Buenos Aires

An interesting little piece from a website that touts the Palermo Viejo barrio of Buenos Aires:

Did you know that the heart of Palermo Viejo and a couple of streets were named after famous Argentine writers?
Plaza Serrano, considered the center of the neighborhood, was named after Julio Cortázar, who used to live in the area.
Built in 1910 for servants, the Arlt passageway was named after Roberto Arlt, who lived there at the time he used to work for the newspaper Crítica. This narrow alley reaches halfway down the block and has houses on both sides. It is not so admired as other alleys in the neighborhood.
In 1996, Serrano, between Santa Fe Ave. and Honduras St., became Jorge Luis Borges. The writer lived in 2135 Serrano St. when he was a child.

Indeed BsAs is a city made for writers with the convergence of European and South American traditions, the numerous bookstores and the sidewalk cafes made for conversation, observation and writing.

Quite interesting Bert. Speaking of Arlt's 'Seven Madmen'--you can use a city map to follow his characters around as they go from one place to another. BA is as much a character in this work as Erdosian or the Astrologer.

Argentina as a whole has many diverse immigrant cultures. It is a mainly Spanish speaking melting pot comparable to our or Canada's mainly English speaking ones.

It would seem that the Palermo Viejo of the 21st century shares little with the Palermo Viejo of the early decades of the past century. These days (at least as I remember it from 2005) it's a hip, trendy neighborhood with lots of good restaurants and high-fashion boutiques. Steadily gentrifying...For a fun profile of the Palermo of yesteryear, you can check out Borges's profile of the poet Evaristo Carriego. It is a study of Carriego's poetry, but it is also a nostalgic reflection on Argentina and a neighborhood on the outskirts of a steadily-expanding metropolis.

Anyway, I really came in here to post this prologue to an Italian edition of Los siete locos, written by Juan Carlos Onetti. It provides compelling reasons for reading and appreciating Roberto Arlt! I will post it below...

I want to clarify from the beginning that these pages are being written, mysteriously, because the editor and the author were in agreement with respect to their tone. I couldn't write a prologue for Arlt's novel full of literary judgements; I will instead make sociological ones. I also wouldn't be able to fall into easy sentimentalisms about, for example, the great writer who prematurely disappeared. I wouldn't be able to do this due to personal tastes and incapacities; but, above all, I imagine and know the loud burst of laughter that something of that sort would provoke in Roberto Arlt. I hear his exaggerated laughter, repeated in recent years due to the efforts of exegetes and neodiscoverers.

For that reason, I didn't re-read Roberto Arlt, although this precaution is excessive because I know him by memory, despite the passage of so many persistent years. Neither did I want to review the works published about him that I have in my library. I supposed that a face-to-face encounter would be more adequate, without lies and without tolerating any tricks. I believe that this is an undoubtable form of friendship, if Roberto Arlt ever really had a friend. His interests lied elsewhere. In consquence, I want to ask forgiveness for erroneous dates and for forgotten anecdotes, perhaps already told.

At that time, around 1934, I was suffering in Montevideo from a bacheorhood or widowhood in part involuntary. I had returned from my first excursion to Buenos Aires in poverty and failure. But this didn't matter too much because I was twenty five and I was austere and chaste due to a pact of love, and above all, because I was writing a "brilliant" novel that I baptized Tiempo de abrazar and which never came to be published, maybe because it wasn't good enough or maybe, simply, because I lost it one day in the process of moving.

In addition to my novel I had other things, common to those of my age, among them a friend, Italo Constantini, who lived in Buenos Aires and in those days gambled at the Stavroguin.

Between 1930 and 1934 I had read, in Buenos Aires, Arlt's novels--El juguete rabioso, Los siete locos, Los lanzallamas--along with some of his short stories; but what gave the writer an incomparable popularity were his newspaper articles, "Aguafuertes porteñas," published weekly in El Mundo.

The Aguafuertes appeared, at first, every Tuesday and the director of the newspaper, Muzzio Sáenz Peña, found their success to be excessively positive for the interests of his paper. He quickly verified that El Mundo's Tuesday sales were almost double those of every other day. He then resolved to mix things up and confuse the readers by publishing the "Aguafuertes" on random days of the week. There was no other option for those in search of Arlt than to buy El Mundo every day, in the same way that one persists in betting on the same numbers in the lottery in hopes of one day winning.

