Corto Maltese arrives in Buenos Aires at the beginning of the past century, when he is just a boy. We don’t have a lot of informations about his stay in Argentina: Hugo Pratt always meant to draw this story, with the characters Corto has met in the early years, and with a stiff dose of Tango, of course.
We are allowed to imagine that Corto follows his inclinations for "the lower town, full of thieves and nice women", and puts up at La Boca, in the Buenos Aires’ south part, next to the meandering banks the Riachuelo describes before flowing into the Rio de la Plata which is 80 miles wide, and stately, there.
La Boca (Xeneise) is the Buenos Aires’ harbour. Its name comes from the italian word “bocca”  (mouth), and its importance from the port. Since more than one hundred years ago it has been populated mostly by italian immigrants, Ligurians for the record, as the adjective Xeneise contemplates. We notice that the Genoeses are practically everywhere in South America, because, since Columbus and by his intercession, they have been the only non-Spanish sailors to be admitted on board Spanish Royal Fleet.
At La Boca, the houses are built with galvanized sheet-iron not because of a premature sense of picturesque, but rather for the ground’s softness which can not bear the bricks’ weight, and are painted in vivid colours like every sea place in the world, since the sailors want to see their houses soon, and from far, when they come home after a long voyage. Besides, at La Boca there are churches, schools, a popular library, a post office, tramways, railways and, what’s more, a lot of nightspots with feminine personnel. This is a good move in a city which is mostly masculine. These legendary cafès are lined up the streets Pinzon, Brandsen, Suarez, Olavarria, Necochea, Almirante Brown, and are named Royal, La Marina, La Popular, Las Flores, Del Griego, De la Turca, La Fratinola (where they ad to have two dead bodies each night on the bill, even without reservation), La Buseca.  In the years between 1900 and 1916 La Boca is the Capital of Tango. All the best Tango players are here: Vicente Greco (Garrote), Gennaro Esposito (el Tano), Roberto Firpo, el Aleman Bernstein  (a bandonòn virtuoso who can play and drink beer in the same time) and especially the great Eduardo Arolas, el Tigre del bandoneòn.
But let’s go back to Corto: in this cosmopolitan and bohemian milieu, he is at ease.  He strikes up lasting friendships, he meets and gets acquainted with poets, musicians, dancers, any kind of adventurers and, of course, thieves. 
Nevertheless, they are still thieves of "the good old days" that the poet Raul Gonzalez Tuñon portrayed like this:

Los ladrones usan gorra gris, bufanda oscura y camiseta a rayas. Y si no, no.
Algunos llevan una linterna sorda en el bolsillo. Por otra parte, se enamoran de robustas muchachas, coleccionan tarjetas postales y a veces lucen un tatuaje en el brazo izquierdo: una flor, un barco, un nobre… Rosita.
Todos los ladrones estan enamorados de Rosita… y yo tambièn.
Los ladrones saben silbar, bajarse de los coches en movimiento y bailar el vals.
Aman sobre todo a su madre anciana y cuando ella se les muere,  cantan un tango, lloran desconsoladamente y de las cosas dejadas por la muerta a repartirse entre los hermanos, eligen una Virgen de plata y el canario………
Y son humanos, inhumanos, fatalistas, sentimentales
Inocentes como animales y canallas como cristianos.
Ninguna angustia los desgarra, cada cual vive como quiere
Cuando la madre se les muere, le ponen luto a la guitarra.

The thieves wear a gray cap, a dark scarf and a striped shirt. Otherwise, nothing...
Some of them carry a flashlight in their pockets. On the other hand they fall in love with stout girls, collect postcards and sometimes show off a tattoo on their left arm: a flower, a vessel and a name… Rosita.
Every thief is in love with Rosita… and me too.
The thieves can whistle, get out of moving cars and dance the waltz.
They particularly love their dear old mother, and when she dies, they sing a Tango, cry disconsolately and, among the things she left to share between the brothers, pick out a silver Virgin and the canary...
And they are human, inhuman, fatalist, sentimental
Innocent like animals and felon like men.
No distress tears them apart, each one lives as he likes
When their mother dies, they drape in black their guitar

In the midst of all these chivalrous rascals, the elegant and wistful figure of our young sailor doesn’t go unnoticed: Vicente Greco has a brand new Tango, yet untitled. He dedicates to his friend Corto Ojos negros, one of his best tunes. After Arolas, Garrote is the most requested musician in Buenos Aires. He knows its secrets, its places, its stories. One night they go together at lo de la Parda Flora, next to the Abasto. We may guess they go to dance the Tango. Arolas is also there for the same reason. He plays on his bandoneòn a sketchy Tango which is brilliant and sensual. Formally, this composition is many years ahead of the cheerful tunes we can listen in the cafès. El Tigre del Bandoneòn has made it for his woman, who he tenderly calls Cachila, after a wild little bird from the pampa. A few years later Corto Maltese will remember this Tango when he says hellò to Pandora, at the end of The Ballad of the Salted Sea. "You remind me a Tango by Arolas…”
In those days of discovery, Corto meets a young man who is uncertain whether to embark on a professional prize-fighter’s career (under the stage name of Kid Cele he has just got a beating from a boxeur called Reilly) or to devote himself to Poetry. With his real name of Celedonio Flores he has won the Ultima Hora prize: his poem, by the title of Por la pinta, will travel with Corto for a long time and have a glorious and unusual destiny.
Aristotle Onassis too is living in Buenos Aires at the time. If they meet, it’s hard to tell: the forthcoming billionaire has a job as night operator in the luxury hotel where richmen, international crooks, land speculators and all kind of wheeler-dealers talk business by telephone with their head offices in Zurich or London. Argentina, ladies and gentlemen, is for sale. The “big families”, the gangs of investors and the banks square up their accounts and share out the fabulous resources of this country which has been at last cleaned-up from indios, caudillos and rebels. Any project of reform is put aside once for all. Onassis taps the informations running along the telephone lines and makes a good use of them, laying the foundations for the future initiatives of his family’s traditional trade: smuggling. Anyway, Corto and Onassis will meet a few years later in the Caorle lagoon recovering the Montenegro gold.
For a young bold man who wants to do good, Argentina is the land of opportunity in this century’s early years.  Corto joins a group of professionals who don’t lack these qualities.  Besides, Butch Cassidy, the Kid and Hetta Place, have a big experience in the bank field, which is not bad, and they like to adventure. We imagine our heroes meeting and talking business at Cafè De La Turca, in the Necochea and Pinzòn corner, with a selected bunch of rascals all around.  In the background, the Eduardo Arolas Trio featuring Leopoldo Thompson and Ernesto Ponzio, is embroidering tangos that are jewels.  Corto and the others go out: dawn is breaking and they mingle with the crowd of immigrants who are just over the compulsory quarantine: they are farm hands – they are called golondrinas because, like the swallows do, they go to and from the hemispheres according to the succession of the seasons – but they are also carpenters, bricklayers, plumbers. Eight hundred thousand of them have arrived in the last ten years.  In a few hours, Corto and his new friends will go south.  Another Arolas’ tango will ride with them as a support and a road mark. Its title is  "Derecho viejo" (Straight on).  

Marco Castellani
TANGO - Hugo Pratt © Lizard Edizioni, 1998

COVER            VERSIONE ITALIANA