Chavela Vargas died on August 5th. Read died on August 5th. Read Benjamin Moser . Photograph by Marco Ugarte/AP Photo.

When I was twenty-three, I found myself killing time in San Joaquín de Flores, Costa Rica. The town was within commuting distance of the capital, San José, but had few metropolitan airs: it was a place, I was told, where addresses were unnecessary, and where, in order to find the person I was looking for, all I needed to do was ask any passerby for the “Casa de la Vargas.”

It was an unlikely place to look for Chavela Vargas, whose great age, famous affairs, and heartbreaking renditions of the Mexican classics made her one of the monuments of Latin America. Indeed, for the rich exoticism of the myths surrounding her life, no other singer came close. There were stories of Chavela in Acapulco in its glory days, singing at Liz Taylor’s wedding and then slipping off to bed with Ava Gardner; there were stories of her speeding down the Paseo de la Reforma in the white Alfa Romeo that was a gift of the Mexican President Adolfo López Mateos; there were even stories, which Vargas heatedly denied, of her carrying off peasant girls at gunpoint.

Majestic and beautiful until the very end of her life, she compiled an amorous résumé that ranks among the most distinguished in the history of twentieth-century lesbianism. “I live only for you and Diego,” Frida Kahlo told her. She had an affair with the magnate and collector Dolores Olmedo; rumor linked her to fellow-divas Lola Beltrán and María Félix; and then, she told me in Costa Rica, she had lived a great passion with “the most famous woman in the world.” She refused to elaborate—the mystery (Taylor?) remains for future biographers.

The darker stories were as notorious. The queen of the bohemians of the Plaza Garibaldi, the traditional center of Mexican music, Vargas saw her life almost destroyed by drink; she consumed it such quantities that she later joked that there was no decent tequila left in Mexico—she and the songwriter José Alfredo Jiménez, another musical legend, had polished it all off. Jiménez died from cirrhosis, in 1973, and Chavela’s own alcoholism was so devastating that she disappeared entirely for more than fifteen years. Friends assumed that she had died. “If anyone goes to Mexico,” the famous Argentine singer Mercedes Sosa reportedly said, “place a rose for me on Chavela Vargas’s tomb.”

She attributed her pain to her terrible upbringing in Costa Rica, where, as a child in San Joaquín, she was tormented for her sexuality (“What hurts isn’t being homosexual,” she said, “it’s that people throw it in your face as if it were a plague”), and to her early struggles in Mexico, where she arrived as a teen-ager. She claimed that she had sold some chickens to pay for the bus fare. She sang in cantinas for years, until Jiménez discovered her on a corner of the Avenida Insurgentes. This time, the myth suggests a pedigree: Edith Piaf, after all, had been discovered singing on a street in Pigalle.

There was a lot about Chavela that, like these legendary stories, was hard to believe. When I first heard her, on a CD a friend lent me in college, I couldn’t believe, first of all, that that murky, rough voice was a woman’s. And I couldn’t believe that the songs were the same anthems—with their sequined interpretresses, sombreroed mariachis, and screeching ai-yai-yais—that provided the backdrop to the margaritas of my youth. What was easy to believe, hearing the voice, was that Chavela Vargas had known an uncommon share of hard luck. And as she uncovered the core of poetic emotion in those cheesy old songs, she enunciated, for me, a longing that I had vaguely felt since adolescence: a first intuition of adult passion, of loves that burn all the more brightly because they are fleeting.

From the moment I heard that recording, I was infatuated. As I found more and more of her albums, I grew determined to track her down, and when at last I discovered her, in Costa Rica taking care of her ailing sister Ofelia, I headed there as soon as I could. Once there, however, it was not easy to find her. As promised, the “Casa de la Vargas” was known to every citizen. But she was so persistently not home that after a few days of trying, I assumed she didn’t want to see me, and headed to Nicaragua. When I returned to Costa Rica, I tried again. This time, Vargas picked up the phone and told me to come right on over.

Dressed in a T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops, the grande dame was living in a tiny apartment in the town where she had been born in 1919. She was not thrilled to be back. If Costa Rica is today the only Latin American country that might fairly be described as suburban, in her childhood it was a harsh, isolated, conservative place, as far from the cultural ferment of Mexico as Dubuque is from Manhattan. “Ten families own this whole country,” she said, eyes widening with dismay. She hadn’t been here in years, and had only returned because of her sister’s illness. “I owe my whole life to Mexico. And to myself.” She had been influenced by nobody. She owed her prominence to no one—except, she said, to the Aztec gods.

I had never conducted an interview in my life. Imagining that this Olympian figure would never deign to speak to a mere fan, I said that I was a journalist and, to prove it, bought a cheap tape recorder at the Miami airport. When I took it out of my bag, I first observed a rule I have since seen proven again and again: as a change comes over the features of a person being photographed, a voice that knows it is being recorded changes, too. Before I turned it on, Chavela was relaxed. On the sofa that doubled as her bed, she inquired about my trip to Nicaragua and peered anxiously into my coffee to make sure I didn’t really want sugar.

When I fumblingly hit the “record” button, the friendly old lady’s voice gained the enunciation of a prima donna, the informal accent ceding to the careful syllables of an unschooled woman eager not to betray her lack of education. Here was the great singer, and here was her mythology—the Indian family that had saved her from alcoholism, for example, and the tribe that had anointed her a shaman (La Chamana was one of her nicknames). But in her touching way of mentioning how many people—and not just anyone!—loved and admired her, I could hear just how completely she had been abandoned and despised. She repeatedly mentioned how her “spouse,” Pedro Almodóvar, had put her music in his films; and how Isabel Preysler, Julio Iglesias’s glamorous ex-wife, had recently thrown a party for her in Madrid; and how the then-President of Argentina, Fernando de la Rúa, had personally begged her to stay in Buenos Aires. In the dingy apartment in San Joaquín, these names shone with otherworldly lustre.

Of all these famous people, she spoke most longingly of her companion from the Plaza Garibaldi, José Alfredo, known to all Mexico, like Chavela herself, by his first name only. “I lifted his songs to the height of glory,” she declaimed, speaking of places unfathomably distant from that little apartment. “I took them to the Olympia, in Paris, to the Palau de la Música, in Barcelona, to the greatest theatres in the world.”