Tango (15 page)

Did you see the flags? . . . There isn't a flower to be had in the whole city. If you got ill and wanted a flower before you died you wouldn't find one anywhere. Tonight the Principal Theatre smells of magnolia. He was all dressed in black. Did you hear? . . . And not a drop of sweat on his whole body. Not even when he was feeding the pigeons in the square. Not a bead of
perspiration on his forehead, and everyone's saying – look he doesn't sweat, Gardel doesn't sweat . . .
⁴

Gardel and Le Pera flew on to Medellín in Colombia, where a runway crash prematurely ended the life of them both.

Gardel's funeral procession to La Chacarita cemetery in Buenos Aires in March 1935 was the largest public gathering ever seen in the city. He was mourned, and continues to be mourned in Medellín and across the continent. He was in every sense a superstar.

But what was it in the music that created such admiration within Argentina and Latin America and across the world? This was a very different tango fever from the craze that hit Europe and the
U
.
S
. immediately before the First World War. At that time, the exoticism and overt sensuality of the dance, its identification with a dangerous world of the shadows, where criminality, prostitution and transgression prevailed, was what drew a new generation towards tango. Perhaps its riskiness, its moral ambiguity reflected a world on edge, full of portents of disaster and the winds of change – what George Dangerfield had described for Britain in
The Strange Death of Liberal England.
⁵
Gardel's songs were framed by a very different worldview, one that closely reflected the changed perspectives of postwar tango in Argentina, and which was then refined and honed for a cosmopolitan audience growing used to cinema musicals and the high production values of Hollywood in the early Thirties.

What were the elements of the tangos that Gardel sang? Musically, they were rich and complex; their lush orchestration and sophisticated presentation were matched by the quality of both poetry and voice. Gardel presented himself to the world not as a disappointed pimp abandoned by his ambitious protégée, but rather as a much more recognizable romantic hero. The lyrics were poetic, and had for the most part abandoned the
lunfardo
that still tied the tangos of, for example, Celedonio Flores, to its history. And although
Gardel recorded a huge proportion of the tango repertoire, including the work of Flores and the great Enrique Santos Discépolo (to whom we will come in a moment), the tangos that he sang on screen and for which he is widely remembered were essentially romantic ballads. They shared the nostalgia, the longing for a lost and idealized past, the preoccupation with loyal and devoted men abandoned by women whose shallow self-interest had deposited them in the arms of wealthy but worthless protectors. But they relocated those feelings in a less specific world and universalized them. One of Gardel's most famous songs, ‘Silencio en la noche', transfers some of tango's central themes to the fields of Flanders and a First World War in which Argentina played no part.

Silencio en la noche
.

Ya todo está en calma
.

El músculo duerme
,

la ambición trabaja
.

Un clarín se oye
.

Peligra la Patria
.

Y al grito de guerra

los hombres se matan

cubriendo de sangre

los campos de Francia
.

Hoy todo ha pasado
.

Renacen las plantas
.

Un himno a la vida

los arados cantan
.

Y la viejecita

de canas muy blancas

se quedó muy sola
,

con cinco medallas

que por cinco héroes

la premió la Patria
.

Silence in the night / Everything is calm / the muscles at rest / ambition at work
.

A bugle sounds / the nation is in danger / and with war cries on their lips / men kill / covering with blood / the fields of France. Today everything has passed / the plants are reborn / the ploughs sing / a hymn to life. / And the little old lady / her hair a pure white / sits very much alone / with five medals / which the Nation awarded her / for the five heroes she bore
.

(‘Silencio en la noche', Silence in the night – Gardel / Le Pera, 1932)

The most famous of all their collaborations, however, is a sort of resumé of the tango story. ‘Volver' is lyrically and musically moving and beautiful – but it takes tango into a different moral universe where there is little in the way of danger.
⁶

Yo adivino el parpadeo

de las luces que a lo lejos
,

van marcando mi retorno
.

Son las mismas que alumbraron
,

con sus pálidos reflejos
,

hondas horas de dolor
.

Y aunque no quise el regreso
,

siempre se vuelve al primer amor
.

La quieta calle donde el eco dijo:

‘Tuya es su vida, tuyo es su querer'
,

bajo el burlón mirar de las estrellas

que con indiferencia hoy me ven volver
.

Volver
,

con la frente marchita
,

las nieves del tiempo

platearon mi sien
.

Sentir, que es un soplo la vida
,

que veinte años no es nada
,

que febril la mirada

errante en las sombras

te busca y te nombra
.

Vivir
,

con el alma aferrada

a un dulce recuerdo
,

que lloro otra vez
.

Tengo miedo del encuentro

con el pasado que vuelve

a enfrentarse con mi vida
.

Tengo miedo de las noches

que, pobladas de recuerdos
,

encadenan mi soñar
.

Pero el viajero que huye
,

tarde o temprano detiene su andar
.

Y aunque el olvido que todo destruye
,

haya matado mi vieja ilusión
,

guarda escondida una esperanza humilde
,

que es toda la fortuna de mi corazón
.

I glimpse the blinking lights / in the distance / that mark my return. / They are the same ones / whose pale reflections / shed their light on deeper sorrows in the past. / And though I never wanted to return / you always do come back to your first love. / The quiet street whose echo tells you: / ‘This was your life, these were your loves', / under the mocking gaze of the stars / that watch me with indifference at this moment of return
.

