GARDEL: NUMERO UNO IN HEARTS OF ARGENTINES

Carlos Gardel sang better than ever Monday, and Argentina paused, with nostalgic smiles and fresh tears, to honor his memory.

“Who is Carlos Gardel?” may sound like a trivia game question, but for uncounted millions of Latin Americans, the answer is obvious in half-century-old recordings aired daily from Ushuaia, Argentina, to Queens, N.Y.

Gardel is an unblemished and lasting Latin-American legend, the Argentine Sinatra, a macho, trench-coated singer who made the Argentine tango an international dance. As the saying goes here, “Carlitos sings better every day.”

On Monday, the 50th anniversary of Gardel’s death in a plane crash in Medellin, Colombia, the Uruguay Post Office issued a commemorative stamp in his honor. In Queens, where he made four talkies (including “Tango on Broadway”), the large Latin-American community there was collecting money for a Gardel statue. Recitals in his honor were on programs scheduled at New York’s Town Hall and Carnegie Hall.

Gardel has had many imitators over the years, but only Eva Peron, the charismatic second wife of the late dictator Juan D. Peron, is serious competition as Argentina’s greatest 20th-Century hero. And, despite stiff imported competition, the tango endures as Argentina’s national sound.

The tango--its music formal, yet rough and sexy, its lyrics a litany of life’s injustices--mirrors Argentina’s self-image. And, as its paramount interpreter, so does Gardel--battered and cynical, bittersweet, certainly, but ultimately enduring.

Before Gardel, Argentines danced to a music born of local and foreign influences in Buenos Aires waterfront dives. In 1917, Gardel daringly sang a tango called “Mi Noche Triste” (My Sad Night). Argentines have been singing tangos ever since, but no one, Argentina agrees by acclamation, has ever sung one as well as Gardel.

“I never heard a voice more beautiful or more sonorous,” Bing Crosby once said.

“Read the lyrics of a thousand tangos if you want to understand Argentina,” Argentine newspaper editor Jacobo Timerman once challenged a visiting American scholar.

Here in Buenos Aires on Monday, people brought flowers and placed smoldering cigarettes between the nicotine-stained fingers of his statue at Chacarita Cemetery. Plaques affixed to his crypt ascribe supernatural powers to the dead singer: “Carlitos, thanks for your help,” reads one, signed “Amelia, Nov. 15, 1979.”

A distinguished cross section of Argentine society joined anonymous tango buffs at Buenos Aires’ historic Teatro Colon on Monday night to hear the national symphony’s premiere of a Carlos Gardel Oratory. The Argentine Congress had already paid its tribute with a musical program dedicated to Gardel.

What used to be the the Aguero subway stop became Carlos Gardel Station on Monday, complete with a handsome tile mosaic in which a smiling Gardel vows his love, “body and soul.”

To mark the anniversary, a symposium of scholars presented learned papers on the meaning of his life and his art. As usual, most of the scholars agreed that Gardel was born in France in 1890, but a few die-hards held out for Uruguay, in 1887. Gardel himself used to brag that he was born of an unmarried immigrant mother “in Buenos Aires, at age 2 1/2.”

“The sociological and philosophical studies about the Gardel myth are senseless. He is not a myth, but a living presence in Buenos Aires,” asserted writer and Gardel fan Bernardo Verbitsky.

On Argentine airwaves, even such awesome heroes of modern culture as Michael Jackson and Madonna could not compete Monday with Carlos Gardel, dead for 50 years.