte Egmont Street the aroma of paradises no longer rises,’ I recited to them, in case the phrase might refresh their sense of direction. The only
thing I achieved was to make them flee from me.

The following Friday at midday, as the heat intensified, I went into Chacarita cemetery. Some of the tombs were extravagant, with large glass doors that let you peer inside at the altar and
coffins covered with lace mantles. Others were adorned with statues of children struck by lightning bolts, sailors peering through a spyglass at an imaginary horizon, and matrons ascending to
heaven carrying their cats in their arms. The majority of the graves, however, consisted of a headstone and a cross. Turning down one of the avenues, I came across a statue of Aníbal Troilo
playing the bandoneón with a pensive expression. Beyond it, Benito Quinquela Martín’s raw colors adorned the columns that flanked his tomb, and even the painter’s coffin
was covered in loud arabesques. I saw bronze eagles flying over a bas-relief of the Andes, and the poet Alfonsina Storni entering a granite sea, while the Galvez brothers’ hearses crashed
next door. When I stopped before the monument to Agustín Magaldi, who’d been Evita Perón’s boyfriend and was still strumming his guitar for eternity, I heard some
heartrending laments in the distance and imagined they must be coming from a funeral. I walked towards the commotion. Three women in full mourning, with veils over their faces, were weeping at the
foot of the statue of Carlos Gardel. They lit a cigarette for him and placed it between his greenish lips, while other women left floral crowns before the Madre María, whose talent for
miracles improved with each passing year, according to the plaques on her tomb.

Around two in the afternoon I left by Elcano Avenue and walked north, with the hope of eventually arriving at a field or the river. The extension of the metropolis, however, was invincible. I
remembered a J.G. Ballard short story, which imagined a world made entirely of cities joined by bridges, tunnels and almost imperceptible ocean currents, where humanity was suffocating as if it
were in an anthill. Nothing in the streets I walked that day, however, reminded me of Ballard’s colossal buildings. They were shaded by old trees, jacarandas and plane trees, which protected
the neo-classical and colonial mansions, and the odd pretentious aviary. When I noticed I’d arrived at José Hernández
¹⁴
Street, in the neighborhood of Belgrano, I imagined I must
be near the plot of land where the author of
Martín Fierro
had lived
out his last happy years, despite the critics’ increasing contempt for the book
– which, only thirty years after his death, in 1916, would be exalted by Leopoldo Lugones as the ‘great national epic poem’ – and the cruel battles to federalize the city of
Buenos Aires, an idea he had championed. Hernández was a physically imposing man with such a powerful booming voice they called him ‘Matraca’
¹⁵
in the Chamber of Deputies. At the
gargantuan banquets he offered at his country house, several hours’ gallop from the city center, Hernández’s guests admired his appetite as much as his erudition, which enabled
him to quote complete texts of Roman, English and Jacobin laws that no one had ever heard of. He was tormented by ‘fits,’ as he called his attacks of gluttony, but he couldn’t
stop eating. A myocarditis laid him up in bed for five months, until he died one October morning, surrounded by an immediate family of more than one hundred, all of whom were able to hear his last
words: ‘Buenos Aires . . . Buenos Aires . . .’

In spite of walking the entire length of José Hernández Street, I didn’t find a single reference to his place. I saw instead plaques paying homage to lesser heroes of the
national literature, like Enrique Larreta and Manuel Mujica Láinez, on the fronts of mansions on Juramento and O’Higgins Streets. After a few turns I came out at the Barrancas of
Belgrano, which in Hernández’s time had been the city limits. There, the park designed by Charles Thays not long after the poet’s death was now surrounded by imposing apartment
buildings. A fountain decorated with valves and marble fishes, and a gazebo that might have been used for Sunday concerts, were all that was left of its rural past. The river had receded by more
than a mile, and it was impossible to see it. In a painting of refined beauty,
Washerwomen in Lower Belgrano
, Prilidiano Pueyrredón depicted the calmness usual in this area. Although
the title of the oil painting alludes to women in plural, it shows only one, with a baby in her arms and a gigantic bundle of clothing balanced on her head, while an even bigger bundle is carried
by a horse who comes along behind, riderless. On the gentle curve of the hills, then lonely and wild, two ombues with their cleaving roots, in open combat with the rough water of the river, the
beaches of which are trodden by the washerwoman at this early morning hour. Buenos Aires then had a green color, almost golden, and no future sullied the desolation of its only hill.

When it started to get dark, I wearily went back to the boarding house. A cruel commotion awaited me. My neighbors were throwing mattresses, blankets and bundles of clothing down the stairs into
the hallway. In the kitchen, Enriqueta was sobbing with her eyes fixed on the floor. From the cellar came the industrious rustling of Bonorino’s index cards. I went over to Enriqueta, offered
her tea and tried to console her. When I managed to get her to speak, I too felt like the world was ending. A poem by Pessoa buzzed through my mind over and over again; it began:
If you want to
kill yourself, why don’t you go ahead and kill yourself?
No matter how much I swatted it away, it would not leave me alone.

At three o’clock that afternoon – Enriqueta told me – two police officers and a notary had arrived at the house with orders to evict all the tenants. They demanded proof of
payment and gave refunds to everyone who was up to date on their rent. As far as I understood, the owners had sold the building to a firm of architects, and they wanted to move in as soon as
possible. When Bonorino read the judicial notification, which granted only twenty-four hours to vacate the premises, he stood motionless in the hallway in a state of absence that Enriqueta’s
screams couldn’t break through until finally he held his hand to his chest, said. ‘My God, my God,’ and disappeared into the cellar.

