Authors: Tomás Eloy Martínez
I thought when he finished
Volver
we’d leave, but Martel brought his hands up to his chest in an almost theatrical gesture, unexpected in him, and repeated the first verse of
Margarita Gauthier
at least four times, always in the same register. As the repetition advanced, the words gradually filled with meaning, as if they were collecting up as they went past all
the voices that had pronounced them in other times. I remembered, Alcira said, having a similar experience during certain films with a fixed image that stays on the screen for more than a minute:
the image doesn’t change, but the person watching it starts to become another. The act of seeing imperceptibly turns into the act of possessing.
Today, overcome, I invoke you, my divine
Margarita
, sang Martel, and the words were no longer outside our bodies but flowing into our bloodstreams, can you understand that, Bruno Cadogan? Alcira asked me. I answered that a long time
ago I’d studied a similar idea by the Scottish philosopher David Hume. I quoted: Repetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but in the spirit which contemplates it. That’s what
it was like, said Alcira. That phrase clearly defines what I felt. When I heard Martel sing
my divine Margarita
the first time that afternoon, I didn’t think he was changing the tempo
of the melody, but the second or third time I noticed that he was subtly spacing each word. It’s possible he was also spacing the syllables, although my ear isn’t sharp enough to tell.
Today, overcome, I invoke you
, he sang, and the Margarita of the tango returned to the big house, as if time had not passed, with her body of twenty-four years earlier.
Today, overcome, I
invoke you
, he said, and I felt that this summons was enough to make the glass on the floor vanish and the cobwebs and dust fade away.
My missed encounter with Martel in the Plazoleta del Resero disturbed me. I lost track of what I was writing and I lost track of myself. I spent several nights in the
Británico observing the desolate landscape of the Parque Lezama. When I returned to the boarding house and managed to sleep, the slightest unexpected noise would wake me. I didn’t know
what to do about the insomnia and, in dismay, I went out walking through Buenos Aires. Sometimes I strayed off from the ruined Constitución Station, about which Borges had written so much,
towards the neighborhoods of San Cristóbal and Balvanera. The streets all looked the same and, although the newspapers called attention to the constant attacks, I didn’t feel in
danger. Gangs of boys no more than ten years old roamed around Constitución. They came out of their shelters looking for food, protecting each other, and asking for spare change. You could
see them sleeping in the hollow buildings, covering their faces with newspapers and bags of leftovers. Many people were sleeping rough and, where I saw two one night, I’d find three or four
the next. From Constitución I’d walk down San José or Virrey Cevallos to Avenida de Mayo, and then cross the Plaza de los Dos Congresos, with its benches occupied by destitute
families. More than once I spent hours of wakefulness at the corner of Rincón and México, spying on Martel’s house, but always in vain. Only once did I see him leave with Alcira
Villar at midday – although I didn’t know who she was until weeks later – and, when I tried to follow him in a taxi, a group of demonstrating pensioners blocked my way.
Even though the city was a flat grid, I couldn’t manage to get my bearings, due to the monotony of the buildings. Nothing is more difficult than noticing the subtle changes in something
unchanging, like in a desert or on the sea. Confusion sometimes paralyzed me on any given street corner and, when I emerged from the shock, it was to circle round in search of a café.
Fortunately, there were cafés open at all hours, and I’d sit in them and wait until, with the first light of dawn, the houses recovered profiles that allowed me to recognize them. Only
then would I return to the boarding house by taxi.
Insomnia weakened me. I had hallucinations in which photos of early twentieth-century Buenos Aires would superimpose themselves on images of reality. I would lean out the balcony of my room and,
instead of the vulgar buildings across the street, I’d see the terrace of Gath & Chaves, a shop that had disappeared from Florida Street forty years ago, where gentlemen in straw hats and
ladies in starched collars drank cups of hot chocolate before a horizon bristling with spires and empty balconies, some of them crowned with Hellenic statues. Or I’d see the absurd dolls that
used to advertise analgesics and aperitifs in the 1920s. The unreal scenes went on for hours, and during this time I didn’t know where I was, because the past installed itself in my body as
strongly as the present.
