Tango (11 page)

Irigoyen was elected in 1916; his rise to the presidency marked the end of a century-old political system controlled by the old elite and used to maintain its interests. They remained the controlling economic class, of course, but the shifting and changing balance of power between these two social forces would mark and shape the subsequent two decades of Argentine political life. The Radicals, even before their election to the national government, had consolidated their influence at local and regional levels, in particular in the growing cities where the networks they created felt and looked very like the system of controlling city bosses that was already well established in the United States. For the working class, however, the changes were limited, and what improvements were achieved were the result of militant trade union action. While the immigrant populations may well have thrown their support behind the Radicals and against the old ruling class, their relationship with a Radical party in power remained tense and conflictive.
³

POLITICS AND CULTURE

After its boom years on both sides of the Atlantic, tango came home in 1914 as the exiles returned. They came flushed with their success in the cafés and clubs of the demi-monde of Paris and their acceptance in the elegant salons of the city. Those who returned from the United States brought back a different, sexually less adventurous tango, its steps sacrificed in exchange for access to the
thés dansants
of the Upper East Side and the elegant parties of the
grandes dames
of New York. What they found in Buenos Aires was that news of Europe's craze for tango had arrived before them, and that new cabarets and cafés had opened in the city centre, bearing French names and European decor. The Armenonville
and the Pigalle, Lo de Hansen or the Café Tortini mimicked a kind of French grand style. There was little here to recall the rural interior from which the internal migrants had come nor to reflect the poor rural background from which the steerage passengers on the migrant ships had emerged.

The beginning of the First World War brought the exiles back to the River Plate. But tango had arrived back before them. Though it was still seen as risqué, tango could now be danced in Buenos Aires at semi-respectable tea dances, where the more adventurous ladies of the middle class partnered the slick young gigolos who frequented the cafés of the city centre in the afternoons. In the evenings their husbands would dance with women who were definitely not of their social circle, but young women who had graduated from the brothels and cabarets of the port areas to the grander surroundings of the new cafés. The resentment of their erstwhile pimps, the
compadritos
, when they had to watch their charges disappear into this other world on the arm of a wealthy protector (the
bacán
) would be a central theme of the tango songs of subsequent decades.

Muchacho

Que porque la suerte quiso

Vivís en un primer piso

De un palacete central
,

Que para vicios y placeres

Para farras y mujeres

Dispones de un capital
.

Muchacho

Que no sabes el encanto

De haber derramado llanto

Por un amor de mujer
,

Que no sabes qué es secarse

En una timba y armarse

Para volverse a meter
. . .

Young man / who because destiny placed you / in a first-floor apartment / in a mansion in the centre of town / and for vices and pleasures / for parties and women / gave you money to spare
.

Young man / you don't know the enchantment / of weeping tears / for the love of a woman / who doesn't know what it's like / to be cleaned out in a game and steel yourself / to go back the next day and start again . . 
.

(‘Muchacho', Young Man – Celedonio Flores, 1929)

Another irony of the triumphant return of tango from Europe was that the tango recordings that were causing such an impact in the wider world were largely made in Europe and the United States, mainly on the Odeon and the Victor labels, respectively. There were some recordings being made in Buenos Aires, but they signally failed to capture the spirit of tango as the French and German engineers had done.

The (local) gramophone companies did not aim their product at those who would rather spend their money on sex, narcotics and pistols. Early examples of Tango are largely stiff, somewhat ersatz affairs and the few genuine groups to record made little impact on the domestic market.
⁴

The Odeon label's agent in Buenos Aires, Max Glücksmann, was instrumental in reacquainting Argentina with the music of its lower depths. Odeon, a German company, preferred to have Germans selling their products abroad, and Glücksmann was appointed their agent in Buenos Aires. As the war affected supplies of shellac and made the transport of discs more difficult, the ties between headquarters and its far-flung agencies were broken.
Glücksmann, who was already active in finding and recording local artists, persuaded his bosses to provide both a pressing plant and a recording engineer in Buenos Aires. He went on signing up artists and performers, who now appeared on his own label, ‘Discos Nacional'. At war's end, Glücksmann reached an agreement with his old employer and his records began to be exported back to Europe, where they caught the mood of the ‘Jazz Age'.

The
Vieja Guardia
, or ‘Old Guard' as this first generation of tango musicians and performers were called, developed in Paris. It was there that the original tango trios expanded into sextets, like the early
orquestas típicas
of Juan Maglio and Vicente Greco. Tangomania was providing opportunities for tango musicians to live from their music. And the dance was also changing under the influence of Europe and America. The fast, tripping style (conserved most closely in the
milonga
today) was giving way to the slower, more dramatic and less crudely erotic version – the
tango argentino
. And that in turn eased its entry into the respectable night life of Argentina's bourgeoisie, and opened a new market for the enterprising Glücksmann.

Under Glücksmann's tutelage another change was taking place, more profound and far-reaching, and moved by a combination of transformations. The Law of Social Defence of 1910 had referred explicitly to social and political undesirables whose right to remain in Argentina could be withdrawn. It seemed a dramatic reversal of that original assurance of four decades earlier that immigrants could become part of the expanding Argentine nation.

The target was clearly not so much the immigrant community as such as the militants and dissidents who had begun to stamp their presence on the society through acts of political violence in some cases, and more generally through the growing trade union movement whose dominant anarchist ideology made it less amenable to political negotiation.

At first sight, the decision to withdraw the legal recognition of brothels may seem to be unconnected. But ‘from 1900 onwards prostitutes were linked symbolically to the most dangerous men in Argentina – the anarchists'.
⁵
And the association of tango with the sexual underworld was explicit.

