3 “Cuando lejos me vi”: Alephs and Other Views of Argentina in Tomás Eloy Martínez’s El cantor de tangos

In The Forever War, Dexter Filkins’s book-length report on the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the author describes a Black Hawk helicopter journey over war-torn Baghdad. As foreign correspondent for The New Yorker, Filkins had been in Afghanistan long before September 11, 2001, reporting on the protracted war between competing Afghan factions. After the World Trade Center attack he remained in Afghanistan and then, when the U.S. invaded Iraq, headed directly there to report from the new front. By the time he boarded the Black Hawk helicopter, he felt all he had known for over half a decade had been an endless, downward spiral of violence and destruction.

And yet soaring high above the chaotic surface, as he tells it, he found himself transported beyond the horror: “the altitude and the movement… offering a cubist view of the world below.” There it feels as if a whole other Iraq opens itself to him. “Green rectangles of farmland shifted as if in a mirror,” he writes, “then flattened as they fell into the horizon. The anarchy of the streets carried no sound so high; every haphazardness of the place, the trash, the goats, the fields of junk, seemed, from the distance, planned and carefully measured, like a city by L’Enfant. A farmer stopped his work, cupped his hand over his eyes and waved.” He notes then that “under the spell of the whirring motor I felt suddenly hopeful for the country below.” He is able to imagine at last the people below, “going about their days just as any of us would up here, with fears and desires no greater or lesser than our own, or which, in any case, were not so different that they couldn’t be reconciled.” He concludes, “It was useful to fly in helicopters for this reason, I thought to myself, useful to think this way, to take a wider view of the world. Too much detail, too much death, clouded the mind” (145).

The ”forever” war Filkins was reporting on—Afghanistan followed by Iraq post September 11, 2001—marked the close of a short Pax Americana that had followed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade earlier. The latter events had, for a brief moment, signaled the possibility of what George H. W. Bush championed in the early 1990s as a “new world order,” the advent of which signaled for scholars like Francis Fukuyama an “end to history.” While economic inequality and social strife might continue for the foreseeable future, they argued, alternatives to responses to these problems beyond democracy and capitalism were exhausted. To quote Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s Prime Minister at the time, there was “no alternative.” For Bush, Fukuyama, and other believers in classical Western liberalism, we were living, it appeared, on the brink of the best of all possible worlds.

Such political high hopes, the innocent dream of pain-free Western-style democracy for all, of course, came crashing back to earth with the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, and the start of the forever war only a few weeks later. Today, nearly two decades lost, that war drags on. A weakened United States now contends with an emboldened, increasingly rogue Russia, an economically resurgent China, and a fledgling, unstable nuclear player in North Korea, to say nothing of the ongoing unrest in the Middle East.

***

Less famous than September 11 and the ensuing Middle Eastern conflicts, but arguably just as devastating to the “New World Order”/”End of History” narrative were certain economic events unfolding over those same final months of 2001. In another corner of the globe, in the heart of the South American pampas, a place far removed from Kabul or Mosul, in a city famous for music, dance, fútbol, and literature, an economic crisis was taking shape that would bring a nation to its knees and an entire global economic order into question. That city was Buenos Aires.

The collapse of the Argentine economy in December of 2001 has been called “one of the most spectacular in history” (Bustein 1). It earned such superlatives precisely because up until the collapse, Argentina had been the poster child for the economic promise of neoliberal capitalism. In the early 1990s, at almost the same time as the collapse of the Soviet Union that had inspired Bush and Fukuyama’s proclamations, Argentina had surprised the global financial community by doing everything asked to enter that order: it lowered trade barriers, it deregulated its economy, and it privatized its industries. In doing so it was following to the letter the economic protocols that came to be known in those years as the Washington Consensus.

Those efforts led first to a dramatic curbing of inflation, for decades the intractable bete noir of the Argentine economy. Soon Argentina was receiving top scores from financial ratings agencies, and cash from private global investors began pouring in. Between 1991 and 1998 the Argentine economy grew by 6% a year with little inflation. Argentina’s gross domestic product reached $300 billion, and by 1999 it was tied with Chile as the top-rated Latin American country on the Heritage Foundation’s “Index of Economic Freedom.” Argentina was showing the world the benefits of neoliberalism.

But while bullish forecasts poured foreign cash into Argentine markets, it also poured in the volatility increasingly associated with that kind of money, a volatility for which delicate developing economies are rarely prepared. When markets in Russia (1998) and Brazil (1999) collapsed, coinciding with a sudden drop in key global agricultural prices, the Argentine economy was left exposed. Its assets were not sufficient, its tax revenues anemic, and its public sector still too bloated to withstand the sudden downturn. Unemployment crept up, inflation reappeared, tax revenues plummeted, and international investors took flight.

The IMF, hoping to save its Washington Consensus poster child, stepped in with a $22 billion bailout, but to no avail. By the fall of 2001, Argentina found itself without the currency to make its next payment on its now $140 billion debt, and, worse yet, with no plan that could convincingly guarantee future economic solvency. After months of global capital flight, in late November Argentine citizens executed their own run on local banks withdrawing $3.6 billion or 6% of all investments. The government responded by shuttering the banks. A few days later on December 1, IMF officials arrived in Buenos Aires for emergency meetings. While the IMF had twice authorized cash infusions earlier in the year, this time they decided nothing could be done. The cause was hopeless.