I met El Tucumano almost every night in the Británico. We argued over and over again about the best way to get Bonorino out of the cellar without ever agreeing. Perhaps it wasn’t a
problem of means but of ends. For me, the aleph – if it existed – was a precious object that couldn’t be shared. My friend, on the other hand, was intending to degrade it, turning
it into a fairground attraction. We’d found out that, at the death of the Bulgarian aristocrat, the boarding house was sold to some investors in Acassuso, who owned another twenty rented
houses. We decided that I should write them a letter denouncing the librarian, who hadn’t paid any rent since 1970. It would be detrimental to the finance manager and perhaps also to poor
Enriqueta. None of this bothered El Tucumano.
Towards the end of November, NYU sent me an unexpected remittance of money. El Tucumano suggested we forget the bohemian scrimping of boarding-house life and go spend a night in the suite on the
top floor of the Hotel Plaza Francia, where we could look out over the Libertador Avenue and some of its palaces, as well as buoys of the north shore that twinkled above the unmoving waters of the
river. Although it wasn’t a first-class hotel, that room cost two hundred dollars, more than my resources would allow. I didn’t want to say no, though, and I paid for a reservation for
the following Friday in advance. We thought we’d have dinner first in one of the restaurants in Recoleta that served
signature cuisine
, but that day an unforeseen misfortune occurred:
the government announced that people could only withdraw a minuscule percentage of cash from their accounts. I was afraid of being left with nothing in my pocket. From the very moment of the sudden
decree – too late to cancel the hotel – no one wanted to accept credit cards and the value of money became vague.
We got to the Plaza Francia around midnight. The air was the color of fire, as if a storm were brewing, and the streetlights all seemed muffled in watery hoods. Every once in a while a car drove
down the avenue, slowly, bewildered. I thought I saw a couple kissing at the foot of the statue of General Alvear, under our balcony, but everything was shadowy and I’m not sure of anything,
not even the peace with which I took off my clothes and lay down in bed. El Tucumano stayed outside for a while, scanning the profile of the Río de la Plata. He came back into the room in a
bad mood, bitten by mosquitos.
The humidity, he said.
The humidity, I repeated. Like in Kuala Lumpur. Less than a year before I had confused the two cities. Maybe, I told him, it was because I’d read a story about mosquitos that was set here
in February 1977. An irritating stink of fish invaded Buenos Aires then. Millions of dorados, pejerreyes and catfish, poisoned by the factories the military protected, lay rotting on the
drought-enlarged shores. The dictatorship had imposed an iron censorship and none of the newspapers dared publish anything about this, despite the fact that the inhabitants, through the unavoidable
use of their senses, received constant confirmation. Since the water from the taps had a strange greenish color and looked infected, those who were not extremely poor emptied the stores of soda
water and fruit juice. In the hospitals, where they expected an epidemic from one day to the next, they dispensed thousands of vaccinations against typhoid daily.
One afternoon, a cloud of mosquitos rose up from the swamps and blackened the sky. It happened all of a sudden, like a biblical plague. People got covered in welts. In the forty blocks north of
the Cathedral, where the banks and bureaux de changes were clustered, the smell of the river was intolerable. Some rushed pedestrians who had to conduct some financial transactions covered their
faces with white masks, but the police patrols forced them to remove them and show their identity documents. On Corrientes Street, people walked along with lit mosquito coils, despite the furious
heat, bonfires were lit on some corners in an attempt to disperse the insects. The plague receded as suddenly as it had arrived. Only then did the newspapers publish, on inside pages, brief
articles that all had a similar title: ‘Inexplicable phenomenon.’
While we slept in the hotel, a fierce wind began to blow at about two in the morning. I had to get up to close the suite’s windows. El Tucumano woke up then, and asked me who I was looking
at from the balcony.
No one, I said. And I told him about the wind.
Don’t lie, he answered me. You lie so much, I don’t know if you’ve ever told the truth.
Come over here, look at the sky, I said. It’s clear now. You can see the stars over the river.
You’re always changing the subject, Bruno. What do I care about the sky? The only thing I care about is your lies. If you want the alé all for yourself, tell me. I’ve had
enough. It’s all the same to me now if I get stood up. But don’t string me along, big guy.
I swore I didn’t know what he was talking about, but he was still anxious, hyper, as if he’d taken an overdose. I knelt down beside him, next to the bed, and stroked his head, trying
to calm him down. It was useless. He turned his back on me and switched out the light.
