La Grande (48 page)

An article in
La Región
, in mid July, outlined the theoretical precepts of the second volume. Its theme was the decadence
of the west, manifested in the irrationality of thought and the increasing relevance of the masses in historical events.
If he goes on like this, he'll end up publishing for Reader's Digest
, someone had told Benvenuto, who, however, received the sarcasm with constraint. In some ways, Brando's article coincided with two of his favorite theories, namely that a first, enlightened romanticism had been distorted after the fact by one that was irrational and vulgar, and, meanwhile, that the decadence of the west, which was an incontrovertible fact, confirmed the supremacy of eastern thought. Furthermore, Benvenuto perceived, in Brando's article, certain veiled critiques of the government. For several days, Benvenuto asked himself whether or not he should call Brando to suggest a meeting at a symbolic and neutral location, the restaurant behind the market, for instance, but in the end coincidence took care of that, when, one afternoon, coming out of his office, he ran into Brando as he was walking through the door. The two men embraced on the sidewalk, under the lukewarm July sun, and walked together two or three blocks, talking about the past, about their friends, about Leonardo da Vinci, and about Chinese jurists. After remarking on the suicide of R, Benvenuto learned that Brando had been aware of his problems, and that on two or three occasions R had come to see him, deeply depressed, and that Brando had tried to calm him down. (Less sympathetic versions asserted that Brando, after hearing R's more or less veiled confessions, had demanded that he remove himself from the movement.) According to Benvenuto, in his final days, R lived on uppers and barely slept. He'd spend whole nights walking through the city and in the morning would go straight to work, without going to bed. Brando asked Benvenuto about Tardi, and suggested that they get together for a cookout at the house in Guadalupe, where he'd moved after he got back from Rome (and where, meanwhile, he continued to live until his
death). Noticing Benvenuto's hesitation, Brando asked for the numbers of Tardi and other former members and said that he would call them himself, which would discharge Benvenuto from a difficult task, making things much easier, because if Brando himself was in charge of making contact with the other precisionists a reconciliation would be much more likely. And so, two Sundays later, at around eleven, the precisionists from 1945 that were left in the city, along with their families, began to arrive for the cookout at the villa in Guadalupe.

A surprise was waiting for them: Captain Ponce himself was preparing the cookout. He'd arrived the day before from Córdoba, where his regiment was stationed, due to one of those unexpected troop movements, since his headquarters were in the south. The continuous punishment of the Patagonian wind had removed his frail look and had given him the consistency of leather. He greeted them cheerfully, with a glass in his hand, but worried about the progress of the coals. He himself had brought the demijohns of Caroya wine that were one the table, and he filled their glasses with generosity and insistence, under Brando's slightly reproving gaze.

Also present was a stranger to the historical precisionists, a Doctor Calcagno. He was a serious, almost sad, and well-educated man, and although he was several years older than Brando, he seemed intimidated by him and acquiesced to everything he said, even to things he didn't seem to agree with. He taught Roman Law at the university and enjoyed a considerable reputation in his specialty, and two or three years after Brando left his old firm in order to start his own they became partners and were never separated again. Calcagno was like Brando's silent and obedient shadow. He accepted everything, and even Tardi, who had been almost literally Brando's servant during the first period of the precisionist movement, was scandalized by so much submission,
possibly feeling irritated that as of that day Brando would prefer Calcagno's servitude to his own. The firm made a lot of money, but while Brando kept a few cases for himself, which he managed personally, at the margin of the firm, Calcagno was the one who took on all of the work, something which would have been more or less understandable if the reason had been to leave Brando free time for his literary activities, but Calcagno also took on all of the practical work for the movement, editing, distribution, public events, proofreading, correspondence. Even years later, when he married a much younger woman, Calcagno still maintained that religious obedience to Mario Brando. What's curious is that Calcagno wasn't even a writer, and, moreover, that he was an honest man, but even when Brando, who'd become a provincial minister after the revolution, had to resign his post due to obscure accusations of corruption that were never completely clarified, and which, despite his opportunism, prevented him from ever aspiring to a public post again, Calcagno, whose honesty was unquestionable, continued to support him till his death.

With that cookout, precisionism's second institutional era, after the announcement in
La Región
and Brando's article, was inaugurated. Brando, upon his return from Europe, must have badly needed the restoration of the group, because otherwise he wouldn't have invited his disciples and their families and everything else to the house in Guadalupe. It was a gesture of reconciliation that would not be repeated. Once he was assured of the collaboration of the three or four poets from the old guard, he went back to meeting them at peripheral and depressing bars and restaurants. His social life, meanwhile, took place at his house and in the houses of his rich and ignorant friends, at the Jockey Club, or in political circles, although, as the regime lost popularity, and though he'd had a diplomatic post in Rome, he started to move imperceptibly toward the side of those who, three or four
years later, after a couple of aborted coups, would end up overthrowing it. The only person who shared both worlds with him was his faithful shadow, Doctor Calcagno.

Even Brando's most intransigent enemies admired his political opportunism. Over five or six years he'd managed to be named cultural attaché in Rome by one government, to spend several years in Europe with his family, on a diplomatic salary, without any sort of declaration or public stance, and even without seeming to carry out any political activity, and then, just after the provincial inspector formed the first cabinet after the coup, he was asked to take the post of Secretary of Public Works. Had it not been for that obscure embezzlement incident, which was never clarified, and which had no other consequence for him than his retirement from politics, it was almost certain that a national trajectory awaited him.

