By Osvaldo Soriano

he brim of his hat darkens his eyes, his smile is tender and wide and his small eyes become almond-shaped by amazement or melancholy. The motion pictures impoverish his gestures, they hardly let his perfect soul be evidenced, so those who knew him say. But when he sings his face is full of light, everything, everything is illuminated. And even those melodramas of the 30s get stronger, make sense.

Osvaldo Soriano

Carlos Gardel is the voice and the word of the Argentines: plaintive, choked by anguish, numb with pain. Sometimes, he’s a merry masked person who wants to be more than a tango and is the sunlight, the soft air, inebriating, like the sweet warbling of a nightingale. A sad and challenging Buenos Aires still gets out of that throat burnt 52 years ago at the Medellin airport.

Why do the Argentines love him so much? Why have they made him an untouchable myth? Why his voice and his figure are the only things to which they are not indifferent? Why, in a way, do they all feel they are what he is?

It is difficult to answer: he was a simple man, son of a French single woman that emigrated to the River Plate to evade humiliation and misery. He sang at cheap cafes, toured the dozing towns of the province of Buenos Aires in a duo with José Razzano, an Uruguayan now fallen into oblivion. And one day he went to Barcelona and Paris to get some money to pay his gambling debts. There he began in the Pigalle quarter, like many other Argentines that dressed up as gaucho for the public of the “belle époque”, and all of a sudden, as if the gods would have been dazzled by his smile, he was more than Maurice Chevalier.

«Look, I saw him only once and we did not exchange a word. I was at a café with some friends in the wee small hours of the morning, when I saw him enter. He came as if he were lighted up. Everybody at the barroom remained silent, or, at least, that was what I thought. He touched his hat and with only one bow of his head everybody there knew he had said hello to them all. I stood up, took him this photo and stayed there, leaning on the counter, and envying the guy who was shaking his hand».

That photographer sold the Gardel’s portrait in 1973, at the exit door of a neighborhood movie theater where two of his movies were shown. For years the one who writes these lines has been asking those who lived in his time how Carlos Gardel was. Who was the man that gave place to the most gigantic myth that the city of Buenos Aires has created and which encompasses all Latin America? But it’s in vain, there’s nothing exceptional in him, there’s no trace of heroism, no advertising apparatus that had modeled his figure. On the contrary, is so little what we know about Gardel today, that the Uruguayan researcher Federico Silva only needed a hundred pages to collect all the instants of El Zorzal’s life that have left a track and enough evidence: documents, interviews, encounters, travels, scarce love affairs. However he lived 45 years and had friends, furtive lovers (that later blossomed by hundreds), a mother that outlived him, an executor —Armando Defino— that honestly wrote about his days of glory.

It does not matter what was, how it was. What it is is what matters: an enormous quantity of dreams, illusions, loyalties, hidden hates. What people made of him. In one of his journeys he was for 48 hours in Caracas; a curious journalist carefully reconstructed those two days by interviewing those who said that had seen him, that had been by his side, at the horse racetrack, at the theater, at his table, in his bed. The reconstruction of that stay of Gardel proved a truth richer than the routine reality: to carry out all that is said he did the singer ought to have stayed in Caracas at least 45 days. Many were the nights of spree and the days of friendship that people had given to him.

It was said that before leaving for Europe he was a frequenter of the committees of the conservative party and tough guy at dancehalls. There are evidences that he was shot when going out of a cabaret, but it is not true that he was in a jail of the Patagonia. The criminal record of the one who was there is under the name of Carlos Gardel, bricklayer. But our man was in fact named Charles Romuald Gardés, born on December 11, 1890 in Tolouse. The criminal record of El Zorzal —very few know it—, is in the Police museum and is kept in a confidential strongbox guarded by a lieutenant colonel. Why so much absurd secret? Why the jockey Irineo Leguisamo, his closest friend, did always say and repeat what he really did that he would bury with him all what Carlitos asked him not to reveal? Maybe because, in fact, wasn’t the singer Carlos Gardel the same Charles that left France with his mother towards his South American destination?

There are people who think that Gardel was born in Uruguay and there is an extensive research by Erasmo Silva Cabrera, a journalist of Montevideo, which tries to prove it. Its story is enthralling and reveals a quite unlikely but disquieting incoherent drama. However, there is no other proof but the birth certificate of Tolouse from where Charles arrived in Buenos Aires at age three. Even in the slightest details of his life doubts appear. He recorded some discs in French like somebody who learnt it by heart. He also sang in Italian and in English. A little and badly. Gardel was unbeatable in porteño, in the lunfardo (slang) of those years that today seems somewhat baroque and far distant in our memory. Nobody calls now a woman “percanta” or “papusa”, nor means “tamango” for shoes. But there is not even one man, nor one woman capable of conveying the blues, a grief, a loving feeling, an outrage like he did.

Because of that Gardel grows up in the exile of others. For the Argentines who live abroad his voice restores the color, the taste and the scents of Buenos Aires. No matter how beautiful or absurd were the lyrics sung by El Morocho, the fatherland comes out from his throat, from those recordings that resemble a crash of saucepans. But there is something else, something that evades the Argentine explanation. Why have the inhabitants of Medellin in Colombia placed loudspeakers on his monument and meet to listen to him as if he were still alive, as if the airplane that was to take him to Cali would not have crashed. Generosity, loyalty, the successful and tragic parable of Gardel identifies Buenos Aires.

Like Argentina, El Morocho was an artist in keeping up appearances and in hiding; he reached the top, he succeeded in making the greats of Europe regard him as a peer but when he was about to be admitted by the Hollywood limelight, Fate stopped him. Like it did with Argentina. It was not a mistake by the pilot which made the aircraft fall, it was God. The Argentines are not the ones who destroyed this country, it’s simply that God does not love them. In the short life of Gardel we can schematically summarize the saga of the people that have made him immortal.

It’s clear, there is a Gardel for each Argentine. One that kills us and another one that makes our life milder. A question of opportunity, for the exiled: the teardrop of nostalgia; for the tortured: the prelude of death. For everybody, the symbol of what we wanted to be: great, handsome, beautiful, loyal, successful. Also the awful mirror that gives us back the truth of 52 years of failure.

Sources: Página 12, Saturday 27 June, 1987.