On December 3 the IMF informed Argentina’s president that the country would not be receiving the IMF’s next cash installment of $1.24 billion. To pay its foreign bills in the coming days, the government converted billions of dollars of pension-fund assets into treasury bonds. The Argentine people responded over the next three weeks by taking to the streets, then looting grocery stores, and finally storming government buildings. On the night of December 19, looting and rioting reached a zenith. Sixteen people died. The next day Argentina’s finance minister resigned. The president followed soon thereafter. But the violent street protests continued for another fortnight. Scores more were killed or injured. In one ten-day period Argentina was governed by five different presidents.

Even as peace was restored, the aftermath of the crisis came into ever sharper focus. The crisis had gutted the Argentine middle class. Over the coming months, its lower classes suffered malnutrition and in some cases starvation. Within months of the crisis, over half of Argentines lived below the poverty line (compared to just over 16% in 1994, the high point of the economic revival). Millions ate daily at community kitchens. Hundreds of thousands dropped out of the middle class, losing their homes and building makeshift dwellings in Argentina’s shantytowns, the villas miseria. Over the next four years the number of villas increased from four hundred to one thousand. Perhaps the most palpable evidence of the new poverty were the tens of thousands of cartoneros, entire families—some formerly members of the middle class—who left their homes each night to pick through garbage in search of recyclables when not food itself.

* * *

Events of this nature inevitably provide the ingredients of storytelling. In the case of Argentine author Tomás Eloy Martínez, the tale may truly have been impossible to avoid. Eloy Martínez, who was living at the time in New York City, was on assignment during the very weeks of the crisis back in Buenos Aires, commissioned to pen a narrative of his hometown. The resulting story was El cantor de tangos [The Tango Singer], a tale that perhaps inevitably is at once a celebration of the Argentine capital and a report of its descent into chaos. In this manner, it is a bit what Dexter Filkins’s helicopter ride above Iraq was to the chaos of that bloody conflict—Filkins fully cognizant of the messiness on the streets below but so easily soothed by the calming beauty available to those with the privilege and power to peer down occasionally from above.

On its release, Eloy Martínez’s novel was hailed as a “paen to Buenos Aires,” an “homage to the city,” “a magical impression of the chimera that is Buenos Aires” (Hooper), and an attempt to capture “the soul of a city of writers and labyrinths” (Marco). It is a novel that reveals “a Buenos Aires where reality, like a labyrinth, unfolds along infinite paths” (isaacsource). Reading such early praise, one could be forgiven for thinking Eloy Martínez’s novel was nothing but a gorgeously composed Argentine Vanity Fair, a delicious feast of Porteño modes and manners. And yet, the Buenos Aires that is so beautifully rendered in El cantor de tangos is, when examined for evidence, almost anything but beautiful. It is, instead, a rendering of the Argentine capital at arguably its worst moment in modern history, a time of unprecedented economic, social, and political collapse, of growing human desperation which led to rising violence and frightening urban chaos.

This is not to cast aspersions on the impressions shared by the reviewers noted above. Readers take in stories as overall packages. On a first go, we read for plots and people. As noted in the introduction, humans are gossips who want to know. In general, readers come away from novels with a sense of who, what, and why and a general overall tonal impression of the work, if also, I would argue, a vague sense of other more subtle matters even if not typically articulated. Given this, despite the miserable crisis transpiring over the course of Eloy Martínez’s novel, the general sense of Buenos Aires the novel leaves the reader is of a fascinating, almost magical place. One could be forgiven if they came away from their reading with the itch to vacation next year in the famous Southern Cone city.

Indeed, the novel’s protagonist is one who decides to vacation in Buenos Aires. Unfortunately, he only makes that decision on first seeing the city. His official reason for visiting the Argentine capital is to work on his doctoral thesis, a study of Jorge Luis Borges’s writings on the origins of the Argentine tango. Instead, our protagonist—Bruno Cadogan, by name—devotes the better part of his semester fellowship on obsessive quests to experience the wonders of live tango performances and to peer into fabled (but entirely fictional) peepholes. As Dianna C. Niebylski points out in her excellent reading of the novel, Cadogan’s change of plans shifts his—and the reader’s focus—from aesthetic concerns to historic-economic experiences. Instead of spending four months immersed in books, Cadogan wastes his time wandering streets where he will find himself thrust into the heart of social, economic, and political conditions appropriately akin to those in which the tango genre first arose (a history outlined in detail in Aída Nadi Gambetta Chuk’s own study of the novel [Niebylski 778; Gambetta 43]).

The artist Cadogan pursues is one Julio Martel, who, despite possessing what aficionados claim to be a voice even greater than the legendary Carlos Gardel’s, has over the course of a lifetime never allowed it to be recorded. Even more unusual, in recent months Martel has refused to perform in the conventional cafés or theaters where tourists and researchers might readily find him. Locating him now is a matter of only sheer luck. Moreover, he appears to be performing in the most unusual of locations across the Buenos Aires cityscape.

