The Tango Singer Read Online Free PDF

friends when he returned from exile and set up a bookstore on Corrientes Street, where there were already
twenty or thirty others and lots of shoppers. It was an instant success. People stayed to chat until the early hours between the tables of special offers, and he soon felt obliged to add a
café, which encouraged spontaneous guitarists and poets.
    The months flew by in a blur, not knowing where they were headed, as if the past were innocent of the future. One night in 1985, in the bookstore, someone mentioned a marvelous tenor who was
singing in a little place over in Boedo for whatever they felt like paying him. It was difficult to understand the lyrics of his tangos, which reproduced an ancient and now meaningless language.
The tenor had a refined way of pronouncing them, but the words wouldn’t let themselves be caught:
You donked the little strumple / upagainst a bamp in the
creamery.
They were all like that, or almost all. Sometimes, among the six or seven tangos he sang a night, one or two would come up that the oldest of his listeners could identify, though not
without effort, like
Mucked up with Yeast
or
I got Gut Rot from your Manger
, of which there are no records or sheet music.
    In the first appearances, when a flutist accompanied the tenor, the songs revealed mischief, sexual happiness, perpetual youth. Later the flutist was replaced by an impassive, serious
bandoneón player, who darkened the repertoire. Fed up with songs they couldn’t decipher, the more conventional clients stopped coming. Instead, more imaginative listeners began to
frequent the place, amazed by a voice that, rather than repeating images and stories, slid from one emotion to another, with the clarity of a sonata. Like the music, the voice had no need of
meaning. It expressed itself alone.
    Virgili had a hunch this was the same person who’d sung
Mano a mano
in the Sunderland twenty-two years earlier. The following Saturday he went to the place in Boedo. As he watched
the slight and spidery Martel move towards the platform beside the counter, and listened to him sing, he realized that this voice eluded any description because it was itself the tale of the past
and future of Buenos Aires. Suspended by a tenuous thread of Cs and Fs, the voice hinted at the massacre of the Unitarians 4 , Manuelita Rosas’ passion for her father, the Revolution of the
Park 5 , the overcrowding and despair of immigrants, the slaughter of the Tragic Week 6 in 1919, the bombing of the Plaza deMayo 7 before the fall of Perón, Pedro
Henríquez Ureña 8 chasing death down the platforms of Constitucíon Station, the dictator Onganía 10 censoring Bach’s Magnificat and the enchantment of the artists
Noé, Deira and De la Vega in the Di Tella Institute 9 , the failures of a city that had every possible advantage yet had nothing. Martel let all this pour out like thousand-year-old water.
    Come and sing in El Rufián Melancólico bookstore, Virgili proposed to him when the show finished. I can pay you and your bandoneonist a fixed salary.
    Fixed salary, imagine that. Didn’t know there was such a thing anymore.
    His speaking voice bore absolutely no relation to the voice he sang with: it was reticent and uneducated. The man it came from seemed different from the one who sang. He wore a ridiculous signet
ring glittering with gemstones on the little finger of his left hand. The veins of both hands were swollen and had needle marks.
    There is, said Virgili. On Corrientes Street more people would hear you. Which is what you deserve, sir.
    He didn’t dare drop the formalities. Martel, on the other hand, answered while looking the other way.
    What comes here ain’t so bad, man. Let me hear the deal and I’ll think it over.
    He started to sing at El Rufián the following Friday. Six months later they took him to the Club del Vino, where he shared the bill with Horacio Salgán, Ubaldo de Lío and
the bandoneón player Néstor Marconi. Although his