— What’s new with our local avant-garde?
Gabriela hesitates a few seconds before she responds, because she wasn’t expecting the question and because there’s a hint of irony in it, but finally she explains:
— The testimonies coincide and actually overlap quite a bit, at least at some points. We’ve divided the project into three periods, and have gathered different informants for each of them: the forties, the fifties, and the sixties and seventies. Luckily, there’s a lot on paper.
Nula nods, pressing his lips and widening his eyes to show that he’s giving her his complete attention, at once respectful and reflective. The attitude pleases Gabriela, because it seems to show that Nula is able to behave with some deference and stop himself from acting so arrogantly. Soldi, for his part, also leans back against his seat, making room for the two of them to see each other.
— The main problem is with the head of the movement, Mario Brando. Some people say he was a real artist, others think he was a fraud.
— That’s so often the case, isn’t it, Nula says.
— That’s true, Gabriela says. But there’s some consensus from trustworthy sources toward the latter option.
When she says consensus from trustworthy sources, Gabriela is thinking of Tomatis in particular, who, each time he refers to Brando calls him, somewhat affectedly, that miserable fraud, or, more simply, Brando the Swine. And she continues her explanation for Nula, while Soldi, upright against the seat back so as to not interfere in their visual field, also listening extremely carefully, appears to verify, with his eyes, the things Gabriela is saying. For the second period, the second half of the fifties especially, they have the testimony of Gutiérrez himself, in certain respects invaluable, because he worked at Brando and Calcagno’s firm, where Brando was always assigning him work for the magazine. For the first period, they have Cuello, who ran a criollista magazine in the fifties, Copas y bastos, and for the sixties and seventies, they have, among others, Tomatis, who edited the literary supplement to La Región for a long time, where, by the way, he never published a single line of his own work, but which was a platform that Brando often utilized. There are other informants as well, protagonists or witnesses, or both things simultaneously, at one time or another. Then there’re the magazines, El Río, edited by Higinio Gómez in the early thirties; the three eras of Nexos, the official organ of the precisionists; Tabula rasa, an avant-garde magazine that started to come out in the mid fifties; Espiga, published by the neoclassicists of the ’40s generation, who were the most competitive with the precisionists: like them, they mostly wrote sonnets; and, especially in the sixties, Catharsis, published by the Instituto de Letras out of the philosophy department in Rosario. Of course there had been a thousand other magazines published in the region since the turn of the century, representing every national and international tendency in art and literature, and which she and Soldi used for their general study of avant-garde movements, but all the ones she just mentioned had more or less a direct relationship with the precisionists. And then there were the literary supplements and the other sections in local and national papers. And, finally, a singular document, which they’d given Tomatis a copy of, and which they were thinking of publishing as an appendix to their book, but anonymously, because its author, an older man who still lives in the city, and one of their principal informants, doesn’t want to be named because of his connection to the families of several members of the movement. It’s the fragment of a tentative history, more or less novelized, written at the end of the seventies, the decade, in the words of its author, that condemned so many decent people of both sexes to silence, to hiding, to exile, to torture, and to death.
A familiar sound interrupts Gabriela’s explanatory gloss: a horse approaching at a slow trot, its hooves striking quietly against the sandy ground, which, before she has time to turn around, starts up the embankment, scratching softly against the slightly inclined surface where the loose gravel left behind by the paving mixes with the sand. The horse and rider appear suddenly, very close to the car, so much so that, to see the rider completely, Gabriela has to lean her head out the window. And she doesn’t regret it, because she immediately recognizes, with that fondness particular to city dwellers, a figure typical of the coastal countryside, so magnified by her young imagination, a figure represented thousands of times in oil, in watercolor, or in pencil or ink, or even in wood or in marble, by every kind of plastic artist, painters, sculptors, weavers, and illustrators, or recalled in verse and in prose, in elevated or popular language, rhapsodized in chamarritas and litoraleñas, captured in movement by documentaries or films of touristic or critical stripe: A boy of ten or twelve, with dark skin and hair, barefoot and shabbily dressed, riding bareback on a compliant horse that he urges on by kicking its sides with his heels, or by whipping it briskly on its flanks with a green branch. At the edge of the asphalt the horse stops, uncertain, though it’s crossed the road countless times in its life, and the whips with the branch and the kicks become more vigorous, forcing it to brave the provincial highway, changing the sound its hooves make, now on the hard and resonant pavement. And when he reaches the other side, the opposite edge, where the saddest and dustiest weeds in the world grow, the sound of the hooves disappears, creating a sharp contrast between the proximity of the animal, its movements, and the silence with which it executes them.
