Authors: Tomás Eloy Martínez
My torpor lifted as soon as I discovered what was happening. You’d have to have an iron stomach not to be horrified by those two open coffins – one luxurious, imperial; the other
miserable, badly made, like the ones hurriedly assembled in cities with the plague – and by the ruins of the two dead bodies lying in the open air. The girl with the ringlets arranged
something that, from my vantage point in the attic, looked like a swap, although I don’t know now if what I saw was what I think I saw or if it was just a trick of my senses, the embers of
the days I spent shut up in the tank. With the fastidiousness of cabinetmakers they took the rosary and one of the military medals from one of the bodies, and put them on the chest and between the
fingers of the other corpse. What had been in one of the coffins was taken to the other and vice versa, I’m not sure about what I’m saying – Mocho told him, and Alcira repeated it
to me, and I am telling it in turn in a language that undoubtedly has very little in common with the original tale, none of the tremulous syntax or the unwrinkled voice that lasted a few hours in
Mocho’s throat, that distant night in the Sunderland – I’m only sure that the luxurious coffin went into the white van and the miserable one went back into the tanker, perhaps
with a different body inside.
I slept the whole morning and woke up around one o’clock. There was an enormous silence in the house and, call as I might, I didn’t see anyone. At about two, the poet appeared at the
door where they’d confined me. I embraced him. He was thin, shaken, as if surfacing from a grave illness. I began to tell him what I’d seen and he told me to be quiet, to forget it,
that things are never what they appear to be.
I’m not from here anymore
, he recited:
I barely feel like a passing memory. Neither you nor I are of this unhappy world, to which we
give our lives so that nothing remains as it is.
It’s time to go, he said.
He covered my eyes with a black cloth and dark glasses. That’s how I left the operations house, blindfolded, leaning on his shoulder. For more than an hour I was led along paths that
smelled of cows and wet grass. After that, I was surrounded by a persistent stink of gas. We stopped. The poet’s hand removed the sunglasses and black blindfold. The sun was shining straight
down on us and my eyes took a long time to adjust. I made out, a hundred meters away, the tanks and towers of an oil refinery. There was a long line of tanker trucks identical to the one I knew at
the entrance, while other also identical ones drove out every five minutes or so. We stood in silence for I don’t know how long, contemplating that rhythmic and tedious coming and going.
Are we going to stay here all day? I said. I thought the work was finished.
One never knows when something finishes.
At that very instant our truck drove out of the refinery. It was too familiar an image not to recognize. They’d also painted an imperceptible yellow line over the door of the tank and,
from where we stood, we saw the line gleaming as a ray of sun struck it.
Should we follow it? I asked.
We’ll just let it disappear into the distance, the poet said.
Until the ashes are blown away on the wind.
We lost sight of the imposing cylinder on the highway, laden with its small lake of gasoline. It carried a body that would disintegrate as the years went by and leave strands of itself in the
subterranean tanks of the service stations and, through the tailpipes of cars, in the air without flair of Buenos Aires.
I’ll give you a lift. Where are you going? the poet asked.
Drop me off anywhere near Villa Urquiza. I’m going to walk.
I wanted to think about what I’d done and what it meant, to know whether I was fleeing something or going towards something.
My confidence rests on the profound disdain for this unhappy
world
, the poet had said to me.
I’ll give my life so that nothing remains as it is.
We spend our lives giving them up for causes we don’t entirely understand only so that
nothing will remain as it is, Mocho said to Martel that night in the Sunderland.
Couples danced indifferently around them. An entourage of moths fluttered around the spotlights. Some brushed against the burning glass and died. Martel was perturbed for a long time. The wings
of history had brushed against Mocho and he too heard the sound of flight. It was more vehement than the music, more dominant and intense than the sound of the city. It had to embrace the whole
country and the next day, or the following, it would be on the front page of the papers. He felt like saying, as his mother did when confronted with a death, ‘What tiny things we are, nothing
at all in eternity,’ but he just said: ‘That’s the only reason I sing as well: so what once was returns and nothing remains as it is.’
