The Tango Singer (5 page)

Something worse happened to me with Julio Martel. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t attend any of his performances, which were extravagant and sporadic. Someone told me where he lived
and I spent hours waiting outside the door to his house until I saw him come out. He was short, with thick, black hair, stiffened with hairspray and lacquer. He hopped along like a lobster, perhaps
leaning on a cane. I tried to follow him in a taxi and lost him near the Plaza del los Dos Congresos, at a corner cut off by a teachers’ demonstration. I had the feeling that in the Buenos
Aires of those months the threads of reality moved out of step with the people and were weaving a labyrinth in which no one could find anything, or anyone.

El Tucumano told me that some companies organized guided hour or two-hour-long tours for Europeans who disembarked at Ezeiza airport on their way to the glaciers of
Patagonia, Iguazú Falls or the inlets of Puerto Madryn, where the whales went mad as they thunderously gave birth. The buses often got lost among the ruins of the Camino
Negro
¹¹
or in the quagmires of La Boca and wouldn’t reappear for days, and even then the passengers would have no memory of whatever it was that had held them up.

They muddle them up with all kinds of gimmicks, El Tucumano told me. One of the excursions went to all the big soccer stadiums simulating a day of classic matches. They get a hundred tourists
together and go from the River Plate stadium to Boca’s, and from there to Vélez’ ground in Liniers. By the gates of each they have people selling chorizos, t-shirts, pennants,
while the stadium loudspeakers reproduce the roar of a non-existent crowd, which the visitors imagine to be there. They’ve even written articles about this fakery, El Tucumano said, and I
wondered who the authors might have been: Albert Camus, Bruce Chatwin, Naipaul, Madonna? They were each shown a Buenos Aires that doesn’t exist, or maybe they could only see the one
they’d already imagined before their arrival. There are also tours of the meat processing plants, El Tucumano went on, and another one for twenty pesos of the famous cafés. At around
seven in the evening they take the tourists for a walk down the Avenida de Mayo, through San Telmo and Barracas, to see the cafés. In the Café Tortoni they set up a show for them with
dice players who flourish their shakers and threaten each other with daggers. They listen to tango singers in El Querandí, and in El Progreso on Montes de Oca Avenue they chat with novelists
working away on their laptops. It’s all a front, all a set-up, as you can imagine.

What I didn’t know then was that there was also a municipal excursion devoted to Borges’ Buenos Aires, until I saw the tourists pull up at the boarding house on Garay Street, one
November day at noon, in a bus with the lurid McDonald’s monogram on each side. Almost all of them were from Iceland or Denmark and they were on their way to the southern lakes, where the
landscapes might surprise them less than the endless solitude. They spoke in a guttural English, which permitted intermittent conversations, as if the distance might leave the words hanging in
mid-air. I understood they’d paid thirty dollars for a walk that began at nine in the morning and ended just before one. The pamphlet they’d been given to help find their way was a
sheet of newsprint folded in four with lots of ads for masseurs who did home visits, rest clinics and euphoria-producing pills freely for sale. In the midst of this typographical jungle, one could
just make out the points of the itinerary, explained in a peculiar English twisted by Spanish syntax.

The first stop on the route was Borges’ birthplace, the house at 840 Tucumán Street, at a time when the Saturday morning traffic is tangled and short-tempered. There, the tour guide
– a short young woman with her hair in a bun and the gestures of a primary school teacher – read an extract from the ‘Autobiographical Essay’ that described the place at
breakneck speed: a
flat roof; a long, arched entranceway called a
zaguán
; a cistern, where we got our water; and two patios.
God knows how the Scandinavians imagined the
cistern, or rather the well, with a pulley at the top and a water bucket hanging from it. In any case, none of that was still standing. On the site of the original house stood a building with three
names:
Solar Natal, Café Literario
and
Fundación Internacional Jorge Luis Borges.
The façade was glass, and gave a view of wrought-iron tables and chairs, with
unbleached fabric cushions tied onto the seats. At the back, in the open-air patio, you could make out more tables with parasols and several colored balloons, perhaps left over from a
children’s party. Across the façade, like a blindfold, stretched a painted strip of dusty pink. The building on the right, which belonged to the YWCA, at number 848, also claimed the
right to be considered the site of the birthplace. It sported a shiny bronze plaque, which protested against changes to the numbering of the street and maintained that, since 1899, the buildings
had shifted from their original locations and the whole street was slipping down the slope of the river bank, even though the river itself was at least three-quarters of a mile away.

