A Narrative Biography of Horacio Quiroga, the Lone Anarchist [1 ed.] 1527551784, 9781527551787

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A Narrative Biography of Horacio Quiroga, the Lone Anarchist

A Narrative Biography of Horacio Quiroga, the Lone Anarchist By

Wilson Alves-Bezerra

Translated from Portuguese by Felipe Menezes Revised by Tauan Tinti and João Pereira de Sá Neto Spanish Quotations translated by Juana Adcock

A Narrative Biography of Horacio Quiroga, the Lone Anarchist By Wilson Alves-Bezerra This book first published 2023 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2023 by Wilson Alves-Bezerra All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-5178-4 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-5178-7

TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments .................................................................................. viii 1. The old anarchist revisited................................................................... 1 Madam’s chauffeur ................................................................................ 5 A corpse in dispute ................................................................................ 8 2. The rain turns into deluge and the wind into hurricane – becoming a writer ....................................................................................................... 11 Writing against indifference ................................................................ 14 I am not from Salto. I am from Paris! .................................................. 17 A notable failure .................................................................................. 27 3. Blood and gunpowder ........................................................................ 31 A trigger that will not stop shooting .................................................... 35 The crime of the other .......................................................................... 38 4. Runaway writer .................................................................................. 44 Planet Lugones..................................................................................... 47 The construction of exile ..................................................................... 52 5. Sentimental education ........................................................................ 57 A country named Misiones .................................................................. 60 An atypical man in the herd ................................................................. 66 6. Snaps of the jaw .................................................................................. 68 On trees, children, and short stories ..................................................... 72 Sketches of Ana ................................................................................... 78 7. Love and death .................................................................................... 82 Versions of the unspeakable ................................................................ 83 Berenice's extinguished flame ............................................................. 85 Inventing another life ........................................................................... 89 Story of two man cubs ......................................................................... 91

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8. The man who counted ......................................................................... 94 The diplomat ........................................................................................ 97 Of love madness and death .................................................................. 98 Jungle for children ............................................................................. 101 I am a civil servant and this is not my greatest discontentment ......... 103 9. Women of light .................................................................................. 106 10. Anaconda, this woman ................................................................... 112 Norah’s eyes ...................................................................................... 115 11. In search of Brazil .......................................................................... 123 Good children of Kipling ................................................................... 125 Oscar Mendes, a Quiroga reader ........................................................ 130 Other Brazilian magazines ................................................................. 132 The mute and the loquacious ............................................................. 133 Language effects ................................................................................ 140 12. Alfonsina and the savage ................................................................ 143 Love under words .............................................................................. 144 Deliberate silences ............................................................................. 149 The voices .......................................................................................... 151 The call of the wild ............................................................................ 152 13. Generous in love ............................................................................. 154 Why did I not get married? ................................................................ 159 14. On the jungle without her .............................................................. 162 Ocre ................................................................................................... 163 Pasado Amor...................................................................................... 167 15. Fame in review ................................................................................ 173 Los desterrados .................................................................................. 174 The boys of the fancy street ............................................................... 180 Dissecting grudges ............................................................................. 184 Georgie in the pillow ......................................................................... 187 16. Meeting a woman, repeating a love ............................................... 192 Bills to pay ......................................................................................... 196 The return .......................................................................................... 202

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17. All leaves belong to the wind ........................................................... 207 The potatoes burn .............................................................................. 211 The winter of my time ....................................................................... 225 The last pages .................................................................................... 227 18. The man from the past ................................................................... 233 The book of days ............................................................................... 234 Spring................................................................................................. 238 Printed traces ..................................................................................... 242 Scribbles in a notebook ...................................................................... 243 En la noche ........................................................................................ 245 María’s silence ................................................................................... 247 19. The sun on the newsstands .............................................................. 250 The flame ........................................................................................... 252 The smoke.......................................................................................... 254 Ashes still embers .............................................................................. 255 20. Los cuentos de mis hijos ................................................................. 259 The light of urgency........................................................................... 262 The Father’s dazzling sun .................................................................. 265 Prisioneros de la tierra ....................................................................... 272 Errant postmen, bombs, and a postponed party ................................. 277 My father ........................................................................................... 280 El perseguidor ................................................................................... 283 Afterword .............................................................................................. 285 What moves these lines...................................................................... 285 What moves this biographer .............................................................. 288 References ............................................................................................. 294 By Horacio Quiroga ........................................................................... 294 Translations of Quiroga quoted in the work ...................................... 294 About Horacio Quiroga ..................................................................... 295 Others................................................................................................. 297

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Part of this work was carried out throughout a postdoctoral internship at UNICAMP (State University of Campinas), between 2017 and 2019, under the supervision and with the valuable interlocution of Cláudia Thereza Guimarães de Lemos. Collections were consulted in several countries, to whose institutions I express my gratitude: Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno – Buenos Aires, Argentina; Biblioteca Nacional de Uruguay; Hemeroteca de la Biblioteca Nacional de España; Hemeroteca da Biblioteca Nacional do Brasil; Hemeroteca Digital da UNESP; Ibero-Amerikanische Institut (IAI) Berlin; Centro de Documentação Alexandre Eulálio, from State University of Campinas. It is also worth thanking Vera Lucia Coscia for preserving and repairing the unpublished letters of Horacio Quiroga and his personal library, a meticulous and priceless job. Gracias to all the editors who accepted this manuscript: Adam Rummens (from Cambridge Scholars, UK), Alejandro Ferrari (from Más Quiroga, Uruguay), Paulo Slachevsky (from LOM, Chile), and Samuel Leon (from Iluminuras, Brazil). Finally, I would like to thank those who took care of correcting, translating, and preparing, with attention and diligence, these originals in Portuguese, Spanish, and English: Eder Cardoso, Felipe Menezes, João Pereira de Sá Neto, Juana Adcock, Patrícia de Oliveira Leme, Rodrigo Millán, and Tauan Tinti.

1. THE OLD ANARCHIST REVISITED

It was at the end of February 1937, and the Uruguayan communist writer Elias Castelnuovo, who had been living in Buenos Aires for years, received a commission: to write the cover story for Claridad magazine in honor of the recently deceased Uruguayan short-story writer Horacio Quiroga. Castelnuovo didn't have much to say about the dead man's work. He was never his admirer, he was never his reader, they were never friends, he was never a literary critic, and their relations were few and circumstantial. In the five months that Horacio was hospitalized at Hospital de Clínicas, he was not there once. Of course, he remembered when, seven years earlier, as a communist militant, he had tried to convince Quiroga that he had to visit the Soviet Union. Times were hard: the military coup had taken place in Argentina and General Uriburu had seized power, closing Crítica newspaper. Uruguay was also going from bad to worse. It was time for popular writers like Quiroga to systematically return to society something that they had always received from it. Knowing the Soviet reality and coming back to spread its principles was the least he had to do. That time, naively, he thought: Quiroga had a social conscience, he was not going to refuse the invitation. What he got in response: a click of the tongue, at most. He said he would not go, he could not go, he would not fake a feeling that was not his. If Buenos Aires was already suffocating him, it would not be in Eastern Europe where he would be able to breathe the air he needed. Castelnuovo never forgot that insolence. Neither did Horacio Quiroga. For him, it was time to leave Buenos Aires, return to the jungle that had so often welcomed him, to the village of San Ignacio, in the poor and inhospitable north of Argentina, where Guarani was heard on the dirt streets, indigenous peones were exploited as if the State did not exist, and Horacio would let himself be in his stone house, built on top of a plateau overlooking the Paraná River, planting a little cane and mate. It was his jungle, where he felt free. As long as he had love, paper to write, soil to sow plants that common sense said could not thrive on that

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basalt-filled plateau, with a harsh sun, above 40 degrees Celsius in summer, and with temperatures close to zero and frosts in the harsher winters. Still, he planted the most improbable things: Brazilian pineapples, orchids, ginkgo biloba. To make anything grow in the barren soil was his profession of faith. He did not at all expect Castelnuovo to understand his refusal. Years later, he wrote in a letter to his friend Estrada: “a solitary and courageous anarchist cannot write for the account of Stalin & Co”, concluding right away, “Castelnuovo is a good kid, but a blunderer.”1 Fool or wise, Castelnuovo had, it is true, some respect for Horacio. A work like his was not built every day, but... Anyway, it would not be difficult to write a beautiful obituary about him, even more so now that he was a little out of fashion, forgotten, after having turned his back on the capital and stuck among the snakes, on the banks of the Paraná River. It was his chance to reveal new facets of the writer, fulfill his historical duty, and begin to promote the judgment that every man must go through: personal, political, moral. As he walked down the street, on that sunny afternoon, he thought about how he was going to write the article. A personal, political, and ideological profile. The reflection that readers need. The refusal six years ago – yes! –, it was from there that he would build the text. After all, how could a writer who knew firsthand the exploitation of the loggers by capitalists on the banks of the Paraná River be so resistant to the cause of socialism? He could not find the answer. The only thing he knew about Quiroga were family stories, told by a relative from the other side of the La Plata River who now lived in Buenos Aires. Chilling stories. But he had never heard anything from Horacio's mouth. And he used to speak so little! How many times has he tried to get close and was just blown off? Quiroga was his failure. The writer with the greatest revolutionary potential; however, limited himself to a kind of tormented genius. Such a pity. Surrounded by the wandering thoughts that plagued him, he sat down to finally write the article. The first posthumous portrait of the writer, to be published in the largest left-wing magazine in the country, was going to come from his typewriter. The profile was like this: “Horacio Quiroga was a surly, acerbic, retiring man. By his side, one always had the impression of being before a wild, tangly, thorny plant that needed to be looked at

1

“Castelnuovo es un buen muchacho, pero torpísimo.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 578).

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without getting too near to avoid getting hurt.”2 He was satisfied and continued: I understood that that’s what Quiroga was like. Not very expansive, reserved, dour, solitary. I understood, in the process, that each person is as he is, not as one wants him to be. From that day on I was his friend without, however, ever breaking the distance that his way of being imposed on me. But that, I repeat, now that I am in front of his corpse I would not dare allow a tear to fall on his face or to him on the forehead. To somehow leave before my conscience some sign of farewell.3

That was it. With each line that advanced, it was as if he redeemed himself from the failed relationship. On the paper soon being released from the typewriter’s cylinder, that man, once incomprehensible to him, was becoming his own. Castelnuovo could mold Quiroga on the page and touch him in a way that had always been impossible. But he wanted more. He wanted to say what was not said in public, to write the stories he had heard from his family, to show everyone what went on that unsociable man’s mind. The germ of Horacio Quiroga's conversion into his tragic character. Quiroga was all his and everyone would know the truth: (...) nobody understood the tragedy of his life. Because Horacio Quiroga’s life began and ended tragically. When he was six months old, according to what a first cousin of his, Jorge R. Forteza, whose testimony I invoke, told me, while his mother was breastfeeding him, one day, his father was brought home dead from three bullets. At the age of twelve, his stepfather, who was the only father the boy knew, suffered an attack of amnesia and forgot everything: speech, writing and walking. Horacio Quiroga, who felt a great affection for him, began to teach him everything from the beginning. When he managed to restore him back to normal life, another day, in his presence, the stepfather committed suicide. Already in his youth, he went out as godfather in a duel in which his best friend was participating, and while he 2

“Horacio Quiroga era un hombre adusto, puntiagudo, huraño. A su lado, se tenía la impresión siempre que se estaba frente a una planta salvaje, enzarzada, espinosa, que había que contemplar sin acercarse demasiado para no pincharse” (Castelnuovo, “La tragedia de Horacio Quiroga”). 3 “Comprendí que Quiroga era así. Poco expansivo, reservado, arisco, solitario. Comprendí de paso que cada uno es como es no como uno quiere que sea. Desde ese día fui amigo suyo sin romper, empero, jamás la distancia que su manera de ser me imponía. Pero eso, repito, ahora que estoy frente a su cadáver no me atrevo a dejar caer una lágrima sobre su rostro ni a darle un beso en la frente. A dejar de algún modo ante mi conciencia alguna señal de despedida.” (Castelnuovo, “La tragedia de Horacio Quiroga”).

