Heartbreak Tango

The novel opens with the passing of Juan Carlos Etchepare due to tuberculosis. Then the book picks up with the lonely Nélida, a former small-town Argentine beauty who earned the title of Miss Spring 1936 in a rural village in Buenos Aires Province.

By 1947, Nélida is married to a boring and impoverished auctioneer in Buenos Aires. But Nélida still dreams of Juan Carlos Etchepare, the handsome youth that had swept Nélida "off her feet".

The body of the narrative portrays the character of Juan Carlos via the confessions, newspaper clippings, diaries, letters, eyewitness accounts, and remembrances of his life. In a sort of hodgepodge array of these sources, Puig uses the story of Nélida and Juan Carlos as the archetypal contrast between mediocre reality and fantastical dreams, for example when Nélida dreams of her celestial wedding ceremony to Juan Carlos in heaven while taking the bus with her children, only to be disturbed by her son who says he needs to pee. The book touches upon questions of machismo and its damages to both the male and female characters.

The title refers to a fox trot, Rubias de New York, that Carlos Gardel sang in a 1934 film, El tango en Broadway. Boquitas pintadas is a novel in the form of a serial that talks about the loves, pettiness and small miseries of the inhabitants of a town through the history of the provincial love affairs of Juan Carlos Etchepare, a thirties heartthrob marked by the stigma of tuberculosis, with three women: Mabel, a teacher, Nené, the shop assistant and Elsa, a local widow. All this in the midst of backdrops and passions of all kinds.