Astor Piazzolla

Maria de Buenos Aires

Music: Astor Piazzolla

Lyrics: Horacio Ferrer

Translator’s Preface:

“Maria de Buenos Aires” was first staged in 1968. It was performed in the style of a qualitatively new genre, “operita-tango,” which initially prevented it from gaining widespread popularity. The story follows the life, death, and resurrection of a girl born in the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Seventeen different scenes narrate Maria’s journey through various stages of her life. The opera is filled with symbolism and contains biblical parallels and allusions.

In the very first scene, the duende (a demon) announces to the people that Maria has been killed. Fearing that her name will be forgotten, he begins to recount her story—how Maria came into existence, how she became a prostitute, how she was killed by men who desired to possess her but ultimately failed to do so.

The antagonist is shrouded in mystery. His name changes throughout the performance: in the third scene, he is the “payador” (a street singer); in the fifth, “the drowsy sparrow of Buenos Aires”; in the eighth, “the oldest thief”; in the thirteenth, “the first analyst”; and in the seventeenth, “the voice of that Sunday.” This character was originally written for a male voice. Every time he appears, his outward appearance changes, yet his nature and character remain the same. The antagonist mocks Maria’s humble origins, ridicules the duende, and, when he fails to deceive Maria, he kills her. When Maria becomes a ghost, the antagonist continues his mockery, but the moment she is resurrected, he loses his magical powers. The antagonist—embodying the devil—disguises himself among the city’s inhabitants. Because of this, the other characters in the plot are easily deceived and submit to this dangerous figure. Through cunning tricks, he kills Maria and considers himself victorious throughout the performance.

As soon as Maria dies (in the ninth scene), her ghost immediately appears, but she no longer remembers who she is or what has happened to her. She aimlessly wanders through the melancholic and fatal city. The devil, believing he has triumphed and that Maria’s ghost is doomed to wander eternally, makes a crucial mistake—he gives her too many hints in one of the scenes. As a result, Maria begins to recall who she was. She remembers that she was murdered, and this memory makes her sing. In the final scenes, through a miraculous conception aided by the duende, Maria gives birth to a new Maria. Some experts interpret the last scene as an allusion to Christ and the Virgin Mary.

At the same time, “Maria de Buenos Aires” is also the story of tango itself—how it was born in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, how it infiltrated brothels, cabarets, and city centers, and, over time, how it exhausted itself only to be reborn as a genre.

Interestingly, the text’s author, Horacio Ferrer, was frequently criticized for the poetic, intricate, and often difficult-to-comprehend nature of his writing. In an interview, he explained: “This tango was not written to have an understandable text, but to create an atmosphere and convey emotion.” He openly stated in interviews that many of his word combinations, which might seem strange and devoid of meaning at first glance, were intended solely to maintain rhythm and melody. Ferrer also claimed that Maria represents Buenos Aires itself. However, upon deeper analysis, it would be incorrect to confine Maria solely to this interpretation.

The first half of the operita is filled with Easter imagery, and the narrative unfolds in a way that foreshadows Maria’s death. The second half tells the story of Maria in the underworld—where her personal hell is wandering through the city. In the final part, the time of resurrection, revelation, and miraculous birth approaches—the birth of a new Maria, accompanied by the ringing of Christmas bells.

Scene 1: Alevare [the beginning of a tango]
The Duende:
Now that the time has come and a murmur
of black nightshade
Remains awake in your silence, through a pore
in this asphalt
I must conjure up your voice … now that the
time has come.
Now that you are forever dead, and my blonde
witches are partying
For you, tangoing hot masses
at dawn
With their dull, low, tarts’ litanies;
Now that your love threw in its hand and,
lefthandedly,
With a strange, mean ark in the rings under
each eye,
Burnt the wine cross of a hangover in the
darkness of your brow;
Now that in the sordid, gangsterish tension
Of a well tampered clavier
the sleepless
Hands of a Cain and a street walker play tangos
with your bones;

