Read Online The Tango Singer by Tomás Eloy Martínez - Free Book Online Page B

used to store water in times of extreme drought or as a place to deposit unusable bits of pipe. After studying the plans of the palace, Colonel Moori Koenig had chosen that cubicle to hide the
mummy of Evita Perón in 1955, after taking her away from the embalmer, Pedro Ara, but an uncontrollable fire in the neighboring houses prevented him when he was very close to achieving his
objective. In the same place, more than a hundred years earlier, a crime so atrocious had been committed that it was still spoken of in Buenos Aires, where unpunished crimes abound.
    Each time Martel got out of his wheelchair and decided to walk with crutches he ran the risk of tearing a muscle and suffering another of his painful internal hemorrhages. That afternoon,
however, since he had an urgent need to climb those sinuous iron staircases to get to the highest tanks, he gathered his patience and hoisted the weight of his body from one step to the next, while
Alcira, behind him, carrying the crutches, prayed he wouldn’t fall on top of her. He rested every little while and, after some deep breaths, tackled the next steps, with his neck veins
swollen and his pigeon’s chest about to explode beneath his shirt. Even when Alcira tried to dissuade him over and over again, thinking how the torment would be repeated on the way down, the
singer carried on as if possessed. When they got to the top, almost entirely out of breath, he collapsed on one of the iron girders and remained there, eyes closed, for several minutes until the
blood returned to its course. But when he opened his eyes his astonishment left him breathless again. What he saw surpassed the oneiric sets from
Metropolis.
Ceramic necking, lintels, tiny
blinds, valves, the premises as a whole gave the impression of the nest of a monstrous animal. The water had long disappeared from the twelve tanks divided between three levels, but the memory of
the water was still there, with its silent metamorphoses as it entered the pumping station’s pipes and the dangerous swells that disfigured it at the slightest onslaught of the winds. The
reserve tanks, located in the four attics, were especially susceptible to falling, when the southeasterly whipped up, breaking the subtle balance of the pillars, the horizontal panels and the
valves.
    The pink water of the river gradually changed as it flowed from one canal to the next, detaching itself in the locks from the urine, semen, scandals of the city and frenzies of the birds,
purifying itself of the savage past, life’s toxins, and returning to the transparency of its origins until eventually cloistering itself in those tanks criss-crossed by streamers and joists,
but awake, even in memory, always awake, because water was the only thing that could find its way through the ins and outs of that labyrinth.
    The central patio, which Boye earmarked for public baths, but the overblown construction of which had reduced to an area of three hundred square meters, was covered in mosaics whose extravagant
designs obsessively imitated the geometry of kaleidoscopes. At that time of the afternoon when the light coming in through the skylights hit them directly, vapors of colors more vivid even than
rainbows rose from the floor, forming shimmering arcs that broke up when the slightest sound vibrated in the cavern. Martel went over to one of the banisters that separated the tanks from the abyss
and sang:
Aaaaaaa
. The colors waved madly, and the echo of the sleeping metals repeated the vowel infinitely:
aaaaaaaa
.
    Then, he stood up so straight and tall that he resembled another being, handsome and supple. Alcira thought some miracle had restored him to health. His hair, which Martel always combed with
brilliantine, slicking it down and straightening it to look like that of his idol Carlos Gardel, sprang up in rebellious ringlets. His face was transfigured by an astounded expression that conveyed
both beatitude and wildness, as if the palace had put a