The next morning, Alcira told me, Mocho wanted Martel to accompany him to the house on Bucarelli Street, where the labyrinth of his own life had begun. The radios announced the return of
Evita’s corpse and the discovery of the white van with Aramburu’s coffin inside. If what Andrade wanted to do was to finish one story and go back to the past to begin again – as
he said to the singer in the Sunderland – he had no choice but to return to Parque Chas and hold a vigil over the ruins of his life.
Their morning was a series of disappointments, one after the other. The conspirators’ house had been cordoned off and a patrol car stood guard by the door. In the distance, the streets
opened in circles and on the sidewalks that stopped without warning there was not a soul to be seen and the silence was so oppressive it was hard to breathe. Not even the dogs stuck their noses out
between the curtains. They couldn’t stop to look up at the windows of the top floor without appearing suspicious to the police in the patrol car, so they turned onto Ballivian in the
direction of Bauness and back up the slope that came out on Pampa. Every once in a while, Martel turned to Mocho and detected his growing despair. He would have liked to take his arm, but he feared
that any gesture, the lightest touch, and his friend would dissolve into tears.
When they got to the bus stop, Andrade said they had to part company at this point because he was expected somewhere else, but Martel knew that somewhere else was nowhere, perdition, that he had
no one left to ask for refuge. He didn’t even try to keep him from going. Mocho seemed in too much of a hurry and detached himself from his embrace as if he were detaching from himself.
He had no more news of him until eleven years later, when one of the survivors of the dictatorship mentioned in passing that a big man with the voice of a rooster had been
‘transferred’ one summer’s night from the dungeons of the Athletic Club, that is, taken to his death. The witness didn’t even know the real name of the victim, only his
noms de guerre
, Rubén or Magic Eye, but the mention of the voice was enough for Martel. The name Felipe Andrade Pérez does not figure on any of the infinite lists of
disappeared persons that have circulated since then, nor is it recorded in the civil actions against the dictatorship’s commanders, as if he’d never existed. The story he’d told
in the Sunderland was, however, full of meaning for Martel. It represented what he himself would have wanted to experience if he’d been able to, and also – although he was less sure
about this – it represented the rebel’s death he wished he could have had. That was why, Alcira said, he dyed his hair black, with the illusion of returning to his self of twenty-seven
years ago, and put on his striped pants and black double-breasted recital jacket, and went out one evening two weeks ago to evoke his friend on the corner of Bucarelli and Ballivian, in front of
the house they hadn’t been able to enter the last time they’d seen each other.
Accompanied by Sabadell’s guitar, Martel sang
Sentencia
, by Celedonio Flores. In spite of the makeup over the bags under his eyes and on his cheeks, he was pale, full of rage
against the body that had abandoned him when he most needed it. I thought he was going to faint, said Alcira. He squeezed his abdomen tightly, as if holding up something that was falling, and went
on like that:
I was born, your honor, in the back streets / unhappy back streets of immense sorrow.
The tango is a long one, lasting more than three and a half minutes. I feared he
wouldn’t be able to finish it. The little Korean girls from the cookie shop applauded him as they would have applauded a sword swallower. Three boys rode by on their bikes, shouted
‘Encore!’ and went on. Maybe the scene seems pathetic to you, said Alcira, but in reality it was almost tragic: the greatest Argentine singer opening his wings for the last time before
people who didn’t know what was happening.
Sabadell amused himself for a while on the guitar, jumping from a fragment of
La cumparsita
to others from
Flor de fango (Flower of Mud)
and
La morocha (The Brunette)
, until
he got to
La casita de mis viejos (My Folks’ Little House).
More than once Martel was on the verge of collapsing into sobs as he sang that tango. His throat must have hurt, perhaps a
memory was hurting him too, the memory of a dead man who didn’t want to accept his condition, like all those who have no grave. Why didn’t he cry, then? Alcira said to herself and later
said to me, in the hospital on Bulnes Street. Why did he hold back the tears that might well have saved him?
Quiet neighborhood of my past / like a melancholy dusk / on your corner I grow
old
. . .
He was sweating buckets. I told him we should go – Alcira told me – I stupidly told him that Felipe Andrade would have surely sung along with him by now from his eternity, but he
rebuffed me with a firmness or fierceness I’d never seen in him before. He said: ‘If there were two tangos for the rest of them, why should there also be only two tangos for my dearest
friend.’
