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To the Troesma from the middle of
the world
What i know and what i don´t know
about tango
By Francisco Febres Cordero
My complete works are Samuel and Valentina, Catalina,
"Retratos con Jalalengua", "Alpiste para el recuerdo", "Cazuela de verde
y otras biografías" and "El duro oficio: vida de Alfredo Pareja
Diezcanseco". If you exactly fold the century in two, you will know
the year of my birth. At the university I started to study law and got
a piece of cardboard, something they call a master's degree. Soon I
shifted to theater, an art I never studied but which I performed for
ten years. Later I flew to journalism, a science that I did not study
but in which I have fun as long as they stand me. I am so serious, clumsy,
nervous, unsure and anguished, that I often turn to humor to hide my
faults. I think I don´t know anything at all. I want that my coffin
be buried in earth, with no pomp. I hate the curriculum vitae as much
as funerals.
It was not a gray afternoon of those when you feel
like weeping, as later I heard described by Julio
Sosa´s voice. No. Mine was a sunlit morning because I had managed
to deceive my parents with the story of my illness, by means of a happy
mise en scene of a cruel sorethroat which prevented me from
getting up to go to school. Then, at about ten, accompanied only by
my Zenith radio, I heard him.
It was him, but I didn't know that he was. He sang,
yes, the same song which more than once I had heard on the magic voice
of my uncle Alfredo who must have had something of Le Pera. It was not
because my uncle Alfredo was Le
Pera. The pear (la pera) was mine and no one else´s but mine.
But Alfredo, and the pear and that what I heard complemented each other
to perfection at that happy moment of my triumph.
Gardel, said the speaker when the song was ended.
And to me, then, what a happiness! A happiness of eight
years old, which made me be beside myself. To such an extent, that this
stanza was stuck to me: "golondrinas de un solo verano/con ansias constantes
de cielos lejanos".
Later (would I be on vacation?), I always tuned in
to a program which I discovered by chance on radio Quito. Tango,
solamente tango I think so was called and was broadcasted around
noon. The one I liked most was "flaca, tres cuartos de cogote, una percha
en el escote bajo la nuez". It made me laugh because it reminded me
of the old woman, but forever Miss, who taught us piano lessons who,
besides the three quarters of neck, below Adam's apple had a bad breath
which reached her armpits. But milongas were what bewildered me with
their rhythm: "Cuando tú pasas caminando por la calle, repiqueteando
tu taquito en la vereda".
I don´t know if it was because of my father´s
birthday, that there was a big party at home. My sisters and I spied
on from the stairs. From the "victrola" (my grandma so called that thing
that I would rather call a radiola) tangos were coming out which the
very elegant guests danced, the men with striped cashmere crossed suits
and very wide ties, and women with dresses which reached far below their
knees. Men got in with overcoats, hats and scarfs which, when crossing
the door, aloofly handed to the usher. Years later, seeing one of Gardel´s
movies on which he sang "Mi Buenos Aires querido", I understood that
tango was like that: scarfs, hats, cloaks and beautiful women. More
hair gel.
My brother Rafael also sang in duet with my cousin
Margarita, in family soirées where what I enjoyed most was to
perform a comedy about Christopher Columbus. I can´t remember what
songs they sang, besides the Spanish ones by Joselito, but I think there
were tangos in the repertory because when I recall my brother´s
face at that age, his smile had something of Volver (return). Where
to? I don´t know where he would like to return, because he never
got out of the house, but if he was to return, he returned.
To die without dancing a tango.
The only woman I heard singing tangos, besides my cousin
Margarita, was Libertad
Lamarque who then was exactly the same age she is now. Imperio
Argentina, frankly, I don´t remember her. And Susana
Rinaldi, even less. I discovered her not many years ago, I don´t
know if it was because she started singing not long ago or because in
my childhood nobody paid attention to her, maybe because, she was devoted
to theater. But, honestly, had I listened to her when I was a child
I would have fallen in love through that incomparable, magic, precious
voice. Maybe by hearing her in time I would have tried, made a sacrifice,
an effort until achieving something I always longed for and never was
able to: dancing a tango.
With Susana
Rinaldi´s voice, I surely would have learnt. Because I know
(I have tried it in secret and also playing football or bullfighting
indoors) that my legs can stretch much so as to open like a compass,
to immediately fold and stay close as if both were only one and, then
turn around, rotate, in a swift surprising movement to, at last, run
striding and abruptly stop. But no. Two steps and one, mamma told me
what had to be done and caught my hand and guided me. But I, nothing.
I stumbled. I stepped on her. I made mistakes.
Later, when I discovered love, something of it remained
incomplete.
Bolero is a different thing. But love without tango,
is half love. It's as if the consequent kisses were lacking the necessary
antecedent. A justification. 0r a pretext.
And I am old enough to try it now. I have resigned
myself to die without having succeeded to dance a tango, what is as
sad as tango itself, like that one which says "percanta que me amuraste
en lo mejor de mi vida, dejándome el alma herida y espina en
el corazón".
