Martinez, Tomas Eloy - The Tango Singer

Jorge Luis Borges (paraphrasing Oscar Wilde) wrote in his essay “The History of the Tango” (1955) that music can reveal hidden “personal pasts,” moving the listener to lament misfortunes he never suffered and wrongs he did not commit. “I confess that I cannot hear ‘El Marne’ or ‘Don Juan’ without remembering in detail an apocryphal past, simultaneously stoic and orgiastic, in which I have challenged and fought, in the end to fall silently, in an obscure knife fight. Perhaps,” speculated Borges, “this is the tango’s mission: to give Argentines the belief in a brave past, in having met the demands of honor and bravery.”

In The Tango Singer, Tomás Eloy Martínez’s brilliant new novel, music does indeed reveal hidden pasts. The story centers around Julio Martel, an aging tango singer in modern-day Argentina. Martel is eccentric and elusive, but the few who have heard Martel sing swear that he is better even than the great baritone Carlos Gardel - the highest of honors. One woman describes a performance she saw the ailing Julio Martel give in the middle of a sweltering summer day in Buenos Aires:

“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…I myself was remembering things I never lived.”

Bruno Cadogan, an NYU graduate student who is writing a thesis on Borges’ tango essays, travels to Buenos Aires to find and interview Julio Martel. But he is nearly impossible to track down. Martel no longer sings in the tango clubs. He performs instead at seemingly random landmarks around the city and always without notice.

Just as unpredictable is Buenos Aires itself. Inhabitants of the capital city have an expression: “I can’t find myself here,” which is the same as saying “I’m not myself here.” Streets vanish and reappear with different names. Buses of tourists get lost in the poor southern suburbs of the city; they don’t find their way out for days “and even the passengers…have no memory of whatever it was that had held them up.” The Tango Singer takes place in the summer of 2001, during which at least 25 people were killed in street protests in Buenos Aires, a general strike crippled the city, and the country was under the leadership of five separate presidents in just fourteen days. “I had the feeling,” Cadogan says, “that in the Buenos Aires of those months the threads of reality moved out of step with the people and were weaving a labyrinth in which no one could find anything or anyone.”

Cadogan becomes obsessed with determining the logic behind Martel’s recitals. He discovers that, contrary to Borges’ theory, Julio Martel does not perform to conjure up a false history Argentines can be proud of. The music invokes a true past that has all but disappeared - psychologically repressed, officially censored by a succession of tyrannical regimes, or simply never told. He sings, for example, on the balcony of a hotel behind Recoleta Cemetery, where Eva Peron is buried, and an aurora borealis rainbow forms over the graves. He sings at the Waterworks Palace and doors are opened by the ghost of the adolescent girl who had been tortured there a hundred years before. Martel sings also for Violeta Miller, a member of the Peron resistance who was betrayed by her tragically paranoid employer. He sings for the fifteen hundred young men and women who perished in the basement of the Athletic Club, tortured and executed by the military government in the late 1970s and early 80s, sometimes hung on hooks until they bled to death. And he offers an extra song for his dearest friend who is one of “The Disappeared” from that era. Buenos Aires is a city in which crimes are committed with impunity and Martel’s music serves as an “incantation against cruelty and injustice.”

The Tango Singer is nothing short of extraordinary. It’s depiction of a city turned illusory and insubstantial under the weight of its secrets is poignant and steeped in melancholy. But the novel is also a subtly hopeful meditation on the power of art to remake the world by shining light into the forgotten, neglected corners of the past. I sing, Martel once explained, so that “what once was returns and nothing remains as it is.”

If we haven’t met the demands of honor and bravery in the past, perhaps we will in the future.