Today I come to tell you a story that goes through us as Buenos Aires residents. Contains Carlos Gardel, tango and the Almagro neighborhood. A story that runs along Corrientes Street, but in the opposite direction to vehicular traffic. From the port to Chacarita. Of course, with an intermediate stop at an authentic neighborhood cafe. I mean the coffee bar La Orquídeathe Almagro cultural temple that opened in the early 50s of the last century on the corner of Corrientes and Acuña de Figueroa.
I owed a liturgical visit to The Orchid. Also to Almagro. It’s been a while since I’ve been around the neighborhood. I entered the cafe, as I always do, with the intention of writing the chronicle in the place, and looked for an outlet to plug in. “We don’t have any outlets here,” the waiter responded while I wandered aimlessly checking sockets. Good. I won’t deny that it comforted me to know that La Orquídea is an analog cafe. And I went back to the notebook and the pen.
La Orquídea is a milestone within the neighborhood heritage. Debator of the deceased Flower Market that occupied the opposite block. From there it got its name. Although today I bring another reason. They will already know it.
The place is a spacious, generous and bright living room covered in wood up to three quarters high. The windows are sashes. They still keep the bronze bar in the middle so they can draw curtains. Although these were removed since the last overhaul of the place about 15 years ago. The café bar has four ceiling fans, also made of wood, with flower-shaped lampshades. There are seven wall coat racks. Almost the entire front of the room is accompanied by the bar. There are approximately ten meters of wood and tin. The staff dresses to match the furniture. The large windows, some blackboards inside and the signs indicating the genders at the entrance to the bathrooms They are intervened by the filleting master Gustavo Ferrari. Bingo. The harmony is total. Now La Orquídea has also increased its capacity with some tables outside. They are in a deck that advances over Acuña de Figueroa. Ideal pets.
I ordered a coffee with a croissant and it came with a slice of bread pudding. If I had known I would avoid flour. Know it. Fact.
The usual congregation of La Orquídea is made up, almost entirely, of neighbors. Many writers, members of the artistic colony and musicians. Mario Alarcón, the actor who plays a judge in The secret of your eyeschat with some friends at the bar. The waiters bring coffees with milk and croissants. The strong point of the place is its toasted crumb. At a table, a sixty-year-old with “the snows of time silvering his temples” drinks a cut in a jar accompanied by scrambled eggs. The boys before did not use proteins. I consumed my service and went to the bar to chat with the manager. His name is Alterio Mora. Alterio—which is his first name—has been at La Orquídea for 38 years. It survived five changes of ownership. That’s what he told me. Man must do something good.
Currently, it is open from 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 a.m. Monday to Monday. La Orquídea once boasted of being the only café bar in Buenos Aires open 24 hours a day. The public did not change. Yes, customs and lack of money.
In truth, I approached to chat with this man with the name of a tango singer convinced that he could confirm the story I have come to tell you. When I finished narrating it he looked at me bewildered. I had never heard it. And it may be because it happened many years ago. It even predates the opening of the cafe. It was transmitted to me by Osvaldo Peredo, a hero of the nights at Roberto’s Boliche, the miraculous little chapel that still provides spiritual—and alcoholic— shelter in Bulnes almost Perón, diagonally from Plaza Almagro.
The legend in question is one more stitch of the darning that unites Carlos Gardel with Corrientes Street. In its long extension Corrientes crosses the neighborhoods of San Nicolás, Balvanera, Almagro, Villa Crespo and Chacarita. It is known that the Café Guaraní of Corrientes and Esmeralda had reserved a table for the Gardel-Razzano duo to feed them after their presentations at the Maipo, then Teatro Esmeralda. What can we say about the umbilical cord that united the brat Carlitos with the Mercado del Abasto. Or the house – today the Carlos Gardel House Museum – about Jean Jaurés that Zorzal bought for his mother on the outskirts of Corrientes. However, the link between Gardel and Almagro is not so permeated in popular consciousness. With central knot at the corner of Corrientes and Acuña de Figueroa.
The first scene of this film takes place in Luna Park. It is February 1936. The heatwave is settling with all its humid weight on Buenos Aires. At 0 Corrientes, a crowd gathers around the usual place reserved for the ring inside the Palacio de los Deportes. In its place, a burning chapel has been set up to bid farewell to the remains of Carlos Gardel who arrived at Dársena Norte on the Steam Pan America, after the fateful accident that killed him in Medellín. The wake lasts all day and night. The next morning the procession leaves on foot for the Chacarita Cemetery. A crowd in their best clothes, sweating profusely, slowly advances the seventy blocks of the street that separates the Bajo from the cemetery.
When the caravan reaches 4100 Corrientes, this is the intersection with Acuña de Figueroa, a very humble woman, unattractive and bent over with anguish, makes room among the neighbors who throw flowers along the way to stand in front of the mass of fanatics and stop their advance. The event surprises the crowd. The woman advances to the hearse, lifts an orchid among so many different types of flowers from the floor and places it as an offering on the coffin. From among the audience watching the scene absorbed, a good man emerges who, moved by the gesture, approaches the woman and helps her leave, allowing the procession to advance. And it is known that he protected her so much that shortly afterward he ended up marrying her and giving her a son who was obviously named Carlitos. This is the story that Osvaldo Peredo told me at a table at Roberto’s Boliche one night of tangos and wines at the end of his time as a singer. Take it or leave it.
Almagro is a tango by Vicente San Lorenzo whose first stanzas read: “How I remember, beloved neighborhood, those years of my childhood”. Carlos Gardel came to record it. You can listen to it on Spotify. Why do I mention it? Because a few blocks from Corrientes and Acuña de Figueroa, on Don Bosco Street, is the Pío IX School where Gardel attended as a child.
At the Salesian Institute, little Carlitos Gardés – his mother’s real surname – was Ceferino Namuncurá’s classmate. The other myth that flies over Almagro, not without hesitation, points out that on the occasion of an assignment for Music class, Gardel composed his first tango and that the lyrics were written by his Indian buddy. The unpopularity of the fable is due to the fact that tango was born cursed. That the clash of cultures between a French child and a Mapuche child produced a clash of energies that generates irreversible damage just by singing or whistling it. In 2014 I wrote the script for a short film produced by INCAA about this story. And the main actor was Osvaldo Peredo playing himself. But I don’t want to cause any setbacks with this memory. Better to return to the La Orquídea café bar because the story is not over yet.
Always according to Peredo, many years later, based on the transcribed events, with the bar operating, it was created the Order of the Orchid. They were single women who were walking around the Flower Market, They would buy an orchid, and cross the street to leave the flower on the windowsills of the bar hoping to find the love of their lives.
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