El Tucumano’s moods were incomprehensible to me. We didn’t have any commitment to each other and each one was free to do as he liked, but when I stayed up till dawn working in the
Británico, he’d come and find me and make jealous scenes in public that embarrassed me. He asked me to do difficult things for him, or for gifts, to put me to the test, and as soon as
I began to satisfy his desires, he’d pull away. Not really knowing what he expected of me was maybe what most attracted me.
Exhausted, I slept. Three hours later I woke up with a start. I was alone in the suite. On the table in the hall El Tucumano had left a note scribbled in pencil: ‘I’m off, Titan. I
leave the alé to you as an inheritance. One day you can pay me back.’ I went over the events of the previous night to understand what could have bothered him and couldn’t think
of anything. I wanted to leave the hotel right then, but it was crazy to go downstairs and ask for the bill without any explanation. For half an hour or more I was sitting in the suite’s
little living room with my mind a blank, submerged in that state of despair that makes the simplest movements impossible. I didn’t dare close my eyes for fear that reality might desert me. I
saw how the grey glare of the morning advanced over me and how the air, which had seemed so humid the night before, thinned to transparency.
I stood up after an effort, feeling like someone had laid the body of a sick man across my shoulders, and went to the balcony to watch the sunrise. The globe of the sun, huge and invasive, rose
above the avenue, and its golden tongues licked the parks and sumptuous buildings. I doubt there has ever existed a city as beautiful as Buenos Aires at that moment. The traffic was heavy unusual
for so early on a Saturday morning. Hundreds of cars moved slowly along the avenue, while the light charged the bronze of the monuments and burned the crests of the towers before falling
bloodlessly through the leaves of the trees. The cupola of the Palais de Glace, beneath my balcony, was suddenly split by a blazing sword. In some of its salons in the 1920s, and other decades
– when it was known as Vogue’s Club – they’d danced the tango to Julio de Caro’s sextet and Osvaldo Fresedo’s orchestra. As the sun rose and its disk became
smaller and blinding, a purple light washed the façade of the Bellas Artes Museum, where I’d contemplated scenes of the Battle of Curupaytí that Cándido López had
painted with his left hand between 1871 and 1902, after the right one was blown off in a grenade explosion.
I had the impression then that Buenos Aires was hanging weightless in that icy clarity, and I feared that, pulled by the sun’s attraction, it would disappear from sight. All the bad omens
of an hour earlier vanished. I didn’t feel I had the right to unhappiness while watching how the city blazed within a circle that reflected others above it, like the ones Dante saw at the
center of paradise.
Pure sensations tend to get mixed up with impure ideas. It was at that moment, I think, when, after deciding to write a letter to El Tucumano describing the spectacle he’d missed, I
completed a different one, addressed to the Acassuso investors, in which I denounced the illegal occupation of the cellar, for more than thirty years, by the librarian Sesostris Bonorino. I
don’t know how to reconcile the ignoble lines my hand was writing with the thoughts of the dazzling light I’d just seen. I had wanted to say to my friend that, since we didn’t
come from Buenos Aires, he and I were perhaps more sensitive than natives to its beauty. The city had been raised at the limits of an unvarying plain, among scrubland as useless for nourishment as
it was for basket-making, on the edge of a river whose single redeeming feature was its enormous width. Although Borges tried to ascribe it a past, the one it now has is also smooth, without any
heroic feats other than those improvised by its poets and painters, and each time one took any fragment of the past in hand, it was only to watch it dissolve into a monotonous present. It’s
always been a city where the poor were plentiful and where one had to walk with occasional jumps to dodge piles of dog shit. Its only beauty is what the human imagination attributes to it.
It’s not surrounded by sea and hills, like Hong Kong and Nagasaki, nor does it lie on a trade route along which civilization has navigated for centuries, like London, Paris, Florence, Geneva,
Prague and Vienna. No traveler arrives in Buenos Aires en route to somewhere else. Beyond the city there is no somewhere else: the spaces of nothing that open up to the south were called, on
sixteenth-century maps, Land of Unknown Sea, Land of the Circle and Land of Giants, the allegorical names of non-existence. Only a city that had denied so much beauty can have, even in adversity,
such an affecting beauty.