—We can’t just ignore it, Soldi says, relaxing in his seat, speaking to Nula but turning back and forth to Gabriela, as though to ask her approval for everything he says. In the forties, he says, the movement created a stir, even on the national level. Brando regularly published articles in La Prensa and La Nación. Cuello, who is our principal informant for the first period, and who, for political reasons especially, thinks more or less the same of Brando as Tomatis, admits that the cultural life in the province was genuinely shaken by the arrival of precisionism. Like every belligerent avant-garde, they had almost everyone against them, and in particular Cuello’s group—what you might call pastoral realists—which practiced a kind of social costumbrismo and constantly published polemics against the precisionists in Copas y bastos. Curiously enough, after 1946, Cuello and Brando belonged to the same political party that had just taken power, but inasmuch as one was basically proletariat, the other was an elitist bourgeois who some people even called a fascist. Cuello’s magazine took its name from two verses in the Martín Fierro: En oros, copas y bastos / juega allí mi pensamiento, and in the first issue the editorial collective announced (and Soldi laughs as he quotes the line): Cups to share with friends and clubs for the ones who call us out to the crossroads. What do you think?
—No more or less aggressive than Breton and his friends, our criollos, Nula says, pleased to see that the comparison provokes an involuntary smile not only in Soldi but also in Gabriela.
And Soldi continues: The best literary magazine in the city was El río, which Higinio Gómez published in the early thirties, before he left for Europe. Since he paid for it out of pocket, more or less, Soldi says, when he left the city the magazine disappeared, and when he returned a few years later he didn’t have a penny, so he stayed in Buenos Aires and went to work at Crítica. But in the forties, according to Soldi, of the three important magazines that came out more or less regularly, Nexos, the official organ of the precisionists, was the best. Espiga, edited by the neoclassicists, unlike Cuello and his friends’ magazine, was in direct competition with Brando. Some time later, in the mid-fifties, a highly experimental broadside called Tabula rasa started coming out: About this, Washington, who’d just finished a stay at the psychiatric hospital, had once (in so many words) said, Drivel without punctuation is still drivel, but in this instance, despite being typed in all lower case, this is Drivel with a capital D. The other two magazines, Espiga and Copas y bastos, had preceded Nexos, which was first published in 1945, and in a sense its release shook our small literary world from a slumber, an awakening as rude as it was abrupt: Brando and his followers, with their radical and exclusive aesthetic, were trying to show that the others didn’t really exist at all. According to Soldi, the defensive rejoinders from the magazines that the precisionists attacked, and even Cuello’s present memories, those of a calm and stable old man, all brim with outrage and resentment. The precisionist manifestos were graphic to the point of personal injury, and while the novelty of their theories made them feel disoriented and out of fashion, the absolute certainty with which they were formulated seemed to demonstrate beyond a doubt that up until that moment they’d been living in darkness. That clamorous novelty, widely celebrated and discussed on the radio, glossed approvingly in the press, discussed on conference panels, in university seminars, welcomed assiduously by the papers in Buenos Aires and even in Montevideo and Santiago de Chile, had something offensive about it because it apparently intended to substitute not one magazine for another, not one outdated aesthetic for an innovative one, but rather a provincial and harmonious universe in which each act and each object was indexed and classified, for another, up till then unknown, governed by laws that up till then they’d neglected, and that was there to rearrange their very essence, as if something brilliant, perfect, and rare had come to unmask them as the disordered, coarse, and antiquated beings they really were. They’d gone to bed thinking they were artists and intellectuals and had woken up ignorant and backward provincials. The precisionists’ autocratic doctrines and attacks undermined not only what they wrote, but also what up till that moment they believed they’d been. And, according to Soldi, the overlapping testimonies that he and Gabi had gathered for their investigation were unequivocal: the conflicts and bitterness had lasted almost fifty years, continuing even after Brando’s death—from colon cancer in 1981—made plain by Cuello and Tomatis’s reactions, and especially the more or less novelized history written by their fourth informant, the old man who’d been caught up in all those conflicts for more than three decades and who now prefers to remain anonymous.