Now that spite, with rage and a penny’s worth
of gunpowder
Triggers, in its pleated bandoneón,
the witchcraft of a blow
In Ouch minor for the side of
your kisses;
Now that you are never more, child María,
I shall blend a handful of that
bandoneón voice
That still burns in your throat, with a little bit
of mine,
With dregs of memories, black breath, and the
dapple-grey hoarse note
Of a bass string. Thus, from your intimate
goodbye on the outskirts of
Buenos Aires, crossing the simple frontiers
Of death, I shall bring up your
dark song.
It will be the same age as God and have
two old stigmata:
On the right, hate, and on the left tenderness.
And to the hard
And sweet ghostly sound of its echoes,
the Marías-to-be,
Climbing up Santa Fe Avenue towards a new day,
Will tremble and hurry,
not knowing why …

Now that the time has come, chestnut fog
and black nightshade …
A plume of night-dew, your voice, María-like,
Will come up with your memory, here, small
and one, now.
Now that your time has come, María of
Buenos Aires.
Scene 2: María’s Theme (instrumental)
María responds to this appeal and appears
embodied in her voice in a tango theme,
‘María’s theme’. The tango is María’s language,
and it is here a song without words.
Scene 3: Lame Ballad for a Crazy
Barrel Organ
The voice of a payador (gaucho itinerant singer):
Luckless little piano
Which grinds out stories … let’s see
If the lame man shows
The true colours of his waltz to the girl,
She who no-one wants to see!
Voices of Men who Returned from Mystery:
Let the Devil dip his gammy leg
In Garnacha wine as he grinds.

The voice of a payador:
Time shows its true colours
And no one wants to see them.
The Duende:
She came from that dimension out beyond
the town where a fence and a road are
reached by hope; the bell, three stars, an eye
ringed with shadows on the shady balcony,
a goal, the square … The unhurried sun of a
mass with mornings, neighbours, and doves;
some boys excited by skirts; and a railway
platform with another smoke and another
sorrow and another train to wait for, a novena,
a hooker, a corner shop.
The voice of a payador :
The wee girl was born on a day
When God was drunk;
That’s why three bolshie nails
Sounded out the pain in her voice …
She was born
With a curse in her voice!
Voices of Men who Returned from Mystery:
Three crooked nails on a day
When God was in a bad mood.
The voice of a payador :
Three black nails
On a day when God was propping up the bar.

The Duende:
And two chubby, dreary angels, two strange
doves that trotted along the flat shore, brought the
Child – crying – on their back. On the dark
rendering of the last wall, folding their tin wings in
sadness, they wrote her name, María, with dark
bullets. They created her days out of sand and
cold – so hard! And on the further bank of the
river, where the river meets nothingness, the
child María grew up in seven days.
The voice of a payador :
Zapada [a tango improvisation] of ill fortune,
Milonga of luck and truth
Which a rough bass string strumming –
Without crying about you or loving you either –
Was playing in your loneliness …
Voices of Men who Returned from Mystery:
Little girl, what twisted luck
To know the whole truth!
The voice of a payador:
The zapada of death
Played in its loneliness.
El Duende:
Like this city, of grieving and partying, stolen from
low-life witches on heat who drive life on, María
was part of the deranged insomnia of each
suicidal and empty poker hand played on a lost
gamble of loneliness. She was the verse of

impulsive anger at the door of first failure and
the one-eyed rose of a limping clown. Goddess
and waster, from the heavens and from the
underworld, she was all the same a trap.
And, tied up by a hair, through the dawn they go,
part abyss and part bread.
The voice of a payador :
In the neighbourhood, the harpies,
Old women in black hoods,
As in a filthy Eucharist,
Pray for María in lunfardo slang,
Their arms outstretched.
Voices of Men who Returned from Mystery:
There in the neighbourhood, María,
Your cross has been named!
The voice of a payador:
María of the prophecy,
You will have two tangos far a cross …
The Duende:
But those men, the rough masters of my
sadness, who know about the quiet rolling up of
sleeves which that name evokes, and have come
back – as they do – so slowly, so solemnly, from all
our mysteries, when there is full-bodied suffering
dancing a canyengue [form of tango] in the thick
fug of the bars – give it a name, uncertainly,
barking out to her memory the shadow of past
tangos and of those that don’t yet exist.