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Chapter 1 was checking the weapons, another day, he missed a shot and killed him. Finally, he married a woman who also committed suicide in his presence. Without counting the end, his own suicide, we have in his story four singularly tragic events.4

It was done, and now everyone would have his profile in front of them. The tragic portrait was already finished, but he still had to deal with the alienated man. The useless pain, the arid insistence of wanting to go to Misiones instead of the Soviet Union. To go back over his steps to undo what he had called the writer's tragedy and project it onto the cold canvas of ideology. After all, everyone has personal problems, but why not give the other a share of yourself? He resumed: The writer who fights for the emancipation of a class (...) knows that tragedy is not in the constitution of human life. Rather, it is in the constitution of society. And that the dagger is not wielded by the muse of poetry, but by the muse of economy. He knows that all conflicts, the most serious ones revolution, war, crises - do not recognize in their basis any other cause than that. If he suffers, he knows that he suffers not because of himself, but because of the society that makes him sick or oppresses him or exploits him or poisons him. And he knows that his pain is to no purpose if he does not join the pain of others, and instead of picking at his own wounds he tries to pick at the wounds of society. And instead of being satisfied with his pain, he tries to contribute with his experience and his action to create another society in which neither pain nor tragedy is possible.5 4

“(...) nadie conocía la tragedia de su vida. Porque la vida de Horacio Quiroga comenzó y concluyó trágicamente. Cuando tenía seis meses, según me contó un primo hermano suyo, Jorge R. Forteza, cuyo testimonio invoco, mientras la madre lo amamantaba, un día, le trajeron al padre muerto de tres tiros de escopeta. A los doce años, el padrastro, que fue el único padre que conoció el muchacho, sufrió un ataque de amnesia y olvidó todo: la palabra, la escritura y la marcha. Horacio Quiroga que sentía por él un gran afecto comenzó a enseñarle todo desde el principio. Cuando logró restituirlo de nuevo a la vida normal, otro día, en su presencia, el padrastro se suicidó. Ya en su mocedad salió de padrino en un duelo en que participaba su mejor amigo, y mientras revisaba las armas, otro día más, se le escapó un tiro y lo mató. Finalmente, se casó con una mujer que también se suicidó en presencia suya. Sin contar el final, su propio suicidio, tenemos en su historia cuatro hechos singularmente trágicos” (Castelnuovo, “La tragedia de Horacio Quiroga”). 5 “El escritor que lucha por la emancipación de una clase (…) Sabe que la tragedia no está en la constitución de la vida humana. Sino en la constitución de la sociedad. Y que el puñal no lo esgrime la musa de la poesía, sino la musa de la economía. Sabe que todos los conflictos, los más graves, - la revolución, la guerra, la crisisno reconocen en su base más causa que ésa. Si sufre, sabe que no sufre por su culpa,

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Yes, that was it. What good was it to write those short stories that so many would like to have written? Maybe I would give my left arm to be the author of “Los desterrados”, “Los precursores”, “Los pescadores de vigas”. But what good are those pages if nothing was destined to the cause of the men who suffer? From now on, no one will overvalue his work. They will think not about what he accomplished, but about what he could have accomplished for us. Horacio Quiroga is far from being the model writer we need. So much ink wasted on feuilletons for the bourgeois society, so much idyllic love in service of alienation… The old tale of love. So much wasted talent. Let us get this over with: Despite everything, I think about his tragedy. I do not think about his literature. (…) I think of everything that has happened to him and I feel the horror. The horror of his life and the horror of his death.6

Done. Everything had been said. He was satisfied. It was written. It was, without a doubt, the best article on Horacio Quiroga, the most thoughtful, the most daring. The text would be featured in the next issue of Claridad magazine. Now everyone would think twice when reading a text by Quiroga and would think about the story he, Elias Castelnuovo, had told. He collected the paper sheets beside the typewriter and went to San José Street to deliver the text.

Madam’s chauffeur A little less than five kilometers from there, in a small room in a luxurious three-story mansion with 24 balconies, on the corner of Viamonte and Florida streets, in the office of the magazine Sur, a meeting was taking place. It was time to settle the details to finish the February issue of the magazine, which was almost ready. At the meeting were Eduardo Mallea, Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Ramona Victoria Epifanía Rufina Ocampo Aguirre, or simply Victoria Ocampo, a direct descendant sino por culpa de la sociedad que lo enferma o que lo oprime o que lo explota o que lo envenena. Y sabe que su dolor es un cero a la izquierda si no se suma al dolor de los demás, y en vez de ponerse a hurgar sus propias llagas trata de hurgarle las llagas a la sociedad. Y en vez de conformarse con su dolor trata de contribuir con su experiencia y con su acción para crear otra sociedad en la cual no sea posible ni el dolor ni la tragedia” (Castelnuovo, “La tragedia de Horacio Quiroga”). 6 “A pesar de todo yo pienso en su tragedia. No pienso en su literatura. (…) Pienso en todo lo que le ha sucedido y siento horror. Horror por su vida y horror por su muerte” (Castelnuovo, “La tragedia de Horacio Quiroga”).

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of Lope de Aguirre, the colonizer. Yes, her, a fine flower of the Buenos Aires aristocracy, who owned and was in charge of Sur’s editorial office. Victoria had no affection for or interest in Horacio Quiroga. Her gaze did not reach him, so to speak. Sur was for her the magazine of the cultural elite, to which, according to her concept, the bearded Uruguayan did not belong. As with Claridad, Quiroga had never published a single line in Sur. On the other hand, it was impossible to ignore his death: he was famous, and had been publishing his writings in that city for almost forty years, had hundreds of short stories, articles, movie reviews, feuilletons… his short stories were translated in Europe, in the United States. It was not possible to stay silent. The other members of the magazine's board thought the same, even though they turned up their noses at the dead man. Jorge Luis Borges always took advantage of every opportunity to make fun of Quiroga, whom he called Uruguayan superstition: too popular, too vulgar, someone who had even dared to emulate – to imitate badly, in Georgie's words – the short stories Kipling had done better. Adolfo Bioy Casares, Victoria's brother-inlaw and then still a writer at the beginning of his career, spent his whole life thinking that anyone who admired Quiroga was a lost cause. Eduardo Mallea, novelist and editor of the cultural section of the newspaper La Nación for six years, understood that Horacio’s death was unavoidable. They then resorted to Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, a postal worker and writer for whom they had no affection either. The acclaimed author of Radiografia da Pampa was a friend of Horacio. It was known that over the last two years he had been close to the writer, who was already sick in the Misiones jungle, before he decided to go to Buenos Aires to treat his prostate problems. It was up to him to say the most effusive words at the writer's funeral. It would also be up to him to pay homage to Quiroga on the pages of Sur. Even better, they decided to quote the speech he had given in full, which would even allow the text to be published in the following issue, and without any hurry. Published on the final pages of that issue of Sur, the article was more a concession than a homage. Preceded by an editorial that, as much as it wanted to be impersonal and discreet, ended up being emphatic, clarifying to readers that he did not belong there. Mineiros are solidary only in cancer, Nelson Rodrigues seems to repeat to us from the depths of time. In that laconic final note, although not described, the aesthetic differences are highlighted: A criteria that differed from the art of writing and the general character of the preoccupations we believe to be indispensable for nourishing that art separated us from the excellent short story writer that had just died in a

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hospital in Buenos Aires. As a testimony of respect to his memory, in a country where to just dare to have ideas and dare to express oneself in terms of beauty implies a heroism, we transcribe today these words pronounced by Ezequiel Martínez Estrada before the body of Horacio Quiroga.7

If the differences between the group of Sur and Martínez Estrada were already large, between them and Horacio Quiroga they were abyssal. The Uruguayan's popularity, seen as rude and unsociable, hurt the affectation of the local elite, given their general inclination to the Old World. It seemed to them that Horacio had nothing to offer: he was too brutal for the Europeanist ideal of the magazine's board. If one were to talk about wild beasts, it should be the ones from Asia or other faraway lands, not those from the north of Argentina, as he used to do. As for fantastic literature, they were already satisfied with that of Maupassant, Poe, and the locals José Bianco and Santiago Dabove. The bearded Uruguayan, for them, was one too many. Horacio, for his part, had not had any sympathy for that group either, which was not part of his world. He had already taken a dig at Victoria in an old short story from the time he lived in Buenos Aires called “Su chauffeur”, published more than a decade earlier, in 19258. It was known that the Ocampo family educated their daughters with English and French tutors so that the girls could learn to speak, read, and write in those languages before Spanish. Victoria often complained, already as an adult, about her difficulties in expressing herself in writing in the language of her native country. She claimed to feel more comfortable writing in French, and it was in that language that she wrote an important part of her personal correspondence, including with Argentine friends such as Delfina Bunge. Horacio could not forgive her affectation. In “Su chauffeur”, he created a priceless story: two high-society young sisters are having fun discussing 7

“Un criterio diferente del arte de escribir y del carácter general de las preocupaciones que creemos imprescindibles para la nutrición de ese arte nos separaban del excelente cuentista que acaba de morir en un hospital de Buenos Aires. Como testimonio de respeto a su memoria, en un país donde sólo atreverse a tener ideas y osar expresarse en términos de belleza implica un heroísmo, transcribrimos hoy estas palabras pronunciadas por Ezequiel Martínez Estrada frente al cuerpo de Horacio Quiroga” (Revista Sur, “Editorial,” 108). 8 “Quiroga was insolent when he became annoyed at someone. He never liked Victoria Ocampo. He never contributed to Sur. A short story entitled ‘Su chofer’ has thorns that perhaps the director of the magazine never accused as daggers shot at her” [“Quiroga era insolente cuando le tomaba fastidio a alguien. Nunca quiso a Victoria Ocampo. Jamás colaboró en Sur. Un cuento que se titula ‘Su chofer’ tiene espinas que quizás la diretora de la revista nunca acusó como pinchazos dirigidos a su persona.”] (Amorim, El Quiroga que yo conocí, 24-25).

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art and culture in French in front of the servants, that uncultured mob. Many contemporary and future readers understood the allusion to Victoria and one of her sisters. In the short story, one day the girls' private driver provocatively quotes Proust in French as they chat with their friends. They were the kind of woman, says the driver, who only has eyes for their peers or subordinates. People who take pleasure in their socio-economic position and enjoy it: But it is not enough to be the chauffeur of a girl of the world to interest her. You need the mystery of the contradiction between the job and the man, just as children are able to capture some interest by their talk, passing for revolutionaries. (...) A literary jolt, the fearful exhilaration of having a university student at your service – humiliate him a little and flirt with him a little – seemed to me the most effective in the genre.9

This is how the character short-circuits his mistress's head and seduces her. It is very unlikely that Victoria Ocampo was shaken by the short story, or even that she was aware of it. She was a figure much more given to being enchanted than to being disappointed. On her list of delights are Virginia Woolf, Le Corbusier, Drieu La Rochelle, Ortega y Gasset. But definitely not Horacio Quiroga. His name is not even mentioned in her vast memoirs, published in several volumes. But the fates of Horacio Quiroga and Victoria Ocampo had finally bumped into each other in that space awkwardly conceded on the final pages of that Buenos Aires elite magazine. Readers are left with the words by Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, learned from Horacio: “He has taught us that blood is the best ink.”10

A corpse in dispute The smoke from the flames of Horacio's newly cremated body went high; his word was being detached from his flesh. What had been written – and published or kept in the drawer – remained, but what was recollected and made up on top of such recollections remained as well. Ezequiel 9

“Pero no basta ser chauffeur de una chica de mundo para interesarle. Se requiere el misterio de la contradicción entre el oficio y el hombre, del mismo modo que los niños bien logran dar algún interés por su charla, pasando por revolucionarios. (…) Una sacudida literaria, el temible alborozo de tener a su servicio un universitario – humillarle un poquito y coquetear con él otro poquito – me pareció lo más eficaz dentro del género” (Quiroga, “Su chauffeur”). 10 “Él nos ha enseñado que la sangre es la mejor tinta” (Estrada, “Horacio Quiroga,” 108).