Cadogan’s only other significant activity during these months involves a quixotic plan to discover and exploit what he comes to believe is none other than the actual Aleph made famous by Borges in the story of the same name. In Borges’s fiction the Aleph is a single point in space visible through a shaft of light. In that point all other points across the infinite spectrum of space and time reveal themselves to the viewer. Cadogan and a fellow boarder who he has befriended conclude, against overwhelming evidence, that the space still exists, and is, in fact, located in none other than their very boarding house. They are determined to discover it, take possession of it, and then exploit it for their own commercial gain as Cadogan’s fellowship draws to a conclusion and he prepares to return home. For Niebylski, Cadogan’s shift of focus from Borges’s interest in tango to Martel’s tango performances moves the protagonist from the metaphysics of ideas to the physicality of the streets. At the same time, his obsession with the aleph tugs in the opposite direction, representing a desire to escape the material reality of the streets into which the quest for Martel has thrust him (780).

The actual story of this quest and counterquest, then, commences as Cadogan arrives wide-eyed at Argentina’s Ezeiza airport where he promptly makes the acquaintance of his future partner in crime, the soon-to-be-aleph-obsessed El Tucumano. When El Tucumano learns his new friend is looking for a room, he invites him to stay at his own boardinghouse. As Cadogan walks about the city on his first days there, his initial impressions support the earlier noted readings of reviewers:

Aunque el Tucumano me dijo que la ciudad estaba vencida y que debía haberla conocido un años antes, cuando su belleza se mantenía intacta y no había tantos mendigos en las calles, yo sólo vi gente feliz. Caminamos por una avenida enorme… Apenas alzaba la vista, desubría palacios barrocos y cúpulas en forma de paragua o melones, con miradores inútiles que servían de ornamentos… No entendí por qué los argentinos preferían escribir historias fantásticas o inverosímiles sobre civilizaciones perdidas o clones humanos u hologramas en islas desiertas cuando la realidad estaba viva y uno la sentía quemarse, y quemar, y lastimar la piel de la gente. (22)

[Despite El Tucumano’s insistence that the city was in ruins and that I should have seen it a year ago, when its beauty was still intact and there weren’t so many beggars on the streets, I saw only happy people. We walked down an enormous avenue.…Every time I looked up I discovered baroque palaces and cupolas in the shape of parasols or melons, with purely ornamental turrets.…I didn’t understand why Argentines preferred to write fantastic or unbelievable stories about lost civilizations or human clones or holograms on desert islands when reality was so intense you could feel it burning up, and burning, stinging your skin.]

Cadogan continues—and the impression of Buenos Aires becomes more seductive still:

Cuanto más avanzaba la noche, más se poblaban los cafés. Nunca vi tantos en una ciudad, ni tan hospitalarios. La mayoría de los clientes leía ante una tan vacía durante largo tiempo—pasemos más de una vez por los mismos lugares—, sin que los obligaran a pagar la cuenta y retirarse, como sucede en Nueva York y París. Pensé que esos cafés eran perfectos para escribir novelas. Allí la realidad no sabía qué hacer y andaba suelta, a la caza de autores que se atrevieran a contarla. (22)

[As the night wore on, the cafés became ever fuller. I’d never seen so many in a single city, and all so hospitable. The majority of the clients sat there reading with an empty cup on the table for ages… without being asked to pay up and leave, as would have happened in New York or Paris. I thought those cafés were perfect for writing novels. Reality didn’t know what to do there and wandered around loose, hunting for authors who would dare to tell it.]

Under the spell of the city, Cadogan gets to work in the coming days not on his dissertation but on his quest to discover the mysterious Martel. However, rather than locating the elusive artist, Cadogan again finds himself entrapped in the enchantments of prepackaged tourism. Rubbing shoulders with holidaymakers from around the globe, Cadogan learns to dance the tango in the arms of instructors who moments before were deftly waltzing about with Japanese retirees dressed in stereotypical gardelian hats and jackets.

Leaving Cadogan, as it were, dancing with the tourists, Eloy Martínez breaks up the narrative with the tale of another tourist in another part of Buenos Aires, Grete from Denmark. Grete is on what would appear to be a more refined, but ultimately equally exploitative, vapid, and deceptive tour of Borges’s Buenos Aires. Midway through the tour, Grete gets separated from her group by a cluster of tangoing street performers at a stop on Calle Florida. As Grete’s pack of fellow Scandinavians files away and out of sight down the famous shopping street, the enchantment of tourist-packaged Buenos Aires vanishes in an instant. For her, the Argentine capital is suddenly foreign, dangerous, and—her pocket being immediately picked—unaffordable. Her only hope is to relocate her group at a destination further along the carefully programmed itinerary. Unable to afford a respectable taxi, she accepts a charity lift from a dreadlocked dropout. From the windows of his makeshift cab, she stares anxiously out at a very different Argentine city. It initially frightens her, as in this description of the Recoleta cemetery: “Había visto en el taxi, dijo, otra Buenos Aires, una muralla de ladrillos rojos más allá de la cual se erguían flores de mármol, compases masónicos, ángeles con trompetas, ahí tiene usted el laberinto de los muertos… han enterrado todo el pasado de la Argentina bajo ese mar de cruces” [She’d seen another Buenos Aires from the taxi, she said: a red brick wall beyond which rose marble flowers, Masonic compasses, angels with trumpets; there you have the labyrinth of the dead…they’ve buried all of Argentina’s past beneath that sea of crosses] (62). If Recoletos cemetery is beautiful for some, for the increasingly terrified Grete it is confusion, death, and forgetting. Grete is utterly lost and her impromptu taxi driver of little help, mistaking locations and arriving at Grete’s supposed destination, the National Library, only to discover that the building both is and is not the National Library. In what will become a theme in the novel, places have shifted and streets have been renamed, entrapping visitors in labyrinths of chaos and confusion that the novel describes as lasting hours, days, even weeks.

