Tango (16 page)

DISCÉPOLO

That discontent, that ill humor, that vague bitterness, that undefined and latent anger against everything and against everyone which is almost the quintessence of the average Argentine.
⁸

Of all tango lyricists and composers, the words and music of Enrique Santos Discépolo have survived the many metamorphoses that tango song has undergone. ‘Yira Yira' (On and On), ‘Cambalache' (The Junk Shop) and ‘Qué Vachaché' (Who Cares?) define the melancholy mood of tango. More than that, his work is imbued with a vision of the world and the people in it, which in some sense encapsulates the history of tango, of Buenos Aires as well as the existential crises of modern urban man. Tango has not so much abandoned its origins as given them new expression in
more global, more timeless terms. Carlos Gardel sang everything that Discépolo wrote – but he did more than simply sing. He expressed in words and music the sense of abandon and isolation that many of Discépolo's best known tangos describe. While much of Gardel's music, particularly his film performances, is sustained by lush orchestration and lengthy musical introductions, he sings ‘Cambalache' to the accompaniment of a single guitar, its unadorned form a reinforcement of its symbolic universe.

Que el mundo es y será una porquería

Ya lo sé;

En el quinientos seis

Y en el dos mil también
.

Que siempre ha habido chorros
,

Maquiavelos y estafaos
,

Contentos y amargados

Valores y dublés
,

Pero que el siglo veinte es un despliegue

De maldad insolente

Y no hay quien lo niegue;

Vivimos revolcaos en un merengue

Y en un mismo lodo todos manoseaos
.

Hoy resulta que es lo mismo

Ser derecho que traidor
,

Ignorante, sabio, chorro
,

Generoso estafador
.

Todo es igual; nada es mejor;

Lo mismo un burro que un gran profesor . . .

Siglo veinte, cambalache
,

El que no llora no mama

Y el que no afana es un gil
.

Dale nomás, dale que va
,

Que allá en el horno nos vamos a encontrar
.

No pienses más, échate a un lao
,

Que a nadie le importa que naciste honrao

Que es lo mismo el que labura

Noche y día como un buey

Que el que vive de los otros
,

Que el que mata o el que cura

O está fuera de la ley.&&

The world is and always will be a junkheap / You don't have to tell me that. / In the year 506 / Or in 2000, / it'll be the same / There have always been thieves / Con men and victims, / Happy and bitter people / Honest men and hypocrites. / The twentieth century's just a stage / For insolence and evil doing / And no one can tell me otherwise; / We re all in a mess / Rolling in the same shit. Today no one sees any difference / Between loyalty and treachery, / Ignorance, wisdom, robbery / Or generous trickery. / It's all the same; nothing's better than anything else; / A donkey's worth the same as a professor
.

Twentieth century, junkheap, / if you don't cry you don't eat / if you don't cheat you're a fool / A little bit here, a little bit there. / We'll all meet in the fire down below. / Don't think about it, just move out of the way, / Nobody gives a damn if you were born honest. / The man who works day and night / Like a slave is no better or worse / Than the man who lives off others / No better the doctor than the killer / Or the outlaw. / Twentieth century, junkheap
.

(‘Cambalache', The Junk Shop – Discépolo, 1935)

‘Cambalache' is sung defiantly, its voice angry and resentful. It does not speak of resistance so much as protest – the lonely protest of the individuals who tried to find their way out of the city margins but were defeated.

The first of Discépolo's tangos to be performed, ‘Qué Vachaché', was presented to an extremely unappreciative public in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1926. It was booed off stage. Perhaps it was the nihilism, the despair of its most famous lines (echoed later in ‘Cambalache') that offended the public at the Teatro Nacional. Or perhaps its mood was just a little ahead of its time, two years too early for the Great Crash, the crisis in the
U
.
S
. economy in 1929 that would spread chaos and collapse across the world.

¿Te crees que al mundo lo vas a arreglar vos?