The voice of a payador :
Sad María of Buenos Aires …
The Duende:
Forgotten art thou
Amongst all women.
Scene 4: I am María
María:
I am María of Buenos Aires!
María of Buenos Aires, don’t you see who I am?
María tango, slum María,
María night, María fatal passion,
María of love, of Buenos Aires, that’s me!
I am María of Buenos Aires
If people in the neighbourhood should ask
who I am,
Soon the women who envy me
Will know it very well
And every macho will fall at my feet
As if a mouse had fallen into my trap!
I am María of Buenos Aires!
I’m the utmost witch both at singing
and loving.
If the bandoneón arouses me … tia-ra, ta-ta!
I bite it hard on its mouth … tia-ra, ta-ta!
With ten flowering spasms that I hold within
my being!

always say to myself, ‘Go for it, María!’
When a mystery comes climbing
up my voice
And I sing a tango nobody ever sang before
And I dream a dream nobody ever dreamt before,
Because tomorrow is today and then comes
yesterday, man!
I am María of Buenos Aires!
Of Buenos Aires María, I am my city!
María tango, slum María,
María night, María fatal passion,
María of love! Of Buenos Aires, that’s me!
Scene 5: Milonga for the Child María
(in the style of Evaristo Carriega)
Sleepy Buenos Aires Sparrow (sung):
In the eyes of my child,
Offbeat of other upsets,
There is a dark nostalgia
For things that have not yet happened.
The street told her fortune with the cards of hate,
With cards that were marked;
Her mother wove laziness;
And her father herded up failures.
The old, sad, tango bar
With the lunfardo Buenos Aires blues
Gives a certain I don’t know what to my María
And a something else to her cat’s back.

(spoken) Chestnut is her voice, her hips,
her mane and her breasts are chestnut.
She is carrying as a yoke on her back
The desires of twenty men.
(sung) Late at night, when it’s raining,
always the same – always – in her courtyard
the mouths of the underground station
tell her fairy tangos.
Seventy times seven
Winds of the south have lifted her;
Only to my voice does she turn
Her skin, her pink, and her years.
María:
Sleepy sparrow of Buenos Aires,
You’ll never catch up with me.
I’m like a rose that says I don’t love you,
You’ll never catch up with me now.
Sleepy Buenos Aires Sparrow (sung):
You’ll go at night, María,
From this district of Buenos Aires
With your plaits undone
And your dreams in tatters.
And the dark truck-drivers
Who hump their anger around the market
Will put together for you a bouquet of turnip tops
And a choir of knife wounds.

Far beyond in the far-beyond
Night-time whisky sessions,
Two hippies with lefty beards
Will insult her with miracles.
(spoken) The mandrake blondes
of a half-caste zodiac
will give her thirteen bites
in the lifelines of her hand.
(sung) And her kiss, which was a bit
Of both saffron and indifference,
Will taste of a full page spread
As if it were an armed bank raid!
Seventy times they will have stolen
Seven surprises from her,
Three will remain: mine
And the eyes of her cat.
María:
Sleepy Sparrow of Buenos Aires
You’ll never catch me …
Sleepy Buenos Aires Sparrow:
My voice, in all voices
You will always feel.
Scene 6: Fugue and Mystery (instrumental)
María, as foreseen by the Sleepy Sparrow,
leaves her neighbourhood at night and goes
through the city silently in a trance.

Scene 7: Waltzed Poem
María:
A bandoneón which keeps a record of
my sadness
Has today mixed two tremors in my throat:
With a taste of the South it gave me the tremor
of Milonguita,
And the other a worse one that tastes of the
North and nobody sings!
From the bandoneón that smells of the shadow
of pimps,
I hear the archangel of brotheldom
Sound his mean chord in seven voices
That sound like seven and are – always – mine.
If I feel on heat even in the grasp of death
And I tear it up a bit with each client
What mourning will there be that will no longer
be my mourning!
What dark trap that can no longer be mine!
And I’ll be the remains of tangoed ashes;
And half-hearted love, from the end,
will wink at me,
And I’ll still burn another life for two coins,
Over a lunatic fold in my bra.
I’ll be sadder, more discarded, more cheated
Than the cruel tango that no-one has yet been;
And, dead and trotting off towards nothingness,
I’ll give God the trembling spasm of
a hundred Marías …

