Free The Tango Singer by Tomás Eloy Martínez

spell on him.
    I heard him sing an other-worldly song then – Alcira told me – with a voice that seemed to contain thousands of other bereaved voices. It must have been an antediluvian tango,
because he phrased it in a language even less comprehensible than that of the works in his repertoire; it was more like phonetic sparks, random sounds in which you could detect feelings like
sorrow, desertion, lamented lost happiness, homesickness, to which only Martel’s voice could give any meaning. What do
brenai, ayaúú, panísola
mean? Because that
was more or less what he sang. I felt that it wasn’t just one person’s past flowing through that music, but all those pasts the city had witnessed as far back in time as you could go,
to the time when it was just useless scrubland.
    The song lasted two or three minutes. Martel was exhausted when he finished it, and struggled back to the iron girder. There had been some subtle change in the premises. The immense tanks still
reflected, now very quietly, the last waves of the voice, and the radiance from the skylights brushed the damp mosaics of the patio and lifted smoky figures as distinct as snowflakes. It
wasn’t those variations that caught Alcira’s attention, however, but an unexpected awakening of the objects. Was the handle of some valve turning? Was it possible that the water, though
cut off since 1915, was stretching in the locks? Things like that never happen, she told herself. Nevertheless, the door of the tank in the southeast corner, sealed by the rust of its hinges, was
now ajar and a milky brightness marked the fissure. The singer stood up, driven by another flow of energy, and walked towards the place. I pretended to lean on him so he would lean on me, Alcira
told me months later. It was me who opened the door all the way, she said. A stench of death and damp took my breath away. There was something in the tank, but we didn’t see anything. Outside
it was covered by a decorative mansard, with two skylights letting in the three o’clock afternoon sun. From the floor, as shiny as if no one had ever touched it, rose the same mist we’d
seen in other parts of the palace. But the silence was thicker there: so absolute you could almost touch it. Neither Martel nor I dared speak, although we were both thinking then what we
didn’t say out loud till we’d left the building: that the door of the tank had been opened by the ghost of the adolescent who’d been tortured in that space a century before.
    The disappearance of Felicitas Alcántara happened on the last afternoon of 1899. She’d just turned fourteen and had already been a famous beauty since childhood.
Tall, with an indolent manner, she had astonishing iridescent eyes, which instantly poisoned anyone who looked into them with inevitable love. Many had asked for her hand in matrimony, but her
parents felt she was worthy only of a prince. At the end of the nineteenth century princes didn’t come to Buenos Aires. It would be twenty-five years yet before Umberto of Savoy, Edward
Windsor and the Maharaja of Kapurtala appeared. The Alcántaras lived, therefore, in voluntary seclusion. Their Bourbon residence, in San Isidro, on the banks of the Río de la Plata,
was adorned, like the Waterworks Palace, with four towers covered in slate and tortoiseshell. They were so ostentatious that on clear days they could be seen from the coast of Uruguay.
    On December 31st, just after one in the afternoon, Felicitas and her four younger sisters were cooling off in the yellow water of the river. The family’s governesses were all French. There
were too many of them and they didn’t know the customs of the country. To keep themselves occupied they wrote letters home or talked of their romantic disappointments while the girls
disappeared from view, in the reed beds by the beach. From the stoves in the house came aromas of the turkeys and suckling pigs roasting for the midnight meal. In the cloudless sky birds