MUSIC-ARGENTINA: Gardel and the Raging Debate on His Origins

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Oct 3 2003 (IPS) - Tango icon Carlos Gardel smiles down from murals painted all over the historic neighbourhood of Abasto in the Argentine capital, and from photos on the walls of the restaurant that carries his name, on Gardel street, as if he were enjoying the raging debate on the mysteries surrounding his life.

The debate among music experts and tango lovers about where the world’s most famous tango singer was born became especially heated in the seminar ”Who Is Carlos Gardel?”, organised by the Gardelian Studies Centre (CEG) in Buenos Aires.

Although the seminar was supposed to be international in character, the only participating foreign nationals were a delegation of Uruguayans who argued that the legendary tango singer was born in their country.

Uruguay (population 3.2 million), is located across the Rio de la Plata from Argentina (population 37 million). The two countries share many cultural traits and a similar Spanish accent, and tango emerged simultaneously in the two main ports on the Rio de la Plata: Buenos Aires and Montevideo.

But the real aim of the seminar was to ”warn” Argentines about a supposed ”plot” by Uruguay to circulate the version that Gardel was born in that country, as a kind of ”national cause,” CEG director Enrique Espina Rawson admitted in a conversation with IPS.

He said that in an encyclopedia, Uruguay has even published a ”false biography” on the life of the singer who died in a plane crash in Colombia in 1935, claiming he was Uruguayan – which according to Espina Rawson is ”sheer madness.”

”That absurd legend began to take shape in the 1960s, and the (Uruguayan) government supports it,” he said.

”The supposed evidence they have is invalid, and repeats things that have already been rejected by the courts,” said Espina Rawson at the end of the seminar, held Sep. 22-28 in Esquina Carlos Gardel, a restaurant with 1950s decor which offers a tango show at a steep entrance price.

The restaurant is located in the Abasto neighbourhood, where Gardel once lived.

The ”official history” – as Uruguayans ”scornfully refer to it,” according to Espina Rawson – holds that Gardel was born in 1890 in the southern French city of Toulouse under the name Charles Romualde Gardes, the illegitimate son of Berta Gardes.

Proponents of that version point to a French birth certificate and Gardel’s hand-written will.

Above and beyond Gardel’s artistic genius and the undisputed fact that his brilliant international career was launched in Argentina, there is virtually no aspect of his private life that has not been called into question by his fans in Uruguay.

But Argentines continue to hold to the ”official story”, and say they have the evidence to prove it.

In August, the CEG even asked the courts to order the exhumation of the bodies of Gardel and Berta Gardes to carry out DNA tests to prove that she was his biological mother. The organisation also requested that Uruguayan experts be invited to take part, to verify the procedure.

In addition, the CEG has requested expert analyses of Gardel’s signature, his will, and other documents, to ”definitively establish the truth” about Gardel, a collection of whose records was recently inscribed on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO)’s list of cultural heritage of humanity.

”This is not a capricious version. It is based strictly on the documents,” said Espina Rawson, although he clarified that regardless of where he was born, ”Gardel was an Argentine,” having adopted that nationality in 1923, and because his life and works were inextricably linked to Buenos Aires.

Nevertheless, many Uruguayan fans of Gardel claim he was born not in France, but in the central Uruguayan city of Tacuarembó, 380 kms north of Montevideo, to María Delia Oliva and Colonel Carlos Escayola, the local political boss and police chief, in 1887.

Espina Rawson rebutted that argument. Although he admitted that the undocumented Gardel went to the Uruguayan consulate in Argentina with two witnesses to declare that he was born in Tacuarembó, he said the singer did so to avoid being drafted by France to fight in World War I.

”With the resulting document, he later became a naturalised Argentine citizen,” he added.

Espina Rawson and several lawyers said in the seminar that the Argentine courts had already ruled on Gardel’s identity when his will was executed.

But in Uruguay, a more complex story is told. ”This is not a question of national chauvinism,” Carlos Mendive, cultural attaché in the Uruguayan Embassy in Buenos Aires, told IPS after taking part in the seminar, where he cited the documents in which Gardel declared that he was born in Tacuarembó.