A new wind from the rose of the winds
Stirs up the sound of a bandoneón in my retreat
And the bandoneón has a bullet in its breath
To shout my death with the sound of a
single shot …
Scene 8: Lowlife Toccata
The Duende (to the bandoneón):
The wounds of your bellows dripped an absorbed
Prestige of wisterias; and your folds were
The echo of a tango rosary, working hard on
the striped
Tenderness of a miracle … What a swindle
those thorns were
Which you sold us one day, groaning on
the Calvary!
I know that among your voices, secret
and arbitrary,
The Devil sharpens your tongues; and that
your sounds
Are cries robbed from the dissolute oil
That a boorish Goya painted against
a shroud,
With the tears of Judas, of tarts
and pimps.
I’ve seen your gang of rogue
bandoneons
Beat their black wings and scorch
their button panels

As they build up to a ritual; and there,
on the back of the card
Of iniquity, bleeding from the stained ivory
of the buttons,
The voice of the young girl, with all her
kiss showing!
Where did you bury her? Damn me! She was
The little bit of mystery that a troubled God
gave us,
A poor God of Buenos Aires who loved in his
own way,
So that forever – inside – a question would keep
Striking us – and now you have
killed it!
Now and at the hour, of catches and prophecies
The deaf fingers of a rebel angel will play
A solo on two daggers, for each
misdeed;
A Judas Iscariot solo, with a swing of jail
antiphony
Until you spit out, in twos, the two keyboards!
Then, with a verse of clenched teeth,
A verse like a pickaxe, thirsty,
total, forbidden,
I’ll cut you triumphantly, from side to side,
So that you die sad, screaming, on your feet,
In a sort of tango nausea, what we’ve lost.

Scene 9: Canyengue Miserere of the Old
Gutter Thieves
Chief Old Thief:
Today, when yet again
a white raven
Will come out of the mouth of the poets,
pickpockets and whores;
Today, when through the deep-cut two of the
loaded dice
Two little sulky eyes stare, from another world …
Today, when the tired leg of a neon
street sign
Tries to find its pair in dingy bars;
Today, when the bored bloody-minded tango
of a macchiato –
A harlequin – who saw the end of the cord –
Sank in the embrace of a sugar lump …!
Voices of the brothel-keepers:
With remains of old black crepe in flames
We old madames will light the lamps.
Voices of the old thieves:
Our old thieves’ fingernails will hang on to
Primitive signs of superstitions.
Voices of the brothel-keepers:
We old madames, stripping the beds,
Will hold the tea leaf between our breasts.

Voices of the old thieves:
Wearing a lacquered mask on our face
We’ll celebrate Matins with a couple of crowbars.
Voices of brothel-keepers and old thieves:
For the Girl is coming today and misfortune, wine
And a very D minor will be in flower.
Chief Old Thief:
Because it was written in salt on the walls
Of this lonesome Buenos Aires catacomb,
And to the shout of seven mandolins, we opened
A seventh seal of lunfardo slang and of old age;
Because it was written with tango this day
And outside there’s oblivion and it’s Tuesday
the thirteenth,
A black full-blooded cockerel will crow three times
The canyengue Easter which announces María.
Voices of the brothel-keepers:
Here comes the Girl, looking for the mulatto
Way to hell, astride her cat.
Chief Old Thief:
Her eyes are like prison candles of squatting light
Which shine, running along the stones,
Small polar auroras of things,
Very old, that live in the gutters.

The nights scorch her behind her forehead
Like wet nuns of dust – reciting morbid milongas –
Who darn the sweet, silent
And strange hot rings under her eyes.
Voices of the old thieves:
The Girl has arrived … The Girl has fallen;
We shall pray and sing in the Key of No!
Chief Old Thief (to María):
From now and forever, I condemn
your shadow,
That, in sorrow and stolen from God’s hand,
It may return to the asphalt, dramatic, alone,
And drag your guilts, as a female and
a shadow,
Bled by seven knives of sun.
Voices of the brothel-keepers:
María dove, María, in your gut
You’ll undergo the torment of sordid stabbing
Voices of the old thieves:
One-peso María, María what a laugh!
Two chalky hands grasp your thighs.
Voices of the brothel keepers:
Whisky María, María on the rocks,
What a taste in your mouth when you come
back round!

Voices of the old thieves:
María the gun, Amen María,
And you’ll have a scarlet mark on your temple.
Chief Old Thief:
There goes María’s shadow to her other hell …
Here remains, alone, the pink husk of her body;
It holds all the pain of the world, in blossom,
complete and open
To the end; and yet, the heart
Has refused to be worse!
Voices of brothel keepers and old thieves
(at the same time):
Chief Old Thief!
Her heart … is dead!

