If we look at the Gardel case, so peculiar in so many ways, we remain under the impression that people, the public, are always waiting for something more. It seems that there is always one last revelation to come that will explain the whole of the character, but like those hand tricks that the magicians execute in front of our very eyes again and again, and again and again we think that we finally understood the trick it vanishes when we are just about to discover it.
Why in no other artist of his time, not even of this time I would add, does this happen? Why, I repeat, and taking as an example Hugo del Carril or so many others that had a big and long popularity, nobody asks them nor their fans to explain anything, not even any “mystery”(according to Borges, one of the names of oblivion) that they might have had?
The proof is that there isn’t -that I know of- collectors of all those interpreters and if there were there isn’t a commercial market for the souvenirs of those important figures, justly or unjustly. I am in permanent contact with collectors of records, photographs, objects, documents. Everything revolves around Gardel. The rest –with the exception of records- is of little o no interest.
We could venture that there might be an identification of the singer with his characters. The indisputable authority of Gardel when singing those tangos about “malevos”(troublemakers), of “compadres”(city gauchos) that tell their stories leaned on a bar of the outskirts, and of duels in dark alleys makes us believe in absolutely everything that he is telling us, again and again. We would swear that he has been witness or protagonist in all his tales and furthermore, that his confidence is strictly personal and no matter how many times we listen to the record it will sound different, as a spontaneous and unique conversation. In some way we could also say that Gardel is the voice of the “arrabal”(poor neighborhood), because, without doubt he lived there and his characters represented in a way, legitimately, his own world. Certainly those arrabales must have not been like the “Tierra del Fuego” of the Borgian(Borges) Palermo, but true or not, the arrabal of the Tango literature and of the one-act farces will forever remain like that, because like that is required by the legend. None of his contemporary colleagues could have assumed that personification with credibility. Some later tried the resort of the sturdy voices, which wore out in an exhausting male chauvinism.
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