Yet for all the dirt and disorientation accumulated during her panicked hours among the lost, Grete emerges from the Argentine labyrinth thoroughly won over. In confronting the grime and giving in to fear, she has discovered a deeper Buenos Aires. She has become enchanted, even transformed by the city. She proclaims it not merely beautiful but, more significantly, the true home she didn’t know she was looking for. She declares it the place she would live the rest of her life were it possible:

Eso es Buenos Aires, se dijo en aquel momento Grete y nos lo repitió más tarde: una delta de ciudades abrazado por una sola ciudad, breves ciudades anoréxicas dentro de esta obesa majestaed única que consiente avenidas madrileñas y cafés catalanes junto a pajarera napolitanas y templetes dóricsos y mansiones de la Rive Droite… Si pudiera nacer otra vez, elegiría Buenos Aires y no me movería de aquí aunque volverán a robarme la billetera con cien pesos y licencia de conducir de Helsingor porque puedo vivir sin eso pero no sin la luz del cielo que he visto esta mañana” (63)

[That was Buenos Aires, Grete said to herself at that moment and repeated to us later: a delta of cities embraced by one single city, a myriad of tiny, thin cities within this obese unique majesty that allow Madrid-style avenues and Catalan cafés next to Neapolitan aviaries and Doric bandstands and Rive Droite mansions.… If I could be born again, I would choose Buenos Aires and I wouldn’t move from this place even if they stole my purse again with a hundred pesos and my Helsingor driver’s license in it, because I can live without those but not without the light of the sky I saw this morning].

While Cadogan saw only light in his first view of Buenos Aires, our second observer, Grete, has glimpsed a darker side. Even so, her final take is even more powerfully positive than Cadogan’s.

It is here at the conclusion of Grete’s strange journey and at our first glimpse into a more complex Buenos Aires, that Cadogan and his new friend El Tucumano make her acquaintance. They do so because, they discover, their boarding house is being marketed to tourists as the location of Borges’s Aleph. Thanks to Borges’s international fame and the ever-pressing drive of entrepreneurial tour guides, the location of the Aleph has become yet another stop on their tours of Argentina’s capital. Unfortunately, due to the eccentricities of the boarder, whose private stairwell the shaft illuminates, the tourists are able to gaze only at the location of the portal, not into the portal itself. The actual shaft of light that might open to them the storied view is blocked by the scholarly gentleman’s unruly piles of books and note cards.

Cadogan, as one who has actually read Borges, understands in theory that not only is the Aleph a product of fiction but that in the fiction—even if it weren’t fiction—the location of the building would have been several blocks away. Moreover, even if they could locate the actual property, what they would find couldn’t be the actual house since, as Borges relates in his story, by the time the story was written, that house had long since been levelled. In other words, the Aleph isn’t at Cadogan’s boarding house. It’s just not possible, neither spatially, temporally, nor ontologically.

Despite all this, Cadogan catches a kind of Aleph fever from his friend El Tucumano, and the two determine to rid themselves of their fellow boarder. Their original reasons for doing so are to make money. But quickly their obsession, particular Cadogan’s, is simply to gaze into the mysterious—even if utterly fictional—shaft of light. To do so, Cadogan first befriends the odd man in order to study his options, then later turns on him, penning a letter falsely accusing him of not making rent in order to get him evicted so that Cadogan might take possession of the basement flat.

Our otherwise rational protagonist’s sudden obsession with this singular shaft of light, as special as it is fictitious, can only make sense in the context of Cadogan’s experience of Buenos Aires to date. While he first sees only beauty, he slowly grows aware of darker happenings in the streets around him. From his observations of a smiling citizenry upon arrival in August of 2001, Cadogan observes in September and October that he is blocked by groups of hundreds of people “Agitaban carteles en los que protestaban por la falta de trabajo y el recorte de los salaries” [waving signs protesting against unemployment and salary cuts] (49). A month later he finds gangs of young children roaming the streets and later newly homeless families filling the plazas: “Muchas personas estaban viviendo a la intemperie y, donde una noche veía dos, a la noche siguiente encontraba tres o cuatro” [Many people were sleeping rough and, where I saw two one night, I’d find three or four the next] (139). The Argentine economy, we readers understand, is beginning to unravel. But for Cadogan, as with the experience of Grete, this newer, darker vision of Buenos Aires ironically allows the city to reveal its magic. It’s a place, as Grete saw, where people get lost, where streets change names and buildings change location. And it’s a place, as Cadogan is coming to understand, where one of its most famous personalities—the elusive Martel—appears seemingly out of thin air in the most random of locations, only to fade back into the spatial fabric of the place as quickly as he had emerged. The magic of Buenos Aires arises out of its mystery and perhaps even, for Cadogan, out of the contrast—or conflict—with its misery. The Aleph, for Cadogan becomes, then, the completion and realization of the spatial, temporal, and ontological experience Buenos Aires inspires. The Aleph offers the clearest view of reality in all its completeness. In it one experiences every last detail of every event, thing, and moment that ever was, wherever it was, in all its beauty or filth. It is reality at its most real. Yet to see all of it is to be overwhelmed, to confront the sublime. Each space-time point it reveals is known only in its absolute specificity. Yet in the conjunction of infinite specificities, its privileged viewer understands at once, if only for an instant, all things, discovers, as it were, deeper, even ultimate truths. For a protagonist overwhelmed by his present spatial experience, the temptation of the Aleph may prove overwhelming—to the point of wearing out even the most rational resistance. Cadogan knows it doesn’t exist. But he doesn’t care. Because in his present state he can’t afford to.