Scene 10: Funeral Countermilonga
for the First Death of María
The Duende:
María of Buenos Aires died for the first time;
They told her – it was late – with her
funeral grimaces,
A knife and a bell.
And the sunrise was choked with a feeling
of lazy embolism when the Girl left, hauling
down the gesture, towards a street with
candles and magnolias already wearing the
cold and her death apparel.
And in the corner where the bored grandmas
Still knit bad-temperedly,
Two misty versions of the tango ‘Malena’
Which had died many times
Taught her to die.
Mystery there, miserere-ing on the tightrope of an
obscene jingle in the solitude of the sacrament,
her dove-covered gun carriage was surrounded
by the twelve Judases of a little drunken Christ.
In the factories, the girls
That work the looms on the night shift
Laid on María
A plastic geranium
And a calico orchid.

From her cleavage rose a mist, black and tied with
the sad dirty ribbon that a strange Beatle undid,
on the quiet, from the mysterious mourning of
its twists.
The girl died so much
When she set herself to dying,
That she was a tragic pregnant woman
Who, full of little deaths,
Never stopped giving birth!
How terrible! Our María
Died for the first time …
Two beggars buried her
To the toll of the clinking tips
In the dregs of an espresso.
But in her lonely gloominess, her clumsy
craving for a mad superhuman caress,
against the contrayumba rhythm of two
small explosions in her eyes, she shed two
mascara tears on the tomb …
María of Buenos Aires
Cried for the first time.
Scene 11: Tangata at Dawn (instrumental)
María’s body already buried, the Shadow of
María’s long Via Crucis begins. She wanders,
lost, through Buenos Aires.

Scene 12: A Letter to the Trees and
the Chimneys
The Shadow of María (spoken):
Buenos Aires, April of All My Sadness,
Dear Trees and beloved Chimneys
That give shade and cloud in my district:
My pain has invented the pain
Of another cross in the same root;
It all happened, as you’ll know … I’m in mourning
for the memory of myself. As I write to you –
with tenderness on my shoulder and full of that
one obscenity which I don’t know how to say –
the sun rises again to throw stones at my fear
with some crumbs from its sweet breakfast,
like the man who shies three balls for twenty
pence at the face of bloodstained infamy.
The people went off to live;
There is heaven in a wage!
Crazy for blue, God has light to spare
To knead the birds and the bread.
If He, again, should shut me out,
Fed up with me, my eyes will turn
Three times, and will go
Squinting towards a puppet show
Of gunpowder and alcohol.

Then they’ll say, in the neighbourhood:
‘Her memory is critically ill again …!’
Dear Trees, beloved Chimneys; just like the
smoke and the leaf, already lost, you’ll hear my
name, with the shadow of living death, the first
and the last time a breeze – asthma of the south,
taste of Amen, man in exile – wafts in to work the
last seam of its tango in Buenos Aires!
Nothing else. There’s no farewell: because
this farewell
Hurt us at the beginning and not at the end.
And on a fragrant balcony, as a sign of mourning,
Dab two little marks of soot on my voice.
The Shadow of María.
Scene 13: Aria of the Psychoanalysts
Chorus of psychoanalysts:
Come and see, gentlemen,
Things never seen before;
We shall bring the psychoanalysts
To this Buenos Aires circus …!
Come and see; jugglers
Full of a beautiful remorse
That makes a tragic attempt
With a seven-odd dose of Valium …!

First Psychoanalyst:
Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires,
Bring out your dreams into the sun,
Because dreams have a sharp edge,
Rataplan and rataplon.
Chorus of psychoanalysts:
Come and see! How life
Got tangled up with flabby emotion,
And how an I, just because it feels like it,
Puts up with raging anguish!
Here is the somersault
Of a grudge that, wearing slippers,
Produces a run of nightmares
From behind its mask!
First Psychoanalyst:
Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires,
Bring out your dreams into the sun,
Because dreams have a sharp edge,
Ratapleno and rataplon.
Chorus of psychoanalysts:
Come and see! How leaning out
On the sagittal plane,
A huge conquered memory
Performs a double flip of forgetting!
Come and see! Step up!
In the ring, little by little,
The shadow spins the ball
With guilt feelings from long ago!

