The Tango Singer (24 page)

We have to be careful, he said. Today the patient seems a little down. Are you a relative?

I didn’t know how to answer. I’m nobody, I said. Then I hesitantly rectified: I’m a friend of Alcira’s.

Let the lady decide, then. The patient has been taking strong painkillers. I assume you’ve been informed of the latest complication. Advanced necrosis of the liver cells.

Alcira told me that sometimes he recovers for a while and seems to be healthy. One of those times he asked for me. He said I could come in to see him.

When did she say that?

Yesterday, but it was because of something that happened three days ago, or more.

This morning he couldn’t breathe. The solution was a tracheotomy, but as soon as he heard that word, he gathered strength from nowhere and shouted that he’d rather die. I think the
lady has been awake for days.

It was obvious that Alcira had spoken of the issue with Martel, and that they’d taken the decision together to resist. I said thank you to the doctor. I didn’t know what else to say.
My singer, then, had reached the end and I would now never have the chance to hear him. Bad luck was pursuing me. Since they’d closed the boarding house on Garay Street, I felt I was arriving
late to all of life’s opportunities. To distract myself from despondency, I’d spent weeks reading
The Count of Monte Cristo
in the Laffont edition. Every time I opened the novel
I forgot the misfortunes all around. Not this time: this time I felt that nothing could take me away from the curse that circled like a crow and sooner or later would feed on our carrion.

I asked one of the nurses to call Alcira.

I watched her come in five minutes later, carrying a century’s worth of tiredness. I’d already noticed, the day before, in the café, that Martel’s tragedy had begun to
transform her. She moved slowly, as if dragging all the suffering of the human condition in her wake. She asked me:

Can you stay, Bruno? I’m all alone and Julio’s in a bad way, I don’t know how to raise his spirits. So much struggle, poor thing. Twice he stopped breathing, with such a pained
expression, which I never want to see again. A while ago he said: I can’t take any more, honey. What do you mean you can’t take it? I answered him. And the recitals you’ve got
coming up? I already told Sabadell that the next one is on the Southern Shore. We’re not going to stand him up, are we? For a moment, I thought he was going to smile. But he closed his eyes
again. He has no strength. You won’t leave me alone, will you, Bruno? Please don’t leave me. If you stay here reading, waiting for me, I’ll feel we’re less defenseless.
Please.

What was I going to say to her? If she hadn’t asked I would have stayed anyway. I offered to buy her something to eat. Who knew how long she’d been there without anything. No, she
stopped me. I’m not hungry. The more empty and pure my body is inside, the more awake I’m going to feel. You’re not going to believe it but I haven’t been home for three
days. Three days without a shower. I don’t think I’ve ever gone so long, maybe when I was little. And the strangest thing is I don’t feel dirty. I must smell awful, no? I do mind,
but at the same time I don’t. It’s as if all that’s happening to me were purifying me, as if I were preparing to not have life.

That torrent of words surprised me. And the confession I wouldn’t have thought her capable of. We’d only met a little over two weeks ago. We barely knew anything about each other
and, suddenly, we were standing there talking about her body odor. I was taken aback, like so many other times. I know I’ve said it before, but I can’t stop thinking that the true
labyrinth of Buenos Aires is its people. So near and at the same time so distant. So similar on the outside and so diverse within. Such reserve, which Borges tried to assert as the essence of the
Argentine, and at the same time such shamelessness. Alcira also seemed unfathomable to me. I think she was the only woman I ever wanted to sleep with in my whole life. Not out of curiosity but
love. And not for physical love but something deeper: out of need, a craving to contemplate her abyss. And now I didn’t know what to do seeing her like this, so desolate. I would have liked
to console her, hold her against my chest, but I stood frozen, I dropped my arms and watched her walk away towards Martel’s bedside.

