Juan José Saer - La Grande

The news caused considerable commotion in the literary media. Gamarra, the head editor of Espiga, repeated the same joke everywhere he went, namely that Brando, who took himself for avant-garde, was arriving twenty years late to the march on Rome. But La Región published a very long piece that Brando practically dictated to the journalist, in which it said that the nomination recognized less the value of a man than of an aesthetic and philosophical doctrine. In the three or four weeks leading up to his departure, Brando made himself visible often, on San Martín and at parties, as though he wanted the density of his person, highly polished and neatly combed, to be engraved on everyone’s memory during his absence. His elegance was sober, not that of a dandy, as may have been expected from his avant-garde tendency, but rather that of a tasteful bourgeoisie, who isn’t trying to call attention to himself with extravagances, but who always dresses in the manner that his station both obliges and permits him to be seen in the street, adding two or three personal touches to show that a bourgeois fits naturally into his social class while at the same time being a well-differentiated individual. Some golden accessory, whether they were cufflinks or a tie clip or a ring that stood out when juxtaposed with his wedding band, always gave him an additional glow. Cuello said sarcastically that he always looked like he was on his way to or from a wedding.

With Brando’s departure, the rest of the precisionists scattered: Tardi and two others, Carreras and Benvenuto, fell in with the neoclassicists. Benvenuto started to specialize in German romanticism and eastern philosophy. Tardi and Carreras ended up on the editorial committee for Espiga, which was last published in 1950. Among the other four, two abandoned literature completely, and of the two who were left, one moved to Buenos Aires and the other one committed suicide sometime later (it was rumored that he was a pedophile). There was less activity in the literary world, and politics seemed to be the main topic of conversation. Members of the opposition spoke in low voices, like conspirators, and those who had joined the government or the official party pontificated openly, demonstrating their enthusiasm. Gamarra, who refused to join the party, arguing that he was apolitical, lost his post at the university, and thanks to his relationships at the Alianza Francesa, went to live in France. The regionalists were also divided. One, who had been an anarchist, ended up joining the communist party after Cuello joined the official party. Among the neoclassicists, two or three radical Catholics joined the government, but the rest, who’d joined the opposition, claimed that El Gran Conductor had a brain tumor — in the sella turcica of the sphenoid bone, to be precise — and didn’t have long to live. Somehow, everyone kept publishing chapbooks and hardcover editions and individual poems in literary supplements. But the era of the precisionist dinners and the Friday cookouts at the San Lorenzo grill house had come to an end.

Every so often there was news of Brando. Someone had seen him in Trastevere, driving around in an Alfa Romeo. Someone else thought they’d heard, though they couldn’t quite remember from whom, that he was summering in Sicily. The elder Brando, who was now too old to accompany Cuello around the islands, but who had a cookout with him every so often, and who’d taken to calling his son Il Dottore, said that Lydia had just had a baby girl and that the post at the embassy left them plenty of time to travel. In 1950, Lydia had another daughter, but, according to the first lieutenant (who was a captain by then), who’d run into Gamarra once on a bus to Buenos Aires, they were getting tired of being away from their family, and Lydia didn’t want their grandparents to die without knowing their granddaughters.

Most Tuesdays at eleven in the morning, Tardi would pass by the Highway Administration, where Benvenuto worked, to meet him for a cup of coffee at the corner bar. Once, Benvenuto was waiting for him with a copy of the previous Sunday’s La Prensa (which had been banned by the government). There was an article by Brando in the rotogravure. He’s worth his weight in gold! Benvenuto had said, brandishing the rolled-up newspaper. While Benvenuto finished organizing some forms, Tardi read it, shaking his head and issuing surprised, scandalized laughter every so often. It was an essay on Dante, written practically at the foot of the Florence Cathedral. According to Brando, contemporary literary language was like Latin in the era of Dante: it was dead. De vulgari eloquentia, and if it couldn’t stand up as a valid program, it had, nevertheless, the value of a universal token inasmuch as it demonstrated with clarity that every great poet should forge his own language. Dante couldn’t express himself with precision in Latin; he needed a new language. Given this, he didn’t go against his time at all, because he’d adopted the language of his time. Without shrill, false rebellions he’d managed to express a complete philosophical system. That had cost him more than one hardship. For instance, his disciples, his friends, his group Dolce Stil Novo, were no doubt unable to stand it that Dante, elevating himself above doctrinal squabbles, and above the limited reach of every little courtesan poet, would have dared to take on, in his great philosophical poem, all knowledge, both human and divine. Yes, but Dante was forced into exile, and he lives off the fat of the dictatorship, Tardi exclaimed, throwing the paper on the table and lowering his voice slightly when offering that aside.