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Martínez Estrada and Elias Castelnouvo were setting up the foundations for the memory of the one who would not be seen wandering in Buenos Aires, San Ignacio, or Salto, his birthplace, anymore. And “the smell of words on the body”11 never dissipated, whether by those who lived with it or by how this smell would be evoked, narrated, and described by so many people from then on. After all, who would have the authority to talk about that man who amassed such passionate final reactions for himself when he was no longer present to take his own stand? Who was the person who had lived up to this pair of unusual obituaries? Being the lone anarchist came at the price of having few people willing to defend him. Castelnuovo had said so and the photographs published in the newspapers confirmed that there were not many people at the funeral of a writer who had enjoyed such fame throughout his life. His talent and strength have always allowed him, throughout his trajectory, to occupy public spaces, in the most diverse publications, over the last three decades. However, in that early 1937, and in the time around his death, Horacio, more than a writer, was a prematurely tired, aged, and forgotten man. The first Argentine redress came only in the following year, in a curious and unexpected way. At the Argentine Congress, Senator Alfredo Palacios, from the Socialist Party, gave a speech that brought together the recently deceased Horacio Quiroga and Alfonsina Storni and a third man, so different from them in so many ways, but close to them during some key moments: Leopoldo Lugones. Concerning the three suicidal writers, the senator said the following: In two years three of our great spirits, each one of which would be enough to bring glory to a country, have departed from existence: Leopoldo Lugones, Horacio Quiroga and Alfonsina Storni. Something is wrong in the life of a nation when, instead of singing it, poets depart, with a gesture of bitterness and disdain, in the midst of the glacial indifference of the State.12

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“el olor de las palabras sobre el cuerpo” (Luis Gusmán, “Ropa difunta”, 16). “En dos años han desertado de la existencia tres de nuestros grandes espíritus, cada uno de los cuales bastaría para dar gloria a un país: Leopoldo Lugones, Horacio Quiroga y Alfonsina Storni. Algo anda mal en la vida de una nación cuando, en vez de cantarla, los poetas parten, con un gesto de amargura y de desdén, en medio de una glacial indiferencia del Estado” (Mucci, Leopoldo Lugones: Los escritores y el poder, 17-18). 12

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The year was 1938 and poets and writers gave themselves up to death and suffered from singular obituaries. To whom do life and works belong? Who builds the memory of those who are no longer there?

2. THE RAIN TURNS INTO DELUGE AND THE WIND INTO HURRICANE – BECOMING A WRITER

On the banks of the Uruguay River is the city of Salto, in the Uruguayan far west. Across the river there is Concordia. To this day, Salto is the second-largest city in the country. Horacio was born there, the fourth child of Uruguayan Pastora Forteza and Argentine Prudencio Quiroga. Since childhood the boy was seduced by movement, by how things work, by science and poetry. It is at the age of nineteen that we find him, small, muscular, in search of adventures, and filled with a pioneering desire: together with his friend Carlos Berrutti, he wanted to cross on his bicycle the 120 kilometers that separate the cities of Salto and Paysandú. They went by bicycle, a still rudimentary contraption invented a little more than thirty years before. It was a vehicle that very few had access to: Horacio, son of a diplomat, was one of the wealthiest among his friends. The chosen route, going from the city where he lived to the next big city, had the extra appeal of going through a road rather close to the bed of the Uruguay River, always to the south. Traveling, however, was not enough. More than going all the way, it was necessary to give some epic character to the quest. More than doing it, they wanted to showcase what they had done. To print, to give light, to publish! Thus, on the continuum between the desire for adventure and the desire to report, “Para los ciclistas”13 was born, the chronicle of the trail explored over two days through muddy terrain, puddles, and the torrential rains of the Uruguayan spring. The text appeared on December 3, 1897, signed by “Two cyclists”. It was the first text published by Horacio. Perhaps it was his debut as a writer. When is someone really a writer? The editor in charge of publishing the feat was a man even younger than Horacio, Alfredo Lagos (1880-1926), who was in charge of the newly created newspaper La Reforma, which “was published in the afternoons, 13

Quiroga, Obras inéditas y desconocidas, 25-28.

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with the news, and was commercial and of general interest”14, that is to say, a newspaper which is not particularly interesting in itself, and is more indicative of the moment of flowering of the South American press, with its small vehicles of commercial character run by young people, than anything else. Riding the bike and then running the pen on the small notebook. Crossing nearby bogs and then reporting as if he had ventured into the wild sea. Amplifying hardships newly faced and telling them as if they were the greatest ones ever faced by a human being on the planet. The bicycle crossing was something else. Robert Louis Stevenson throbbed on the tip of Horacio's pen. The seas opened up, adventures were possible, and it was possible to tell them. Like a logbook, “Para los ciclistas” is synthetic and descriptive. It resembles notes by explorers, but, at the same time, shows readers that they too can take the same route: “In short: with dry weather and no headwind, the journey is extremely feasible”15. But just as the bicycle crossing is not meant to be just a bicycle crossing, but a liberating experience, the article is also not meant as just an article, but a tale of adventure with a desire for literature. This is how, in Horacio's inexperienced pen, “the rain becomes deluge and the wind a hurricane”16. Something was being born beyond the worsening of the weather, something was growing. The first trip, the first article, and the first traces of a style. What spreads across the white of the page, a little by chance, a little inadvertently, was not what Horacio imagined for himself. He had his secret clubs, with his friends from Salto: first, The Musketeers; then, The Consistorio del Gay Saber. In them, all literary experience had to do with poetry, with free association, with the style in vogue at the time: the boys wanted to be musketeers, knights, poets, not a new Stevenson. But it did not matter, it was time for experimenting. And Horacio was proud of his article written with a friend and published under a pseudonym. Thus, the debut was a surprise for Horacio himself. On those daily, solar, printed pages of La Reforma, and not on the poetic, nocturnal, handwritten pages of the youth notebooks, Horacio first got acquainted with his own printed word.

14 “salía de tarde, era noticioso, comercial y de interés general” (Manuel Olarreaga, El periodismo en el departamento de Salto, 13). 15 “En resumen: con tiempo seco y sin viento alguno de frente, el viaje es sumamente factible” (Quiroga, Obras inéditas y desconocidas, 28). 16 “la lluvia se transforma en diluvio y el viento en huracán” (Quiroga, Obras inéditas y desconocidas, 26).

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He would grow to like it, that is for sure. He would ritually repeat travels and writings. For those born by the river, their whole life is a crossing. In his future years, Horacio would cross the city of Posadas and the town of San Ignacio with a rowing canoe, or a mighty Paraná River17; he would fantasize a journey on foot by two old septuagenarian peones in an attempt to return from Misiones to the Paraná they came from, after years of being away. The emerging desire was one of roaming, despite the adversities, or perhaps driven by them, to tear up paths, to expand horizons. It all started with that bicycle in the mud, with that ink in the notebook. The account of Horacio's bicycle trip registers that he and his friend are towed by a horse, that they fall into some stony fields due to a moment of inattention. At another time, they half sink in a bog. Living and telling were born together on that trip. On which of these days, Horacio, did you become a writer? On the day you convinced Berrutti to take the trip with you? The day you hit the road? The day you saw your text being published? You deny it. You say no, it was not in any of these days. As an old man, you look back on your past and say something else: your personal epic was never one of sport, but of making a living. That at some point you decided to be a professional writer, and that it all started when they first decided to pay you some change for your written lines: “I started writing in 1901. That year, La Alborada de Montevideo paid me three pesos for a contribution. Since that moment, of course, I have tried to earn a living by writing”18. Cunning, you turned “starting to write” and “starting to receive” into synonyms, implying “starting to publish”. When you published that, Horacio, on the eve of completing half a century in this world, you were just repeating a conception of life that was being forged over the years: the one which says that writing is not a gift nor an art, but a craft, and that, therefore, it has to be paid like any other. That inspiration is a chimera. That writers must be treated as professionals and that their descendants must have the right, as an inheritance, to receive copyright for a period longer than the mere ten years then enforced by Argentine law. That was your public image, that is how it was forged: a professional writer. There was practically no page of yours that was not paid. As an adult, no more literary magazines, no more favors, no more giving a hand: mass17 Feats present in short stories as “Los remos de ‘La Gaviota’” (1918) and “En la noche” (1919) 18 “Yo comencé a escribir en 1901. En ese año, La Alborada de Montevideo me pagó tres pesos por una colaboración. Desde ese instante, pues, he pretendido ganarme la vida escribiendo” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 1206).

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circulation newspapers and magazines – remunerated, as it should be. Whoever crossed your path calling you a master, with a pat on the back, inevitably left with a story for a lifetime, never printed on paper, but in memory, like the one told by César Tiempo. It happened in 1925, when your young admirer came to you with an invitation to collaborate on a text in the magazine of his friends from high school, of which he was the editor: I had to pass him a glass of water and I took advantage of the opportunity to remind him that I had written to him asking for a contribution destined to a youth magazine, ex-high school classmates, whose address I had been entrusted with. ņ Do you know I live of what I write?, - he said, looking me straight in the face. ņ. I don’t think you are in a position to pay me. He left me speechless.19

While the mature writer established himself as craftsman in scenes like this, which took place in 1925, the young man continues cycling, with confidence in a future whose shape looked great in the distance, even if the specifics were still too far away to even be imagined. To tell a rational truth in order to hide the truths you no longer dare to confess, I know it very well. I will not confront you, I will not judge you. I will just tell some stories about you.

Writing against indifference Let us just say, with a touch of fable: Horacio's passion for the bicycle continued. And the same goes for that other passion. Writing was a good way to be noticed, to make his own voice rise in that flat city. He began to publish frantically. First in a weekly magazine called Gil Blas, run by his friends Adrúbal Delgado and José María Fernández Saldaña, known as the Maitland. There he poured his lyrical verve, born from the – affective, chemical, and literary –experiences that, with his friends Alberto Brignole, Julio Jaureche, and

19 “Yo tuve que alcanzarle un vaso de agua y aproveché la coyuntura para recordarle que le había escrito requiriéndole una colaboración destinada a una revista de jóvenes, ex-compañeros de bachillerato, cuya dirección me habían confiado. ņ Usted sabe que vivo de lo que escribo?, - me dijo mirándome derechamente a la cara. ņ. No creo que ustedes estén en condiciones de pagarme. Me dejó mudo.” (Tiempo, Cartas inéditas y evocación de Horacio Quiroga, 9).

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José Hasda, were shared by the group of musketeers. Horacio, the D’Artagnan, felt the need to make himself heard. The magazines and newspapers that flourished in Salto at that time were the possibilities for the musketeer verses and ideas to try bolder flights, among peers and beyond the nights of party and poetry, and to get to the printed letter and the light of day. On the pages of Gil Blas, already in its fifth issue, Horacio will take a risk with his first literary text: a prose poem called “Noturno”. (Horacio, can I say that this is your literary debut? Or will you insist that it was only when you received the first three pesos?). A calculated risk, because the boy hides his name once again. This time, the pseudonym chosen is Guillermo Eynhardt, the protagonist of the Hungarian novel by Max Nordau (1849-1923), Fin de Siècle (in Brazil, published as Moléstia do Século), very much in vogue at that time. Of the very short text, few memories remain, among which the most eloquent being those that capture the lyricism of the chemistry student in love with electroplating, who was then Horacio: “The moon appears, and, in its galvanizing light, each leaf is a piece of silver, and each ray of light, a fantasy. (...) All is mystery. From the moon, which resembles a voltaic arc, to the wind that seems like a caress.”20 Magazines followed one another, opening and closing like fireflies in the night of Salto. The boys tried themselves as editors, journalists, editors, poets, and then, when the experiment was over, they went on to live adult lives, as doctors, engineers, lawyers, or merchants. In the following year, when they founded La Revista Social, Horacio started to try his hand at yet a third genre, the everyday chronicles [crónicas de costumbres]. With the expertise acquired throughout his twenty years of existence, he began to rebel, on the pages of the magazine, against all sorts of conventions: mourning, the proper ways of dancing in public, ways of expressing love, among many others. His fun consisted of teasing readers and social rules. He was the authority. Not satisfied with writing in other people's magazines, Horacio decided to found his own. The title was pompous and serious: Revista del Salto. Semanario de Literatura y Ciencias Sociales. It was quite a contrast to the Spanish picaro honored by his friends' magazine, Gil Blas. It contrasted even with the playful spirit of the musketeer brotherhood. But it had to be that way, for Horacio's new task was to transform local society, according to his own words. It was necessary to say what he was 20 “La luna aparece; y, a su luz galvánica, cada hoja es un trozo de plata, y cada rayo de luz, un ensueño. (...) Todo es misterio. Desde la Luna que semeja un arco voltaico, hasta el viento que parece una caricia” (Quiroga, Obras inéditas y desconocidas, 29).