The periodistic triumph of the "Aguafuertes" is easy to explain. The common man, the petty and extremely-petty bourgeois of the streets of Buenos Aires, the office employee, the owner of a stale business, the enormous percentage of bitter and pessimistic individuals, could all read their own thoughts and sadnesses, their pale illusions, predicted and told in their everyday language. Furthermore, they encountered the cynicism that they felt without daring to confess; and, beyond that, they hazily discerned the talent of the man who was telling them the story of their own life, with a mocking smile but also with a believable degree of complicity.

In speaking of cynicism, the aforementioned Muzzio Sáenz Peña--to whom Arlt normally submitted his manuscripts so that he could correct any orthographic errors--became alarmed because the writer had been publishing articles in left-wing magazines. This restlessness or caprice of Arlt preoccupied the newspaper's management, fearful of losing the advertisements of Ford, Shell, et cetera, and determined to retain them.

Muzzio called Arlt and told him, with the following question that wasn't really a question:

"Do you have any idea of the mess you've put me in?"

"Because of that? Don't worry, I'll take care of it tomorrow."

(Jorge Luis Borges, the most important Argentine writer of the era, said in a recent interview that Roberto Arlt pronounced the Spanish language with a strong German or Prussian accent inherited from his father. It's true that his father was Austrian and a real son of a bitch; but I believe that Arlt's prosody was the sublimation of porteño speech: he was sparing with his Ses at the end of words and he multiplied them in the middle of words as a tribute to the spirit of balance that he never possessed.)

And the next day, after Muzzio revised the grammatical errors, the "Aguafuertes" said something like this: "I became interested in labor issues out of curiosity. The only thing that mattered to me was to obtain more material for my writing and more readers."

The anecdote shouldn't offend his relatives, friends nor admirers. The problem that Arlt presents in this respect is easy to understand. Arlt was an artist (he hears me and scoffs) and nothing was more important to him than his writing. As it should be.

Now let us return to Italo Constantini, to Tiempo de abrazar and to another season in Buenos Aires. Tired of chastity, nostalgia and plans to assassinate a dictator, I sought refuge for three days during the Easter holiday in the house of Italo (Kostia); I stayed for three years.

Kostia is one of the most intelligent and sensible people with respect to literary matters that I have known, up to the limit of intimacy that he himself has established. Unfortunately for him, he read my monstrosity in two days and on the third day, lying in bed with numerous grams of ash from Player's Mediums on his lapel, he said to me:

“That novel is good. It needs to be published. Tomorrow we'll go see Arlt.”

It was then that I found out that Kostia was an old friend of Arlt's, that he had grown up with him in Flores, a Buenos Aires neighborhood, and that he had probably participated in the early adventures of El juguete rabioso.

But who was Arlt and what was he like? I imagined him as a compadrito porteño, an untranslateable definition which would take hours to explain, without guarantee of eventual success.

At the moment, the night before a meeting that seemed unbelievable, I learned that Kostia, at the very least, was personally acquainted with many of the protagonists of Los siete locos and Los lanzallamas. Of course, Erdosain remained invisible, impalpable, because he was the ghost of Arlt himself, converted into a character.

That same night, I tried to imagine my immediate future:

"But what I write doesn't have anything to do with what Arlt does. What if he doesn't like it? What gives you the right to impose my book on him?" "Of course your writing isn't like his," said Kostia, smiling sweetly. "Arlt is a great novelist. But he hates what you might call quote-unquote 'literature,' and your little book, at least, isn't guilty of that. Don't worry (glasses of wine and his lapel patiently accepting its role of ashtray); the most likely result of your meeting is that he'll tell you to go to hell."

The meeting at El Mundo turned out to be as unforgettable as it was disconcerting. Arlt had the privilege, so rare in the editorial office, of occupying an office without sharing it with anyone. At least, not at that moment, at four in the afternoon. He greeted Kostia:

"What're you up to, you old scoundrel."