Piazzolla?
Also much, much later. Like Rinaldi,
who knows why he was not broadcasted through the radio. Perhaps it could
have been because the creole speakers did not like that the two loved
each other. Because at other places he was already famous; didn't he?
"Tres minutos con la realidad" had become a boom, even though he still
had to wait eleven years for his "María de Buenos Aires", that
I think was something like his definitive consecration.
Julio Sosa
was called el varón del tango and a record of his with
a coffee-colored cover was the first I bought with my own money, when
I was going downhill along the slope of my first job. There was, of
course, a gray afternoon and I felt like crying. However, thinking it
over, I don't know if I bought that record, stole it to Juan Acosta
or won it at a poker game.
Maybe. Yes, I think I stole it because when I beat
him at poker his caps were what I got.
And Pichuco? And Troilo?
He was a bandoneon magician, so the speaker said, but to me, with the
awful ear I've got, what I liked most were lyrics: "Garufa, pucha
que sos divertido, Garufa, vos sos un caso perdido". I knew that
by heart and many others. Of course, none of them complete.
There were impossible words which hampered any attempt
of learning by rote. Certainly, later I came to know that that was lunfardo
(slang) because tango has an origin etc. etc, but that those words were
a drawback, they really were. And I didn't know if in reality the bill
was to be paid by Lothar (lotario) or by a silly one (otario)
or by a notary (notario)and, what is worse, what the hell any of these
three words meant, so it was better to forget them for not playing the
fool before myself, because I dare not to sing tangos in front of anyone
else.
Gardel. Impossible not to go back to his voice with
which he played with the same facility as I do play football. He dribbled.
He went forward. He misled. He bluffed. And he scored such goals against
the blues!.
Certainly then mine were not yet the blues, but something
like a hopeful illusion. But it was also the sadness of a low mark,
the punishment for some prank, a "fair-haired girl" who did not return
to see me.
For example, I did not know who or what Leguisamo was,
now that I remember it.
But one day I learnt he had been a jockey, then horse
races were my obsession for a time: Leguisamo solo. And in
Gardel's voice they were a Derby in which I bet all my fortune on him.
Gardel duetted with Magaldi,
didn't he? Once I heard a record of his through a Colombian short wave
radio. The best tango program I have ever heard and the most dignified
homage to Gardel that, I guess, has ever been produced: three consecutive
days of pure Gardel; his songs, testimonies of those who had known him,
interviews to musicians who had worked with him, commentaries and an
ending which, being a commonplace, was the only one possible: he sings
better each day.
Mariano Mores
came to Quito with a Miami-styled tango show and there I met him. But,
after the talk, I realized that tango is better in the distance. His
manners annoyed me and I guessed he did it for the money and only that
was what he, full of hopes, was after.
I have to hang up. This article is turning out much
longer than it was supposed to be. And Diego Araujo asked me to write
it to say something about Piazzolla, who is dancing cheek to cheek his
tango with death.
Something about Piazzolla.
Well, I will say something.
Piazzolla
Besides having given another look to tango, I love
his harsh provoking phrases. One day he said he was a musician for minorities.
And added this which deserves being hung on a wall with a frame: "Fortunately
because majorities have bad taste". Jazz entered in that phrase too,
didn´t it?. But, in the background tango is playing.
He was always ahead of his time. And, because of that,
without a bit of modesty, he also said: "I will go on composing, as
usual; but afterwards, when I die, I don´t know what will happen
to tango".
In reality, tango after Gardel, was him. Without voice.
But him. Without hair gel, but him. But with a bandoneon, which he forces
to contort with those big hands of his which rather look like those
of a pugilist than those of a musician until he starts to play, of course.
If tango is bandoneon, bandoneon is Piazzolla as well.
Because Piazzolla
is tango. A tango "not so sad, not so boring, not so solemn", to go
on with his words.
A tango with improvisations, as well. And embellishments.
And violins. And piano. And come what may. But above all, with genius,
with personality, with fantasy.
More than four hundred works are his.
When Astor was thirteen, Gardel heard him play the
bandoneon. It was in New York, when Gardel was going to shoot "El día
que me quieras". And the Mudo invited him to appear on that movie as
a newspaper vendor. A later meeting was spoiled by the cursed flight
which departed from Medellín...
The meeting was in New York because Piazzolla lived
there with his parents, Vicente Piazzola (an amateur acordeonist and
barber by profession) and Asunta Maneti (a manicure), who had moved
to the United States from Mar de Plata in 1924, that is to say, three
years after Astor´s birth.
His tuition was that of a classical musician. He was
awarded a scholarship to study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Afterwards,
jazz. And only later, tango. An irreverent tango that this superstitious
man -fond of burning incense to drive away bad spirits- was building.
And who is dying today.
What is going to happen with tango? Well, that each
day Balada para un loco, Rapsodia porteña, Balada para mi muerte,
Tangazo, Milonga en Re, Se fue sin decirme adiós, will sound
better each day too.
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"To the Troesma from the middle
of the world"
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