Soldi stops speaking and thinks, as though he were searching for something to add. His curly, closely trimmed black beard, which starts at his sideburns and covers his entire face and part of his neck, leaves a small opening for his mouth, which despite its owner’s silence has remained half open, possibly remaining available for the use that he may want to put it to once his search through the shifting, unstable, and highly deceitful corners of his memory yields the appropriate conjunction to his previous subject and the command arrives from the organs that transform memories into words, into sonorous material, and it can propel them into the external world. But actually Soldi has been distracted from the story because an unusual thought, but which he’s had before, has crossed the narrow but brightly lit stage of his mind, filling it completely. In the midst of the literary conversation that Nula apparently listens to carefully, Soldi thinks of the extra-literary consequences that they might have had for the people implicated, as they say, by all those conflicts, ruptures, betrayals, all the enmity, hatred, verbal and even physical aggression, the slander and denunciations, the acts of cruelty, the suicides, and all caused by disputes over vocabulary, form, themes, and exposure in print and on the radio. Soldi knows that there was something between the son of a friend of Cuello’s, a young engineer, and the daughter of a precisionist, and that their respective families had done everything they could to break up the relationship. One of the editors of Espiga, who people said was sexually attracted to children, had ended up committing suicide, though it was never clear if it was because of the guilt or the rumors that, because of indiscretion or malice, were circulated among other literary groups, and even within his own. Gutiérrez told them about a time he accompanied a precisionist to a radio show, and as they left the studio two neoclassicist poets who’d been waiting to come in after them started beating down the precisionist and had to be pulled off him by the radio staff, and because Brando had introduced him, in an ambiguous way, as a member of the group, when in fact he was just a clerk at the law firm, Gutiérrez himself had received several threats and insults over the telephone. Cuello claims that Brando anonymously denounced the social realists as communists, and Tomatis, who admits that he doesn’t have any other proof apart from what Cuello said, confirms it, because if Cuello had been capable of that kind of slander he wouldn’t have been friends with Washington Noriega for over forty years, and besides, to him, Tomatis, those denunciations (most likely indirect and no doubt anonymous) seem like something Brando would’ve done. If their informants hadn’t been as trustworthy, Soldi wouldn’t have believed all those stories. The author of the text, who by now is very old, and who’s made them promise a thousand times not to mention his name, talks about Brando and his friends in a sarcastic way that reveals a contained resentment, and fifty years of mulling over the same insults and meanness doesn’t seem to have been long enough for him to say everything he has to say. But neither he nor Gabi enjoy those stories, they depress them, actually. By temperament, Soldi’s own life is solitary and private—Tomatis is the only person who knows that he’s had a long-running sexual relationship with a much older married woman—his inclination toward literature doesn’t include the contingencies of its personalities, and is made exclusively of texts, ideas, and forms, and there isn’t room for anecdotes or gossip, not even for biographies. Within that almost abstract relationship, it’s hard for him to see how a di
fference in aesthetics could produce hatred rather than dialogue, or how a truly accomplished work could produce anything but admiration. He’s ashamed of all the slag they’ve been collecting over the course of their investigation, and though he sometimes relates those stories to another person, each time he does so he feels exposed, as though he too had committed a base act, betraying himself first of all, but especially those dazzling, steely objects, made so curiously of the deft association of words, and seeming more permanent than the accidental, mutable, and empty transience of the material world.
Nula and Gabriela Barco wait patiently through those seconds of hesitation, and Nula looks into the distance, to the north, toward the place where the blue sky meets the horizon, an irregular green line interrupted by trees and shrubs, where scattered and apparently static cloud masses emerge, suspended over many points in the vast, blue sky. The sandy road that begins just after the embankment is slightly oblique relative to the bluish horizontal of the asphalt, and some three hundred meters off, more or less, is lost in an organic background, swallowed abruptly by the darkening green foliage, the borders of the yellow strip converging, through the effect of perspective, until they almost meet. The horizon, Nula thinks, paradigm of the external, is in fact the result of a human impossibility: the parallels do not meet at an infinitely distant point, but rather in our imaginations. A good portion of the world exists because I exist. I should note this down but I’ll wait till later—I shouldn’t forget it—because if I do it in front of them I’ll have to give them some kind of an explanation and if I tell them the truth it might sound pedantic. But, contrary to what he’s just decided, he reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket, pulls out his notebook, and opens it. Beneath the last note, which he wrote yesterday in Paraná, at around the same time, after leaving Lucía’s—Sensory deficiency makes chaos seem like harmony. Flight of butterflies—he draws a horizontal line in the middle of the next space to separate it from the next note, and, with Gabriela and Soldi watching him discreetly, after thinking for a few seconds, as though he’s alone, he props the notebook on the transversal rail of the steering wheel and without rushing, writes, Optical illusion and external reality (Horizon, parallels, etc.). When he finishes, he closes the notebook and puts in back in his jacket pocket, and then, clicking the end of the pen so as to make the tip disappear into the metal tube that protects the ink cartridge, inserts it, vertically, into the same pocket, hanging it in place by its clip on the edge of the pocket. Then he looks up and meets the gazes of Gabriela and especially Soldi, whose look expresses a combination of curiosity, surprise, and a vague and inexplicable satisfaction.