And, after making the necessary introductions, Kostia sat back and enjoyed himself in silence and to the side the Original of the novel remained on top of the desk. Roberto Arlt adhered to the stillness of his friend, barely moving his head to refuse my pack of cigarrettes. At that time he must have been around thirty-five, his head well-shaped, pale and healthy, a swath of black hair hard against his forehead, a defiant expression on his face that wasn't deliberate, that had been imposed on him in his infancy and that would never abandon him.

He kept staring at me, motionless, until he had placed me in one of his capricious personal categories. I understood that it would be useless, bothersome, possibly even offensive to speak of admirations and respects for a man like that, an unpredictable man whose "head was always elsewhere."

Finally, he said:

"So you're the fellow who wrote a novel and Kostia says it's good and that I need to find you a publisher.”

(At that time Buenos Aires had very few publishing houses, practically none. It was a shame. Today it has too many, which is also a shame.)

Arlt lazily opened the manuscript and read fragments of pages, skipping five, skipping ten. In this manner, he made it a quick read. I thought: I spent almost a year writing it. I had feelings of astonishment, the absurd sensation that this scene had been planned out beforehand.

Finally, Arlt set down the manuscript and turned to his friend, who smoked indolently as he sat to his left, far away, as if he were in a different place.

"Tell me, Kostia," he asked. "Did I publish a novel this year?"

"You didn't. You announced one but nothing came of it."

"It's because of the 'Aguafuertes.' They're driving me crazy. Every day somebody comes to me with an idea that he swears is brilliant. And they're all friends of the newspaper and not a single one of them knows that the 'Aguafuertes' hunt me down on the street, or in my apartment or where I least expect them. Well then, if you're sure that I didn't publish any books this year, then the one that I just finished reading is the best novel that was written in Buenos Aires this year. We've got to publish it."

Then amnesia was feigned so blatantly that my only preoccupation was to disappear.

"I warned you," Kostia said.

"You're like me, you're never mistaken when it comes to books. That's why I don't show you my originals, because I don't want to give myself any doubts." He sighed; he put his open hand on the manuscript and remembered I was still there.

"Of course, you think I'm kidding and right now you want to tell me to go to hell. But it's not like you think. Look: when I have enough money to buy books, I go to a random bookstore on Corrientes. And that’s all I have to do, skim through a book, in order to know if the novel is good or not. Yours is good and now let's go have a drink to celebrate and have a good time as we talk about our friends and colleagues.

Arlt walked into the café at Rivadavia and Río de Janeiro, across the street from the El Mundo building. He was a tall man and in those days he was into being healthy and going to the gym.

It's possible that we went to the same cafeteria where Erdosain's wife observed the motionless and melancholy profile of her husband, through the musty windows, sunken in the smoke of tobacco and that of the coffee machine.

We talked about a lot of different things, and that afternoon, he did a lot of the talking. Nearly every contemporary Argentine writer paraded through our conversation, and Arlt cited them with precision and bursts of laughter that resonated strangely in that neighborhood café, at that peaceful hour of the afternoon.

"But look, the guy is capable of writing, in all seriousness, a sentence like this:" And then came the sentence and the laughter. But Arlt's jokes didn't have any relation to the foreseeable and ritual jokes told in literary clubs or societies. He laughed frankly, because it seemed absurd that in the 30s anyone could write or keep writing with themes and styles that were acceptable at the turn of the century. He didn't attack anyone out of envy: he was sure of being superior and distinct, of inhabiting a different plane.

Evoking him, I can imagine his laughter in front of the phony passenger of the boom, in front of those writers who keep on buying tickets, with visible effort, for the useless and grotesque trip to an all-encompassing whole that always ends in nothingness. Arlt, who was only brilliant when he wrote of people, of situations and of the consciousness of an unreachable paradise.

A fitting memory, which may provide confusion or clarity. At one time he told this to us and he also published it. "When a guy shows up at my office (at the newspaper where he worked) with a manuscript or I'm asked to read a book by an unknown who has talent, I never do things in the same way as my colleagues. They get scared and they make up a thousand excuses--quite courteous, very respectful and polite--to tell the recently-arrived fellow. I do things differently. I dedicate myself to obtaining every possible opportunity for the new genius to publish his work. It never fails: a year or two down the road and the fellow doesn't have anything else to say. He silently returns to the things that made up his life prior to his literary adventure."

