The Tango Singer: A Novel
Tomas Eloy Martinez
Language: English
Pages: 246
ISBN: 1582346011
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A hypnotic novel in which an American student's quest to find the greatest living tango singer leads him deep into the labyrinth of Argentina's past.
It is 2001, and inflation is spiraling out of control in Argentina as Bruno Cadogan, an American graduate student specializing in Borges, arrives in Buenos Aires. Cadogan is on the trail of Julio Martel, an elusive tango singer rumored to be even better than Carlos Gardel, the greatest singer of the 1920s and '30s. Martel has never recorded and his strange, powerful performances, at seemingly arbitrary sites around the city, are always unannounced.
Cadogan finds lodging in a boarding house rumored to be the setting of the famous Borges story "The Aleph," and soon finds himself drawn into the tangle of legends surrounding the singer's life. As the economic tension grows and the city hovers on the verge of riots, Bruno begins to believe that Martel's increasingly rare performances are in fact far from random―that they instead form a map of the darkest moments in the city's past.
sphincters ruptured. During the five and a half years of her martyrdom, Violeta had managed to save, centavo by centavo, the money from her tips. She had two hundred and fifty pesos, a fifth of what they’d paid for her at the first auction, and, now that she was worth nothing, it might have perhaps been enough to buy herself. That was impossible, because the women were only handed over to other men in the same business. Desperate, she asked the bricklayer if anyone he knew would be willing to
down the flowers and people came and went indifferently through the Plazoleta del Resero. The singer had his head down, without saying a word. His will for silence was so deep and dominant that all I remember of that morning are the fleeting shadows of the vehicles, and the image of Sabadell, who looked naked without his guitar. From there we set off for the big house on Avenida de los Corrales, Alcira continued. The property was still under litigation and was worth less than the rubble. The
The ashen lamp with its twenty-five-watt bulb barely illuminated his hunchbacked body, upon which the world’s ills seemed to have fallen. Sad news, Cadon, he said. The light of knowledge has been condemned to the guillotine. I’m sorry, I lied. You never know why these things happen. Whereas I can see all that has been lost: the squaring of the circle, the domestication of time, the act of the first founding of Buenos Aires. Nothing will be lost if you’re well, Bonorino. May I pay for your
hotel for a few days? Allow me this favor. I’ve already accepted the invitation of other outcasts, who’ve offered me shelter in Fuerte Apache. You’re a foreigner, there’s no reason for you to take responsibility for anything. We serve our Lord in possible things and content ourselves with desiring the impossible ones, as Saint Theresa said. I remembered how desperate Carlos Argentino Daneri was when they announced the demolition of the house on Garay Street, because if he was deprived of the
sketched new drawings when I got bored of reading in cafés. I traced lines between the places where, according to Virgili, the bookseller, Martel had sung before I arrived in Buenos Aires: the lovers’ hotels on the Azcuénaga Street, next to Recoleta Cemetery, the subterranean tunnel under the obelisk in the Plaza de la República. In the newspaper archive in the National Library – the one where Grete Amundsen had got lost months before – I looked for evidence of why Martel might have chosen those