It was the first tango lyricist, Argentina's first war journalist, the voice that refuted platitudes rigged by an infamous bourgeoisie that denied poverty.

To find cracks where to escape the prohibitions, to answer the status quo that lies basking in believing that everyone believes, beautiful roses of dignity and rebellion have grown. This memory is small and skewed to encompass the life of a woman who was the first tango lyricist, Argentina's first war journalist, the voice that refuted commonplaces rigged by an infamous bourgeoisie that denied poverty - even if it was obvious- and ended up stating that "the time of the sword had come for the good of the country", giving way to a disgraceful chain of coups. The same bourgeoisie that found comforting and murky emotions in tango where its offspring children-well learned something about life.; but that denied to the same tango the full right to be a legitimate son of that land.

The bourgeoisie encouraged immigration and then felt dread at the "white evil", how he called the crowd of poor people who came down from the boats and were inclined to listen to the proclamations of egalitarian social redemption of the also protesting immigrants. Alcazar Carnelli, today definitely with his real name on the record labels, represents a happy and rebellious audacity, aligned with the writers of the so-called - without pretending to make an ism to use- Boedo Group. They had watched people live, hug and dance the hug, exercise picaresque and prostitution, hang your clothes on the balconies, take care of the daily bread, remember with sorrow the land they left behind the indefatigable ship, look at the sky and dream a different sunrise. With these people he related when he naturally felt that his life was oriented towards a literary destiny.

Very young, in the year 1922, publishes his first book of poems, Woman verses.  There he gives voice to a woman assumed as such, that leaves the scheme of rich and poor. His heart on the side of the latter, forever; but without willingness to voice postulates of a workerist or mimetic nature with such a class. She sings and manifests that she feels intimately that side of life, gets excited about the neighborhoods, The squares, the sounds of the old phonograph where "maybe it could fit / the letter of my destiny". Will also write there:

"I would go, walking slowly,
so far away, on the outskirts,
I would reach the unpopulated
where the city turns
before a field ad.
I would go a lifetime
walking, walking".

His poetry does not miss academic resources, choose a language that is citizen speech, different from the literary arrogance of the dictionary culterans that abounded then. While writing his verses he trains in journalism of a very varied and innovative thematic range, fight for women's equality in civil rights, Marries young and with a child in her custody, divorces soon, having to hold its place in a quiet and close society. In that situation he writes songs among which the tangos ... signed at that time with pseudonyms shine for the authenticity of his word..

To earn a living, he writes in different media. Always willing to work, she goes through magazine offices such asHome, Faces and masks, Fray Mocho, or the newspapersThe nation, News Charts, Clarion, etc. I wrote about what I knew, of what I had walked and explored, of the information I obtained at the foot of the street.

The narrative also bustled. In an emblematic novel of his "I want work",published in 1933, the protagonist married by law of custom, failure, got divorced and "fell" later into prostitution. In time, raised on the shoulders of her own fall, look for work, what you wanted to be done. There he finds himself face to face with the contradictions of the unfavorable or miserable wage. In those struggles he discovers, next to other women, the horizon of liberating struggles where they face conditionings and fears, willing to create another social subject that better expresses their wills for change and transformation. They are texts that make up bets for an aesthetic that integrates the signifiers of a new society made without tutelage, composed of women and men free to choose their lives. In this profile, María Luisa Carnelli inscribes her condition as a cultural worker that she embodied in the aforementioned books and in other titles of poetry collections such asFragile branch, Poems for the window of the poor, Butterflies from the horizon. All these appeared in the decade of 1920, when the pulse of literature was played in Argentina that would come to express the world generated by a bustling and changing society, prosperous and alive. Then avant-garde of different signs flourish. Jorge Luis Borges publishes the “Size of my esperanza”, where he exposes his desire to create the poem of a new world with a breath of the future. Indeed, our poet probably felt that that poem would be a collective work, that of many who made the school of promising identity in the streets phrased by the lyrics of tangos.

He had designated friends among these people. We think of the members of the aforementioned Boedo Group where Castelnuovo carved, Anvil, Olivari, the brothers Enrique and Raúl González Tuñón. Enrique was a sentimental partner María Luisa Carnelli, until the year 1943 in which the writer and journalist died, leaving powerful traces in Argentine cultural history. He stood out as a storyteller and novelist; Y, In his capacity as a journalist, he enhanced attention to the work that was being developed in the popular media through theater and tango. He was a man of the left, steeped in the anarchist ideology that connected M.L.Carnelli -communist- with the tango environment. Any attentive look at the development of popular culture will not miss ostensible ideological connections between the gravitation that could be exercised in a convergent sense with González Tuñón, the versatile and absorbing action of José González Castillo. He had already founded the Peña Pachamac and the Popular University of Boedo, as we have pointed out in another moment. Both writers fostered an atmosphere where young artists met enthusiastic and growing audiences who recognized those who spoke their own language..

