Authors: Tomás Eloy Martínez
I shoved the idea away and it came straight back. Even against all notions of reality, I believed the aleph was below the last step of the cellar and that, if I lay down in a supine position on
the floor, I’d be able to see it the way Bonorino saw it. Without the aleph, the librarian wouldn’t have been able to draw the inside of a Stradivarius with such precision or reproduce
the moment when Borges and Estela Canto kissed in the Parque Lezama. It was an indestructible sphere fixed in a single point in the universe. If the boarding house was struck by lightning or Buenos
Aires ceased to exist, the point would still be there, perhaps invisible to those who didn’t know how to see it but no less real for that. Borges had been able to forget. I was tirelessly
tormented by it.
Until then my days had been routine and happy. In the afternoons I sat in the cafés and visited second-hand bookstores; in one of them I found a first edition of
The Early Italian
Poets
, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, for six dollars, and Samuel Johnson’s book on Shakespeare published by Yale for a dollar fifty, because the covers were bent. Since before I arrived,
unemployment was increasing unchecked and thousands of people were selling off their assets and leaving the country. Some hundred-year-old libraries were being sold by weight, and book dealers
sometimes bought things without any idea of their value.
I also liked going to El Gato Negro Café, on Corrientes Street, where I was lulled by the aroma of oregano and paprika, or sitting by the window at El Foro to watch the young lawyers go
past with their entourage of clerks. On Saturdays I preferred the sunny sidewalk terrace of La Biela, across from the Recoleta, where all the apt phrases that occurred to me for my dissertation
were destroyed by the intrusion of mime artists and the frightening tango spectacles in the open space in front of the Church of Pilar.
Sometimes, around ten in the evening, I’d drop into La Brigada, in San Telmo. There was a market there that stayed open till late and it was old like the century we’d left behind. At
the entrances, strings of Bolivian women were stationed with their colored outfits selling bags of mysterious spices that they spread out over a piece of cloth. Inside, in the maze of galleries,
kiosks of toys bumped up against stalls selling buttons and lace, like in an Arab souk. The nucleus of the square was full of sides of beef hung from hooks beside heaps of kidneys, tripe and blood
sausages. In no other place in the world have things kept the flavor they’d had in the past as much as in this Buenos Aires that was, however, no longer almost anything like what it once had
been.
It’s always difficult to find a spot in La Brigada. To demonstrate that the meat is tender, the waiters cut it with the edge of a spoon, and it’s worthwhile closing your eyes as the
first bite touches your tongue, because that way the pleasure cleaves to the memory and stays in it. When I didn’t want to eat alone, I approached the tables of movie directors and actors and
poets who congregated there, and asked if I could join them. I’d learned when it was appropriate and when not.
The heat began in November. Even the little kids who went from place to place with wheelbarrows full of old cardboard, to sell for ten centavos a kilo, got their sorrows out of their souls and
whistled music so good you could lean your head back on it: the poor kids put their hands in their pockets and all they found was the good weather, which was enough to let them forget for a moment
the scorching bed where they wouldn’t sleep that night.
When I got to La Brigada I saw a couple of young television actors at a table near the window. Valeria was with them and, from the drawings she was sketching for them on a piece of paper, it
seemed like she was explaining some tango steps. I hadn’t seen her since the night of my arrival, but her face was unforgettable because she reminded me of my maternal grandmother. She
greeted me with enthusiasm. I noticed she was bored and hoping someone would rescue her.
These two guys have to dance tomorrow in a film and they don’t even know the difference between a
ranchera
and a
milonga
, she told me. They both nodded, as if they
hadn’t heard.
Take them to La Estrella or La Viruta or whatever that place is called tonight, I answered. I turned to the young men and told them: Valeria is the best. I saw her teach a bow-legged Japanese
man. By three in the morning he was dancing like Fred Astaire.
She’s a lot older than us, one pointed out, stupidly. Older women don’t turn me on, so I can’t learn this way.
Old or young, we’re all the same size in bed, I said, copying Somerset Maugham or maybe Hemingway.