With this desire for Alephian space awakened, Cadogan’s narrative begins, itself, to function for the reader as a spatial experience as much as a temporal one. While Cadogan’s narration moves temporally from the beginning to end, from his August arrival in Buenos Aires to his late-December departure, the narration of his time in Buenos Aires is broken up by tales that paint a kind of spatial picture of the city, as each tale arises from a visit Cadogan pays—always belatedly—to a place where the elusive Martel has recently performed. The narrator of the intercalated tales is Martel’s partner, Alcira Villar. But readers don’t understand this until the final chapters of the novel. Hence as the tales appear in the story, they catch readers off guard. They shift our focus away from Cadogan’s multiple quests to seemingly unrelated tales lifted from a forgotten Argentine past that together create a deeper impression of Buenos Aires as place—a space teeming with mysterious and, importantly, forgotten histories.

The first of these tales is the relatively short but tragic story of Felicitas Alcántara, the adolescent daughter of one of Buenos Aires’s wealthiest families. Felicitas disappears one beautiful summer day while playing with friends among the reeds of Argentina’s Río de la Plata. Weeks later her body reappears, immaculate in appearance and wrapped in river grasses, resting peacefully in a corner of the city’s new, opulently constructed waterworks. The only evidence, scant as it is, points to Buenos Aires’s chief police inspector, the man most obsessed with solving this very crime. The evidence against him, however, isn’t enough and no one is ever arrested. Felicitas Alcántara’s death remains to this day one of the capital’s great unsolved mysteries.

The next intercalated tale, a quite lengthy aside occupying nearly an eighth of the novel, relates the life of one Violeta Miller, in her full circle journey from slavery to aristocracy to misery over the course of a lifetime that coincides with the major events of the Argentine twentieth century. As a young Jewish girl in Poland, Violeta is lured to Buenos Aires with the promise of work, only to find herself trapped as a sex worker in Argentina’s infamous turn-of-the century Zwi Migdal brothels. After years of misery, Miller contrives to purchase her freedom, moves to the province of Catamarca, remakes herself as a pious Catholic, and accumulates great wealth. Decades later she returns in triumph to Buenos Aires, where she reinvents herself once more as a wealthy Jewish aristocrat. Her life unravels, however, when she unwittingly surrenders a young caregiver over to the death squads of Argentina’s Dirty War, finding that, rather than rewarding her, the murderers turn on her as well.

Interrupting Miller’s own story is the novel’s third major intercalated anecdote, that of Miller’s caretaker, Catalina Godel aka Margarita Langman. As a young nineteen-year-old, Catalina falls in love with a fellow student belonging to the Peronist Montaneros, a left-wing political group dedicated to direct action, including guerrilla warfare, in their struggle for social, political, and economic justice. When the government of Isabel Perón falls in 1975, the Montoneros become wanted men. Catalina is among the first rounded up by the security forces of the new military junta. Managing to escape, Catalina finds employ with Violeta Miller, only to be turned in and then disappeared for good when the wealthy septuagenarian mistakenly suspects her of theft.

The last intercalated anecdote is the tale of Julio Martel’s childhood friend, Mocho Andrade. Another Montonero, Mocho participates in two distinct kidnappings of General Pedro Aramburu, the man who led the original coup that sent Juan Perón into exile in 1955. The bulk of Mocho’s tale involves the second kidnapping, this time not of a live Aramburu, but of his cadaver, which the military government has planned to place in a mausoleum meant to commemorate their version and vision of Argentine history. Mocho’s tale, in contrast, reads like an absurdist nightmare. He experiences endless days trapped in the pitch black of the back of an empty tanker where he keeps vigil over Aramburu’s rotting cadaver, the truck aimlessly traversing the streets of the Argentine capital.