Coming back / with furrowed brow / and silver temples
. /
Feeling / that life is a single breath / that twenty years pass in a moment / that a fevered glance / wandering in the shadows/seeks you and calls your name. / Coming back/with your soul tied/to a sweet memory / that you weep for once again
.

I'm afraid of what I'll find / in the past that's now returning / to confront the life I've lived. / I'm afraid of the nights / that, full of memories / will occupy my dreams. / But the traveller who tries to flee / sooner or later must halt his steps. / And if the forgetfulness that destroys everything / has destroyed my old illusions / it still conceals a modest hope / that is the only fortune that my heart retains
.

(‘Volver', Returning – A. Le Pera, 1935)

Gardel's appearance and dress had always been emblematic of tango's origin – the homburg, the fitted suit, the gentle and seductive voice of an ordinary young man. There was never a sense that he was a working person; how he earned a living was left unspecified, like every tango protagonist. And Gardel's private life was also deliberately kept mysterious, though he always presented the minimal attributes of the tango protagonist – a man but not a
machista
(compare the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, for example), without swagger but intense and passionate, a gambler (but in the more genteel world of horse racing), a lover (but with one long-term stable partner, Margarita).

In Argentina itself tango's transformation from the transgressive expression of a marginal world into the emblematic expression of a new national community – urban, cosmopolitan and modern – accompanied Gardel's rise to fame. And his mythic status and tragic death confirmed the register and character of the tango through its continuing heyday until the mid-1940s.

The tango can be seen as a discourse on human suffering and the negation of real and sincere happiness for both men and
women. Happiness seems possible only if persons are grounded in their behaviour by sincere and authentic love.
⁷

The romantic is male, by and large, the women who are the object of his passionate admiration are moved by other, more pragmatic considerations – the good life, comfort, and the pursuit of a power that youthful sexuality brings.

Gardel's early death did not bring an immediate end to the Golden Age of Tango. On the contrary, his death created a highly profitable myth for the music and film industries; even after death, Gardel continued to lead the globalization of tango.

Tango was not only sung by men, however. Among the very early tango singers were women, like Azucena Maizani, who did break into this male preserve – though Maizani in those early years usually appeared in male dress. The
Guardia Nueva
and the emergence of
tango-canción
also brought to prominence a small group of women singers – Rosita Quiroga and the brash Uruguayan Tita Merello among them. Talking pictures introduced a new generation of female stars, like Libertad Lamarque and Mercedes Simone, who would take their place among the pantheon of tango greats. Yet the characters they portrayed in their music were very rarely different from the women implied in the songs of Contursi or Celedonio Flores and of whom Gardel sang so beautifully. Rosita Quiroga's version of ‘De mi barrio' is one example.

Azucena Maizani's ‘Pero yo sé' might well be an answer to the accusation so often repeated by men, and shifts the responsibility and the challenging gaze back to the emptiness of the rich boy's life. She may serve him in return for reward, but she clearly understands the nature of the relationship.

Con todo tu brillo con toda tu andanza

Llevaste tu vida tan sólo al placer

Con todo el dinero que siempre has tenido

Todos tus caprichos lograste vencer

Pensar que ese brillo que fácil ostentas

No sabe la gente que es puro disfraz;

Tu orgullo de necio muy bien los engaña

No quieres que nadie lo sepa jamás
.

Pero yo sé

Vivís pensando un querer

Que querés hallar olvido

Cambiando tanta mujer

Yo sé que en las madrugadas

Cuando la farra dejás

Sentís tu pecho oprimido

Por un recuerdo querido

Y te pones a llorar
.

With all your flashy appearance and your moves about town / your life was a pursuit of pleasure / with all the money you've always had / you could satisfy all your whims / But do you think that people don't know / that it's all just a facade / your foolish pride might fool them / you want nobody to know
.

But I know / that you're yearning for love / that you're looking to forget / by moving from woman to woman / I know that when the dawn comes / when the party's over for the night / you feel the weight on your chest / of a much loved memory / and you begin to weep
.

(‘Pero yo sé', But I know – Azucena Maizani, 1928)

AFTER GARDEL

The
Guardia Vieja
orchestras of Francisco Canaro, Juan de Dios Filiberto, Roberto Firpo and others still played for dancing; their vocalists would sing choruses or interludes. The
Guardia Nueva
, by
contrast – Julio de Caro, Osvaldo Pugliese, Pedro Maffia – increasingly played to audiences who listened to them and their singers. After Gardel's death, a new generation of fine dramatic singers emerged in his wake and in his honour – Roberto Goyeneche, Francisco Fiorentino (who sang with Troilo), Susana Rinaldi and others.

Tango-canción
was becoming a national music, an acoustic emblem of the new Argentina. Its references to a rural world belonged to the collective past; the present was resolutely urban, masculine and cosmopolitan. Though the lyrics were now almost entirely in Spanish, they were coloured with scattered words in
lunfardo
, references to the barrio where tango was born. But increasingly the specific condition of the excluded immigrant labourer restricted to the city margins was translated into a different kind of statement, a comment on the human condition, a universal experience of isolation and regret rediscovered in a local setting. That is what the classics like ‘Volver' illustrate.