He had obviously discussed the subject with Sabadell, because the guitarist interrupted me with the prelude to
Como dos extraños (Like Two Strangers).
The lyrics of that song
conjure up a spell against the pure past that Martel was trying to resuscitate, Alcira told me. That afternoon, however, a past that was not dead flowed through Martel’s voice, the way
something cannot be dead when it has only disappeared and remains and endures. The past of that afternoon kept tenaciously in the present while he sang: it was the nightingale, the first lark from
the world’s beginnings, the mother of all songs. I still can’t understand how he could have breathed, where he got the strength to keep from fainting. I found myself crying when I heard
him sing, for the second time:
And now I stand before you / we seem like two strangers / a lesson I’ve learned at last. / How the years do change things!
I myself was remembering
things I’d never lived.
With the last word of
Como dos extraños
Martel collapsed, while the people of Parque Chas asked for yet another tango. When he fell into my arms I heard him say, with the last of
his strength: ‘Get me to the hospital, Alcira, I’ve nothing left. I’m dying.’
I don’t remember if Alcira told me that episode the last time I visited her in the Fernández Hospital or weeks later, in the Café La Paz. I only remember that midnight in
December with the sky in flames, and Alcira by my side, exhausted, standing before the nurse who was trying to console her and didn’t know how, and the silence that passed over the waiting
room, and the smell of rotting flowers that took the place of reality.
During those insane days I bought some maps of Buenos Aires and drew colored lines on them joining the places where Martel had sung, in the hope of finding some picture that
might decipher his intentions, something like the rhombus with which Borges solves the riddle in ‘Death and the Compass.’ The imperfect geometric figures varied, as we know, according
to the order in which the points connect. Starting from the boarding house where I’d lived, on Garay Street, I could uncover the outline of a mandrake, or a slightly twisted Y that resembled
geomancy’s
Caput Draconis
, or even a mandala similar to Eliphas Lévi’s magic circle. I saw what I wanted to see.
I carried my maps around everywhere and sketched new drawings when I got bored of reading in cafés. I traced lines between the places where, according to Virgili, the bookseller, Martel
had sung before I arrived in Buenos Aires: the lovers’ hotels on the Azcuénaga Street, next to Recoleta Cemetery, the subterranean tunnel under the obelisk in the Plaza de la
República. In the newspaper archive in the National Library – the one where Grete Amundsen had got lost months before – I looked for evidence of why Martel might have chosen
those spots. The only stories I found were of a couple murdered in the act in a hotel that rented rooms by the hour, towards the end of the sixties, and that of an execution by firing squad at the
obelisk during the first months of the dictatorship. There didn’t seem to be any connection between the events. The murderer in the hotel was a jealous husband whom the police had alerted by
phone, back when adulterers were denounced. He wasn’t even tried: three doctors certified that he’d been temporarily deranged and the judge absolved him a few months later. And the
death at the obelisk was one more of so many between 1976 and 1980. Despite being a ferocious exhibition of impunity, not a single Argentine daily paper registered the fact. I found the piece of
information by chance in the
Economist
, where the Buenos Aires correspondent wrote that one Sunday in June 1976 – the 18th, I think – a group of men in steel helmets arrived at
the Plaza de la República slightly before dawn in an unmarked car. An unidentified young person was dragged across the plaza, leaned up against the white granite of the enormous obelisk and
shot with a burst of machine-gun fire. The murderers left in the same car, abandoning the corpse, and nothing more was known.
I gradually began to realize that, as long as I didn’t know where else in Buenos Aires Martel had sung, I would never manage to complete the pattern – if there was any pattern
– and I didn’t dare bother Alcira with something that might only be a crazy idea. When I asked if she knew where else Martel had performed for himself, apart from the places we already
knew, she, upset about what was going on in the intensive care unit, just mumbled a few names: Mataderos, the tunnels, the Waterworks Palace, and left. I’m trying to remember, she answered me
once. I’ll write down a list of places and give it to you. She didn’t do so until much later, when I was about to leave Buenos Aires.