The Tango Singer Read Online Free PDF Page B

tangos were more and more abstruse and remote, the voice rose with such purity that people recognized in it feelings they’d
lost or forgotten, and burst into tears or laughter without the slightest embarrassment. The night Jean Franco went to El Club del Vino they gave him a ten-minute standing ovation. He would have
gone on like that for who knows how long if an intestinal hemorrhage hadn’t put him back in the hospital.
    Martel’s hemophilia, caused by the lack of factor 8, was accompanied by a retinue of illnesses. He frequently succumbed to malignant fevers or pneumonia. He was often covered in scabs that
he hid with makeup. None of his admirers knew that he arrived to sing in a wheelchair or that he couldn’t have walked more than three steps across the stage. Near the curtain there was always
a stool screwed to the floor, which he’d lean on as he sang after bowing his head slightly. It had been quite some time since he’d been able to imitate Gardel’s gestures and,
although nothing would have pleased him more, his style had gained in frugality and a certain bodily invisibility. So the voice glittered on its own, as if nothing else existed in the world, not
even the accompanying bandoneón in the background.
    The intestinal bleeding put him out of circulation for a few years. Months before I arrived in Buenos Aires he had started singing again. He didn’t sing when asked anymore but only when he
felt like it. Instead of returning to El Rufián or El Club del Vino, where they still longed to hear him, he would appear out of the blue in the dance halls in the neighborhoods of San Telmo
or Villa Urquiza, or he offered open air concerts in some part of the city, for whoever wanted to hear him. To his repertoire of bygone tangos he began adding those composed by Gardel and Le Pera,
and some of Cadícamo’s classics.
    One night he sang from the balcony of one of the hotels for furtive lovers on the Azcuénaga Street, behind Recoleta Cemetery. Many couples interrupted the clamor of their passion and
listened to the powerful voice infiltrating through the windows and bathing their bodies forever in a tango they’d never heard before, in a language they didn’t understand, but which
they recognized as if it came from a previous life. One of the witnesses told Virgili that a sheet of aurora borealis shone in an arc over the crosses and archangels of the cemetery, and after the
song everyone there felt a guiltless peace.
    He showed up in unusual places that held no special interest to anyone, or perhaps they were points on a map of some other Buenos Aires. After a recital in Retiro Station, he announced that he
would one day be going down into the canal through which flowed the Maldonado stream, under Juan B. Justo Avenue, which crosses the city from east to west, to sing a tango there that no one now
remembered, whose rhythm was an indiscernible blend of
habaneras
,
milongas
and
rancheras.
    However, he sang in another tunnel first: the one that opens like a delta beneath the obelisk at the Plaza de la República, at the intersection of 9 de Julio Avenue and Corrientes Street.
The place is inappropriate for his voice, because sounds carry for eighteen or twenty feet and then suddenly die out. At one of the entrances is a string of chairs with footrests for the few
passersby who might want their shoes shined, and tiny stools for those who serve them. There are lots of posters of soccer teams and
Playboy
bunnies around them. Two of the branches lead to
kiosks and shops selling army surplus, second-hand magazines and papers, shoelaces and insoles, homemade perfumes, stamps, handbags and wallets, industrial reproductions of Picasso’s
Guernica
and
Paloma
, umbrellas and socks.
    Martel didn’t sing in those populous labyrinthine detours but in one of the dead-end hollows where some homeless families had set up camp. Any voice there drops like lead as soon as it
leaves the throat: the density of the air