First Psychoanalyst:
Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires,
Bring out your dreams to the sun,
This dream is María’s
Rataplin and rataplon.
Chorus of psychoanalysts:
Camera one: memory!
Camera two: consciousness!
Set up a scene
With a trapeze of darkness,
The girl will do her jump
Dressed in black memory
And the First Psychoanalyst
Commands her to do four pirouettes.
First Psychoanalyst:
Close your eyes, María,
So that there’s room in your mind’s eye
For a flat patio and for a song
That will be heard on that patio.
Is it your mother’s crying?
The Shadow of María:
I can’t hear it. They say she had around her
waist the sentimentality of an empty chair and
that she scrubbed dirty stairs for others but
that she never cried. So say those who knew
her.
It was a Friday – and not Good Friday –
And I can hardly remember.

First Psychoanalyst (sung):
Open up your dreams, María
So that in your dreams there will be
A forge and two hands
Which make bread in that forge.
(spoken) Are they your father’s hands?
The Shadow of María:
I don’t know. But they say of him that he used to
play craps with two chisels loaded with hardened
blood, and that he lost as many times as he
wanted. That’s what the winners swore, with
their laughing sevens and elevens.
It was on an Ash Wednesday
And I can hardly remember.
First Psychoanalyst: (sung)
Close your eyes, María
And in two eyes you will see
A scream and a sinister kiss
That runs away into that scream.
Is that your first kiss?
The Shadow of María:
I wouldn’t know. But they say that it could hold
as much sadness as there was in the Jesus who
could not afford the wood and painted a cross on
his back. And that this kiss, some other day, had a small cherry abortion on each lip. This is what
the people who know about this kiss, and still
enjoy it, do not say.
I was then a rose;
And I can hardly remember.
First Psychoanalyst:
Open up your dreams, María,
So that your dreams will then hold
A whisky and two blonde blows
That will be heard right from the back.
Is it your heart that calls?
The Shadow of María
Hardly. My heart, cut out in four pieces – they
say – is buried in the four pockets of a stolen
pool table. The one on me now I bought from a
heart-shop attendant who kept a second-hand
heart store in a good-for-nothing part of town;
she sold little saddish hearts of French cards
and of rabbits, of tattoos of a lazy sailor, of a
lullaby rhyme and of an artichoke. She put one
on me which looks good, and which is alright,
cut out of a bandoneon player’s apron; and,
with a little tin needle and some thread of brown
smoke, she embroidered it on my stomach.
She said that was the right thing for someone
who, like myself, is a shadow María; as a
shadow – just a shadow – I’ll be a shadow
and a virgin forever.

She said so while she sewed –
I can hardly remember.
First Psychoanalyst:
Cover your breasts, María,
With a fistful of salt,
Because inside a zero is looking at you
And the zero will cry for you!
The Shadow of María:
Of the endless greys of the past
I can only remember
That one cruel mystery that screamed at me:
‘Be born!’
And when I made my entrance and started to live
It smiled …
And then finally, when it saw me like this,
So with-it and so myself,
It bit itself and shrieked:
‘Drop dead!’ …
Scene 14: Romance of the Drunken Poet
Duende
The Duende:
Here, in this magical, lucky bar, almost all is
known! … It’s told in a gambling game by the
jacks and kings, gangster ventriloquists of things
that Fate brews up between the card decks.

Right here, stuck to the flat bottom of each glass
we’re watched by the quiet open eye of madness,
that some Discepolín who wanted to see the devil’s
paces, sewed with a fine thread of bitterness.
Voices of the Three Marionettes Drunk on Things:
From this glass from which the Duende,
Is gloomily gulping, we,
Three Marionettes Drunk on Things,
Are watching him.
The Duende:
Here, where tomorrow tastes of the past, looking
for God, I saw, in the space of a shiver, that he
was in what I love and in that which I miss, cut, at
that time, as the size of the grain gives the length
of the summer.
Here in each bottle there’s room for a river;
and at the bottom of this river there’s another bar;
and drunk, in this bar, one of my poems, and in it,
the sad silver of another river that made me a
Duende, made me … a thousand years ago!
Voices of the Three Marionettes Drunk on Things:
The Duende – who in the operita
Came along to tell the tale –
Has lost a shadow
And, in his drunkenness, keeps calling it.