As this prologue is threatening to be longer than the book I'll tell two "Arltian Aguafuertes:"

1) One morning his coworkers found him at the office (it was at another newspaper, Crítica, where Arlt was in charge of the Police Blotter) barefoot and lying on the table, crying, his socks full of holes. A glass with a wilted rose lay in front of him. Upon questioning, he answered, full of anguish: "don't you see the flower? Don't you see that it's dying?"

Another morning he was barefoot but half-dead, his swath of hair covering his face, refusing to speak. He had just seen the body of a girl, a servant, who had thrown herself to the street from a fifth-or seventh-floor window. He was mute and ill-mannered for a number of days. Afterward he began writing his first and greatest play, "Trescientos millones o cifra parecida," based on the supposed story of the deceased girl.

2) In those days, like now, I lived apart from that perpetual masturbation known as literary life. I wrote and I write and the rest doesn't matter. One night, out of sheer chance I ran into Arlt and some other acquaintances in a cafeteria. That monster, the very antonym of sacred, as I recall didn't drink alcohol.

Late that night, four or five of us agreed to take a taxi to get something to eat. Among us went a writer, also a dramatist, whom I will conveniently baptize Pérez Encina. During the trip we spoke, of course, about literature. Arlt looked out at the lights of the street in silence. As we neared our destination (a twisted street, a bodega that pretended to be Italian) Pérez Encina said:

"When I premiered La casa vendida..."

Then Arlt burst out of the shadows and started laughing and kept laughing until the taxi stopped and someone paid the fare. He kept laughing, leaning against the wall of the bodega and, I suspect, we all thought that he was having a completely predictible fit of madness. He finally stopped laughing and said, calmly and seriously:

"Pérez Encina, nobody considers you to be a pillar of intelligence. But you're a Nobel prizewinner when it comes to memory. You're the only person in the world that remembers La casa vendida!"

The numerous tribe of Manicheans can choose between the two anecdotes. I believe in the sincerity of both of them and I don't pass judgement on Roberto Arlt's person. A person, on the other hand, who interests me less than his books.

At this point I think I've included enough memories and it is, it would be, necessary to talk about the book. But I have always believed, furthermore, that the only thing that truly matters with respect to readers--and this is demonstrable--is that they aren't children who need help crossing through the darkness or avoiding puddles or going to the bathroom. They, the readers, always have the last, definitive word, after the critical verbiage that adheres to first editions.

This is not a critical essay (I would not be capable of writing a serious one), rather a simple remembrance, in reality quite brief if I compare it to what I'm remembering at this moment, this May evening in a place that you haven't visited by the name of Montevideo. A remembrance of a fellow named Roberto Arlt, destined to be a writer.

And destiny, I suppose, knows what it's doing. Because the poor man tried to provide for himself with the invention of unbreakable stockings, eternal roses, supercombustion engines, gases that could slaughter an entire city.

But he always failed and maybe that's why this book is full of industrial, chemical and geometric metaphors. It's enough for me that he had faith and that he labored away at his fantasies with seriousness and germane methods.

But he was born to write of his infantile, adolescent and adult unhappiness. He did it with anger and with genius, which he had in spades.

All of Buenos Aires, at least, read this book. The intellectuals took a break from their dry martinis to shrug their shoulders and piously grumble that Arlt didn't know how to write. He didn't, it's true, and he was ignorant of the Mandarin language; but he wielded with complete control the language and the problems of millions of Argentines incapable of expressing themselves in literary articles, capable of understanding him and seeing him as a friend who is there--sullen, silent or cynical--in one's darkest hour.

Arlt was born into and endured an infancy within that fixed limit that statisticians of every government of this world refer to as abject poverty: he endured a pureblooded father who told him I'll give you a whipping at six tomorrow each time he got in trouble. Arlt tried to tell us, and perhaps he was able to do so in his first novel, of the nights of insomnia during which he looked into the blackness of a small window, seeing the signs of an implacable morning.

I found out that he read Dostoyevsky in the miserable Argentine editions of his time. Humilliated and Insulted, without a doubt. Later he discovered Rocambole and he believed. He was, literarily, a frightful semi-literate. He never plagiarized anyone; he stole without realizing.