Yet if sexual commerce became less visible and less tolerated, its most fervid expression simply stepped across the lines of class and the physical frontiers between urban barrios and made its way into the wider world. It was helped by Glücksmann's energetic support for the genre, of course, as well as by the advent of radio, though sheet music continued to be sold in large quantities well into the 1930s too.

But perhaps the most active guarantee of tango's survival was the emergence of a new form – tango-song and its particular poetry. Although there were already recognized lyricists in the tango world, most notably Ángel Villoldo, tango remained a music for dancing. Yet by 1917–18, the lyrics were beginning to become as well known and as enthusiastically received as its music. Tango had found a voice.

THE SINGERS AND THE SONGS

Pascual Contursi's ‘Mi noche triste' (My sad night), written in 1917, was not the first tango with words. ‘Dame la lata' was written in the 1880s and by the following decade verses proliferated – but they were, like the early blues, largely invitations to sex couched in not very subtle metaphors: ‘Touch me the way I like it', ‘Shake my curtains', and many others like them. The early twentieth century produced the first lyricists, particularly Ángel Villoldo, who injected some social comment into these early songs, as in his ‘El carrero y el cochero' (The carter and the coachman) and the emblematic ‘El porteñito' of 1903. But his most famous tango, ‘El Choclo' only acquired lyrics some two decades after its first publication in 1910.

‘Mi noche triste' is universally acknowledged as the first of a new genre, the
tango-canción
or tango-song. Its accompaniment was the music of the
Vieja Guardia
of Roberto Firpo and Vicente Greco whose expanded ensembles still played for dancing. But by 1917, tango was becoming familiar and ubiquitous in Buenos Aires, as the sounds emerging from the elegant cabarets echoed the music of the street organs that had taken tango to the pavements of the city.

Al paso tardo de un pobre viejo

Puebla de notas el arrabal
,

Con un concepto de vidrios rotos

El organito crepuscular
.

Dándole vueltas a la manija

Un hombre rengo marcha detrás
,

Mientras la dura pata de palo

Marca del tango el compás
.

En las notas de esa musiquita

Hay no sé qué vaga sensación
,

Que el barrio parece

Impregnarse todo de emoción
.

Y es porque son tantos los recuerdos

Que a su paso despertando va
,

Que llena las almas

Con un gran deseo de llorar
.

To the slow gait of a poor old man / Music fills the street / With a sound like broken glass / It is the street organ at dusk. / Turning the handle / a one-legged man walks along / his wooden leg / beating time to the music
.

There is in that music / a strange vague feeling / an emotion / that pervades the barrio. / Because, as he passes, he awakens / So many
memories / filling the hearts of those who hear his music with a desire to weep
.

(‘Organito de la tarde', Street organ in the evening

– Cátulo andJosé González Castillo, 1924)

The nascent film industry was also discovering tango – its dramatic choreography on the silent screen was accompanied by the tango musicians in the pit. In the musical theatre of the day, called the
sainete
, tango had won its permanent place. And Glücksmann's work had expanded the audience for tango. But if all of this had won tango its legitimate place in the new Argentina, just as the communities from which it emerged had won recognition by dint of struggle and organization as citizens of the country, the tango was changing in this new reality.

Its words were no longer mere accompaniment to the dance, or cheerful interludes. Contursi and the outstanding lyricists of his generation, above all Enrique Santos Discépolo but also Celedonio Flores, Cátulo Castillo, Eduardo Arolas and others, were creating a new poetry of urban experience, a symbolic universe that would bind together the disparate elements of the new city. Contursi's lyrics, to Samuel Castriota's music, would soon be sung at the Teatro Maipo by Carlos Gardel, who became the embodiment of tango, its first superstar and its first martyr.

Gardel's own transformation, from the singer with the folk duo Gardel–Razzano presenting traditional rural music and dressed in the
gaucho
costumes of the Argentine
pampa
, to the suave streetwise figure in suit and homburg, mirrored the metamorphosis of tango itself. And with that change came a new cast of characters.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

‘Mi noche triste' is more than the first tango-song; it is also in many ways the sourcebook for thousands of tangos that follow. The inhabitants of the tango world were prostitutes, pimps and tricksters, and the immigrants who shared their limited space in the newly populated barrios like La Boca and Nueva Pompeya, the crowded
arrabales
of the city outskirts and the
conventillos
wedged among the old mansions in the city centre. The scenario of the tango drama was the street, the cafés, the dance halls (
academias
and cafés), and the brothels. The props were streetlamps, trams, bottles of champagne or cheap liquor, and bar stools aplenty.

The scenario and its protagonists will reappear countless times, amid the nostalgic evocations and endless expressions of regret and yearning that echo through the tango. And it will establish too the ambiguous and contradictory relationships around which the words and the music dance. This is a poetry born of a masculinity fearful of its loss, in a world where men outnumber women, yet where sexual desire and the search for love give women the power to inflict pain, albeit they too are without social or collective power.

The singer on this sad night is a man abandoned looking back to a time of happiness now lost. His weakness and confusion are the consequences of the actions of a woman who has left him, a
milonguera
who has probably been tempted, as so many are in the world of tango, by rich men who have money but few illusions, and who are willing to pay for her company (the
bacán
). Yet the picture is more complex still. In this world of immigrants and prostitutes sharing the small pool of light from the streetlamp, surrounded by shadows, all are powerless.

El conventillo luce su traje de etiqueta;

las paicas van llegando, dispuestas a mostrar

que hay pilchas domingueras, que hay porte y hay silueta
,