I don’t know how many hours I stayed in that hospital chair. Some of the time I was on tenterhooks, reading Dumas, attentive to the subtle intrigues of revenge that Monte Cristo was
spinning. I knew them already and, nevertheless, the perfect architecture of the tale always surprised me. At dusk, shortly before the poisoning of Valentine de Villefort, I fell asleep. Hunger
woke me and I went to buy a sandwich from the café on the corner. They were just about to close and reluctant to serve me. People were in a hurry to get home and the shops’ shutters
rolled closed almost in unison. The reality of the hospital, however, seemed to belong elsewhere, as if what it contained was too big for its shape. I mean that there were too many emotions in that
place than could ever fit in one evening.

I went back to the novel and, when I raised my eyes, everything that I saw out the window was tinted with a golden light. The sun was setting over the city with a magnificence as invincible as
on that dawn seen from the Hotel Plaza Francia. With surprise, I noticed that now too I felt an irremediable anguish. I fell asleep again for a while, maybe a couple of hours. I was startled awake
by the firecrackers that tore through the night and the tumult of fireworks. I’d never enjoyed new year festivities and more than once, after hearing the crowds count down the seconds on
television and watching the invariable annual ball of light drop into its time capsule in Times Square, I’d turned off the bedside lamp and rolled over to go to sleep.

Was it midnight already? No, it couldn’t even be ten yet. The nurses were leaving one by one, like the musicians in Joseph Haydn’s
Farewell Symphony,
and, in the waiting room,
under the fluorescent lights, I was entirely alone. In the distance I heard a sob and the monotony of a prayer. I hadn’t even noticed that Alcira had come into the room and was smiling at me.
Taking me by the arm, she said:

Martel’s waiting for you, Bruno. For a long while now he’s been breathing without problems. The doctor on call says not to get our hopes up, it could be a passing improvement, but
I’m sure he’s out of danger. He’s put so much will into it that he’s finally won the fight.

I let her lead me. We went through two swinging doors and entered a large ward, with rows of small rooms separated by panels. Although the place was isolated and in semi-darkness, the sounds of
illness, echoing at each step, hurt my ears. Wherever I turned, I saw patients connected to respirators, intravenous drips and cardiac monitors. The last cubicle on the right was
Martel’s.

I could barely make out his shape among those indirect lights the machines gave off, so my first impression was one I already had in my memory: that of a small man with a short neck and thick
black hair who I’d seen, months before, getting into a taxi near Congreso. I don’t know why I’d imagined him to look like Gardel. Not a bit: his lips were thick, his nose wide,
and in his large dark eyes an anxious expression, of someone running to try to keep up with time. The roots of his hair, which hadn’t been dyed since who knows when, were ashen, and here and
there were balding patches.

With a slight gesture he pointed me to a chair beside the bed. Up close, the wrinkles formed soft webs in the skin, and his breathing was asthmatic, labored. I had no way of comparing his
present condition to that morning when the doctor had found him ‘a little down,’ but what I saw was enough not to share Alcira’s optimism. His body was shutting down faster than
the year.

Cogan, he said, with a thread of a voice. I’ve heard you’re writing a book about me.

I didn’t want to offend him.

About you, I answered, and about what the tango was like at the beginning of the last century. I heard that there were many of those works in your repertoire and I traveled here to see you. When
I arrived, at the end of August, I found out you weren’t singing anymore.

What I said seemed to upset him, and he made signs to Alcira to put me right.

Martel never stopped singing, she said obediently. He declined to give recitals for people who didn’t understand.

I already knew that. I’ve been on your trail all these months. I waited in vain one day at noon under the arches in Mataderos, and I found out too late that you’d sung on a corner in
Parque Chas. I would have been happy to hear just one line. But there are no traces of you anywhere. No recordings. No videos. Only a few people’s memories.

Soon there won’t even be that, he said.

His body gave off a chemical smell, and I would have sworn it smelled of blood as well. I didn’t want to tire him with direct questions. I felt we had no time for anything else.

More than once I thought your recitals followed some sort of order, I told him. However, I haven’t been able to figure out what lies behind that order. I’ve imagined many
possibilities. I even thought the points that you chose were drawing a map of the Buenos Aires that nobody knows.

You were right, he said.

He made a barely perceptible sign to Alcira, who was standing at the foot of the bed, with her arms crossed.

It’s late, Bruno. Let’s let him get some rest.

