Free The Tango Singer by Tomás Eloy Martínez Page B

security guards being hired.
    Buenos Aires’ water was extracted by huge siphons in the river a mile off the coast of the neighborhood of Belgrano, and taken through underwater tunnels to deposits in Palermo, where the
excrement was filtered out and salts and chlorine added. After the purification, a network of pipes propelled it towards the palace on Córdoba Avenue. Commissioner Falcón ordered all
the pipes to be drained and checked for evidence, which left the poorer quarters of the city without water that torrid February of 1900.
    Months passed with no news of Felicitas. In early 1901 pamphlets appeared before the Alcántaras’ front door with insidious messages about the victim’s fate. None gave the
slightest clue.
La Felicidad was a virgin. Not anymore,
said one. And another, more perverse:
Ride Felicitas for a peso in the whorehouse at 2300 Junín Street.
That address
does not exist.
    The adolescent’s body was discovered one morning in April of 1901, when the night watchman arrived at the Waterworks Palace to clean the living space assigned to him and his family in the
southeast wing of the palace. The girl was covered in a light tunic of river grasses and her mouth was full of round pebbles that turned to dust when they fell to the ground. Contrary to what the
authorities had speculated, she was as immaculate as the day she came into the world. Her beautiful eyes were frozen in an expression of astonishment, and the only sign of mistreatment was a dark
line around her neck left by the guitar string used to strangle her. Beside the corpse were the remains of a fire the murderer must have lit and a fine linen handkerchief of a no-longer
identifiable color, with the still discernible initials RLF. The news of the initials was profoundly upsetting to Commissioner Falcón, because those were his initials and it was a given that
the handkerchief belonged to the guilty party. Till the end of his days he maintained that the kidnapping and murder of Felicitas Alcántara was an act of vengeance against him, and came up
with the impossible hypothesis that the girl had been taken by boat to the deposit in Palermo, strangled there and dragged through the pipes to the palace on Córdoba Street. Falcón
never ventured a word on the motives of the crime, even less fathomable once sex and money were ruled out.
    Shortly after Felicitas’ body was found, the Alcántaras sold their property and emigrated to France. The security guards refused to occupy the apartment in the southeast rectangle
of the Waterworks Palace, choosing instead the wooden house the government offered them on the banks of the Riachuelo, in one of the most insalubrious areas of the city. At the end of 1915, the
President of the Republic personally ordered the wretched rooms to be closed, sealed and removed from the public records, which is why on all the diagrams of the palace subsequent to that date
there appears an irregular space, which is still attributed to a construction error. 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. The canonical books of the nineteenth century pride themselves on the disappearance of the blacks from Buenos
Aires, without taking into consideration that in the records of 1840 a quarter of the population still declared themselves black or mulatto. With a similar intention, Borges wrote in 1972 that
people remembered Evita only because the newspapers kept committing the stupid error of mentioning her. It’s understandable, then, even if the southeast corner of the Waterworks Palace could
be seen from the street, people would say the place didn’t exist.
    Alcira’s tale made me think that the Alcántara girl and Evita summoned up the same sort of resistance, one for her beauty, the other for her power. In the girl, beauty was
intolerable because it gave her power; in