The conversation languished and for a few minutes Valeria tried to keep it lively by talking about
The Swamp
, an Argentine film that reminded her of the hysteria and negligence in her own
family, and therefore continued to vex her. The young men, on the other hand, had left before it finished: Graciela Borges’ acting was divine, but we couldn’t handle so many dogs in
every scene, they said. They were barking all the time, even the cinema smelled of dog shit.
They preferred
The Son of the Bride
, where they’d cried their eyes out. I hadn’t seen the most recent movies and couldn’t contribute. I liked works soaked in time. In
Buenos Aires, just like in Manhattan, I frequented art house cinemas and film clubs, where I found wonders that no one remembered anymore. In a little room in the San Martín theater I saw in
a single day
The Flight
, an Argentine gem from 1937 that was believed lost for six decades, and
Chronicle of a Lone Boy
, which was comparable to
Les Quatre cents coups.
A week
later, in a series at the Malba, I discovered a short from 1961 called
Faena (Slaughter)
, which showed cattle being knocked out with hammers and then skinned alive in the slaughterhouse. I
then understood the true meaning of the word barbarous and for a whole week could think of nothing else. In New York, an experience like that would have turned me into a vegetarian. In Buenos Aires
it was impossible, because there was nothing to eat but beef.
Shortly after eleven, Valeria and her students asked for the bill and stood up. They had to start filming tomorrow morning at dawn, and they still needed two or three hours of practice. When
they left, I was expecting nothing more from the night, but one of the little actors surprised me:
We have to go to the ends of the earth without even sleeping,
che
. The Liniers Arcades, imagine. They’d told us to be there at noon, but then they found out it was reserved. Some
deformed singer got in ahead of us. That asshole, what’s his name, he said, snapping his fingers.
Martel, the other matinee idol said.
Julio Martel? I asked.
That’s the one. Who’s ever heard of him?
He’s a great singer, Valeria corrected him. The best since Gardel.
You’re the only one who says that, insisted the little actor who wasn’t turned on by her. No one understands what he sings.
The anxiety wouldn’t let me work or sleep. For the first time fate had allowed me to anticipate the place where Martel was going to give one of his private recitals. After seeing
Faena
, I could surmise why he had chosen the arcades, three two-story buildings, with a succession of cloister-like archways at the front, the construction of which had begun on the very
same day as that of the Waterworks Palace. The northern gate was used in the past for access to the slaughter lots and the old livestock market, where at daybreak they auctioned the cattle to be
eaten that day. In 1978, the dictatorship had closed down and demolished the slaughterhouse. On the forty hectares they built a pharmaceutical lab and a recreation park, but the cattle still came
into the adjoining market by the trailer-load, emptied into the corrals and sold by lot, at so much a kilo.
The street the arcades were on had changed its name so many times that everyone called it whatever they wanted. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when the place was known as Chicago,
and the slaughtermen used only knives imported from that butchers’ city, those who ventured down that street called it calle Décima. In the parish records it was inscribed as San
Fernando, in memory of a medieval prince who ate nothing but beef. The auctioneers who got together behind the blue and pink chamfer of the Oviedo bar, right across the street from the arcades,
were still calling it Tellier until recently, in homage to the Frenchman, Charles Tellier, who was the first to transport frozen meat across the Atlantic. Since 1984, however, it was called
Lisandro de la Torre, after the senator who exposed the illegal meat-processing monopoly.
There are no reliable maps of Buenos Aires, because the street names change from one week to the next. What one map affirms, another denies. Directions guide and at the same time disturb. For
fear of getting lost, some people never go more than ten or twelve blocks away from home in their whole lives. Enriqueta, the manager of the boarding house, for example, had never been west of 9 de
Julio Avenue. ‘What for?’ she’d said. ‘Who knows what might happen to me.’
When I finished eating at La Brigada I went to the Café Británico without stopping off at my room, like I usually did. I urgently needed to revise my notes on the film
Faena
to see whether I might find something in the rituals of the slaughterhouse that could explain Martel’s presence in the arcades at noon the next day. According to the short, every morning
seven thousand cows and calves ascended a ramp toward death. First, they’d waded through a pool and then been hosed down to complete the washing. At the top of the ramp, a hatch shut behind
them and separated them into groups of three or four. Then they were each struck a brutal hammer blow on the back of the neck by a man naked to the waist. The blow rarely missed. The animals
collapsed and were almost instantly thrown two meters down onto a cement floor. That none of them felt the imminence of death was essential to the meat’s tenderness. When a cow sensed danger,
it would stiffen with terror and the muscles would be permeated with a bitter flavor.