Si aquí ni Dios rescata lo perdido . . 
.

Lo que hace falta es empacar mucha moneda

Vender el alma, rifar el corazón
,

Tirar la poca decencia que te queda . . .

Plata, plata, plata . . . plata otra vez . . .

Así es posible que morfes todos los días
,

Tengas amigos, casa, nombre . . . y lo que quieras vos
.

El verdadero amor se ahogó en la sopa;

La panza es reina y el dinero Dios
.

D'you think you can set the world to rights? / Not even God can retrieve the situation . . . / What you need to do is carry lots of cash / sell your soul, raffle off your heart / Get rid of the little bit of decency you've still got left / Money, money, money . . . and money once again. / That's how you'll be sure of eating every day / of having friends, a home, a reputation . . . whatever. / Real love just drowned in the soup / The belly's queen and money's God
.

(‘Que vachaché', What the hell – Enrique Santos Discépolo, 1929)

Yet Discépolo's ‘Esta noche me emborracho' (Tonight I'm getting drunk), written in the same year, explored a more recognizable theme of the deserted man drinking away his sorrows and bemoaning his woman's disloyalty, and won instant popularity.
In 1930, the much loved Uruguayan singer, Tita Merello, recorded ‘Que vachaché'; this time it was very differently and enthusiastically received. The times, after all, had changed.

Discépolo's writing held to the language of the street, a counterpoint to the more neutral romantic balladry that cinema was encouraging. Gardel bridged both idioms, both worldviews. In Discépolo, that melancholy individualism became a model of man abandoned in the world, alone in the universe. Significantly, it
was
always man – the experience of women was not approached in the same way in the tango. In some senses, it was the weakness or vulnerability of women that was emphasized; men, by contrast, could aspire to the noble failure of Greek heroes. But Discépolo's work was not simply an existential statement. It was also, albeit indirectly, a comment on the specific social reality of the early 1930s in Argentina. Rather as Busby Berkeley's glorious musicals both belied and distracted from the realities of the Great Depression (it was a very long distance from ‘42nd Street' to ‘The Grapes of Wrath'), Gardel expressed a painful experience in an idiom, musical and linguistic, that somehow consoled and reassured his audience.

Yet tango did also offer some direct critical comment on that reality, spoken in the voice of ordinary people. Enrique Cadícamo, another great lyricist of the Golden Age, lamented ‘Al mundo le falta un tornillo' (The world's got a screw loose).

Todo el mundo está en la estufa
,

Triste, amargado, sin garufa
,

Neurasténico y cortao . . .

Se acabaron los robustos . . .

Si hasta yo que daba gusto

¡Cuatro kilos he bajado!

Hoy no hay guita si de asalto

Y el puchero está tan alto

Que hay que usar un trampolín
.

Si habrá crisis, bronca y hambre

Que el que compra un poco de fiambre

Hoy se morfa hasta el piolín . . .

Y el honrao se ha vuelto chorro

Porque en su fiebre de ahorro

El se ‘afana' por guarder . . .

Al mundo le falta un tornillo
,

¡qué venga un mecánico!

Pa'ver si lo puede arreglar
.

Everyone's complaining/sad, bitter, with nothing to celebrate / neurotic and short of cash / . . . No more big men around / Look at me, I used to look good / But I've lost four kilos
.

There's no money around, you can't even steal it / The saucepan's so high up / You need a trampoline to reach it / There must be a crisis, hunger, anger / When the one who can afford a bit of meat / has to feed everyone on the street . . .

And the honest man has turned to stealing. / He tries so hard to save / That he steals from other people . . . / Just to have something to save / The world's got a screw loose / Where's there a mechanic / Who can put all this to rights?