In between these four narrations, readers catch glimpses of our narrator-protagonist Cadogan searching in vain for Julio Martel as well as seeking out monuments, or the frequent lack thereof, to writers both remembered and, in most cases, forgotten. His walks through the city give readers brief glimpses into Argentine literary history, as he notes the place where Borges was arrested for public display of affection or the street where José Hernández, author of Argentina’s epic poem, Martín Fierro, lived and died with nary a monument to his name. In this way, the cultural tour of Buenos Aires, begun with the evenings of tourist-friendly tango, continues. As it proceeds, though, it acquires more depth and poignance as we see the increasingly dark side of a culture with an uneven and uneasy relationship with its greatest cultural figures, not to mention an increasingly dark relationship with its current inhabitants. As Marcelo Coddou has argued in his reading of Eloy Martínez’s novel, Cadogan’s quest converts Buenos Aires from spatial labyrinth to a temporal one, as a confusing, confounding history overlays the spaces Cadogan traverses (33). Cadogan’s pursuit of Martel’s unannounced and unrepeated performances leads him to the places that inspire rather lengthy asides wherein are told the true tales of a history of Buenos Aires’s enslaved, murdered, and disappeared. Martel sings where Alcántara, Miller, Godel, and Mocho have suffered—and as Caddou shows, more often than not, these places and the events they mark are historically factual—although we aren’t quite sure whether there exists a connection between the victims and these sites or if these are mere coincidences (35). Is Martel marking a map of redemption across a cityscape of unique moments of cruelty, or is Buenos Aires simply a city plagued by crime and violence, both past and present?

It’s easy to draw the latter conclusion as Cadogan notes the growing tension in the city. If from September to November he noticed growing discontent, in December his observations hone in on the specificity of the crisis. The people are now standing in line outside banks, hoping to withdraw cash. This is an economic crisis. At this point, what was a side note over the course of his stay, takes front and center in Cadogan’s narration. By mid-December all hell breaks loose as mass protests turn into a night of looting, bonfires, rubber bullets, and people dying in the streets (201–207). At a general level, the events culminate in Cadogan’s observation of the political chaos that produces five different Argentine presidents in ten days (210). At a more personal level, Cadogan, caught up in the wave of protests, witnesses a man bleed to death on the steps of the Congress building (209). At the height of the crisis, the Argentine people reject one final president, who stepped into the chaos with a promise to set things right. Cadogan refers to this leader only as The Joker, the name by which his own people refer to him.

For the reader, the sobriquet serves as a kind of wake-up to a novel populated by false characters with false names. We have already noted the multiple names and identities of Violeta Miller and Catalina Godel, the foci of the novel’s two principal intercalated tales (tales which, incidentally, occupy an entire sixth of the novel). Julio Martel is, itself, not the real name of the tango singer Cadogan pursues. Cadogan’s closest friend over the course of his Buenos Aires stay is known only as El Tucumano. And while Cadogan is always to us and to himself no one but himself, to everyone else in the novel, he is Cagan, Cagando, or Cagadón, but never simply Cadogan. It’s an error, El Tucumano warns his friend, that his fellow Argentines are likely to commit with the name. Why? Because Cadogan is just too close to Cagando or Cagadón, the name for someone who’s always making a mess of things, a big shitter.

Indeed, Eloy Martínez’s protagonist and our narrator is none other than Mr. Shithead, the one who’s always crapping on himself, the one who, given the opportunity, would make a mess of things. And so it is arguably appropriate that everything at last comes together for Cadogan just as everything is falling apart for everyone else. The shit hits the fan, as it were, when Cadogan finally accomplishes his plan to appropriate the Aleph for himself. He at last manages to get his bookish fellow tenant evicted, but when he shows up to take possession of the privileged space, he learns that his fellow tenant is not the only one being evicted. The old house has been sold and will soon be razed. Cadogan is now, like so many others around him, homeless.

Even worse, almost simultaneous to losing both the Aleph and his home, he at last appears to have tracked down Martel, only to discover he has done so a day too late. The elusive performer has just been admitted to a local hospital where he is simply awaiting death. Also, he has lost the ability to talk. Despite that, Cadogan goes to the waiting room, where he is befriended by Martel’s partner Alcira. But then, in the midst of his waiting-room vigil, Cadogan gets the idea of breaking into the boardinghouse before it’s destroyed to at least get a look into the Aleph. But when he arrives he finds to his horror that the building has been razed. Instead of a look into the infinite, he stares at a pile of rubble. Finally, thanks to a run on the banks, Cadogan finds himself unable to withdraw a cent from the ATMs, to say nothing of entering a bank. At this point everything has been taken from him.

The smallest glimmer of hope opens up, however, when Cadogan learns that Martel has regained consciousness. Even better, the singer, having heard the hapless doctoral candidate’s story, has invited him to his bedside. There Martel signals him to draw near. Cadogan puts his ear to Martel’s mouth, whereupon the artist musters the strength to sing a mere six words: “Buenos Aires, cuando lejos me vi” [Bueno Aires, when I found myself far away] (233).

Cadogan has learned from his studies that these six words formed the opening line of the first Argentine talkie, Tango. They were, therefore, the first words heard in Argentine cinema. As such, the line, like so many of the stories told over the course of the novel, references a unique moment in Argentine history. But unlike those stories of people now forever disappeared, these are words that with every screening of the film can be repeated again and again. Even so, this very fact, and each new iteration, drives home the import of that first iteration. That utterance is a unique historical event with a particular, irreplicable impact, a moment of collective reception that forges a society through a forging of culture. Martel’s choice of lyrics is also, in the moment he utters them, an evocation of Buenos Aires, a city that, over the course of the novel with its many intercalated stories, has itself been reiterated through a series of singular moments, tragic and comic, each as painful as they are unique. But while the lyrics evoke Buenos Aires in the very naming of the capital city, they follow that naming with a cry of futility, “cuando lejos me vi.” The phrase is translated in the English version of the novel as “Buenos Aires, when I’m far away” (234). But it obtains such figurative meaning by way of a literal signification that, again, references a unique moment evoked by the first-person preterite of the verb “ver,” that is, “to see.” The phrase points to a singular historical point in time, a particular experience of impossible distance: “Buenos Aires, when I once found (or “saw”) myself so far away.”