What interested him was poetry and science, and astronomy in particular. At the house in Guadalupe, in a kind of tower at the back of the garden, which served as his office, he'd built an observatory where he'd shut himself up every night. Apart from Calcagno, who often went to visit him, very few people had enjoyed the privilege of an invitation. But from some poet or journalist from Buenos Aires, which is to say, anyone who could spread, beyond the city, his image as poet and scholar of art and science, a visit was particularly appreciated. After the coup, when he was Secretary of Public Works, in the photo that accompanied an interview with him, he was seen bent over, looking at the sky through the telescope. What's surprising is that the story, which occupied a whole page, came out in
La Prensa
, after its legitimate owners recovered the paper, and despite the fact that he'd published his “Meditation at the Foot of the Florence Cathedral” while the newspaper, seized by the government, had been transformed into an official organ. Someone once said
that Brando didn't own an umbrella because when it rained he was able to walk through the drops without getting wet. What one had to admit, according to this same person, and to several others, including some of his enemies, was his fidelity to poetry, though it was rumored that when he wasn't writing precisionist texts he wrote more traditional poems that very few people, if anyone, had seen, and through which he hoped to save his reputation if precisionism ever fell out of fashion.

This may have been an error on his part, because precisionism was an authentic local product, the most original literary movement in a city that, since romanticism and even since Góngora, had always welcomed every artistic novelty, adapting it to the regional climate and incarnating it in a local artist. We produced romantic poets in quantities greater than it would have been prudent to desire, and a story from the same movement, “The Novel of a Pale Young Man,” even appeared almost simultaneously with the first wave of realist and later naturalist novels, from which the group of regionalist writers captained by Cuello and Righi emerged. Symbolism and French poetry circulated thanks to
modernismo
, and, as I mentioned above, its last representatives, in the sixties, could still recite Belisario Roldán's discourses by heart. In the forties, at the local level, the first surrealists began to appear, along with mystics and orthodox neoclassicists, who gathered around the magazine
Espiga
. We also had writers who practiced social realism, expressionism, what you might call
a virile North American style
, the objective novel, and even the writing, the practical life, and the physical appearance of the Beat generation. Every one of these movements had begun somewhere else, had traveled the world, and had ended up winning some acceptance in the city. Only precisionism had been born here, whatever the political or moral convictions of its inventor may have been, if he had any, and, likewise, whatever
credit its creator may have given to his creation. Mario Brando, precisionism, and the city were as inseparable in the minds of the literary critics from Buenos Aires or Asunción or Montevideo as the three elements of the trinity probably were to Christian theologians. Anyone with a personal conception of literature wasn't intimidated by Brando's success in the forties and fifties (later, in the third period, he was already somewhat forgotten), and many local personalities who understood the deserved rejection of their own mediocrity before the eternal injustice of Buenos Aires toward the interior identified with the recognition that Brando and his poetic school enjoyed, and felt proud to have it as the fame of the city. They were local products like river fish, like Coronda strawberries, like the suspension bridge, and, later, like the underwater tunnel. At last, an author from the city wasn't writing about the landscape or the flora and fauna characteristic to the region, but rather about universal relations that, according to precisionist theory, should exist between poetics and scientific language. As dubious as the aesthetic may have been, there was no doubt that it found attentive and objective interest in its time.

Brando's life was the complete opposite of what one might expect from a poet, in any case according to the current stereotypes used to imagine the life of the poet. Brando didn't drink, and he smoked very little—apparently
the doctor had prohibited him to carry
. His family life was conventional and quiet, and was limited to his wife and two daughters. After the death of the elder Brando he'd stopped seeing his sisters. He almost provoked a lawsuit when the inheritance was distributed, but the conflict was resolved quietly before reaching the courts. His sisters never forgave him for having burned their father's literary papers when he got back from Europe, or for taking the house in Guadalupe, which their father had built in the late twenties for the whole family, without ever discussing the issue with them. Two
of the sisters had moved to Rosario and the third now lived in Italy. Like her brother, she wrote, but in Italian, like her father: realist novels with a certain social and even erotic vulgarity, and in which bread was called bread and wine was called wine,
without disguising provincial hypocrisy behind ridiculous scientistic neologisms
, as she wrote to me once in a letter from Rome, shortly after Brando's death.

In the last years of his life, long before he got sick, in fact (a tumor in his colon finished him off in a couple of months), Brando lived a very reclusive life. He was more occupied with his law firm and with his social and familial connections than with precisionism or with poetry in general. All the same, his articles and poems still appeared every so often in
La Región
, in
La Capital
, or in some other Buenos Aires newspaper. But the precisionist movement itself already belonged to the past. In 1960,
La Nación
published an article celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first dinner at La Giralda, authored by Brando himself, along with a photo that he provided.

•

When he finishes reading, Tomatis turns over the last white page, printed from a computer, and puts it on top of the others, with the printed side facing down. Then, picking up the stack of pages, he taps their bottom edge against the manila folder on his knees several times so that the sheets all line up neatly. On the first page, halfway down the page, the title,
PRECISIONISM
, appears in capital letters, and below it, in italics,
by A witness of the time
, and after a space what strictly speaking would be called the text begins. While he carries out all of these movements, Tomatis holds, between the index and middle fingers of his right hand, and resting as well in the space between his index finger and thumb, the red pen with
which he's been making annotations in the margins every so often. Finally he closes the manila folder, slides it into one of the compartments of the open briefcase in the adjoining seat, the one on the aisle side, and lets it fall, along with the pen, not before pushing down on the button that retracts the tip into the metal cylinder that protects it. Then he puts his elbows on the arm rests that surround his seat, and turning his head and falling still, he stares at the landscape that rolls by on the other side of the window without seeing any of it.