(‘Al mundo le falta un tornillo', The world's got a screw loose

– Enrique Cadícamo, 1933)

By 1930, the radical (or Radical) revolution that Irigoyen had promised was in tatters. The society remained as divided as ever, and although the working class had given him their enthusiastic support in 1916, the limits of the compact became clear three years later when a wave of strikes was brutally repressed in what became known as the ‘Tragic Week' of 1919. It heralded a brief period of recession followed by a decade of relative prosperity
under the more conservative presidency of Alvear, who replaced Yrigoyen in 1922. When Yrigoyen returned to the post in 1928, the economic storm clouds were already gathering over the
U
.
S
. economy – and any crisis there would immediately affect an Argentine economy dependent on its exports to the richer markets of the north and west. The prosperity of the 1920s had certainly improved the lives of the middle classes.

Antes femenina era la mujer

Pero con la moda se ha echado a perder
,

Antes no mostraba más que rostro y pie

Pero hoy muestra todo lo que quieren ver

Hoy todas las chicas parecen varón

Fuman, toman whiskey y usan pantaloon
.

Women used to be feminine / But fashion has finished with all that / They used to show no more than their faces and a foot / Now they'll show you anything if you ask to look / Today the girls all look like men / They smoke, drink whiskey and wear trousers
.

(‘La mina del Ford', The Girl in the Ford – Pascual Contursi, 1924)

Ford had in fact opened its first car plant in Buenos Aires in 1917, and General Motors followed in 1925. Car sales reached 436,000 (and 63,000 in Buenos Aires alone) by 1930.

Yet, for the majority of workers, living standards had barely risen. Even in 1937, 60 per cent of working-class families still lived in one room, as so many immigrant families had been obliged to when they arrived in this new land.
⁹
But only a tiny minority still lived in the
conventillos
of those times. The economic crash, however, had devastating and immediate effects. And the once popular Yrigoyen's refusing resolutely to appear in public more than was absolutely necessary, which had once created about him a certain air of mystery, now enraged the victims of economic decline.
Crowds attacked and trashed his house. And in 1930 he was overthrown by a military coup. It seems likely that, with 90,000 unemployed in the capital alone, it was Discépolo's lyrics that most closely reflected the real feelings of working people in the early 1930s. Gardel, on the other hand, provided a kind of utopian alternative, a dreamworld of handsome heroes and beautiful heroines who sang to one another and danced a tango without rage or despair.

While brothels had been suppressed in 1919, further restrictions on prostitution by the new military government after 1930 underscored its conservatism and its backward glance. The slow renewal of economic activity after 1932 occurred under conditions of repression. Tango's social comments were limited and restrained by and large – though its origins and its audience were overwhelmingly working class, their lives and experiences were only rarely reflected there. An exception was ‘Lunes' (Monday):

Un catedrático escarba su bolsillo

pa' ver si un níquel le alcanza pa' un complete . . .

Ayer –¡qué dulce!–, la fija del potrillo;

hoy -¡qué vinagre!-, rompiendo los boletos . . 
.

El almanaque nos bate que es lunes
,

que se ha acabado la vida bacana
,

que viene al humo una nueva semana

con su mistongo programa escorchador
.

Rumbeando pa'l taller

va Josefina
,

que en la milonga, ayer
,

la iba de fina
.

La reina del salón

ayer se oyó llamar . . .

Del trono se bajó

pa'ir a trabajar . . .

El lungo Pantaleón

ata la chata

de traje fulerón

y en alpargata
.

Ayer en el Paddock

jugaba diez y diez . . .

Hoy va a cargar

carbón al Dique 3
.

Piantó el domingo del placer
,

bailongo, póker y champán
.

Hasta el más seco pudo ser

por diez minutos un bacán
.

El triste lunes se asomó
,

mi sueño al diablo fue a parar
,

la redoblona se cortó

y pa'l laburo hay que rumbear
.

Pero, ¿qué importa que en este monte criollo

hoy muestre un lunes en puerta el almanaque?

Si en esa carta caímos en el hoyo
,

ya ha de venir un domingo que nos saque
.

No hay mal, muchachos, que dure cien años