Obituary: Enrique Cadcamo

AT HIS funeral on Saturday, in Buenos Aires' Chacarita (Western) cemetery, somebody said that with the death of Enrique Cadcamo the tango had been struck speechless. It was a remark typical of the man and the music. In Buenos Aires, tango reflects the moroseness of the city Argentine, best prepared to see the darkest side of everything.

Cadcamo, who had died the day before at the age of 99, was one of the greatest poets of the tango century. "I want to make my heart drunk / to quench a mad love, / which more than love is a deep suffering . . . / And so I want to erase old kisses . . ." In English translation, the poet might not approve of something so akin to doggerel, but it is purest tango, the greatest. Cadcamo had made its special grey nostalgia his own - its yearning for an idyllic moment that was brief, and probably only the product of fantasy.

The youngest of 10 children, Cadcamo was born in a village outside the Argentine capital, but was brought to the city as a small child. Tango historians - fantasists in their way - claim that his poetry was first inspired by the life in the working-class barrio (or neighbourhood) of Flores, on the western outskirts of the city, where Cadcamo grew up. He started writing poetry in 1923, and a year later, with several pieces inscribed on the torn pages of a school exercise book in his coat pocket, he started to tour the ancient city coffee bars where tango was performed for fun and little profit.

A year later, in the Iglesias cafe (demolished when the Corrientes avenue was widened in the Thirties), the sextet led by the pianist Roberto Goyeneche put one of Cadcamo's poems to music. It was "Soap Bubbles", and it has been played everywhere there is tango ever since. Carlos Gardel, who was on his rise to fame and would die in a plane crash 10 years later, took it to the main stages of Buenos Aires and Latin America.

Two years later Cadcamo published his first book of poems. Many of Buenos Aires' leading stage and radio singers of the time put the poems to music, and the poet became famous.

His influence were writers well known to Argentines in the Thirties and Forties, such as the poets Ral Gonzlez Tunn and Celedonio Flores, and his best-known lines are in tangos that are now classics, and which reflect the mood of the genre and the generation: "Los mareados" ("The Dizzy"), "Garua" ("Drizzle"), "La casita de mis viejos" ("The Little House of My Old Folks"), "Anclao en Paris" ("Anchored in Paris"), "Muneca brava" ("Tough Woman"), among many others that people know by heart and have become part of the popular vocabulary.

There were no great moments of excitement or adventure in Cadcamo's life; he was a composer, grounded in his city. In the late 1940s he tried his hand at tango adaptations to theatre and the screen, but only one screenplay, The History of Tango (1949), is regarded of any quality.

He lived just as quietly in fame, at first, as in obscurity, in the late 1940s and 1950s, when tango went out of fashion. At a concert in the 1950s, the late Astor Piazzola, who mixed tango and jazz, was met by booing and hissing.

Tango came back in earnest in the 1980s, and after the restoration of constitutional rule in 1983 in Argentina it started to tour the world stages. The Tango Argentino troupe toured successfully to Paris, London and New York. His lyrics were there, Cadcamo was not.

Since the mid-1990s, Cadcamo had been lionised. Twenty-three of his tango poems, sung by Carlos Gardel, have been re-issued. Young stars and arrangers have adapted his words to new music, giving him new currency with the present generation. At the end, even Argentina's president-elect, Fernando de la Rua, who takes office next Friday, was compelled to contribute his own tribute: "Cadcamo," he said, "will live forever in the memory of this country."

Andrew Graham-Yooll

General Rodriguez (Enrique Cadcamo), poet, lyricist and scriptwriter: born Buenos Aires 15 July 1900; died Buenos Aires 3 December 1999.