The elder Brando died in late 1950. In the final years he may have glimpsed the reason for his repudiation of his ancestors, the ones who had Taine for dinner and led him through a labyrinth of palazzi: it was a kind of melancholy. He ended up taking with him to his grave the interior chuckle with which, not without some compassion, he regarded the known universe. The following autumn, Brando and his family arrived from Italy. According to Cuello, who knew one of his brothers-in-law, an agronomist who managed some family farms near Malabrigo, Brando, while still in Rome, had demanded that all actions concerning the inheritance be frozen until his arrival, and so no one touched a paper, but when Il Dottore arrived (always according to Cuello, who was sarcastic yet incapable of slander), the first thing he did was burn the manuscripts of his father’s realist novels. Everything else, which he was not indifferent to after all, came second.

He never left again. According to him, family complications kept him home, but coincidentally, a few months later, soon after an aborted coup, the general retired, and the embassy was never spoken of again. Brando did not seem too upset. The polish of his gold accessories was now supplemented by the splendor of his time in Europe, giving him, that winter, a particular luster. That veneer remained forever, and even for those who knew him later, the new generations of poets who didn’t care much either for precisionism or its inventor, it worked. Brando was one of those people who exemplified better than most, from a sort of personal density, the old idea that all men are unique. He was recognizable from a distance; his arrival was always remarked; his presence was never ignored. And, once he had been seen, it was immediately understood why six or seven poets, some even older than him, had given themselves to his aesthetic doctrines, and for several years had put themselves almost exclusively at his service. The poets who publicized his tenets or typed up his poems must have found, in his compact soul, a possible model for counteracting the uncertainty of their own beings and the interminable afternoons. It had nothing to do either with ethics or with literary talent, nor with any particular capacity for seduction, because, in that regard, Brando was in no way industrious or demanding. In fact the opposite could be said: he was someone who rarely, if ever, demonstrated his affection, and his relations with people consisted rather of an icy and seemingly distracted courtesy. The contradictory nature of his principles was immediately obvious, given that it would never have occurred to him to conceal his irreconcilable inclination for scientistic poetry and social position within the heart of the philistine bourgeoisie. If he read his disciples’ poems it was, invariably, in order to tear them to pieces in the name of the precisionist aesthetic; if he published them in the magazine it was, unequivocally, because they clearly demonstrated that the hand of the chef de file had given them their final touch. To the company of poets he preferred that of rich and illiterate frivolous attorneys from the Club del Orden, that of Rotarian doctors, and that of neat, brutal, and shaven-headed horsemen of the Círculo Militar. If he went for coffee with some local writer who survived on a meager pension from some public office, he, who had considerable assets and who upon returning from Europe had left his old law firm in order to start his own, always managed to make himself invisible when the check came. It was difficult to imagine him in those tasks or positions that are the burden or delight of most other humans: defecating, fornicating, cutting his toenails, relating in some way or another to contingency. Every so often, an extremely faint scatological echo, which one had to be very alert to perceive, vibrated in his conversation. Whenever he made an observation that he considered keen, and which often were, he would sit for several seconds, as I’ve said before, staring at his interlocutor, waiting for his reaction. But, otherwise, it was impossible to meet his gaze. He was always looking at something over your shoulder, if he was taller than you, and at the knot of your necktie, if he was shorter. To be more precise, it should be said that what he actually had were listeners and not interlocutors. When he stopped speaking and the conversation passed to the other party, to what might be called the external field, his eyes, which were large and brilliant while he talked, narrowing, clouded over or shut down. And, all the same, three or four months after his arrival, in June or July of 1951, the precisionist machine began to function once again.