—It’s nothing, Nula says. I just remembered an order I took on the phone this morning and I had to jot it down so I wouldn’t make a mistake later.
Gabriela seems satisfied with Nula’s somewhat hasty explanation, but Soldi furrows his brow skeptically, the inside edges of his black eyebrows gathering at the bridge of his nose while the outside edges rise to his temples. Soldi turns to Gabriela.
—Don’t believe him, he says. He’s writing an ontology of becoming.
—Is that all? Gabriela says.
—The problem demanded a sacrifice, and I offered myself, Nula says softly, narrowing his eyes, theatrically underscoring the humility of the philosophical martyr and apparently delighting his interlocutors. Though he’s flattered by the response, he considers it an obligatory gesture of courtesy to ask Soldi about the fascinating point at which he interrupted his story, the old man who knows so much about those literary skirmishes. How did they find out about him? How’d they contact him? How’d they gain his confidence? How’d they manage to get a copy of the text and how did they convince him that they were really going to protect his anonymity?
—My aunt Ángela, my mother’s sister, Gabriela says. They’re close friends, and she introduced us. Actually the idea for the history of the avant-garde only came up after we met him, isn’t that right Pinocchio?
In the quick look that Soldi and Gabriela exchange, Nula senses a spark of collusion, or complicity maybe, and he’s not wrong. Gabriela has left out of her explanation that, decades before, her aunt Ángela was in love with the anonymous author of the precisionist history, but he’d had to explain to her that even though she was the person he loved most in the world, women weren’t his strong suit. Her aunt had remained single, and has lived with her friend for years in a platonic relationship. Those facts are only known outside the family by Soldi, who’d never reveal them, which explains why the knowing look that they’ve just exchanged is followed by a slightly awkward silence. Actually the last few ironic words they’ve traded conceal the fact that their interest in the conversation is starting to fade. It’s difficult to tell the reason why some conversations follow that course, becoming quickly animated, lasting for a while at a certain level of intensity, and then, gradually, and sometimes suddenly, fading away and extinguishing. Talking is, after all, a physical activity, and after a while it gets tiring; the translation of thoughts into words, when they’re often fundamentally different, the exercise of the respiratory system, and the muscle movements required by the practice of language inevitably produce a certain fatigue, but most of the tension comes from the effort required to filter out the internal hum, subduing it and hiding it and adjusting oneself to the external world, those two contradictory and mutually opposed infinities that nonetheless supply each other, existing because their opposite also exists, and at the same time, sooner or later, reciprocally, they annihilate each other.
Soldi, changing the topic, says he has a date with Tomatis that night at the Amigos del Vino. Would he, Nula, like to join them? Why not, he’ll call Diana right now and ask her to come along, if she’s free. Nula pulls out his cell phone from the side pocket of his jacket, but Soldi nods and waves goodbye—Gabriela has leaned back against her seat—and, turning the ignition key, pulls away. Nula, surprised, is frozen with the phone in his hand, and smiles hesitantly and inquisitively at Gabriela, who, turning around, shrugs and makes a helpless gesture, and as the car turns onto the asphalt, gives him a friendly wave.
—What’s the hurry? she says.
—Hurry? Soldi asks, unsettled, surprised.
—Your friend didn’t think we were leaving so soon, Gabriela says.
—I was trying to be polite and didn’t want to listen in on a conjugal conversation, Soldi says. And besides, we’ve been blocking the street for a long time.