I thought Martel wanted to raise one of his hands but I realized they were the first parts of him to have died. They were swollen and rigid. I stood up.

Wait, young man, he said. What are you going to remember about me?

I was so surprised by the question that I answered the first thing that came into my head:

Your voice. What I’ll most remember is what I’ve never heard.

Bring your ear close, he said.

I sensed that he was finally going to tell me what I’d waited so long to hear. I sensed that, if only for that moment, my journey was not going to have been in vain. I leaned over gently,
or at least I meant to. I have no idea what I did because I was no longer inhabiting myself, and in my place was another body bending toward Martel, trembling.

When I had got close enough, he let the voice loose. In the past it must have been an extremely beautiful voice, unscathed, full as a sphere, because what was left of it, even thinned by
illness, had a sweetness that didn’t exist in any other voice in this world. He only sang:

Buenos Aires, cuando lejos me vi.

And he stopped. They were the first words to ever have been heard in Argentine cinema. I didn’t know what they meant to Martel, but for me they encompassed all that I’d gone to
search for, because they were the last words to come out of his mouth.
Buenos Aires, when I’m far away.
I used to think it was his way of saying goodbye to the city. I don’t see
it like that anymore. I think the city had already dropped him, and he, desperate, was only asking it not to abandon him.

We buried him two days later in Chacarita cemetery. The only thing Alcira could get was a niche on the first floor of a mausoleum where other musicians lay. Although I paid for
a funeral announcement in all the newspapers hoping that somebody might come to the funeral chapel, the only ones to sit by his body the whole time were Alcira, Sabadell and me. Before leaving for
the cemetery, I hurriedly ordered a spray of camellias, and I still remember walking towards the niche with the spray, not knowing where to put it. Alcira was so heartbroken that nothing mattered
to her, but Sabadell complained bitterly about people’s ingratitude. I don’t know how many times I prevented him from calling El Club del Vino and the Sunderland, before the burial. He
did it when I fell asleep in a chair, at three in the morning, but no one answered the phone.

A series of vicissitudes came together to turn Martel’s death into a joke of fate. Only days later, when I paid the funeral parlor bill, I saw that the newspapers had announced his death
under his real name, Estéfano Esteban Caccace. No one must have remembered that the singer was called that, which explained the solitude of his funeral, but it was too late to repair the
damage by then. A long time later, in the summer in Manhattan, I ran into Tano Virgili on Fifth Avenue and we went to have an iced coffee at Starbucks. He told me that he’d seen the
announcement and the name had rung a bell from somewhere, but the day of the funeral they were swearing in the fifth president of the Republic, expecting the currency to be devalued and no one
could think of anything else.

At the moment Sabadell and I were placing the coffin in the niche, fifteen or twenty wild-looking people burst into the mausoleum, stopping a few steps away from us. Leading the group was a
young guy with chipped teeth and a woman with thick makeup plastered on her face waving a little stick. He was carrying a little girl with skeletal legs, who was wearing a lace skirt and a crown of
plastic flowers.

Oh my Saint, a miracle, the girl can walk! the woman shouted.

The one with the teeth set the little girl down in front of one of the niches and ordered her:

Walk, Dalmita, so the saint can see you.

He helped her take a step and also shouted:

Have you seen the miracle?

I tried to get close to see who they were venerating, but Alcira stopped me, taking my arm. Since we were waiting for Martel’s tomb to be sealed, we couldn’t leave at that
moment.

They’re devotees of Gilda, the laconic Sabadell explained. That woman died seven or eight years ago in a car accident. Her
cumbias
weren’t very popular when she was alive, but
look at her now.

I would have liked to ask her devotees to be quiet. I realized it would have been useless. A huge woman, with a tower of blonde hair and lips broadened with purple lipstick, took something that
looked like a deodorant out of her purse and, holding it like a microphone, urged the faithful:

Come on girls, everyone sing to our Gilda!

She then embarked on an out-of-tune
cumbia
, which began:
I don’t regret this looove / though it cost me my heeeart.
The singing went on for five interminable minutes. Long
before the end, they accompanied the chorus with hand clapping, until one of the devotees – or whatever they were – shouted: Grand Wild Lady!