Gutiérrez, according to Gabriela, who’s just put her head back inside the window, noticing, meanwhile, a considerable difference in temperature between the inside and the outside of the car — as unlikely as it may seem, the air is warmer outside — Gutiérrez shows an extreme tolerance for Brando, despite being fully aware, at the same time, of his character traits. He seems to confuse Brando with his own youth, assigning to the former the supposed values of the latter. But he’s a meticulous and scrupulous informant, and when he has some doubt he doesn’t hesitate to consult his library so as to not overlook anything. Between 1956 and 1960, more or less, the years he studied law and worked at the firm, correspond to the third and final era of Nexos, during which three issues were published. Each issue of the magazine had less to do with precisionism and more with Brando’s own literary and political career: though he’d been a cultural attaché in Rome during the first Peronist regime, he eventually withdrew from the government, going so far as to take part in the coup that overthrew it in 1956. Gutiérrez is aware of Brando’s opportunism, but it doesn’t seem to bother him. At first, the precisionists would meet at a bar downtown that they could all get to easily, but when Brando started to have political aspirations he’d choose more discreet locations — according to Tomatis, his goals demanded a group of literary disciples and collaborators, but since most of them had social and economic positions less relevant than his, he compartmentalized his relationships, to one side the rich and powerful philistines, and to the other his disciples, poor but useful for his literary career — Gutiérrez, who doesn’t hesitate to recognize the truth to that statement, doesn’t appear too scandalized by it, as though the years, the actions, and the protagonists of that lost world had lived a kind of mythic existence, drawn with hard lines in immutable roles they were forced to represent, and were therefore resistant to change, to analysis, and, especially, to ethical critique. According to Gutiérrez, around 1959, Brando spent a year working out the problems presented by the translation of a classical sonnet to the language of precisionism, which is true, because there are some examples of this from the last issue, which appeared in 1960. Apart from his remarkable memory and the pleasure he seems to draw from her and Soldi’s incitements to explore it, Gutiérrez offers a number of supplementary qualities as an informant: that he can tell on his own what might interest them, that he’s a talented student of people, an ethnographer almost, at least with regard to that time period. After more than thirty years away he’s able to describe the small world in which the precisionist poets emerged, and where he didn’t belong, with countless unexpected and invaluable details and a curious mix of indulgence and irony. What they’ve heard him say could be summarized and transcribed more or less as follows: The group was an assortment of famous lawyers and public servants, liberals and addicts of the eleven o’clock Mass, philistine patrons and high school teachers, Peronists, conservatives, and radicals, wealthy and poor, led by an ambitious and scrupulous man with a visceral duplicity, and who’d deserve our hatred had his ambitions not been so mean and transparent: to become a minister in the provincial government or land some subaltern post in an embassy and have his name appear every so often in the national press. His most unfortunate trait was his avarice: despite the fact that he’d inherited a fortune from his father, who’d gotten rich from a pasta factory he’d owned in the early part of the century, and had multiplied his assets at the law firm, he always contrived to have his coffee paid for by his disciples, these poor bastards who had meal stipends from the public assistance office or from the national university. But he was a good leader, and when he put aside his darling precisionism he could manage to write a decent sonnet. According to Gutiérrez, his indecent attachment to money had cut short his political career, because in ’56, after the Revolución Libertadora, they’d given him a post as undersecretary of something, Gutiérrez didn’t quite remember what, but Gabriela and Soldi already knew that it was Undersecretary of Public Works, which he was forced to resign from a year and a half later because he’d taken some liberties with public funds.