The Duende:
From me, betting on you, I send you this fragment
of tango, with bags under its eyes, that in your full
pain will call up again the loving anger of a friendly
song in the bitter ashes of your footsteps.
From me, and wherever you hear me, two
thousand blondes, street walkers and pimps will
walk to your nothingness to cast a job lot of stars
upon your shadow. (Olivari’s bones know
all about this business!)
Voices of the Three Marionettes Drunk on Things:
Poor Duende! He’s looking for that
Little shadow, desperate,
And asks us, his friends,
To take his grieving to her.
The Duende:
From me, and wherever you are, with a strength
born of madness and like an eccentric hymn
which will resonate deeply, an old blind man will
play a low-life concert for you on the third string
of his dodgy Stradivarius.
From me, and wherever you are, I’ll set up a
meeting of sweet little Duendes who can twist
the haze of your skin; and a drunken buzz of jailed
penitents will recite your Annunciation
in back slang.

Voices of the Three Marionettes Drunk on Things:
We will all go, Master Duende,
The punters of this drinking club,
To take the wee Girl
A miracle on your behalf.
The Duende:
And as soon as you’re reborn, you’ll know what
tricks there are in the maté in its gourd and the
sky from the hole which gazes up from a shoe,
the rain that doesn’t arrive and a sip of that rain,
and time in its time‑pot …
And so, María! So, María! So! For every
‘I love’ nine crazy moons on heat from your
stroke of light will make you the amorous
winks of an all-night-long dance of laughter
and childbirth …
Voices of the Three Marionettes Drunk on Things:
Here we come, Shadow María,
With December and the songs
That the Duende is kneading for you
With the pollen of this bar.
The Duende:
And thus, in a quaver’s silence your day will –
finally – come. A chestnut Sunday will make for
you, with the ugliest leaves of a perfumed laurel,
the rambling, angelic beauty of its branches.

Your day will be born from a worn-out meridian
of the threshold where a poet bakes his mass
back to front. So be it, my dear, in good faith.
So be it, yours and ours … So be it!
Scene 15: Allegro tangabile (instrumental)
The Three Marionettes Drunk on Things,
along with their friends, leave the magical bar
and take to the Shadow of María, on behalf of
the Duende, the miracle of fertility. A symphony
of marionettes, clay angels, Chaplins, street
musicians and Discépolíns run amok in the
streets of Buenos Aires, looking for the seed
of a child for the Shadow of María.
Scene 16: Milonga of the Annunciation
The Shadow of María:
Three marionettes –
Bow-legged and mad –
Who shoved a violet into my mouth yesterday
With a knife in their teeth, go sewing
A big patch of fennel and sisal flowers
Along the back of my grey hips
Ow! …

Skinny and lost –
Dragging his chains –
A tawdry Jesus is going along splashing;
in his voice
There’s a little lazy canyengue tango
With a beat
Of cross stitch;
And a sweet clay mud
Of the Southern Cross
That today has got me trembling.
And a terracotta
Angel,
Injured in the cry of the worn-out widowhood
of a railing,
Mumbling an unintelligible psalm,
tied a little sun of milk
On my bra along with a jasmine flower,
So that I have two spasms of light
Beneath my skin!
Come on, María!
If nine sobs
Are all the dark mystery there was to see,
What a mad attempt at fruition you will make!
What a hard bluish branch will rustle for you!
Come on, it’s about to come!
Come on, it really hurts in the right way!
Ow! …

I’ve got so much
Frustrated tenderness
That with only one bit of tenderness I can give
birth to God!
And if nobody wants me to give birth to them,
Wrapped in the stolen cape of some
Charlie Chaplin,
Between my arms I shall
Breast-feed a boot!
Scene 17: Tangus Dei
A Voice of That Sunday:
Today is Sunday, and the day
Is taken out of its Sunday corner
By a bride without a Sunday
And by the last drunkard but one.
The Duende:
Today is Sunday; Laurel with milk. From the
clapper of its teaspoon, a cappuccino rings three
peals behind the missals, the worn-out but
exultant midwives’ bottoms grind motets.
Laurel with garlic.
A Voice of That Sunday:
Today is Sunday, and the witches
Go away, because peeping
Out of the tuco sauce
Children and clowns throw suns at them.