Turning around all the way in her seat, she sees that the dark green colored station wagon, or long hatchback, has started its descent toward the sandy road. Straightening up, absent for several seconds from her surroundings, she holds in her imagination the dark green shape moving slowly up the street and, when it gets to the first corner—in reality, one side of the street is all countryside and the other is dotted with two or three wooden houses in the middle of a wooded plot—it turns right, drives about twenty meters, and stops next to the gate outside Gutiérrez’s house. Like an image projected by an external source, extraneous to her will, the scene, materialized briefly, without apparent reason, from the darkness, is interrupted suddenly, almost accidentally, despite its clarity, from the same consciousness where it had been projected, and Gabriela once again observes, with a kind of muted euphoria, the landscape that rolls past or that rushes to meet them as the car gradually picks up speed. Beyond the dusty weeds that grow on the embankment along the edges of the road, modest unplastered brick houses alternate with a few ranches and, every so often, with more-finished houses, plastered and whitewashed, with carefully installed thatch or tile roofs, with small gardens alongside or out front, with fruit trees or other larger shade trees, eucalyptus or acacias, mulberries or bitterwoods that have made it through the summer with their dense foliage still intact. All the vegetation, even the willows, abundant near the river, and which fade before the rest, is still green, and in the gardens the red hibiscus flowers, and those of other species of the same color, shimmer in the
afternoon light, which the enormous masses of scattered clouds do nothing to block, fleeing from the sun (which is still high) and dissolving into a sky that’s been cleansed by the previous days of rain. Every so often she sees people sitting at a table under the trees, finishing their meal in the shade. Many, and not necessarily the most finished or comfortable ones, are weekend houses, and some of the cottages, whitewashed and carefully looked after, reveal a kind of rural elegance, produced by the intricate, diverse, and ancient vegetation that protects them, adorns them, and distinguishes them. Small, azure-colored swimming pools (the large ones only appear in Rincón itself, or in the residential neighborhood above the floodplain, where Gutiérrez lives), made of plastic, oval, or less traditional shapes, cloverleaf for example, show up every so often in the back yards, along with spherical mud ovens resting on a square brick base and grills in the open air or sheltered under a pavilion, clotheslines loaded with motionless, shining clothes, a motorcycle leaning against a tree, an old car or a light truck parked at the entrance, between the road and the front garden, chicken coops, corrals, vacant lots where a horse or a cow grazes, birds flying between the trees, or which appear from the foliage and land on the power lines or on the posts that spring up at regular intervals along the road, then taking off suddenly and flying off, shrinking in size and disappearing somewhere in the direction of the river. This section of the coast was less populated when her parents and her parents’ friends, Tomatis, the Garay twins, Pancho Expósito, were young, and excluding Rincón, was considered inhospitable wilderness. The region, for years deserted and poor, had slowly been developed, first by small ranches scattered randomly over the countryside, then by industrial chicken farms, by brick factories, by otter hunters, shell miners, and fishing outfits, and later by union-owned recreational centers, by fish and game or bocce clubs, summer camps, and finally by people from the city who’d buy a small plot for pocket change and, as the story goes, would build a small cottage or a cinder block house or even a fancier, tree-shaded cabin with their own hands, or they’d hire someone else to do it. In New Jersey, where Gabriela had gone to finish her literary studies, opulence and poverty were only juxtaposed in large urban centers, in contrast to the coastline, at least around Rincón, which they’re driving toward, where dilapidated cottages and ostentatious weekend houses coexist apparently without antagonism. After Rincón, the sandy roads that branch out from the asphalt into the countryside or toward the river, to the left or the right of the highway, are more and more populated, and every two or three kilometers, in La Toma, in La Bena, in Callejón Freyre (where the La Arboleda motel is located), there’s a rash of businesses, butcher shops, bakeries, corner stores, tourist stands, nurseries, cigarette kiosks, phone banks, groceries, and drink stands. And all along the route, to La Guardia and even to the entrance to the bridge over the lagoon, crude tin or plywood signs advertise fruit, fresh fish, or meats. Through her euphoria, Gabriela sighs inwardly: that mythical place described in texts and in oral traditions, which her parents had often visited ever since her childhood, had become an overpopulated suburb of the city, so much so that they’d had to widen the asphalt road and put up traffic lights at the busiest intersections. According to Soldi, heavy bottlenecks formed on Sunday nights with people coming back to the city. To top it off they’d filled in and cleared the swamp around La Guardia and, virtually overnight, the loud anachronism everyone calls the supercenter had sprung up. But smiling and narrowing her eyes, feeling the sun through the windshield warming her face, she thinks that luckily they can’t change the pleasant weather, at least not yet.
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