As the cattle fell from the ramp, six or seven men went along wrapping their legs with a steel wire and fitting them onto a hook while a counterweight hoisted them up off the ground, head
hanging down. The movements had to be swift and precise: the animals were still alive and, if they awoke from the blackout, they put up a hell of a fight. Once hung, they advanced along an endless
conveyor belt, at the rate of two hundred an hour. The slaughtermen awaited them by the waterwheel, with their knives raised: the sure point in the jugular and that was it. The blood gushed out
into a canal where it would coagulate for later use. What happened next was atrocious and it seemed unthinkable to me that Martel would want to sing to that past. The cows were skinned, slit open,
disembowelled and handed over, now headless and legless, to the quartermen, who chopped them in half or in pieces.
That’s how it was in 1848 as well, when Esteban Echeverría wrote
El Matadero (The Slaughterhouse)
, the first Argentine work of literature, in which the cruelty to the cattle
is a metaphor for the barbarous cruelty inflicted on men in the country. Although the slaughterhouse is no longer behind the arcades and has been scattered among dozens of meat processing plants
outside the city limits, the rites of the sacrifice haven’t changed. They’ve only added another step to the dance, the prod, consisting of two copper poles through which an electrical
charge is generated. When it is applied to the animal’s flank, the prod herds them towards the sacrificial ramps. In 1932, a police commissioner named Leopoldo Lugones, son of the great
national poet – his namesake – realized the instrument could be useful in torturing human beings, and ordered tests of electrical charges on political prisoners, choosing soft areas
where the pain would be most intolerable: the genitals, the gums, the anus, the nipples, the ears, the nasal cavities, with the intention of annihilating all thought or desire and converting the
victims into non-persons.
I made a list of those details in the hope of finding a clue as to what had led Martel to sing in front of the old slaughterhouse, but although I went over it time and time again, I
couldn’t see it. Alcira Villar would have given me the key, but I didn’t know her then. She later told me that Martel tried to recapture the past just as it had been, without the
disfigurations of memory. He knew the past remained intact somewhere, not in the shape of the present but of eternity: what was and still continues to be will be the same tomorrow, something like
Plato’s Primordial Idea or Bergson’s crystals of time, although the singer had never heard of them.
According to Alcira, Martel’s interest in the mirages of time began in Tita Merello’s cinema, one June day, when they went to see two movies Carlos Gardel had filmed at the Paramount
studios in Joinville,
Melodia de arrabal (Suburban Melody)
and
Luces de Buenos Aires (Lights of Buenos Aires).
Martel had observed his idol with such intensity that he felt at certain
moments – he said then – that he was him. Not even the terrible condition of the prints had disappointed him. In the solitude of the theater, he sang softly, in a duet with the voice on
screen, two of the tangos,
Tomo y obligo (I’ll have a Drink and so will You)
and
Silencio.
Alcira couldn’t hear the slightest difference between one singer and the other.
When Martel imitated Gardel,
he was Gardel
, she said. When he strove to be himself, he was better.
They went back to see the two films again the next day at the matinee and, on the way out, the singer decided to buy copies on video that they sold in a shop on Corrientes at the corner of
Rodríguez Pena. For a week he did nothing but watch them over and over again on the television, sleeping now and then, eating something, and watching them again, Alcira told me. He’d
pause them to look at the rural landscape, the cafés of the day, the greengrocers’ shops, the clubs. Gardel, on the other hand, he listened to spellbound, without pauses. When it was
all over, he told me that the past of films was an artifice. The tones of the voices were conserved as clearly as in the recordings they retouched in the studios, but the surroundings were painted
cardboard and, even though what we saw was the very same cardboard as the day it was filmed, the gaze degraded it, as if time contained a force of incorrigible gravity. Not even then did he stop
thinking, Alcira told me, that the past was intact somewhere, maybe not in people’s memories, as we might suppose, but rather outside of us, in some uncertain point in reality.