A sober application of the anachronism’s technique, as doctor Faustroll used to tell, brings on imaginary solutions: during the Siberian adventure hunting for the golden train, Corto falls in General Ungern Kahn’s hands. We are in the middle of the steppe, the situation is very tense, the interests on the line are inextricable.  Ungern and Corto, like poets in a reading at Berkeley, recite Coleridge, talk and hit it off with lyrics and images. Two real Gentlemen of Fortune in action. They drink vodka, get emotional, remember. Eugenio Genero pops up: "When my Venexia, over the roofs of your houses…", some Gardel’s records are played on the gramophone.  The Tango’s thaumaturgical effects are melancholy-proof. The General goes away humming a melody of his own creation over the text Corto has just given him: it’s the tango Margot, words by Celedonio Flores, music by Ungern Kahn, whose final is the epigraph on this foreward.
Some years later, in 1923, Corto Maltese comes back to Buenos Aires. The Tango has changed deeply, but the sailor is so engrossed in his personal affairs that he doesn’t care much about it. His friend Eduardo Arolas is in Paris where he will be killed by a macrò shortly after. People stay away from the night-spots at the Boca and rather attend the cabarets at the Avenida Corrientes.  "A moustache is saddening the Riachuelo" - Borges writes of Juan de Dios Filiberto (who is either holder of moustache and composer of tangos of great renown). Actually, at the harbour, there is no more the fun of ten years before. The former adventurers now are

Naufragos del mundo que han perdido el corazòn

as the Enrique Cadicamo and Juan Carlos Cobian’s tango Nieblas del Riachuelo says. 
The Tango is all the fashion not only in Paris and in Europe, but in the same Buenos Aires. The Roarin' Twenties prescribe that everybody must update and take appropriate measures: les jeux sont faits, the Argentine economy is at last well started in accordance with the international Capital’s directives, and the Tango, as well as any other corporation, has to open a branch office downtown.
Corto is still loyal to the Suburb’s Muse. The confiteria tangable is alien to his nature, he doesn’t mix up with the family audience who cheers the Gardel’s fake version of Margot  (this is a plagiarized work against Ungern, which the modern Performing Rights Society would certainly punish). Sometimes he goes to the barrio of Boedo and visits his friends the poets Nicolas Olivari, Carlos De La Pua (alias El Malevo Muñoz) and Raul Gonzalez-Tuñon, who introduce him to the Julio De Caro’s innovative Tango. One night, in a little place in Triumvirato named La Chancha (The Sow), which is near to his lodgings at the tyre repairer El Parche Honrado (The Honorable Stopgap), Corto listens to the young Osvaldo Pugliese playing his tango Recuerdo thirty times in a row, under those melomaniacs’ threatening will, or maybe in spite of it.
One more marginal note about the Maltese’s agenda in this period: the Borges station really exists. The train traffic is controlled by a simple a very exact timetable. It consists of a domestic blackboard on which the Borges’ stationmaster writes with a piece of chalk the updated figures his fellow stationmasters relay to him from the other stations along the rail. Never, in two hundred years, a train arrived, stayed or left with the slightest gap with the timetable, at the Borges station.

Marco Castellani, 1998  
© Hugo Pratt "Tango" - Lizard Edizioni, 1998

COVER            VERSIONE ITALIANA