The Tango Singer

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Authors: Tomás Eloy Martínez
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disastrous consequences for the symmetry of the whole, it was imperative that the designer – whose sketches numbered more than two thousand –
have the precision of a player able to dominate several simultaneous games of chess blindfolded. Boye was not only concerned with the beauty of the decorations, which represented botanical images,
crests of the provinces of Argentina and fantastical zoological figures, but also with the materials each one should be made from and the quality of the enamels. Sometimes it was difficult to
follow his directions, which were written in tiny letters – and in English – at the bottom of the drawings, because the architect expanded on the details of the grain of the marble from
Azul, the temperature the ceramics should be fired at and the chisels that should be used to cut the pieces of granite. Boye died of a heart attack, in the middle of a game of chess, on the 10th of
October 1892, when he had yet to complete the sketches for the southeast attic roof. Bateman, Parsons & Bateman assigned the task of finishing the last details to one of its technical
draughtsmen, but a defect in the granite used for the base of the southeastern tower, in addition to the last eighty-six terracotta tiles being broken on the voyage from England, delayed the
construction and produced the almost imperceptible deviation in the symmetry that Martel noticed the afternoon of his visit.
    On the top floor of the palace, overlooking Riobamba Street, the water company has a small museum where it exhibits some of Boye’s drawings, as well as the original chlorine ejectors,
valves, lengths of pipe, late nineteenth-century sanitation fixtures and scale models showing how Bateman and Boye had tried, unsuccessfully, to make their palace into something useful to Buenos
Aires but, at the same time, something which would somehow become unfaithful to the city’s lost grandeur. Since Martel insisted on seeing the most insignificant traces of that past before
going up to the monstrous galleries and tanks that took up almost the whole of the interior of the building, Alcira pushed his wheelchair up the ramp leading to the entrance hall, where customers
still paid their water bills at a string of windows, at the end of which was the entrance to the museum.
    Martel was dazzled by the virtually translucent china of the lavatories and bidets on display in the two adjoining rooms, and by the enamel of the moldings and sheets of terracotta displayed on
felt-covered pedestals, as shiny as the day they’d come out of the kiln. Some of Boye’s drawings were framed, and others were kept in rolls. Two of them had notes by Ibsen about the
play he was writing. Alcira had copied a phrase,
De tok av Forbindingene uken etter,
which maybe meant ‘They removed the bandages after a week,’ and chess annotations indicating
the moment the match was interrupted. Martel replied to each of his companion’s explanations with the same phrase: ‘God, imagine that! The very hand that wrote
A Doll’s
House
!’
    It was impossible to get up to the interior galleries by wheelchair, much less pass along the narrow aisles that overlooked the great interior patio, fenced in by one hundred and eighty cast
iron columns. None of those obstacles intimidated the singer, who seemed possessed by an
idée fixe.
‘I’ve got to get up there, Alcirita,’ he said. Perhaps he was
driven by the idea that some of the hundreds of workers – who labored for sixteen hours a day on the construction of the palace, not even having Sundays off or lunch breaks, spending their
brief nights in brothels or tenements – would have whistled or hummed on the scaffolding the first of the city’s tangos, the real ones, because they knew no other happiness than that
produced by that hesitant music. Or maybe, as Alcira believed, what motivated him was a curiosity to see the little tank in the southeast corner, under the attic skylight, which could have been

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