This iterative specificity likewise describes Julio Martel himself. Martel’s refusal to ever have his voice recorded and his insistence throughout his career in performing in small, unlikely venues ensures that his voice will not be one for tourists, that is those who would drop in, step back, and see Buenos Aires from the prepackaged comfort of a tourist bus. His is a voice that can be experienced only firsthand, one that will come by way of an effort that will locate it in the space and time of distinguishable and thus memorable geography and history. His latest decision to not even appear except by chance and then in the most unexpected places drives the point home further. His voice, the stuff of legend, can be located now only at random times in random spaces out of, for most, sheer dumb luck, a conglomeration of factors that will sear the experience all the more fiercely into the minds and hearts of the privileged few who happen upon the blessed sound. Such an experience foregrounds yet again Martel’s voice as always an unrepeatable performance—an iteration.

In Martel we see, of course, the Aleph, as well as its own elusive author, Jorge Luis Borges, and, again, Buenos Aires itself. Borges’s actual description of the Aleph is illustrative:

The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror’s face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I’d seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand.⁷

While the Aleph reveals the universe to its viewer, Borges’s narrator’s description makes clear that the vision is not one of conjoined totality. To the contrary, it is a listing of unique iterations, a freezing of the time of the viewer to allow a perhaps infinite snapshot of all moments in their unique individuality. The Aleph overwhelms, not with some simple beauty, but with its complex, clear representation of moment after moment of truth. It offers, not an opportunity for distant perspective, but an engaged experience of overwhelming and immediate specificity, however largely writ.

Both Martel and the Aleph manage to achieve the separation between the myth and the material, between precision and perspective, the impossibility of which had haunted the figure that haunts this and so much of Argentine literature, Jorge Luis Borges. In his prose poem, “Borges y yo” [Borges and I] the author distinguishes between Borges the writer and Borges the person, the one who people know and to whom things happen as opposed to the one with particular, personal, daily whims and eccentricities. For the poet the division of selves is ultimately impossible to overcome. Even when he has changed the very writing that had produced the other Borges, the other Borges continues to pursue and dissolve into him. He can never escape the reading public and their propensity, not only to read the works of Borges, but to read Borges himself: “Así mi vida es una fuga y todo lo pierdo y todo es del olvido, o del otro” [Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him].

The same could be said, in this novel, of Buenos Aires and of Argentina. By the final pages of the novel and the last days of his stay in Buenos Aires, the mid-December chaos has given way to malaise. The nation, exhausted by rioting, has taken to speculation of national apocalypse: “La gente que veíamos pasar no parecía abrumada sino más bien incrédula. El país se iba a la mierda, decían todos, pero allí estaba. ¿Puede acaso morir una nación?” [The people we saw pass by didn’t seem overwhelmed but rather incredulous. The country had gone to hell, they all said, but there it was. Can a nation die, by any chance?] (227). At this moment of collapse and possible oblivion, Martel also dies. The next day, the legendary yet soon-to-be-forgotten singer is laid to rest in a mausoleum reserved for second-rate musicians and artists. His remains are accompanied to the cemetery by Martel’s faithful partner Alcira Villar and Cadogan. No one else appears.

Cadogan’s time in Buenos Aires draws to a close when, after a half-hearted attempt to convince Alcira to follow him back to New York, our protagonist boards the plane. Lifting off over the still tumultuous city below, gazing down upon a nation that for all he knows may at that very moment be in its death throes, Cadogan sees confirmed what he has suspected over the course of months of wandering its streets: “[Buenos Aires] era un laberinto… La noche me permitió advertir que, tal como conjeturaba Bonorino, el verdadero laberinto no estaba marcado por las luces, donde sólo había caminos que llevaban a ninguna parte, sino por las líneas de oscuridad, que señalaban los espacios donde vivía la gente.” [Buenos Aires was a labyrinth…. The night allowed me to observe that…. the true labyrinth was not marked out by lights, where there were only paths that led nowhere, but by the lines of darkness, which indicated where the people lived] (251).

The trite observation, which he has made now more than once, is that the labyrinth is the people, their lives, their hopes and anxieties, their triumphs and failures. Martel’s impromptu performances had deepened this spatial observation by adding to it a historical layer. The darkness is filled not merely at present by people, but overlayed by a past almost entirely forgotten of people who disappeared by the thousands during years of military dictatorships, or others like Felicitas Alcántara, whose murder escapes even the categorizing logic of political victims. As Cadogan has discovered, even notables can often lack monuments in a past that is official, cultivated, or made to vanish as if it itself were a political prisoner: “En la Argentina existe la costumbre, ya secular, de suprimir de la historia todos los hechos que contradicen las ideas oficiales sobre la grandeza del país. No hay héroes impuros ni guerras perdidas” [In Argentina there is now a secular custom of suppressing from history all the facts that contradict the official ideas of the grandeur of the country. There are no impure heroes or lost wars] (83).

