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To be Gardel is to be the best
 arlos
Gardel was born, so they say, on December 11, 1890 in the French city
of Toulouse. He arrived in Argentina when he was three years old.
When in 1915 he recorded "Mi
noche triste" with José
Razzano, the era of the tango canción begun. Together with
Alfredo Le Pera, he composed
dozens of famous tangos. In Paris he sold 110 thousand records in less
than a year. He shot eleven movies in the United States. He had recorded
about 800 tunes when on June 24, 1935, he died in a plane
crash in Medellín, Colombia.
If the public credibility about Carlos
Gardel´s signifiant resisted the collisions of almost a century
of crises and, even more, it grew, it must be not only because he is
singing better each day. The rational explanation of the popular devotion
persistence or Gardel´s survival so undefeatedly in his heroic
character must be somewhere. Maybe it is lost amidst the papers of the
national archive of unanswered questions or with the questionings which
surprise us every morning.
 Even
today, his undeteriorated voice will rise in the ranking of diffusion
as if we systematically cling to the only Argentine who is not under
suspicion, to the password of all agreements, Gardel will play his
ritual pirouette and will change his last name into an adjective of
easy decyphering. We all know that to be Gardel is to be the best.
Half a century has passed since the accident in Medellín,
that foolishness of history, and our country is different even though
when calamities are not new and have an air of familiarity, which,
at least, overwhelm us.
In Buenos Aires today, only humidity and longing
are a common string with that one of the 20s and 30s which added drama
to Gardel´s vicissitude. Neither word, honor, love or scruples
are the same and, even the machismo is an entity of discard.
The hinge is Gardel, who was the talking loudspeaker
for that desperate, bewildered, drowsy inhabitant of Buenos Aires
and in the River Plate mud, sunk in the huge misery and baffled before
an uncertain future with a narrow horizon. With an economy so damaged,
insufficient to buy a dream, with the naked sensation of so much vain
bronze, it would seem that we resort to that household Gardel as the
only known and safe shelter.
Gardel and his tangos
granted voice and vote to that Argentine individual. If someone regards
him as the archetype of our nationality, he fails for shallowness
and imbecility. But it is also wrong he who states that he was only
a popular artist, a clear voice, a neat style, an instantaneous rival
for every new singer. And he was, without intending it, the most striking
battering ram in that effort to export Argentine culture to a goal
called Paris.
There is no God without mystery and Gardel, who forged
his own legend, filled with shadows the most precise passsages of
his personal history.
He always celebrated his birthday on a different
day, he caused confusion about his true age, even he allowed himself
to fake his birth in different places. The official story puts his
birth in Toulouse, France, on December 11, 1890, son of Berthe
Gardés and unknown father- a lack which would mark his
life. It is no coincidence that Gardel, a bastard son, is a myth and
referent of a country, also a son of bastardy.
The foggy research after Charles Romuald Gardez´s
father leads us to the figure of Paul Lasserre,
a prosperous businessman, married and family father who did not acknowledged
him as son, and made Berta hurry for her South American adventure
who would take her to El Abasto. Gardel
never mentioned his father and that open
leakage made the necessity to form a traditional family hardly possible.
He had no father, he was not father in the Biblical or genetic sense.
He would mend that gap in his history, Gardel was
the father of the tango canción, he gave it his own image and
likeness, he left a legacy and a name.
Behind Gardel´s adventures on stage, on
record or movies, out of the mountain of lies made up by Gardel-haters
and believable or apocryphal stories pupplied by Gardel-fans, beyond
the pieces of his iconography made cheap, there exist unrevealed mysteries.
The gossipings about his sexuality, about passages
bordering misdemeanor at the times of
The Abasto, the information creaks around the reasons of the plane
crash in Colombia soil, it turns out however less attractive for the
Buenos Aires citizen, convinced of, with reasonable motive, that the
truth is, sometimes, less important to the legend.
Between that Argentina of Gardel´s time, before
the immigration of the inner country to the coast and the pitiful
version of today, there are a thousand misfortunes and hundreds of
illusions buried in the corner of the dead memories. It is even understandable
that, for not accepting the shallowness of nowadays we lay our eyes
on that Gardel and that city of his, full of hope.
Gardel will be, because he came from a mythical entity,
furnished or concealed by the condensation of the collective unconscious.
And it will be licit to encourage any of his records to believe, as
good Argentines, that we are also owners of his inspiration. And Gardel
will answer us like a kite hidden into memory to obey the hand and
fly in the emotion by simply giving tension to the string of his voice.
Extracted from the article by Jorge Göttling, from the magazine "Viva" by Clarín- June 13, 1999 |
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