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coming for. It was a task as brief as it was frantic. Throughout the twenty issues, published over the course of its five months of existence, between September 11, 1899, and February 4, 1900, Horacio signed 24 texts of several genres: editorial notes, everyday chronicles, poems, short stories, theater criticism, programmatic texts. More importantly: for the first time, he dared to use his own name. It was his own magazine, his name was exposed on the front page; in its editorial, a true call to battle called for “old school veterans” and “shy enlightened ones” to occupy the publication’s columns, launching their attacks. The typography improved issue by issue, although always at the end of the eight pages of each copy, the editor regretted, sometimes the lack of illustrations, sometimes the lack of room to conclude a text. From number eight onwards, the magazine got a dust jacket, with a subtle message on the back cover, inviting merchants and businessmen to advertise there. This call was also answered, although a little late, in the first December 1899 issue of the magazine, number 13: there were eighteen advertisements, for tailors, drugstores, lawyers, designers, music teachers, homeopaths, watchmakers, and a multipurpose carpentry shop, called Central, which manufactured window blinds, coffins, and even offered a complete funeral service. The loyal local merchants will follow the magazine until its final issue. And then it was over. The end of Revista del Salto happened with the publication of the twentieth issue, prematurely. The final issue was prepared with care: in addition to the final note, strategically placed on the final pages of the magazine, signed by Quiroga – “Por qué no sale más la Revista del Salto”21 – there is also an Open Letter by Atilio C. Brignole, addressed to the editor. In both texts, the “indifference of the scene” is accused as responsible for its disappearance. The editor complains that the magazine was open for submissions, but no one wanted to buy the magazine, no one wanted to write for it, so the magazine was over! An onomastic index, following the editor's note, corroborates the idea that this was a project with a beginning, middle, and end. In it, we see the 24 texts by Horacio Quiroga, in addition to nine unsigned social columns. Almost half a hundred authors had their texts published: forty-seven, to be more precise. The main ones were Horacio and his friend Atilio Brignole. Then came other confreres – such as Alberto Brignole, José María Fernández Saldaña, Asdrúbal Delgado –, relatives – such as Eduardo Forteza –, and the editor’s favorite poets: Bécquer, Gutiérrez Nájera, Heine, Hugo, Lugones, Catulle Mendès, and Amado Nervo. 21

Quiroga, “Por qué no sale más la Revista del Salto,” 164-165.

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Horacio's disappointment, in his final words, was displayed without dissimulation. The editor looked down on his readers, said that they were looking for distraction rather than reflection, and made it clear that he was uncomfortable with the cold reception the magazine had received. He seemed to shout: Enough! His ideal does not fit in that provincial world. Horacio wanted more, he could do more. That is why he was going to leave.

I am not from Salto. I am from Paris! After all the emotions with the bicycle, the poetry, the life in the literary fellowships, the editing of a magazine to call his own – after all that, what else? It is true that Horacio had been satisfied with each of those adventures, but everything seemed little to him. As he went on publishing, other, bigger plans came to mind: what if he went to Paris? The idea was being gestated. Arguments for leaving were not lacking: the word Paris alone loomed larger than all of them. Yet they circled around his head to plan the big leap, the journey that would launch him to new horizons: it was the year of the Universal Exhibition in the City of Light, the first one in the new century; it was his chance to venture out as a cyclist in the local races; he could meet French and Latin American poets and writers he so admired, such as Nicaraguan Rubén Darío; he would meet the French women; he would be recognized as a great writer; Why not go? He had the inheritance money for his father's death and his mother could help him monthly until he could manage things on his own. He would go. Intoxicated with himself and his talent, Horacio left to fulfill his great fate. Literary fate, of course. He wanted to be a writer, even though it was so difficult for him, until then, to sign his own name, oscillating between Nordau's character, Portuguese names, and anything else that could veil his own signature, while he discovered and built himself properly as an author. Horacio, when, on March 30, 1900, you set sail for Paris on the Città di Torino, were you already a writer? I know that you hesitated before the identification form and ended up filling in the “occupation” field something that referred not to the literary fellowships, nor to the bike rides, but to your work of the last few weeks: “giornalista”. Neither a writer nor a poet: journalist. Revista del Salto was the solid thing you had. It was even the strongest of the social justifications for your trip: you would work as a La Reforma's correspondent for the Universal Exhibition and some cycling competitions. As he discovered the ins and outs of the City of Light, he would tell the readers from Salto about it. And who knows, if your articles came from Paris, people would care more about them... Who knows?

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Ten days before the trip, and although family and friends had accompanied him to the harbor of Salto for the first leg of the trip, Horacio was set to travel alone. His first and most important company were two notebooks that would serve as diaries. At 22, he was heading for the unknown. The small steamboat Montevideo, which would take him from the river to the sea, traced its path through the narrow waters for the umpteenth time, presenting to the young man a series of possibilities and desires that he could not determine, lost between intangible ideals and brutal impatience. His first lines recorded in the notebook did not have the intimacy of someone who was used to his own voice, but they were prematurely trying to forge literature. In the ten days he spent traveling around the country, through the rivers, Horacio kept a monumental image of himself in his diary, which remained until the moment he got to the sea: “I seemed to notice in my friends a goodbye that was more than affectionate, that went beyond the ship, as if I saw myself for the last time. I even thought that the people filling the wharf was staring at me, like I was predestined...”22 Feeling grandiose, Horacio reads and writes. Away from the looks he might consider critical, the idea of writing his first novel emerged: I often listen to music, well-known music, that turn me completely visionary. For a few days, the idea of making a novel has been germinating in my head. I let it work, not gathering the courage, for now to provoke a birth that I believe will be premature. In Paris or Buenos Aires, I will try… In addition, I have been beset by some aureoles of grandeur such that I have never felt before. I believe myself distinguished, very distinguished, with a future, above all, of rare glory.23

He wants to be great, but at the same time, the book’s subject must come from lived experience. The writing wants land to be built upon, even if the land in question is a still immaterial Paris or a Buenos Aires yet to become part of his more concrete plans. The infinite period over the waters, however, was muddying plans that were already as little concrete as his 22

“Me parecia notar en la mirada de los amigos una despedida más que afectuosa, que iba más allá del buque, como si me viera por última vez. Hasta creí que la gente que llenaba el muelle me miraba fijamente, como a un predestinado…” (Quiroga, Quiroga íntimo, 60). 23 “Oigo a menudo música, músicas conocidas, que me dejan completamente visionario. Germina en mi cabeza – hace días – la idea de hacer una novela. La dejo obrar, no animándome, por ahora, a provocar un parto que creo será prematuro. En París, o Buenos Aires, probaré… Además, me han entrado unas auréolas de grandeza como tal vez nunca haya sentido. Me creo notable, muy notable, con un porvenir, sobretodo, de gloria rara” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 66).

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image of grandeur. Unlike his friends who admired him in the harbor, there was no one to notice him on the ship: “What deadly drudgery! What endless boredom! Sometimes I get horribly irritated in Salto, among my friends, my things, etc. And what won’t it be like here, alone among Italians, Genoese and Neapolitans, rude and indifferent! To think that this will last twenty days!”24 It was still the end of April. The days go by slowly. The grandiose destiny was quickly giving way to homesickness, the glorious future to the comfort of what was already familiar, the women of Paris to his girlfriend of Salto. One week later, he recorded: What comes to my mind, sometimes, in bursts, is the illusion that I could be in Salto, on the corner, watching people I know pass by, on a warm and soft night, watching her, or maybe dancing... In those moments I formally deny having undertaken this trip, the most stupid trip I have ever taken, stupid, yes, stupid; I will become an idiot and a Genoese…25

He was filled with boredom, and with the despair of having already left but without getting anywhere. The memory of the girl who stayed in Salto and whose name cannot be said takes him under the form of romantic nostalgia, to soon fade away. It is thirty-four long days of solitude on the water, between Salto and Genoa, dedicated to several readings that he had brought in his luggage, mostly novels, such as Sueño de Rapiña, by Uruguayan Carlos Reyles, and the recently released Fécondité, by Émile Zola, and Manon Lescaut, by Prévost. On April 23, at nightfall, after unprecedented loneliness and unparalleled silence and boredom, he finally arrived in Genoa. Stumbling, he left the ship without saying goodbye to anyone, with his newly acquired dislike for the locals, and went to have dinner in a restaurant on Via Balvi, the city’s Main Street. With relief, he felt his legs working and moving again. He was free from the endless sea. The plans were always of grandeur; however, the young man failed to plan the steps to reach it. Everything was diffuse, as in the young writer's 24 “¡Qué mortal pesadez! ¡Qué aburrimiento tan enorme! A veces me fastidio horriblemente en el Salto, entre mis amigos, mis cosas, etcétera. ¡Y qué no será aquí, solo entre italianos, genoveses y napolitanos, groseros e indiferentes! ¡Pensar que esto durará veinte días!” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 61). 25 “Viene a mi cabeza, a veces, por ráfagas, la ilusión de que podría estar en Salto, en la esquina, viendo pasar gente que conozco, de noche templada y suave, viéndola, o acaso bailando… En esos momentos reniego formalmente de haber emprendido este viaje, el más estúpido de los que he hecho, estúpido, sí, estúpido; me volveré idiota y genovés…” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, p. 72).

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first impressionist narratives. Horacio was not sure what to do in the city either. For now, all he had left were the trains, first from Genoa to Modena, and then from Modena to Paris, his final destination. At the Modena station, he sat down to write, lamenting the feeling of invisibility: I’m writing and waiting for the train to Paris in Modena, a station on the border. (...) I am very discouraged from this trip, all the unknown faces, without admiring much because I’m alone, without communicating my impressions to anyone. As for the language, I can communicate quite well, although sometimes I blurt out an expression in plain Spanish due to the difficulty of finding the equivalent in French.26

However, there was no one who saw him. The invisible South American felt bad. Being used to showing off his gifts – as a dandy, as a poet, as a cyclist – in his hometown, after almost a month and a half without being noticed, he at least hoped to make himself known, from across the ocean, by his articles about Europe, published for the locals` delight. It was his only chance for recovering his own image, reviving the generous looks of friends and family from the farewell in Salto. For that, he would have to keep the bitterness inside his personal notebook. The journalist should have more objective words for his readership, those of the South American artist, restless with what he was discovering in the new environment. That is how the editor introduced him to readers in his first published article: “Horacio, as those of us close to him call him, proposes visiting the Universal Exhibition, having made a commitment with us write his impressions for us by letter, which will be published in our sheet as valuable contributions.”27 When facing the blank sheet, however, whether for public or private purposes, Horacio was the very image of rootlessness. It was strange to be away from home, away from his people. When he took hold of his pencil, he wrote

26

“Estoy escribiendo y esperando el tren para París en Módena, estación de frontera. (…) Estoy bastante desanimado de este viaje, todas caras desconocidas, sin admirar gran cosa porque estoy solo, sin comunicar a nadie mis impresiones. Con el idioma me entiendo bastante bien, aunque a veces suelto una expresión en pleno castellano por la dificultad de hallar la equivalente en francés” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 92). 27 “Horacio, como lo llamamos los íntimos, se propone visitar la Exposición Universal, habiendo contraído con nosotros el compromiso de relatarnos por carta sus impresiones, las que serán publicadas en nuestra hoja como valiosas colaboraciones.” (Quiroga, Obras Inéditas y Desconocidas, 220).