The Duende:
Today is Sunday; Laurel with laziness. Sundaylike,
a yawn rolls by. And in the yawn, the girls give
the good news of the good irrevocable step which
burns in the taut and extravagant thread of their
blue jeans; hot laurel.
A Voice of That Sunday:
Today is Sunday, and a choir
Of a thousand boy Sundays
From the offside tells an old story
In four-two-four formation.
Voices of the spaghetti-kneaders:
Something strange is happening to us,
the spaghetti-kneaders;
Why are our tough hands trembling inside
the dough?
Voices of the Three Magi-Bricklayers:
What have they put in the drinks that
There’s a gang of little stars where the olives
used to be?
A Voice of That Sunday:
Today is Sunday, and even
The seventh tangos sleep;
It will, however, be the day
For the oldest profession.

The Duende:
Today is Sunday; Laurel and chance. What
‘buenos aires’ dealt the cards to this Sunday so
that up high, above the Pampas winds, three little
mad prophets toil gathering bunches of a new
aroma; Laurel and air?
A Voice of That Sunday:
Today is Sunday; and it is said
That even the rag doll
That hangs in the buses
Is gazing upwards.
The Duende:
Today is Sunday; laurel served up. What
strange seed this Sunday strewed, so that high
up there on the thirtieth floor, alone amongst
the whitewash of a scaffolding, rebirth of nine
surprises, a shadow seethes: Laurel with woman!
A Voice of That Sunday:
Today is Sunday; and using
Her teeth, as if fighting,
This shadow is washing
The inside of her mourning.
Voices of the spaghetti-kneaders:
In the abyss of her waist
The girdle of a dark knot.

Voices of the Three Magi-Bricklayers:
And the scratch of her nails
Is seen in the reinforced concrete.
The Duende:
So many things, one by one, burgeon from
her ovaries, fertile with a thousand pains,
seduced with slaps. It seems that even her
name is pregnant! What trembling shakes
her insides, as if by delivering seventy
reincarnations of an unborn little Jesus, she
were drawing seventy nails out of the bones
of her womb!
(The shadow of María starts singing a Christmas
carol from far away)
The Duende
Two midwife angels hold her face down as they
use as forceps
The reinforcing rods of the concrete crib.
What a light it sheds inside! What a sharp light
is shed on her stalk! What a clear wound, half
way between orgasm and death – lights up on
her hips like a canyengue of stars. Come on,
María! It’s being born, and born, and it’s being
born so much that it takes you to oblivion and
it pushes you into its hands and in its root and

in its rage, makes you be born again in bits,
in the tips of other plaits, in the cracks of those
lips, in the gesture and in the desire to give
birth to the point of exhaustion!
How much Christmas you had
Choking you up for years!
What a splendid harvest, María,
Harvest of childbirth, your childbirth …
Voices of the spaghetti-kneaders:
The newly born has nothing to spare
And has no crib.
Voices of the Three Magi-Bricklayers:
Her father, who is a carpenter,
Will make a crib for the child.
A Voice of That Sunday:
From the summit of Sunday
The Three Magi-Bricklayers
Have left a pink wink
On the sand of the crib.
Voices of the Three Magi-Bricklayers:
Why is it that the little angels, all of them crying,
Have gone off to get drunk?
Voices of the spaghetti-kneaders:
Because that child is not a boy, Jesus! It’s a
Girl! A girl has been born!

A Voice of That Sunday:
The girl had another girl
Who is her and yet not so.
They want, finally and initially,
To be tears of the same sob.
Voices of the spectators:
Good God! The spectators also want
to know
If the words of this tango have been or are
about to be.
A Voice of That Sunday:
In the eyes of the girl
Time’s been stolen;
Yesterday and tomorrow
She has been christened María.
The Duende:
But those men, the rough masters of my
sadness, who know about the quiet
confidence which that name evokes, when
full grief falls upon the thick fug of the bars –
give it a name, uncertainly, calling out in its
memory the shadow of old tangos which are
both no more and still to come.
A Voice of That Sunday:
Our María
Of Buenos Aires …

The Duende:
Forgotten art thou
Amongst all women …
A Voice of That Sunday:
Our María
Of Buenos Aires …
The Duende:
Portent art thou
Amongst all women …
A Voice of That Sunday:
Our María …
The Duende:
Forgotten art thou
Amongst all women …
A Voice of That Sunday:
Our María …
The Duende:
Portent art thou
Amongst all women …
A Voice of That Sunday:
María …