Although the letter I’d sent to the investors in Acassuso had nothing to do with what was happening, I would still have liked to unwind the course of time. I found myself repeating another
line of Pessoa’s: ‘
God have mercy on me, who had none for anybody
.’ When an author or a melody started going round in my head, it took ages to get rid of it. And Pessoa, of
all people! Who, in the midst of such despair, could love a desperate poet?
Poor Bruno Cadogan, who matters to no one. Poor Bruno Cadogan, who feels so sorry for himself.

Besides, my hands were tied. I couldn’t help anyone. I’d idiotically spent two hundred dollars on a single night in the Hotel Plaza Francia and I couldn’t get the tiny bit of
money I had left out of the bank. And they might as well stop depositing my grant payments, because the banks were seizing all remittances. On Sunday I’d tried to recover a few pesos,
standing in the enormously long lines in front of the automatic teller machines. Three of the machines ran out of cash before I’d advanced four feet. Another five were empty but people
refused to admit it and kept punching in their requests, in the hope of some miracle.

Towards midnight, the neighbors from the next-door room told me jubilantly that they were going to take refuge in Fuerte Apache, where some relatives lived. When I told Enriqueta, she reacted as
if to a tragedy.

Fuerte Apache, she said, separating the syllables. I wouldn’t go for love nor money. I don’t know how they can take those poor children there.

I was tormented by guilt and, nevertheless, I had nothing to feel guilty about. Or perhaps I did: after all, I had been malicious and cowardly enough to send that useless letter to the Acassuso
misers accusing Bonorino, taking advantage of his confessions to me in the cellar. In Buenos Aires, where friendship is a cardinal and redeeming virtue, as can be deduced from tango lyrics, every
informer is a bastard. There are at least six scornful words: snitch, stoolie, grass, nark, squealer, fink. I was sure El Tucumano considered me a despicable person. He’d asked me more than
once to write the letter, thinking I’d cut off my hands before doing so. For someone like me, who believed that language and deeds were linked in a literal way, my friend’s attitude was
difficult to understand. Informing hadn’t been easy for me either. However, the aleph had mattered more to me than the indignity.

I saw the gigantic woman who was washing a blouse in the bidet the afternoon I arrived again. She was going down the stairs with a mattress on her back, gracefully avoiding the obstacles. Her
body was dissolving in sweat, but her makeup remained intact on her eyes and lips. Life sings the same for everyone, she said when she saw me, but I don’t know if she was talking to me or
herself. I was standing in the middle of the hallway, feeling like another piece of furniture on the set. At that moment I realized that sing could be another synonym for betray.

Bonorino’s bald head peered out of the half-light of the stairway. I tried to get away, so I wouldn’t have to look him in the face. But he’d come out of the cellar to talk to
me.

Come down here, Cadon, please, he said. I was getting used to the mutations of my surname.

The index cards had disappeared from the stairway, and the gloomy dwelling, with its street-level windows barely letting in a miserly light, reminded me of the principal passage of the cave that
Kafka described in ‘The Burrow,’ six months before he died. Just like the rodent of the story piling his provisions against one of the walls, taking pleasure in the diversity and
intensity of the odors they emitted, Bonorino leaped around in front of the fruit crates that had served as his bedside tables and which now, stacked on top of five or six more, blocked off the
minuscule bathroom and kitchenette. He was keeping the possessions he’d saved in them. I managed to make out the thesaurus, the shirts and the gas heater. The walls held the shadows of the
papers that had been stuck on them for so many years, and the only piece of furniture that remained in place was the bedstead, although now stripped, with no sheets or pillows. Bonorino clutched to
his chest the accounts ledger where he’d noted down the diverse information from the colored index cards. The ashen lamp with its twenty-five-watt bulb barely illuminated his hunchbacked
body, upon which the world’s ills seemed to have fallen.

Sad news, Cadon, he said. The light of knowledge has been condemned to the guillotine.

I’m sorry, I lied. You never know why these things happen.

Whereas I can see all that has been lost: the squaring of the circle, the domestication of time, the act of the first founding of Buenos Aires.

Nothing will be lost if you’re well, Bonorino. May I pay for your hotel for a few days? Allow me this favor.

I’ve already accepted the invitation of other outcasts, who’ve offered me shelter in Fuerte Apache. You’re a foreigner, there’s no reason for you to take responsibility
for anything. We serve our Lord in possible things and content ourselves with desiring the impossible ones, as Saint Theresa said.

I remembered how desperate Carlos Argentino Daneri was when they announced the demolition of the house on Garay Street, because if he was deprived of the aleph he would never be able to finish
his ambitious poem called ‘The Earth.’ Bonorino, who had invested thirty years in the laborious entries of the National Encyclopedia, seemed indifferent. I didn’t know how to ask
tactfully about his treasure. I could allude to the polished space under the last step, to the sketch of the Stradivarius I’d glimpsed on my first visit. He himself provided the solution.

Count on me if there’s anything I can do, I told him, hypocritically.

Indeed. I was going to ask you to look after this notebook, which is the distillation of my sleepless nights. You can give it back to me before you return to your country. I’ve heard that
rats and robbers live side by side in Fuerte Apache. If I lose the cards, I lose nothing. They just contain drafts and copies of other imaginations. What I have truly created is in the notebook and
I wouldn’t know how to protect it.