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To us, poor exiled from the supreme intellectual life, the vision of Paris is a nostalgia for a place we have never seen and that, today or tomorrow, will lead us to get to know it. Find me at last, in Paris. The first impression felt when contemplating the cities of these latitudes is extremely sad. We are used to houses with flat roofs, completed at the top with little balconies or anything else, separated, so to speak, and with paintings of more or less good taste. Here the houses are crammed so close it looks like a great coldness compressed them into blackish groups, freezing and hungry. From Genoa to Paris, one sees nothing but shacks that were never painted or washed – windows, small, with no taste whatsoever –; tall houses that more resemble pierced walls, damp houses with four to ten storeys – usually six – , walled up on a street of four meters, and that for us, children of the horizon and full sunshine, are the reason for more than one bitter nostalgia.28

These were the opening sentences of his article “Desde Paris I”, which was going to be published in Salto, on May 29. Although he had been excited to write it, he soon realized that in the near future he would not know at all what impression his words would make on his friends. What was not rootlessness was astonishment caused by the modern city, the vehicles, the mob, the hustle. He remembered the passer-by in Baudelaire's poem and believed he saw her on a corner of the Quartier Latin, while he somewhat felt like the man in the crowd of a certain American short story writer who, at that time, was already beginning to disturb him. The sensation of being invisible in the metropolis of three million inhabitants was paid for by the vertigo caused by the human mass, an experience that he had never had before: Life in the great boulevards – of which much is told –, is very agitated, above all pondering. Calculating the number of carriages that pass for a single 28 “Para nosotros, pobres desterrados de la suprema intelectualidad, la visión de París es una nostalgia de un lugar que nunca hemos visto, y que, hoy o mañana, nos lleva a conocerle. Héme por fin, en París. La primera impresión que se siente el contemplar las ciudades de esas latitudes, es tristísima. Estamos acostumbrados a las casas de techo plano, rematadas en lo alto con balconcillos o cualquier otra cosa, separadas, por decirlo así, y con pinturas de más o menos buen gusto. Aquí las casas están tan juntas que parece que un gran frío las comprimió en grupos negruzcos, helados y hambrientos. Desde Génova hasta París no se ve otra cosa que casas de media agua que nunca fueron pintadas ni lavadas – ventanas, pequenãs, sin gusto ninguno –; casas altas que más bien parecen muros agujereados, casas húmedas de cuatro a diez pisos – seis por lo general –, amuralladas sobre una calle de cuatro metros, y que para nosotros, hijos del horizonte y del pleno sol, son motivo de más de una amarga nostalgia.” (Quiroga, Obras inéditas y desconocidas, 100101).

22

Chapter 2 one, is an enormous task – according to the common phrase –. In two rows, in three, in four in five, in six; two hundred carriages, 80 bicycles, 15 automobiles, 1000 people, all in one block of the boulevard, by day, by night, at all hours, bunched together, constrained, squeezed, stunned, waiting for the civil guard to give the order to move, because another equal number of vehicles are crossing any corner. This is repeated every two minutes. It is not easy to cross the boulevards with impunity; one must run, stop, dodge, run again, step back: stop (may Valbuena excuse me), run again and that in just fifteen meters.29

It was not just the indistinct mass and its hustle that captured him. He was also seduced by what was unique, the faces, clothes and adornments of women and men, especially men: Individuals walk by with forty centimeters of hair and eighty of beard (no exaggeration); citizens who not satisfied with carrying mourning in their hat, wear wide crepe armbands; individuals with beautiful, shaved faces, with their little Italian straw hat coquettishly tilted on their silky artificial ringlets, wrapped in a cape that drapes down to their feet, and they walk in slow, soft steps, exhibiting the comical feminism of their gait and their painted faces. The most extravagant and vulgar characters we could ask for pass by; Armenians, Turks, Chinese pass by, Arabs pass by, all dressed in the fashion of their country. Anyone who could pass by in a three millionstrong, magnificently heterogeneous city, in sum, passes by. Except blacks. That’s for sure, during the twelve days I’ve been in Paris, I have barely seen three. And right here, where there is everything and nothing amazes, they stand out.30 29 “La vida de los grandes bulevares – de que mucho se cuenta –, es agitadísima sobre toda ponderación. Calcular el número de carruajes que pasan por uno solo, es tarea ímproba – según la frase usual –. En dos filas, en tres, en cuatro, en cinco, en seis; doscientos carruajes, 80 bicicletas, 15 automóviles, 1000 personas, todo en una cuadra de bulevár, de día, de noche, a todas horas, apelotonados, constreñidos, estrujados, asombrados, esperando que el guarda civil dé la orden de marcha, porque otro número igual de vehículos están cruzándolo en una esquina cualquiera. Esto se repite cada dos minutos. No es fácil atravesar impunemente los bulevares; hay que correr, detenerse, apartarse, volver a correr, retroceder: pararse (perdone Valbuena), correr de nuevo y eso en sólo quince metros” (Quiroga, Obras Inéditas y Desconocidas, 101). 30 “Pasan individuos de cuarenta centímetros de cabello y ochenta de barba (sin exagerar); ciudadanos que no conformes con llevar luto en el sombrero, llevan anchos brazales de crespón; sujetos de cara lindísima y afeitados, con su sombrerito de paja de Italia coquetonamente inclinados sobre sedosos bucles artificiales, envueltos en una capa que les llega a los pies, y van marchando lentamente, suavemente, exhibiendo el cómico feminismo de su andar y de sus caras pintadas.

The rain turns into deluge and the wind into hurricane – becoming a writer

23

In that fauna of exotic types, Horacio had yet to discover what would be most important to him: how would he himself be seen? He was beginning to discover that over there he would no longer be the dandy from a good family, known to all, admired by so many, and with a promising future. Little by little, he would find himself being, in Paris, one of the exotic types that he had seen passing by. At first, it was a point in his favor: a girl he met called him petit joli arabe. He did not keep a record of his expenses in the cabarets for his personal accounting. As for the other costs, he could not silence them, and gave start to neurotic calculations to see how generous the city was going to be with him: I bought a loaf of bread for ten cents and I went into a café to drink some coffee: twenty cents. What a magnificent dinner! I went back to sleep at 10pm and now I have just – 8am – spoken to Escalante. He seems like a very good young man. I told him I am intending to live with fifty pesos. He thought it difficult, but, looking, one may find. We will go out straight away. (...) The house where I have slept costs five francs per day: that is supposed to be too much for me, although in general it is not expensive, given the generosity of the room and the cash required. (…) I have arrived in Paris with eighty eight pesos, that is, with four hundred and forty francs.31

It would be easy to notice, but Horacio did not: considering the price of the hotel, five francs a day, for an initial budget of four hundred and forty francs, there would soon be no money even for basic needs. Fate was reckless, but Horacio did not realize it, drunk as he was in his twenties, with the cars, the boulevards, the French women in the cabaret, and the poorly cleaned houses of Paris. Recording his expenses in his diary, he believed, Pasan los tipos más extravagantes y vulgares que se pueden pedir; pasan armenios, pasan turcos, pasan chinos, pasan árabes, todos vestidos a la moda de su país. Pasa, en fin, todo lo que puede pasar en una ciudad de tres millones, magníficamente heterogénea. Menos negros. Eso sí, en doce días que llevo en París, no he visto sino tres. Y aquí mismo, donde todo hay y nada admira, llaman la atención” (Quiroga, Obras Inéditas y Desconocidas, 102). 31 “Compré un pan por diez céntimos y entre a un café a tomar un ídem: veinte céntimos. ¡Qué cena magnífica! Volví a dormir a las 10 p.m., y ahora acabo – 8 a.m. – de hablar con Escalante. Parece muy buen muchacho. Le expuse mis intenciones de vivir con cincuenta pesos. Le pareció difícil la cosa pero, buscando, se encuentra. Saldremos enseguida. (...) La casa donde he dormido cuesta cinco francos diarios: se supone que es mucho para mí, aunque en general no es caro, dados la bondad de la pieza y el pedido de cuartos. (…) He llegado a París con ochenta y ocho pesos, es decir, con cuatrocientos cuarenta francos.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 97-98).

24

Chapter 2

was the most efficient way to make his resources last. He then drafted his monthly budget, counting on his mother's money: For now, I have two hundred and fifty francs for the monthly rent, to be distributed thus: room, fifty francs, cleaning of the same, five francs; washing and ironing, ten francs (it should be more, but I am not planning to wear more than a t-shirt on the bicycle, and this way are eliminated the collars, cuffs, etc. Afterwards: one hundred francs which I am planning to dedicate per month for meals; perhaps ten francs for some café au laits in the morning. Overall it comes to one hundred and seventy five francs; seventy five remain that I will spend at ease on cigarettes and other silly little things. Seventeen pesos per month in Paris is not much, but saving up from time to time, some days, I am not planning to miss the races.32

Moreover, there was the bike that he had bought so he could dedicate himself to cycling in the City of Lights. The plan was laid out, and it was just a matter of waiting for his mother’s check. He would pick it up at the consulate in a few days. The check, however, was not arriving. It was taking its time in the sea, he thought, much longer than he took to get there. It was strange. His plans were starting to go down the drain, just because of such a pesky thing as him having no more money. On May 25, to make matters worse, he started to notice the symptoms of a gonorrhea: he mentions in passing, when talking about a lady he had been meeting for a few evenings, that he was treating himself with potassium permanganate. Two weeks later, he writes in code that he has gonorrhea and a chancre; and, much more clearly, he says that the check he went to pick up at the Consulate had not arrived yet. Below the waist everything burns, including his pockets: Horacio is already twenty days behind on his rent and has a case of persistent gonorrhea. He feels bad in the face of financial hardship, but does not lose his temper, although he

32

“Por lo pronto, tengo doscientos cincuenta francos de renta mensual, a repartirse de esta manera: cuarto, cincuenta francos; arreglo del mismo, cinco francos; lavado y planchado, diez francos (debía de ser más, pero no pienso andar más que de camiseta en bicicleta, y de este modo quedan eliminados los cuellos, puños, etcétera. Después: cien francos que pienso dedicar por mes a comer; tal vez diez francos de algunos cafés con leche de mañana. El todo suma ciento setenta y cinco francos; quedan setenta y cinco francos que gastaré tranquilamente en cigarros y otras sonceritas. No es mucho que digamos diecisiete pesos por mes en París; pero, ahorrando de cuando en cuando algunos días, pienso no faltar a carreras.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 99).

The rain turns into deluge and the wind into hurricane – becoming a writer

25

cannot find a way out: “A marvellous situation ahead, of which I am not even able to suppose how I will get out. Let’s see.”33 During the three following weeks, Horacio threw himself into a vortex of penury and helplessness which he showed no signs of being able to overcome. The money had irrevocably run out and nothing arrived from Uruguay. Working was not an option. It occurred to him to pawn his personal belongings. His dandy outfit was, little by little, going away, followed closely by the bicycle, the camera, and a long et cetera. Part of the money he raised was used to pay for the distress telegrams he sent to his family. But the replies did not come. Neither did the check. The idea of looking for a job only emerged on June 4 that, albeit under the sign of impossibility. I am truly starting to believe that I will die of hunger. How to work here? In any case, tomorrow night I will go to see Gómez Carrillo. It may be that they will employ me in the Garnier work, even just correcting galleys. But I neither hope, nor understand, nor suspect how I will be able to live. It is a terrible thing.34

The situation deteriorated but, still, the hypothesis of getting a job was not strong enough. Guatemalan Enrique Gómez Carrillo was not even a friend of Horacio, but a journalist, writer, and translator, who was already established and in much better conditions than Horacio was. They had had a disagreement two weeks before: Horacio asked him, at Café Cyrano, if he spoke Guarani. His answer was rude: after saying that he did not know what that was, upon hearing Horacio's explanation, asked him if he spoke English or German and finished: “Americans are rather ridiculous, they still remember their things from there.”35 Gómez Carrillo was the center of attention at the café. To rival him was to draw attention to himself, and the discussion – scrupulously recorded in Horacio’s diary – was perhaps a harsh lesson about the subaltern position reserved for Americans in Europe. It was necessary to swallow his pride and go talk to Gómez Carrillo, the one who

33 “Una situación maravillosa por delante, de la cual ni me supongo siquiera como saldré. Esperemos.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 72). 34 “Empiezo a creer firmemente que moriré de hambre. ¿Cómo trabajar aquí? De todos modos, mañana de noche iré a ver a Gómez Carrillo. Puede ser que en lo de Garnier me ocupen, aunque fuera corrigiendo pruebas. Pero no espero, ni comprendo, ni sospecho cómo podré vivir. Es algo terrible.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 124). 35 “los americanos son bastante ridículos, todavía recuerdan sus cosas de allá.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 112).