Nonetheless, and I persist in saying this, he was a genius. And, before closing, an observation: if there are any Lombrosians left out there it's worth stating that the frontal bones of the genius show a proturbance in the browline. In Roberto Arlt this trait was striking; I do not possess it.

And now, disgracefully, the word "disconcerting" reappears. But, now that it's out in the open, let us examine it more closely. As old admirers of Arlt, as ancient and quarrelsome charlatans, we have verified that the objections of the most educated people with respect to the work of Roberto Arlt are difficult to refute. Not even my eagerness to win the upper hand in a discussion for a matter of minutes will permit me to ever say no to the numerous charges that I've had to listen to and that nonetheless, curiously, nobody dares to publish. Let us elect the most contentious of these, the most definitive in appearance:

1) Roberto Arlt translated Dostoyevsky into Lunfardo. The novel that is composed of Los siete locos and Los lanzallamas was born of Demons. Not only the subject matter, but also situations and characters. Maria Timofeevna Lebyadkin, "the cripple," is easy to recognize, and is here named Hipólita, Stravrogin is reconstructed as the Astrologist; and others; the devil, precisely, appears as many times to Erdosain as he did to Ivan Karamazov.

2) Arlt's body of work can serve as an example of his lack of self-criticism. Of his nine short stories published in book form, this reader envies two: Las fieras and Ester Primavera, and dislikes the rest.

3) His style is frequently the personal enemy of grammar.

4) The majority of his "Aguafuertes porteñas" are perfectly forgettable.

There are more objections but these are the principal ones and they suffice.

The four anterior arguments of the devil's advocate are, let us repeat, irrefutable. We remain profoundly and definitively convinced that if any inhabitant of these humble shores was able to come close to achieving literary genius, his name was Roberto Arlt. We have never been able to demonstrate this. It has been impossible for us to open one of his books and point to the chapter or page or sentence capable of convincing an unbeliever. Disarmed, we have preferred to believe that luck has blessed us, at the very least, with the faculty of literary intuition. And this gift cannot be passed on to others.

I speak of art and of a great, strange artist. On this terrain, grammarians, aesthetes and professors tread uncertainly. Or, better, they can move freely but they don't get anywhere. Arlt's subject was the despairing man, the man who knows--or invents--that only a thin or insurmountable wall is separating us all from undoubtable happiness, who understands that "scientific progress is useless if our hearts remain hard and bitter like those of the human beings of millenia past."

I speak of a writer who understood like no one else the city in which he happened to be born. More profoundly, perhaps, than those who wrote the music and lyrics to immortal tangos. I speak of a novelist who will grow in stature as the years pass--and that is a card worth betting on--and who, incomprehensibly, is nearly unknown in the world.

Dedicated to spreading the word, I distributed the books of Roberto Arlt. One was returned to me after marking with a pen, without distraction, all the orthographic errors, all the syntactic corkscrews. The person who carried out this work was correct. But there are always compensations; that person will never write for us anything equivalent to The agony of the Melancholy Ruffian or The shamed or Haffner falls.

He will never tell us, clumsily, brilliantly and convincingly, that birth signifies the acceptance of a monstrous pact and that, nonetheless, being alive is the only truly marvelous thing. And neither will he tell us, absurdly, that it's better to persist.

And, on another level of Arltism: who will reproduce the pensative cheek, the disgraced and cynical profile of Roberto Arlt in the dirty Buenos Aires cafeteria at the corner of Rio de Janeiro and Rivadavia, when he was named Erdosain?

Ah, Buenos Aires.
I lived in Once and then the Hotel Sportsman off and on from '96-'98 (writing a dissertation), and as I remember it, Palermo was just then undergoing some gentrification.

Regarding literary maps, Buenos Aires: a cultural and literary companion traces the steps of Arlt and Borges and others in what is a fascinating evocation of the spirit of the city.

Onetti's comments were great to read.

made me think about the connection of journalism and fiction. i would think a rather long list of writers first began as daily hacks at a local paper. the great world cities (BsAs being a prime example) offer up great locations and characters on a daily basis. I thought of NYC's Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hammil from my earlier years.

Charles Dickens is probably the most noteworthy example.