The tour’s itinerary was thrifty. It cut out the poor sections of Palermo and Pompeya, where Borges had walked till daybreak when those places ended suddenly in open countryside, in a vast
empty horizon after alleyways, cigar shops and vegetable gardens. It omitted, most of all, the block from the poem ‘The Mythical Founding of Buenos Aires,’ where the writer had lived
from the age of two until he was fourteen, before his family moved to Geneva, and where he had the intuition, later confirmed by the idealist philosopher Francis Herbert Bradley, that time is an
incessant agony of the present disintegrating into the past.

The woman with the bun had informed the passengers that the spot where Buenos Aires had been founded was in the Plaza de Mayo, because it was there that Juan de Garay, from Vizcaya, planted a
tree of justice on June 11th 1580, and cleared the land with his sword, chopping away the pastures and reeds as a sign of his taking possession of the city and the port. Forty-four years earlier
Pedro de Mendoza, from Granada, had done the same thing in Parque Lezama, another square half a league to the south, but then the city had been evacuated and burnt, while Mendoza was dying of
syphilis on his ship.

Since Buenos Aires was born, a strange series of calamities tormented her founders. Mendoza’s crews mutinied twice; one of his ships strayed off course and ended up in the Caribbean; his
soldiers were starving to death and resorted to cannibalism; and almost all the forts he left along his course were destroyed by sudden fires. Garay also faced rebellions in his garrisons on land,
but the worst disturbance happened in his head. In 1581 he set off in search of the illusory City of the Caesars, which he imagined in dreams as an island of giants guarded by dragons and griffins,
in its center a temple made of gold and garnet that shone in the darkness. He traveled more than a hundred leagues down the pot-bellied coast of Samborombón and the South Atlantic without
finding a trace of what he’d imagined. On his return, he could no longer find his way through reality and, to recover his reason, he had to find it in his dreams. In March of 1583, while
traveling in a brigantine toward Carcarañá, he stopped after dark in a network of streams and canals with no apparent exit. He decided to camp on dry land and await the morning with
his crew of fifty Spaniards. He did not live to see it. A party of Querandí scouts attacked before dawn and tore his dream to shreds with their spears.

From the birthplace, the visitors were taken to the house on Maipú Street, where Borges lived in a monastic room, separated from his mother’s bedroom by a wooden partition wall. It
was such a narrow cell that it barely held a bed, a nightstand and a desk. Examining this now faded privacy was not part of the excursion. The tourists were allowed only a brief stop in front of
the house, and a more generous visit to La Ciudad bookstore, which was across the street, where Borges went in the mornings to dictate poems his blindness wouldn’t allow him to write
down.

In spite of the rush, up till then the walk had been calm, upset only by the rage of the drivers obliged to stop behind the bus, and the hell of honking horns, which more than once had convinced
Borges that he should move to a silent suburb. Until that point in the morning, when it was not much past ten, nothing had yet disconcerted the passengers. They recognized the spots on the
itinerary because they figured, although in less detail, in the Scandinavian guidebooks. The first breach of the routine struck when, at the request of the municipal tour guide, they ventured on
foot down Florida Street, from the intersection with Paraguay Street, following the route Borges took almost daily on his way to the National Library. Everything was different from what the
thirty-year-old stories suggested, and even from what the detailed guidebooks from Copenhagen said. The street – which at the end of the nineteenth century had been an elegant promenade and,
later, during the 1960s, the vanguard space, the place for madness, for challenges to reality and order – on that Saturday morning was a reproduction of one of those clamorous, open-air
Central American markets. Hundreds of peddlers had stretched out blankets and cloths to the middle of the road where they displayed objects as useless as they were eye-catching: gigantic pencils
and combs, stiff, straight belts, china teapots with the spout raised up towards the handle, charcoal-sketched portraits that looked completely different from the model.