26

Chapter 2

already felt so European that he could refer to Latin Americans as “your lot”. Being the son of a family with a stable financial situation, Horacio had never worked. His dedication to writing had emerged as an intellectual activity, above all. Considering a job at a publishing house as a proofreader was the first step at that time. But he didn’t seem to have in him the ability to take a second step: putting it into practice? Better not. The following day, and before Horacio could have breakfast or figure out what the day would be like, another fellow countryman went to look for him. It was Juan Fleurquin, who brought him a proposal that was both salvation and humiliation: “Between a few friends we will give you enough for you to eat for a few days. What you should do is leave immediately. (…) I will go to see the Consul and get you a ticket to Marseille. You have a return by steam, don’t you?”36

Juan was telling him, between the lines, Horacio, you failed. Your future of glory came to nothing. Go back while you can and do not humiliate yourself anymore. The gesture of solidarity felt like a slap in the face, for he felt his face burning. It imposed on him the scar of a failure, of being useless, of being someone who has to settle for living off the charity of his friends from the pub. The help being offered by his fellow South Americans hurt him and strangled his self-love. Juan went on: Every day we could give you some two francs. I think it is enough to eat. We do this as a comrade who is in disgrace… I thanked him again. He gave me two francs. I felt I was going red, and felt like throwing the coin to the street. Not being accustomed!... But I contained myself and took my leave, hurrying, wanting to get away as soon as possible. I could not think anything other than: I have been given alms! And they will give me it every day! And I will have to receive it!37

36

“Entre unos cuantos amigos le daremos para que coma unos cuantos días. Usted lo que debía hacer era irse enseguida. (…) Yo iré a ver el Cónsul y le sacaré pasaje para Marsella. ¿Usted tiene el de retorno en vapor, no?” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 125). 37 “Todos los días le podríamos dar cada uno dos francos. Yo creo que alcanza para comer. Lo hacemos como con un compañero que está en desgracia… Le agradecí de nuevo. Me dio dos francos. Sentí que me ponía colorado, y con ganas de tirar a la calle la moneda. ¡La falta de costumbre!... Pero me contuve y me marché, apresuradamente, queriendo alejarme de una vez. No pensaba más que esto: ¡me han dado una limosna! ¡y me la darán todos los días! ¡y tendré que recibirla!” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 125-126).

The rain turns into deluge and the wind into hurricane – becoming a writer

27

Horacio felt like the last of creatures, the most insignificant, worthy of nothing but contempt. He needed to have his own money. He thought that carrying suitcases all day for two francs would be much more dignified, but he did not even know where to try. He regretted having to return to Uruguay without having known Paris as he would have liked. The city that was to be the stage of his glorious destiny was suddenly transformed into the scene of an irrevocable fiasco. He started to wander around the city: he visited the Luxembourg gardens, contemplated the lake; he went for one last time to the Louvre Museum and stopped by Café Cyrano to see if he could get any tips from his friends. He could not find anyone. At least he had a few coins to get something to eat. As for the hotel, he would have to think about what to do later, since the debt had piled up and he did not know how to pay it off. His days went like this; he wanted to write, but his main concern was to appease hunger, and to get money. He went to the Universal Exhibition to pass the time, to not think. More than planning, his mind wanted to escape. He could not see how to follow Fleurquin's advice: how was he going to pay for the carriage, how was he going to eat on the trip? How? It seemed that the way was to go back to Uruguay, humiliated. Trying to free himself from his miserable condition, Horacio wrote down the money he received from Fleurquin, two pesos a day, between June 5 and 11. The spiral of hunger went on. And then the check arrived. The family's much-desired help, the mainstay of all his plans, was finally in his hands. Indebted as he was, that sum was already worth much less. The money belonged to a lot of people, not to him. From being a resource taken for granted in order to fund his intellectual and artistic adventure, the check became the fast way back home. He could not even buy a third notebook to continue his diary. Horacio had to stop writing abruptly. After June 10, he no longer writes anything. He returns silent, there seems to be nothing else to be narrated, nothing to be told, there seems to be nothing else to be expected. A profound silence that fills the entire ship and makes even the seabirds hush.

A notable failure When he arrived, weeks later, in Uruguay, it was no longer Horacio reading the eyes of his relatives and friends, but the opposite. They were the ones who described him for his future biography: His attire revealed from a mile away the hardship experienced. A bad jockey on his head, a blazer with the lapel raised to hide the absence of collar, a pair of second hand trousers, deplorable footwear, constituted his entire

28

Chapter 2 wardrobe. It was hard to recognize him. From the old demeanor only the forehead, eyes and nose were left; the rest was drowning in a sea of black hair that never again, perhaps in remembrance of his Parisian adventure, would he shave.38

Horacio seemed to embody, in the eyes of his biographer friends, the myth of the hardened man, who returns from an ill-fated trip bearing his thick and inseparable beard – grown in hardship – as a scar. But it was not exactly like that. Horacio had already made the decision, when boarding, to have another face, more in line with the image of a writer he had forged for himself. At the end of his first month of travel, on April 4, he already associated his new beard with a certain feeling of displacement and strangeness within himself: I have a beard that is half a centimeter long, long hair and a skinny body. Some people think I’m stupid, others think I’m crazy, especially the former. A very sweet little girl says that I am the ugliest of those who play. My God, I may well be, I’m not saying I am not, because the other three or four have perhaps the healthiest, most regular and happiest faces that can be seen.39

The beard becomes the index of his maladjustment towards the people and things that surround him. The dandy, in fact, was already being dismantled since his departure. The makeup was melted by sweat, like with the character of Death in Venice. The dandy was dying of hunger and reality. His personal brilliance was only enough to get a couple of francs a day from his acquaintances. He wasted the silver bullet: Paris had not – magically – turned him into a successful writer, adored by his peers, desired by women. Paris had offered him hunger, gonorrhea, and scarcity, due to his incompetence in dealing

38 “Su indumentaria revelaba a la legua la tirantez pasada. Un mal jockey encima de la cabeza, un saco con la solapa levantada para ocultar la ausencia de cuello, unos pantalones de segunda mano, un calzado deplorable, constituían todo su ajuar. Costó reconocerlo. Del antiguo semblante sólo le quedaba la frente, los ojos y la nariz; el resto naufragaba en un mar de pelos negros que nunca más, tal vez en recuerdo de su aventura parisina, se rasuraría.” (Delgado and Brignole, Vida y obra de Horacio Quiroga, 101). 39 “Yo me dejo barba que tiene medio centímetro, el pelo largo y el cuerpo flaco. Unos me toman por sonso, otros por loco: sobre todo lo primero. Una chiquilina muy mona dice que yo soy el más feo de los que juegan. ¡Dios mío!, acaso sea, no lo digo que no, porque los otros tres o cuatro tienen acaso la cara más sana, regular y feliz que puede verse.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 69).

The rain turns into deluge and the wind into hurricane – becoming a writer

29

with everyday life. He had come back sulking and bearded: he could no longer fit in Paris and would no longer fit in Salto. He still had Montevideo and Buenos Aires on his horizon: the two capitals. In Montevideo, there were friends, in Buenos Aires, his older sister. He thought a little, not a lot, and decided to settle in the first one, a territory in which he was able to move with ease and where his friends from adolescence, already university students, also were. Horacio revived the literary fraternity he had established in Salto in honor of Alexandre Dumas’s Musketeers. In the Montevideo version, the group was organized into a board of cardinals: the Consistorio del Gay Saber. Everything there were unfoldings of the literary experiences from Salto and Paris: artificial paradises, readings, writings, poetry recitations, and games that anticipate automatic writing. While the novelist had failed on the trip for a lack of money to eat and paper to write on, the journalist had succeeded: two articles in his hometown as an international correspondent telling about Paris and the Fourth Universal Exhibition. From the mismatch between the small hometown and the cultural capital of the West at the turn of the century, he was left with the prestige brought by a few published lines. Better, there was still a hint of possibility left: to be a poet and short story writer in Montevideo. Settled in the capital, he soon resumed publishing some experimental texts. But it was not time yet: he veiled the signatures under the aquatic Portuguese pseudonym of Aquilino Delagoa. At the end of the already long and intense year of 1900, Horacio decided to submit to a literary contest in the magazine Alborada a text that he had created in his first diary, still in the Cittá de Torino, amid daydreams about his girlfriend from Salto, never to be named. It was a short story, or nearly so, and it was called “Sin razón, pero cansado”. The story had a simple and somewhat disturbing argument: a love triangle, formed by Luciano, Blanca, and the writer Recaredo. The concise narrative had descriptions of the landscape that came from Horacio’s readings of fin de siècle poetry: “The sterile sky, of a transparency of emptiness, fell leaden on the landscape, suffocating it.”40 The writer Recaredo, upon discovering that he is being betrayed, reacts ambiguously, asking his friend Luciano: “Why did you not tell me you were the lover of

40

“El cielo estéril, de una transparencia de vacío, caía a plomo sobre el paisaje, ahogándolo.” Horacio Quiroga. “Sin razón, pero cansado…”. (Quiroga, Obras Inéditas y Desconocidas, 113).

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my woman? (...) You already know my ideas regarding that (...) But, at least, do you love her?”41 The betrayed writer seemed more disgruntled by his friend's breach of trust than by his wife's betrayal. The final scene corroborated such a point of view. After a long boat ride, in which Luciano ended up drowning Blanca in a lake, the two friends walk home together. The boundary between intellectual fraternity and homoeroticism erupts before the eyes of anyone who takes a gander at the story. In this small literary page, Horacio proposed a sketch of that literary scene from the turn of the century – with strong misogynistic traits – present, on the one hand, in the two groups he participated in and helped to forge – that of the musketeers and the current Consistorio del Gay Saber – and, on the other hand, depicting secret loves: the girl dies in the name of Art (let us capitalize it). The only love that can be sustained, the short story seems to say, is the love of art and artistic fraternity. It is for art that one kills and one dies. The tale of artistic femicide struck a chord with the jury of the La Alborada magazine award and he was declared the winner on November 26, and soon saw the text published in the same magazine on December 9, still under the pseudonym Aquilino Delagoa. Horacio, or Aquilino Delagoa, was awarded, published, and paid in the capital of his own country. A horizon opened up: that your text was worth some money. The checks would no longer have to come from his mother, his money would not have to come only from the paternal inheritance, nor from the charitable alms given by friends. The young man of a brilliant future finally discovered that the signifier “giornalista”, a foreign word, allowed him not only to moderately triumph among his fellow countrymen in Salto, but also to live what he had written and to write what he lived. That seemed to satisfy him to a point. He consciously began to become a writer. Almost thirty years later, it is that distant moment that Horacio will remember, in a text that, not by chance, will be called “La profesión literaria” (1928). It was his first three pesos, earned months after he had been short of even a few bucks for bread. Is that when it started, Horacio? I'm starting to convince myself of that.

41

“Por qué no me dijiste que eras el amante de mi mujer? (...) Ya conoces mis ideas al respecto (...) Pero, al menos, ¿tú la amas?” (Quiroga, Obras Inéditas y Desconocidas, 115-116).

3. BLOOD AND GUNPOWDER

Signoles was a man who, with his sophisticated manners, his good manners, his virile aspect, was well-liked by his social circle. One day, while with friends at an ice cream parlor, he came across an impertinent man who threw inappropriate looks at one of the women at the table. Signoles’s friend did not want any trouble: “If we were to bother our heads about all the illmannered people we should have no time for anything else.”42 Then, Signoles, the strong, the brave, the one who had invited his friends to the ice cream parlor, the one who wore the title of viscount, took the pain of the offended woman upon himself. He went to the impertinent man's table and confronted him. Urged to react, Georges Lamil – that is what the inopportune man was called – answered him with just one word: duel! Signoles did not retreat. On the contrary, he had waited for this moment all his life. That man, that night, that opportunity. It was his man, at last: “When the time comes for me to fight a duel,” he said, “I shall choose pistols. With such a weapon I am sure to kill my man.”43 “The English know the locution ‘to kill his man’, which can be deciphered as killing the man whose death was mine or killing the man that every man must kill”44, explains Jorge Luis Borges, the library man, the one who never even raised his voice to anyone. It was the imperative to kill or be killed, in the name of honor, that was at stake for Signoles. The time had come. He went home, full of himself. Confident, stimulated by the astonished looks of those present, who gave him even more bravery and continued to follow him out of the ice cream shop. There went the brave, the strong, the bold.