Participating in the seminar along with the CEG were the Porteña Association of Lunfardo (porteño is the popular term for natives of Buenos Aires; lunfardo means slang), the Carlos Gardel Museum, and a number of local tango clubs.

But the prestigious National Tango Academy declined the invitation to take part in the seminar. ”The president is Uruguayan,” said Espina Rawson, referring to Horacio Ferrer, the prominent tango poet who put the lyrics to many of the works by Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla.

The Carlos Gardel Museum which opened three months ago in a house in the Abasto neighbourhood where Gardel lived with his mother has already drawn thousands of tourists.

The property went through many hands until it was donated, practically in ruins, to the Buenos Aires city government.

Visitors to the museum are shown a few objects that belonged to the singer and his mother, and tiles from the original patio are sold at 150 pesos (50 dollars) apiece. ”Tourists, especially from France and Colombia, have bought them,” the guide who accompanied a group of visitors around the small house commented to IPS.

Amiria Curbelo, the president of the Carlos Gardel Foundation of Tacuarembó, who took part in the seminar, told IPS that the claim that Gardel was Uruguayan was denied for many years in her city to hush up the extramarital affairs of the all-powerful Colonel Escayola.

”Escayola had an affair with Juana Sghirla, a married woman with three daughters,” said Curbelo. ”To keep her lover nearby, Sghirla let Escayola marry Blanca Oliva, her oldest daughter.”

Several years later, Escayola became a widower, and married Sghirla’s second daughter, Clara. Around the same time, the colonel got the youngest of the three girls, María Oliva, age 13, pregnant.

According to the Uruguayan version of events, Carlos Gardel is the son of Escayola and María Oliva, and was adopted by Berta Gardes, who reportedly went to work on Escayola’s estate two years after the boy’s birth and took him with her when she left Uruguay.

”That is why Gardel always recognised Berta as his mother,” said the president of the Foundation in Tacuarembó, who agreed that the story sounds like ”a novel.”

In Tacuarembó, the silence was finally broken in the 1990s, when the capital of the department (province) of that name, population 85,000, decided to go public with that version of Gardel’s history, which had been passed down orally.

In 2000, a Carlos Gardel Museum was opened in Tacuarembó, which has been visited by tourists from more than 26 countries.

Notary Fredy González, the president of the Julio Sosa Foundation in Uruguay – which takes its name from a famous Uruguayan-born tango singer who was killed in a car accident in 1964 – backed the ”Tacuarembó version” with legal arguments, speaking in the name of the Uruguayan National Tango Academy.

González cited the document issued by the Uruguayan consulate in which Gardel stated that he was born in Tacuarembó, a certificate of good conduct issued by the police, his voting card, and a passport that he was carrying the day he died, which was salvaged from the crash site.

”If all of these documents are false, then a lot of people committed crimes, including Gardel. And since I don’t believe he was a criminal, I stick with what he himself said,” said González, as many of the participants shook their heads and muttered under their breath.

But the claim that is hardest for Argentines to swallow is the Uruguayan suggestion that a Charles Romualde Gardes did exist, although he was not the famous tango singer, but a soldier who died in World War I.

A Venezuelan, Israel Alvarez de Armas – who was not present in the seminar – says he has a document that proves that Gardes died in the war – a claim that was rejected by Espina Rawson, who said the French Defence Ministry has already declared that no French citizen of that name fought in the war.

Questions have also been raised about other details of Gardel’s life. In Uruguay it is said that he spent time in prison in the southern Argentine province of Tierra del Fuego. As evidence, proponents of that argument point to a postcard sent from the prison by a supposed cellmate, which carries Gardel’s signature.

There are also doubts as to whether it was really his body that was removed from the plane wreckage in Colombia; questions regarding his sexual orientation; and uncertainty with respect to whether or not he knew his father.

Several people in the audience got so riled up at some of the positions set forth that they stomped out of the seminar. Others stood up to argue with – and shout at – the panellists.