Free The Tango Singer by Tomás Eloy Martínez Page A

flew in
untidy gusts, pecking at each other viciously. One of the governesses commented that in the village she came from in Gascony there was no worse omen than the wrath of birds.
    At one-thirty, the girls were supposed to go home for their siesta. When the governesses called them, Felicitas did not appear. They could see a few sailboats on the horizon and clouds of
butterflies over the stiff, scorched puddles. For a long time the governesses searched in vain. They weren’t afraid she’d drowned, because she was a strong swimmer who knew all the
river’s tricks. Boats filled with fruits and vegetables passed by on their way back from the markets and, from the shore, the desperate women shouted to them asking if they’d seen a
distracted girl in the deeper waters upstream. No one paid them any attention. They’d all been celebrating the new year since first thing and were rowing drunkenly. Three quarters of an hour
went by.
    That loss of time was fatal, because Felicitas didn’t appear that day or the following ones, and her parents always believed that if they’d been informed straight away, they would
have found a trail. Before dawn on January 1st 1900, several police patrols were combing the region from the islands of the Tigre Delta all the way down to the banks of Belgrano, marring the summer
tranquility. The search was under the command of the ferocious colonel and commissioner, Ramón L. Falcón, who would become famous in 1909 when he dispersed the crowd gathered in Plaza
Lorea to protest the electoral fraud. Eight people died in the skirmish and another sixteen were gravely injured. Six months later, the young Russian anarchist Simon Radowitzky, who had
miraculously emerged unscathed, blew the commissioner up in revenge by throwing a bomb into his carriage as it passed. Radowitzky expiated his crime for twenty-one years in the Ushuahia prison.
Falcón is today immortalized by a marble statue two blocks from the scene of the attack.
    The commissioner was known for his resolve and perspicacity. None of the cases he’d been assigned had ever been left unsolved, until the disappearance of Felicitas Alcántara. When
no guilty party was available, he’d invent one. But on this occasion he lacked suspects, a body and even an explicable crime. There was a single obvious motive that no one dared mention: the
disturbing beauty of the victim. A few boaters thought they’d seen, on the last afternoon of the year, a well-built, older man with large ears and a handlebar moustache, scouring the beaches
with binoculars from a rowboat. One of them said the onlooker had two enormous warts beside his nose, but no one attached much importance to this claim, since Colonel Falcón had precisely
the same identifying marks.
    Buenos Aires was then such a splendid city that Julet Huret, correspondent for
Le Figaro,
wrote that when he disembarked it reminded him of London with its narrow streets lined with
benches, Vienna with its two-horse carriages and Paris with its wide sidewalks and terrace cafés. The central avenues were lit with incandescent lamps that often exploded when someone passed
by. They were excavating tunnels for the subway system. Two lines of electrified streetcars circulated from Ministro Inglés Street to the Portones de Palermo and from the Plaza de Mayo to
Retiro Station. The racket cracked the foundations of some houses and made their residents think the end of the world was nigh. The capital opened the doors of its palaces to its illustrious
visitors. The most praised was the Waterworks, in spite of how, according to the poet Rubén Darío, it imitated the sick imagination of Ludwig II of Bavaria. Until 1902, the palace was
unguarded. Since the only treasure in the place were the water galleries and there was no danger of anyone robbing them, the government considered paying for security a useless expense. The
disappearance of some terracotta decorations imported from England resulted in