42

“Si’il fallait s’occuper de tous les insolentes qu’on reencontre, on n’en finiri pas.” (Maupassant, Un Lache). 43 “Quand je me battrai, disai-il, je choisirai le pistolet. Avec cette arme, je suis sûr de tuer mon homme” (Maupassant, Un Lache). 44 “El inglés conoce la locución kill his man, cuya directa versión es matar su hombre, descífrese matar el hombre cuya muerte era mía o matar el hombre que tiene que matar todo hombre” (Borges, “El Martín Fierro,” 140).

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When he got home, however, and already freed from the stimulating effect of the argument, insidious doubts began to worry that man: who is Georges Lamil? Why did he so readily accept the duel? Is he a good shot? The uneasiness concerning his opponent was soon replaced by another, even worse. Doubts about himself began to assail him: “Is it possible to be afraid in spite of one's self?”45 Yes, it was. The fear grew, took over his body, provoked tremors, terror, which not even successive sips of rum could assuage. Signoles weakened. He sat down to write his will and could barely concatenate the ideas. The hours dilated and his fear of failure only grew. Although he had prepared himself all his life for that moment, when the duel was imminent, his hesitation was overwhelming. Signoles thought: what if I am not good enough, not agile enough? What if, right in the clutch, I end up giving in to this this crazy desire to run away? He feared not only the mighty Georges Lamil. He feared himself now, everything that was taking place in his soul, in spite of himself. What was doubt soon turned into certainty: Signoles knew he woud fail. Fail twice: he will not be better than his opponent in the duel, nor will he be able to face society again. All eyes, wherever he roams, will disapprove of him. Panic took hold of him. That is when the idea, which had only insinuated itself, took shape and became irreversible. Signoles finally had some clarity: he finally knew his true enemy. Still shaking and feeling the weight and movement of the pistol, he took the gun, took aim, and fired a precise, accurate shot into his own head, putting an end to the martyrdom. Signoles was his own man. “A coward” is the name of this short narrative, written by Frenchman Guy de Maupassant and published on January 27, 1884. Like few others, it manages to capture the panic that could affect men who needed to have courage as an attribute on the verge of fighting a duel. Facing death from an offense done or received was a topic of the patriarchal universe, in which the duel was one of the main ways of washing one’s honor. The Count of Chatauvillard, in 1863, had published a book called Essai sur le duel, in which, right in the introduction, he gives an idea of how frequent and regulated was the duel in French society: “Every man is liable to the stern necessity of risking his life, in order to revenge an offence, or an insult. It is a business of sufficient importance in life to be regulated beforehand, according to the forms and dictates of delicacy and justice.”46

45

“Peut-on avoir peur, malgré soi?” (Maupassant, Un Lache).

46 “Chacun est exposé à cette dure nécesité de risquer sa vie pour venger une offense,

un injure. C’est donc une affaire assez importante dans l’existence pour qu’elle soit

Blood and gunpowder

33

This book is carefully read by Signoles in Maupassant's short story. Signoles knew everything and was prepared. Still, or because of this, Signoles succumbed. The fear of death or loss of honor ravaged not only the men of France but also those of America, for custom had crossed the ocean. By the River Plate, the principle of resolving affective, intellectual, social, or political differences through bullets is supervised, according to careful regulation. In 1953, the president of the Uruguayan Senate, Alfeo Brum, and an opposition journalist, Ulises Pereyra, not only fought a duel but could also be followed in their fight for honor through a Montevideo radio station, from the Boiso Lanza Aerodrome. The radio broadcasts of the fights for honor were definitively banned by the Uruguayan government only in July of the same year. The duels, however, remained legal until 1992. Thus, when, in 1902, the young poet and journalist Guzmán Papini y Zaz publicly began to offend, in a Montevideo newspaper, the equally young Federico Ferrando, it was not difficult to imagine the consequences of the polemic. Guzmán was a poet, born in the same year as Horacio Quiroga, and he had not been able to join any literary group: he was considered a bad poet and an unpleasant person. That is why he was rejected both by the Consistorio del Gay Saber and by Julio Herrera y Reissig’s La Torre de los Panoramas. His book, Canto a la batalla de Cachanga, newly released, not only received a cold reception, but was also negatively criticized by Federico Ferrando in the local press. Federico, a close friend of Horacio, shared with him the creative space provided by the Consistorio del Gay Saber: Horacio was the Pontiff; Federico, the Archdeacon. Guzmán had been offended by Ferrando's negative review, and tried to get revenge with a violent article published in the newspaper La Tribuna Popular, dedicated to Ferrando. The text consisted in taking the image of the marginal poet to the limit, but without naming him: it created a repulsive image of the person being portrayed, associating him with the theft of the Carrara jewelry store, in downtown Montevideo, an episode in which the thief had invaded the establishment through the sewer pipe. Thus, he attacked and disqualified the one who lacked the sensibility that was required to understand his book. The article was called “El hombre del caño”: My man is a walking Gallicism: the worst translation into Spanish of a French bohemian. A native of Salto, he is a leap and bounce in our literature, pursued by tireless mockery. The leaping articulations that he d’avance réglée selon les formes voulues par la délicatesse et le droit.” (Chatauvillard, Essai sur le duel).

34

Chapter 3 erases are a candombe of foreign ideas, a furious can-can of incoherences; and as an unbridled can-can, they trample on any reputation within their reach. He feels attacked by the delirium tremens of disrespect. He considers himself the only one, the privileged one, the Messiah.47

Lines ahead, he already anticipated his unwillingness to accept any duels. If anyone considers himself alluded to in this article I beg him not to send me godfathers, because I am past the childish age of receiving the water of succor; and because great laughter cannot possibly conclude in duels: laughter and pain are mutually exclusive. On the other hand, whoever believes himself to be ‘the sewage man’, rather than leading me to the terrain of honor, would lead me to the terrain of smell.48

Ferrando did not let it go, and replied immediately, on February 27, on the pages of El Tiempo, in which, in addition to defending himself, he said that he had already challenged Papini to a duel and that he had fled. Papini retorts four days later, in a new article published on March 1. Ferrando, on the 4th, shows up again on the newspaper El Trabajo with great aggression. The editor, in a note, said that the article had only been published “out of respect for the legitimate right of defense”. Papini's last article came the next day, March 5: it was a portrait against another contemporary, Eliseo Ricardo Gómez, poet and friend of his rival; the article, however, was not limited to provoking Gómez, but also Ferrando: “I thank Mr. Federico Ferrando, ‘The sewage man’, for the praising

47

“Mi hombre es un galicismo andante: la peor traducción al castellano de un bohemio francés. Oriundo del Salto, a salto de mata anda en nuestra literatura, perseguido por burlas incansables. Los articulejos bisiestos que borrajea son un candombe de ideas ajenas, un can-can furioso de incoherencias; y como can-can desenfrenado, pisotean a cuanta reputación se encuentra a su alcance. Se siente atacado por el delirio tremens de la irrespetuosidad. Se considera el único, el privilegiado, el Mesías.” (Zás, “El disparo trágico”). 48 “Si alguien se considera aludido en este artículo le ruego que no me envíe los padrinos, porque ya se me pasó la edad infantil de recibir el agua de socorro; y porque las grandes carcajadas no es posible que concluyan en duelos: la risa y el dolor se excluyen recíprocamente. Por otra parte, el que se crea ‘el hombre del caño’, en vez de llevarme al terreno del honor, me conduciría al terreno del olor” (Zás, “El disparo trágico”).

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35

concepts he has dedicated to me. At the same time I communicate to him that I will thank him personally, when I am able to see him.”49 Faced with such an escalation of aggression, Federico had already asked his brother Héctor to buy him a gun. Héctor buys him a pistol, a doublebarreled 12mm Lafoucheux. Federico was prepared and ready for anything. That same Monday, March 5, his friend Horacio was returning from Salto. Federico wants his support and possible intervention as his second. When Horacio arrives, they have lunch at Hotel del Comercio and then go to Ferrando’s house. Once in the house, they head to Federico's bedroom. He wants to show him the gun. He sits on the bed and hands the gun to his friend. Horacio manipulates the pistol and the spring seemed much stiffer than reasonable: he takes the gun and closes the two barrels in order to test the mechanism. As in Maupassant's tale, there was a bullet resting in the gun. The accidental shot meets an unforeseen destination: Federico's head. Horacio anticipated the outcome of the duel by placing a bullet in his friend's occipital bone. Federico was on the floor, agonizing. Drawn by the sound, Héctor managed to enter the room to witness his brother's final moments. Horacio was astonished. It was a scene being repeated in his life, for a third time.

A trigger that will not stop shooting All movement ceased, his feet stuck to the ground. He was frozen. On that March 5 afternoon, at the age of 23, time lost its meaning for Horacio. It was not the first time. He was disturbed. He was horrified with going from spectator to perpetrator in such a scene. It had been more than twenty years since the first time. From the prison cell, where he had been taken, Horacio remembered the first story, told to him by a cousin. It had all happened in March, like now. He was then three months old and was in the arms of his mother, Pastora Forteza. His father had gone hunting in the woods, it was Friday. When he got off the boat, feeling satisfied, after his somewhat successful journey and with a supply of fresh meat for the weekend, Prudencio vacillated when setting his foot on the ground while balancing himself with the game on his back. In that mismatch, he ended up tripping over the hunting shotgun. A straight, erratic shot found his head.

49

“Al señor Federico Ferrando, ‘El hombre del caño’, le agradezco los conceptos elogiosos que me ha dedicado. Al mismo tiempo le manifiesto que se los agradeceré personalmente, cuando pueda verlo.” (Zás, “El disparo trágico”).

36

Chapter 3

Little Horacio – amid the astonished screams of his mother, who ran towards her husband – barely understood the scene of his father’s premature death. This ghostly father of whom he had few memories, if any, some facial features, something of his personality, which would be forever inaccessible. Horacio's first years were of family sadness, discretion, and mourning. Having a father was, for him, a belated construction, infinitely postponed throughout his childhood. Eleven years after this traumatic event, Pastora decided to remarry. The chosen man, Ascencio Barcos, like her late husband, was also Argentine and was based in Salto. He would be her companion in old age. They got married on February 28 and shared five years together as a family. The then-teenager Horacio became fond of his stepfather, who encouraged him to study chemistry and experiment with electroplating. The stroke that affected Ascencio, however, took him away from family life. Semi-paralyzed and with serious difficulties in communicating, he had a devoted Horacio to act as his interpreter. Nonetheless, it was too hard for the old man's honor, as he became dependent on others, even for the simplest daily tasks. That was when he made his decision: on a Saturday, September 5, 1896, with difficulty, he took the shotgun and pointed the barrel at his own mouth. With the only foot that still worked, he pulled the trigger, putting an end to his suffering. Horacio was the first to come to his rescue, but there was nothing left to do. The final shot was accurate. Blood and gunpowder. Back in 1902, the gun is now in Horacio's hands, and death has come from his fingers to reap his friend Federico. He turns his eyes, in dismay, to Héctor, so that he can take him to the police station. Horacio does not say a single word. Héctor, between the pain of the loss of his brother and the commiseration for the crime that his friend attracted to himself, testifies in favor of Horacio. The brother of poet Julio Herrera y Reissig, Manuel, will act as a defense attorney. Horacio remains in jail awaiting trial. Things seemed to have gone too far, to a point of no return. His greatest pains in Paris, without food, receiving alms from fellow migrants, giving up his dream of greatness, now took on another dimension. Everything became juvenile and trivial. Was that being a man? The nights were of pain and guilt. They were long. Time stood still during this immobile eternity he spent in jail. Part of him got tangled up in a frozen life. Isolated, he was unable to attend his friend's funeral. He was not at the side of his Consistorio friends and he did not listen to the speeches that excused him and sang the virtues of the dead man. Locked in his cell, with his thoughts and with images that recurred with insistence. After four

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long days and four endless nights, he was judged, cleared of all charges, and set free. Free? The tragic event also had consequences for the city. The literary controversies cooled down in the newspapers and Papini's articles disappeared from the press. The last offended man, Eliseo Ricardo Gómez, gave up responding to the provocation received in the newspapers: “After the tragic event, any replica is impossible; The only answer I can give to this bad gentleman, Guzmán Papini, is that from now on, when he attacks, he should look in the mirror of his life and respectively measures the degree of culture he possesses with that of the one he intends to injure.”50 It was enough, the polemics no longer had the charm of dangerous adventures. An innocent stranger had taken upon himself a death that did not belong to him. Horacio's literary fellowship, now deprived of its archdeacon, would never meet again. In the words of his friends, “youth will die there.”51 Released, Horacio decided to leave Montevideo and use his second option when he returned from Paris: to seek support from his older sister, María, who lived in Buenos Aires. At that time, she was his only living sister: he had lost his other two older siblings, Pastora and Juan Prudencio, to typhoid fever in the Argentine Chaco; the mother, widowed twice, continued to live in Salto. It was time to become an adult, to have a job. In Buenos Aires, with the support of his brother-in-law, Eduardo D. Forteza, he began to work as a teacher trainer, first as part of evaluation boards and, from the following year on, as a substitute for his brother-in-law, at the British College of Buenos Aires. The city of Buenos Aires was the third capital in which Horacio arrived trying to settle. He gave up on Paris without even trying. Montevideo seemed to have been a possible extension of the Parisian capital, where he managed to continue having a youthful and bohemian life, with his family money, without a regular job, and without many worries other than writing sporadically. The event, that happened at the age of 25, of killing a poet, one of his best friends, led him to renounce the dreams he had had so far: poetry, as literary genre and personal experience, so intimately associated

50

“Luego del luctuoso suceso, toda réplica es imposible; la única contestación que puedo darle a este mal señor, Guzmán Papini, es que en lo sucesivo, cuando ataque, se mire en el espejo de su vida y mida respectivamente el grado de cultura que posee con la del que pretende herir” (Alzugarat, “Federico Ferrando: una tragedia del 900”). 51 “la juventud morría allí.” Delgado and Brignole, Vida y obra de Horacio Quiroga, 139).