The first tango of María Luisa Carnelli dates from 1927; isThe malevo with music by Julio De Caro. They followedLife goes away, Molin Rouge, When the milonga cries, Pal` Cambalache(these last two engravings by Gardel), First water, Linyera, The orange was born green, Turn off the light, The milonga of oblivion, and dozens of more songs with various composers of the leading tango musical line. It is instructive to mention a few names: Teisseire, Francisco De Caro, Pontius, Firpo, Filiberto, Brignolo, Servidio, Rossi, In this, among others. Of the titles it is easy to find different versions, in times and modalities, even today. A good amount of them she signed with the pseudonyms Mario Castro, or Luis Mario. Why? In the early days to hide from the conservative severity of the father who did not even admit that the tango was heard in the family home. Then, Apparently it was the authors of the music that accompanied the lyrics of María Luisa Carnelli who saw better the male pseudonym than the clear female name in the compositions. As if the work degraded them. A woman author of tangos with an abundance of lunfardo in form and substance?? However, she did not flinch. Over the years he was able to impose his name. Some of his lyrics became so famous that they allowed him to affirm, in mature age: "I won more money with one of those tangos than with eight books of poetry and narrative".

In the year 1935, sent by the Argentine magazineNow, he moved to republican Spain. On the occasion of the mining riots in Asturias, of the year 1934. He went there to do journalism at the foot of the mine. In an excellent bookU.H.P. Miners of AsturiasTheir reports and descriptions stand out as a denouncement of how those precincts functioned after the military repression of the leftist revolutionaries. He then went through the shameful Francoist coup d'état and the Spanish civil war that began in the 1936. He was in the trenches of combat and in the daily struggle to survive. He wrote in the Spanish press and sent notes to Buenos Aires. The hardships of the miners in the sinkhole passed through its pages, the resistance from the parapets of Madrid to the offensive of Moroccan units brought by Franco, the nobility of a mother before her murdered son, the need to protect children and the elderly from the roar of enemy artillery, etc. They were articles, speeches, poems ... In 1938, for the death of his mother in Argentina, had to return. The Republican commanders fired her, journalists and intellectuals, headed these by María Teresa León, in Madrid besieged and bombed. He was going to the southern country with the commitment to continue the campaign to support the "fight against international fascism" that was then being waged in Spain..

Let's go back to your registration in the tangos that, we warn, On the whole, their preferences lean towards the ideological and temperamental nuance of the lyric and musical emergence of the decade of 1920 until the beginning of 1930. The tango accompanied by that massive immigration, which was precisely cut into 1930. Then the great population movements were internal, from the Argentine provinces to the capitals. María Luisa Carnelli was interested in those brave times, the first, picaresque ornaments, risky, From rebellious antics to the squeamishness of cultured poetry influenced by late romanticism, as for the modernist trend that enthused the Parnassians. Its protagonists correspond to that time; also the language abounds in lunfardías. It's a daring lyric, sententious, ironic, never elegiac. When the milonga cries, perhaps the most famous title of her, it is not a cry in the first person. It happens out there, very close, but it's exposed with distancing, with descriptive sobriety.

On the other hand, unlike his copious journalistic and narrative work with manifest militant intention, in writing lyrics for tangos he did not privilege exemplary or moral. In his work there is a vindication without lukewarmness of the facts of the suburb, "The voice of reality", the tone and the sayings of the characters that inhabited it.

It seems appropriate to emphasize a semblance that identifies our lyricist. In the spectrum of his ideological and political activism he did not include tango. Except in the transparency that their letters could show, In no case did he make them declarative or emphatic carriers of political positions. Perhaps waiting for the very force of things to produce the transformation. We observe his tango in that tenorAvellaneda, “cute neighborhood, working-class neighborhood / bordering the capital / criminal neighborhood and as a criminal / you are dear, my rival", that has music by Ernesto Ponzio. Before releasing slogans or pamphlet oriflamas, work and wait for the “mud of the real” to experience change. Meanwhile he faced the realization of his own life in freedom. Along with the complaint that in his writings he made about the lacerating side of the class struggle, lashed out at the frustration of the best desires of the poor and women.