But even this observation, the one that Cadogan believes has been Martel’s great lesson to him, fails to fully appreciate the idea of the labyrinth. Cadogan is still plotting literally on a map the locations of Martel’s performances, attempting to discover a secret code to the city that has captivated him. Only after Cadogan returns to New York, does his experience come into a kind of focus, or at least the possibility of a focus, both for him and for the reader. While wandering the streets of Manhattan one morning, he enters a bookstore where he leafs through Arcades Project by the German Jewish philosopher and culture critic Walter Benjamin. Cadogan selects one passage to share with his narratee: “El conocimiento llega sólo en golpes de relámpago. El exto es la sucesión larga de truenos que sigue” [Knowledge comes only in lightning flashes. The text is the long roll of thunder that follows] (252). Within minutes of discovering the quote, Cadogan runs into one of his mentors, Richard Foley, dean of Arts and Sciences at the university that has financed his travels abroad. After a brief catch-up on Cadogan’s frustrated Argentine research, Foley remarks as if in passing on the presence of a new tango singer haunting the streets of Buenos Aires, one, he tells them, that the people say has a voice even better than Gardel’s. Foley leaves with a final piece of advice: “Deberías volver, solo para oírlo” (253) You should go back, just to hear him].

Just to hear him. There are no guarantees. Foley has just heard the tale of Cadogan’s failed search. There is no dissertation to show for the months, just as there was no Martel performance to record, and just as there was no Aleph. But Foley here knows what Walter Benjamin knows. The text, the map, the comprehended city, the other Borges, is only the long roll of thunder. In the end that thunder is inseparable from the flash of light. Borges is Borges and will never be anything but Borges. His other is inescapable. But the moment of truth, the element that keeps Borges alive through all the changes, is the burst of the moment, impossible to anticipate, impossible to recover. The lightning flash is only available to those who go back, just to hear him; who go back, just to read him; and who go back, just to live it. The singer, the writer, the city—all are, in their reality of lightning flashes, crippled and lonely and crime ridden and forever on the verge of obliteration, marching inexorably, like cattle Cadogan observes in a slaughterhouse as he walks one day across Buenos Aires, “Y están en la muerte” [already in death’s grip] (109).

And so he asks, “¿Qué diferencia había para ellos entre el no ser de ahora y el no ser del día siguiente? ¿Qué diferencia hay ya entre lo que soy ahora y lo que esta ciudad hará de mí: algo que me está pasando en este instante y que, como las reses a punto de ser sacrificadas, no puedo ver?” [What difference was there for them between the nonbeing of the present and the nonbeing of the next day? What difference is there between what I am now and what this city will make of me: something that is happening to me right now and that, like the cows about to be sacrificed, I cannot see?] (109). The answer to this moment of existential angst comes in his own reverie, when he observes of the cattle: “La muerte les llegará mañana” [but death will arrive tomorrow] (109). All is indeed vanity. But what difference does it make as long as death has not yet taken us; as long as Martel (or another, even newer voice, like his) is still singing; as long as Buenos Aires still stands, and Argentina still exists?

The beauty that the tourists seek mostly in vain but that Grete discovered and that Cadogan lives is an Aleph. It is particular, historical, and geographical. And in that particularity it has the propensity to be awful. Because the Aleph, like the daily experience of the streets of Buenos Aires, is simply what is. It is all too often the awful truth. But we are not cattle merely awaiting the slaughter. We are, like Martel, Borges, even Violeta Miller, capable of shaping ourselves—or at least capable of the dream of the attempt to do so—of changing our names, of changing our course, of performing where and when we will. And like Cadogan’s informant and muse, Alcira Villar, by name suggestive of the power to elevate the city itself, we are capable of narrating that blinding, overwhelming, sometimes awful truth into the thunder roll of a story—precisely what Cadogan wills to do when the final words of the novel run out and all we hold ar blank pages. Now, though, the rumble still rolls, however faint, and we set out ourselves to write.

And so it is in this awful day and age of nations that fail but still don’t die, undone and then reworked by international bodies and their international brain trusts operating seemingly light years away from the tactile pain and pleasures of the street. So too in this cruel day and age of wars that never end, that can only be described as forever because the same international bodies and their international brain trusts similarly undo but then rework and do up again, forever scheming and dreaming, in a process that never ceases because progress is, they report, always being made. And so it is as we ascend—as scholars in planes or reporters in Black Hawk choppers—one thousand, five thousand, ten thousand feet up, that the Aleph, if we search hard enough, negotiating with crooks and criminals or eccentric scholars for a place at the base of the stairs so that we might at last stare up from that nineteenth step, will open up. But thanks to on-the-ground experience, it will not do so to show us vast perspectives of stereotyped cities. Those exist only in guides or on tours, so long as you stay with the group. No, the Aleph is the search, the negotiation, the long stare, and the endless iteration of iterations.

Eloy Martínez’s novel is a pean to Buenos Aires, but to one that is particular, unrepeatable, and often cruel. His Buenos Aires is a place of present economic woe but also of multiple pasts of political cruelty as well as of mere mistakes, misadventures, and memory loss. Strangely, all of it together—for Cadogan and Grete but also for the novel’s readers—somehow produce an experience of beauty. Like a helicopter ride over the hell of a war-torn country with no end in sight. Buenos Aires, cuando lejos me vi.