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Alfredo Marino and “El ciruja”
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Poet, composer and singer |
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by José Gobello
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In 1922 he appeared as singer at the Café Nacional where no one till then had dared to do it on the small stage. In 1926 he formed a duo with Pablo Eduardo Gómez that firstly appeared at the “Casino Pigall” and later at the above mentioned café where at that time the orchestra led by the bandoneonist Ernesto de la Cruz also appeared and which, naturally, had no vocalist. A bet about the use of lunfardo in tango lyrics prompted Marino to improvise a lyric. So he forged a masterpiece, a classic that still is in vogue: “El ciruja”. The latter and its contemporaries “La gayola” and “Barajando” are the last malandra tangos, when the lyricism of Homero Manzi was timidly seeing the light with “Viejo ciego”. Ernesto de la Cruz wrote the music for those words which were sung by Pablo Gómez. The premiere was at the same cafe on August 12. Marino never sang it. Carlos Gardel, instead, recorded it accompanied by José Ricardo and Guillermo Barbieri on guitars that same year. Ignacio Corsini cut it on February 21, 1927 and Rosita Quiroga, some days before: on February 5, 1927.
On his comeback to Buenos Aires he joined the Elvino Vardaro Sextet as refrain singer (estribillista) and was broadcast by Radio Fénix. He was drawn to acting and so he was starred in two plays by Francisco Canaro and Ivo Pelay: “La patria del tango” and “Mal de amores”. He also appeared in movies like: “Turbión”, “El loco serenata”, “Pelota de trapo” and “Su última pelea”. Finally he joined the cast of Radio El Mundo. He worked for that radio sation for 22 years. There he was featured in a famous daily soap opera “Los Pérez García”. For a short time he impersonated the father of that family: Don Pedro. That role was soon later played by Martín Zabalúa. He also appeared in another program that was aired forty-five minutes earlier, the detective story “Peter Fox knew it”. As from 1967 he was director of that radio station. He wrote around thirty lyrics, among them: “Vieja volanta”, “El aguatero”, “El batidor” (See: "Sangre maleva...", “Viejo taura”, “Anochecer”, “Cuartiando”, “Del pasado”. But none of them reached, however, the level of “El ciruja” and no poem of the tango literature has equaled the expressiveness of the unsurpassable twelve-syllable pattern admired by many writers and poets, that figure: “Campaneando un cacho ‘e sol en la vedera” (Watching a piece of sunbeam on the sidewalk). The fable that is told is the customary one, and in it the pimp that takes all the money from the poor hallucinated harlot is not missing at all. If “El ciruja” is a hallmark in the history of tango, it is not due to the anecdote it narrates, nor to the widespread popularity it reached —in five months 150.000 sheet music copies were sold—, but to the purity of its style. It is regarded as the lunfardesque tango par excellence. Maybe it is so but, in such case, it would share that honor with Lorenzo Traverso’s “Uno y uno”.
In the vocabulary of “Nueva Antología Lunfarda” we can read: «Mosaico: deturpación of “moza” (young woman)» (the term deturpación means —according to the Real Academia—, distortion, impairment, pejorative mention). On the tango pages of the periodical by Gaspar Astarita “Tango y Lunfardo”, Nº 80, appear two poems: “Corralón” which belongs to him and “A Alfredo Marino, mi padre” (To Alfredo Marino, my father) by his son Norberto. Some recordings of "El ciruja": Ignacio Corsini with guitars (1926 y 1927) |
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In the latter year Marino, on guitar, together with his peers Iturralde and Barroso became the accompanists of the singer 
It’s necessary to notice, however, the precision of his phrases, free from useless words and pleonasms, as if they had been subjected to a detailed process of smoothing over. And again that line: “Campaneando un cacho ‘e sol en la vedera” (Watching a piece of sunbeam on the sidewalk). Bodily wretchedness and demoralization have never been expressed so eloquently.