Grete Amundsen, one of the Danish tourists, stopped to buy a
maté
gourd made of cactus wood, which would let the boiling water drain out as soon as it was poured into it. While she
examined the object and admired its design, which reminded her of something she’d read about the mammary glands of whales, Grete was left at the center of a circle that suddenly formed on the
street around a couple of tango dancers. Since she was the tallest person on the tour – when I saw her, I estimated she was over six feet tall – she helplessly watched what was
happening as if she were in a box at the theater. She felt as though she’d accidentally entered a mistaken dream. She saw her companions disappearing down the street. She called to them with
all the force in her lungs, but there was no sound that could have risen above the din of that morning fair. She saw three violinists moving forward into the clearing where she was a prisoner, and
heard them play a melody she didn’t recognize. The tango dancers executed a baroque choreography, from which Grete tried to escape while running from one side to the other, finding no cracks
in the increasingly compact crowd. Finally someone let her through, but only to leave her enclosed in a second human wall. She elbowed and kicked her way through, uttering curses of which only the
word
fuck
could be understood. She could no longer see any trace of her friends. Nor did she recognize the place where she was. In the jumble she’d been relieved of her purse but she
didn’t have any courage left to go back and look for it. The merchants she saw when she came out of the tumult were the same; the street, however, was suddenly different. In an identical
succession to that of minutes before, she saw the cloths piled with combs and belts, teapots and pendants, as well as the guy selling the
maté
gourds, for whom time seemed not to have
moved. ‘Florida?’ she asked, and the man, lifting his chin to point out the sign above her head, which clearly read Lavalle. ‘Is not Florida?’ she said disconsolately.
‘Lavalle,’ the vendor informed her. ‘This is called Lavalle.’ Grete felt the world was disappearing. It was her second morning in the city, up till then she had allowed
herself to be taken from place to place by obliging guides, and she didn’t remember the name of the hotel. Panamericano, Interamericano, Sudamericano? They all sounded the same. She still
held, crumpled in her hand, the pamphlet with the itinerary of the excursion. She was relieved to cling to those words of which she understood only one, Florida. She followed, on the rough map, the
course her friends would have taken:
Florida, Perú until México. The Writer’s House. Ex National Library.
Maybe the bus with the McDonald’s ads would be waiting for
them there, at that last stop. She saw in the distance a slow procession of taxis. The previous afternoon she’d learned that in Buenos Aires there were more than thirty thousand, and almost
all their drivers tried to show, at the first opportunity, that the job was beneath them. The one who brought her from the airport to the hotel gave her a lecture on superconductivity, in passable
English; another, in the evening, criticized the idea of sin in
Fear and Trembling
, by Kierkegaard, or at least that’s what Grete deduced from the title of the book and displeasure of
the driver. The guide explained that, although educated, some taxi drivers were dangerous. They drove tourists to some out-of-the-way spot, picked up an accomplice and fleeced them. How to tell
them from legitimate ones? No one knew. The safest thing was to take a car that someone was getting out of, but it all came down to luck. The city was full of empty taxis.

Knowing she had no money, Grete signaled to a young driver with tangled hair. Which way do you want to go? Through the Bajo or down 9 de Julio? These were the usual questions, to which
she’d already learned the answer: ‘Whichever. Ex National Library.’ Her companions from the excursion couldn’t take more than an hour. The itinerary was strict. One of them
would lend her a few pesos.

As they went, the avenues became wider and wider, and the air, although occasionally disturbed by plastic bags that rose in sudden flight, was clearer. The taxi’s radio emitted constant
orders that alluded to an infinite city, incomprehensible to Grete: ‘Federico wait at 3873 Rómulo Naón, second charlie, ten to fifteen minutes. Kika at the front door of the
school, Colegio del Pilar, identify by Kika, seven to ten minutes. Let’s see, who’s near Práctico Poliza Street in Barracas, avoid Congreso, alpha four, there’s a
demonstration of doctors there and they’ve closed off Rivadavia, Entre Ríos, Combate de los Pozos.’ And so on. They passed a solitary red tower, in the center of a plaza, beside
a long wall that protected innumerable steel containers. Further on was a park, a heavy, dark building that resembled the Reichstag in Berlin, and then a gigantic sculpture of a metal flower. In
the distance, on the left, a solid tower, supported by four Herculean columns, seemed to be the destination point.