In addition, surprising in a way, the one who has usually chosen a male narrator or protagonist in most of his tangos. Was a tango that had to dress as a man like herself in the firm of Luis Mario defeated in the demand of the time?, o Mario Castro for publications? Did you recognize that this was the hegemonic and creative force? Seems contradictory, but in the light of the facts of life it is possible to analyze their positions with broader perspectives, nuanced. Crossing the cities of that time an air of party linked to social progress, that made tangos spring from incognito and open places. His statements seem to point in that direction. Inclusive, the splendid and pomegranate Golden Decade does not interest him any more than that earlier era of 1920-30. "I like tango even 1940 by the force that brings exultation from the same country. It was not commercialized. " To which he adds: “There has been an imperialist penetration of fabulous capitals that has allowed tango to vegetate, while the other rhythms were drowning him ".

About the tango "Se va la vida" (1929), a memory

When capitalism triumphed with its prizes for punctuality at work, as to home virtues, she writes LIFE IS GOING. The tango of then is the work of frontiersmen who lived the night knowing that the capricious muse, untimely, rebellious, disobedient and rebellious, he had already begun to regret his own adoration. In some you hear singing: "The girl breaks and tears / goes to deck already defeated. /Today his neighborhood changed his suit / and the malevaje / is working ".  O, "... today you have changed to the suburb / you have become a working man ...". As well, "I'm going to play daddy / buy babies and be a good worker". Yes. And with the surplus value produced enrich the bosses. Fulfilling schedules in factory shifts that were twelve hours a day without holidays. What, when its decline is conquered, ten o'clock and, Finally, the regulation eight hours, They are marked with the blood of workers spilled with impunity.

Alcazar Carnelli, standing from the other side, between festive and answering writeLife goes away. Is that life goes for everyone, But before that, the obedient exemplars who produce wealth for others will go to those who are marked by their resigned virtues.It leaves and does not return... And we leave behind the only chance to do something!! The possibility of living, to be free, in the only life we ​​had. After, that pulpits tremble, chairs, parliaments and podiums preaching goodness, contraction to work, resignaciones. Let those criticisms come! Even the lightness of sayingif a bacán wants to accommodate you… While the critic who eat at the patron's table enjoy our work!! So is. When it comes to telling what each one has had to do, surely the losers will be those who obey the established order. Although they paint divine to order because God wanted it that way, and said the logician Aristotle for whom the slave was a fifth of human. The Constitution of the United States applied this concept, directly, to blacks. Why go around with mazes?

It leaves and does not return, María Luisa Carnelli sings or shouts under the signature of Luis Mario so that her parents would not make her know what for writing tango lyrics, this middle class woman, in the years 1920. Disguised as a man at the signature, She insistsI wanna, girl / that I finally showed the lint / and I remember the mishio / give him a blow of the ax. What will be the memory mishio, paradigmatic in a young girl? Well, that of a love that invites her to cry and to die of despair. More! So add: I did not regue the flower / of a dream unhappy… Invariably, states and doctrines, schools and families have emphasized that age is the morning of life, in disciplines and responsibilities. Few times did young people stand up and make their voices heard in the gloom of generations. When they got it another rooster crowed in the mornings of the world. We remember the University Reform, In cordoba, Argentina 1918, the French May-June of 1968, the North American youth of 1960-70 that unmasked the infamy of the war in Vietnam ... We remember some more, like the Tlatelolco of Mexican students drowned in blood by the capitalist state. María Luisa Carnelli in a jocular and revolting tone ends the tango with a mandate: …don't think about pain or virtue / I lived your youth. It was time to scandalize a little, to tell those of the morality of fasting and sackcloth, of family income and capital gains, that nothing is taken at face value, that the lyrics of a tango are not made to enter with blood. It goes with music that is danced embraced. The heart of the advice, of latest, is that you fully enjoy your life in bloom. There are no "blue princes" waiting. In tango these questions can be told, singing.

It was the star theme in the voice of Azucena Maizani for a long season. Agustín Magaldi also sang it, Andres Galarce, Horacio Lagos, Juan Carlos Godoy, etc. We chose the version made by Imperio Argentina, with guitar accompaniment, to choose.

Life goes ...

Life goes ...
he leaves and does not return.
Listen to this advice;
if a bacán promises to accommodate you,
enter right old.
It will, pebeta,
who stops her
if not even God holds her,
the best thing is to enjoy it and leave
the penalties to roll.

I wanna,
girl,
that at last he showed the thread
and to the mishio
I remember
hit him with an ax.
Children, what do you want
cry a love
and die, perhaps,
of hopelessness.
Don't beg the flower
from an unhappy dream
why, maybe,
luck reaches you
if you decide.

Life goes ...
he leaves and does not return,
listen to this advice;
if a bacán promises to accommodate you,
enter right old.
Days go by,
the years go by,
joy is fleeting,
do not think about pain or virtue,
I lived your youth.

Source: Rafael Flores Montenegro – https://hispanicla.com/