The Tango Singer Read Online Free PDF Page A

As he walked towards the stool, he thought he could discern a murmur of pity. When the violins struck up
Mano a mano
, he took courage by imagining himself on the prow of a ship, irresistible like Gardel.
    Perhaps his gestures were a parody of those seen in the immortal singer’s films. But the voice was unique. It took off by itself, unfurling more emotions than fit into an entire lifetime
and, of course, far more than Celedonio Flores’ tango modestly hinted at.
Mano a mano
told the story of a woman who left the man she loved for a life of riches and pleasure. Martel
turned it into a mystic lament on mortal flesh and the solitude of the soul without God.
    The violins were out of tune and out of time, but they were masked by the density of the singing that advanced like a fury, transforming everything it touched into gold. Estéfano’s
diction was defective: he left off the final s’s of the words and simplified the sound of the x’s in exuberance and examine. Gardel, in the version of
Mano a mano
with
José Ricardo on guitar, says
carta
instead of
canta
and
conesejo
instead of
consejo.
Martel caressed the syllables as if they were glass and poured them out
intact over an enchanted audience, silent since the first verse.
    They gave him a standing ovation. Some enthusiastic women, breaking the rules of the competition, shouted for an encore. Martel left the stage in a state of confusion and had to lean on his
stick. From a bench in the corridor, he listened to another singer imitating the neighing of Alberto Castillo. Then he shuddered at the round of applause that greeted Rossi as he took the stage.
The first lines of
En esta tarde gris
, which his rival let fall with his colorless voice, convinced him that something worse than defeat would happen that night. He would be forgotten. The
vote confirmed, as usual, Rossi’s overwhelming supremacy.
    Mario Virgili was fifteen years old then and his parents had taken him to the Sunderland Club to instill in him a love for the tango. Virgili supposed that Rossi, Gardel, Troilo’s
orchestra and that of Julio De Caro embodied all that the genre had to offer. In 1976, the atrocious dictatorship forced him into exile, where he remained for a little over eight years. One night,
in the city of Caracas, while he was in a bookstore on the Sabana Grande Boulevard, he heard in the distance the opening bars of
Mano a mano
and felt an invincible nostalgia. The melody
buzzed around Virgili’s memory for hours in an infinite present that didn’t want to give way. He’d heard it hundreds of times, sung by Gardel, by Charlo, by Alberto Arenas, by
Goyeneche. Nevertheless, the voice that settled in his head was that of Martel. For Virgili, that fleeting moment one November Saturday in the Sunderland had been transfigured into a breath of
eternity.
    People disappeared by the thousand during those years, and the singer also faded into the routine of the funeral parlor, where he worked seventy hours a week. The pools had
been legalized, so the owner set up baccarat and poker tables in the back, on top of the empty coffins. Martel had the gift of knowing which cards would turn up in each hand, and signaled to the
dealers by a system of gestures how they should play. Many unemployed workers and technicians turned up, and at each table there was so much tension, such desire to domesticate luck, that Martel
felt pangs of conscience for accentuating the ruin of those desperate men.
    In the spring of 1981, a colonel ordered a raid on the gambling den. The owner of the funeral parlor was tried but acquitted due to procedural errors. Martel, however, spent six months in the
notorious Villa Devoto prison. That misfortune left him even thinner and smaller. His cheekbones stuck out, his eyes looked darker and bulged from his gaunt face, but the voice remained intact,
immune to illness and failure.
    Virgili, who had been an encyclopedia salesman in Venezuela, went into business with two