38

Chapter 3

with that period of life, will no longer have a place in his life. It was time for renunciation so that he could go on living. Horacio would be a teacher now. His texts will lose the vigor of the unmediated affront to society and his readers; they will no longer dictate rules of behavior. The controversies around the books of verses written by Montevideans, by the local avant-garde youth, lost their reason for being. The young director of Revista del Salto, the daring young man who penned his first book of poems, Los arrecifes de coral – released in the previous year – would be buried in those erratic events of the previous years. It was time to try something else.

The crime of the other The man arriving in Buenos Aires had more solid plans than the erratic traveler he had once been: having a house and a job. And, as soon as he was settled, he would resume the attempt to publish his literature. It did not take long. A year and a week after Federico's involuntary murder, on March 13, 1903, the short story “Rea Silvia” was published in the Buenos Aires magazine El Gladiador. For his Buenos Aires debut, which could also be called a redemption or restart, Horacio receives 15 Argentine pesos. Also satisfied with the partnership, the editor opens up the possibility of new collaborations. The past, the Uruguayan youth, and the specter of Federico, as is to be expected, still troubled him. One day, while writing a letter to his friend Mailand, Horacio realizes that he still cannot write the name of his dead friend: Es It is curious in the end how, of all that gang of writers, you continue to hold straight the banner of literary action – a rare thing for a painter. Might it be true what I predicted for you one day about your vocation? Abandoned Brignole, dead Cirano, abandoned Asdrúbal, Julio idem, Muñecas idem. Both of us remain. Who knows!....52

He could not write Federico, and calls him by his consistorial name. The veil of the name not only reveals the lost archdeacon but also evokes the Parisian café where, through different means, Horacio had also lost his way. 52

“Es curioso al fin y al cabo que de toda aquella banda de escritores, tú sigas sosteniendo derecha la bandera de la acción literaria – cosa rara en un pintor. ¿Si será verdad lo que te predije un día sobre tu vocación? Brignole abandonado, Cirano muerto, Asdrúbal abandonado, Julio ídem, Muñecas ídem. Quedamos los dos. ¡Quien sabe!...” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 149).

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But he tries not to think about it. He tries not to let himself be defeated by melancholy and guilt. There has already found an outlet in which to publish, moving away from the novelist he never was, from the poet he unsuccessfully tried to be. There is always another genre to try. There are always short stories. Throughout that year, El Gladiador received frequent collaborations from Horacio. Four more of his short stories are published: “Los amores de dos personas exaltadas (o sea la mujer que permaneció niña, y el payaso que permaneció hombre)”, “Idilio (Lia y Samuel)”, “La verdade sobre el haschich”, “El triple robo de Bellamore”, and “La justa proporción de las cosas”. Horacio was looking for his own voice in the new genre: first, through the theme of love, for which he had already been awarded, three years before, in Montevideo; then, resorting to realism, by attempting to recreate his terrible experience through a large dose of hashish; finally, with the detective short story. The big challenge was to do something different. Two years earlier, in Montevideo, he had released a book, Los arrecifes de coral, which was not very well received. As a young man who wrote against readers, against the audience, against society, it was hard to expect benevolence from critics. One of the critics, in the pages of Tribuna Popular, had described his literary debut as “an aberration of good taste, a negation of fine letters, a hybrid and sterile creation like mules.”53 For him, the work “it is decadent to such a superlative degree that it could be qualified as decrepit, senile and valetudinarian.”54 No wonder, for the book was a collection of different genres, with texts coming from different settings: fragments of his Paris travel diary, poems in verse and in prose published in Revista del Salto, the condensed rewriting of a short story by Poe, and the short story “Sin razón, pero cansado”, republished simply as “Cuento” and finally attributed not to Aquilino Delagoa anymore, but Horacio Quiroga. That variety, that search for a voice of his own, the daring to experience the mystery and the dark side of life, none of that could satisfy the conservative Montevideo critics, at a time when experimentalism and hybridism were not in vogue in South America. That was left behind. Horacio, the short story writer, believed it was time to think of a new book. Publishing a book for the first time would be his new beginning in Argentina. Horacio began to gather the short stories 53

“una aberración del buen gusto, una negación de las bellas letras, una creación híbrida y estéril como las mulas” (Delgado and Brignole, Vida y obra de Horacio Quiroga, 135). 54 “tan en grado superlativo es decadente que podría calificarse de decrépita, senil y valetudinaria” (Quiroga. Todos los cuentos, 1237).

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published over the last few years, his first paid collaborations: five texts from 1903, in El Gladiador; another, “Flor de Imperio”, from 1902, published in Revista Montevideo. The other half of the book would be made up of unpublished short stories, which, in his new situation, means saying: short stories that he was unable to publish in any magazine or newspaper. Among those already published, one stood out for its uniqueness: “El haschich”. Horacio had spent the last years of his life going through the most diverse experiences, with poetry, with life, with travel, deeply touched by the thought and aesthetics of the end of the century. Much of what he had written so far bore the imprint of that phase. However, when he decided to record an experience he had had with friends, with a large dose of hashish, something different happened. The inaugural report of the bicycle crossing used objective language, with a few flashes of exaggeration; when talking or fantasizing about love, his writing was twisted like the decorated iron of Art Nouveau. Now, when talking about the effects of the drug, he made use of a new resource: fiction and reality found a new composition. The very first line, seductive, promising, left the readers captive to their own expectations: “On a certain occasion in my life I took a strong dose of hashish that brought me close to death.”55 In addition to the strong effect of the testimony, the experience with the drug, ingested in the form of pills, under the supervision of a doctor and poet friend, Alberto Brignole, blurred the boundaries between fiction and report, between chronicle and medical report, including excerpts from the notes of the Brignole character. Horacio's experimental life broke the screen of fiction. The boy who one day crossed from Salto to Paysandú and wrote an objective chronicle with epic pretensions finally managed to metamorphose the lived experience and bring it, under the cloak of objectivity, to the field of literature. It was quite a change and readers realized that something had happened on that magazine page: I stood up: my heart was beating tumultuously, with sudden shoots; I spread my arms, with the anguish of flight, a hot sensation of leaving the earth; I turned my head to one side and the other. I saw no more monsters. On the other hand, I needed to closely look at everything, a suffering attention that was fixed on every object for ten or twenty seconds, without being able to look away. When tearing myself off those fixed things, I enjoyed as if from a

55 “En cierta ocasión de mi vida tomé una fuerte dosis de haschich que me puso a la muerte.” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 865).

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deep daydream, with diffuse ideas of remote journeys. Gradually, thus, I touched complete peace. It was 4 p.m.56

Overjoyed, Horacio would write in the following year to his partner Alberto Brignole to celebrate the finding and also the fact that his friend and mentor from the early years, the Argentine writer Leopoldo Lugones, qualified the text as a “masterpiece”: “Now I remember, “El haschich” was well liked, being the story that called most attention when I published it. It’s the one that revealed me.”57 Years later, in his biography about his friend, Brignole will comment that the experience of Horacio's overdose had indeed occurred, except for the magnification of certain aspects. Horacio, on the other hand, already knew since he wrote the text that what mattered was not whether the short story was faithful or not to life, but whether life sprang from its lines. He had touched something. That experience, however, was not repeated in the rest of the book. In addition to the half-dozen stories written in fin de siècle language, similar to the language of poetry, with characters almost fading away from the reader's gaze, there was the other half, made up of tales that search for their voice in the diction of the short-story writer Edgar Allan Poe. In this set, “El haschich” was an island. “El crimen del otro”, the short story that would give the book its title, also had something that made it unique. It was not the declaration of admiration for Poe, heard from the mouth of one of the characters: Poe was at the time the only author I read. That damn fool had managed to dominate me completely; on the table there was not a single book that did not belong to him. My whole head was full of Poe, as if they had emptied it in the mold of Ligeia. Ligeia! What adoration I felt for that story! All of them and intensely: Valdemar, who died seven months later; Dupin, in procuration of the stolen letter: the Madames of Espanaye, desperate on 56

“Me puse de pie: el corazón latía tumultuosamente, con disparadas súbitas; abrí los brazos, con una angustia de vuelo, una sensación calurosa de dejar la tierra; giraba la cabeza de un lado a otro. No veía más monstruos. En cambio, tenía necesidad de mirar detenidamente todo, una atención sufridora que se fijaba en cada objeto por diez o veinte segundos, sin poder apartar la vista. Al arrancarme de esas fijezas, disfrutaba como de un profundo ensueño, con difusas ideas de viajes remotos. Gradualmente así, llegué a una completa calma. Eran las 4 p.m.” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 865). 57 “Ahora que recuerdo, ‘El haschich’ gustó bastante, siendo el cuento que más llamó la atención cuando le publiqué. Es el que me reveló.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 167).

42

Chapter 3 their fourth floor; Berenice, killed in betrayal, all of them, all of them were familiar to me. But among all of them the Cask of Amontillado had seduced me as an intimate thing of mine: Montresor, The Carnaval, Fortunato, were so common to me that I read that story no longer naming the characters; and at the same time, I envied Poe so much that I would have joyously had my right hand cut off only to write that marvelous intrigue.58

It was something else. That short story, born so close to Poe's literature, so closely linked to Horacio's reader experience, did not, however, detach itself from its author's everyday life. From the fantastical and outlandish story, from the neurasthenic protagonist who has a friend named Fortunato, the same name as the character in Poe's short story, there was an insistent, singular, and disturbing feature coming from Horacio's life. Fortunato, his character, like a modern Quixote, seemed to go crazy because of literature, because of his readings of Poe's short stories. The short stories by the North American man invaded the characters' daily lives, their discussions, engendering disconcerting interpretations. Meanwhile, the narrator himself subtly showed that he had also lost his wits. At one point, he wondered what would happen if he and his friend met “Poe and his characters”. Taking mirroring to its limit, in the end, the narrator had the idea of, like the character in “The Cask of Amontillado”, intoxicating and walling up his friend Fortunato, with the advantage, according to himself, that since Fortunato had gone mad, he would not even need to carry out the stage of getting him drunk. It is when, in Quiroga's fictional world, the protagonist and narrator, therefore, carried out the plan, mesmerized by that alien force, which also

58

“Poe era en aquella época el único autor que yo leía. Ese maldito loco había llegado a dominarme por completo; no había sobre la mesa un solo libro que no fuera de él. Toda mi cabeza estaba llena de Poe, como si la hubieran vaciado en el molde de Ligeia. ¡Ligeia! ¡Qué adoración tenía por este cuento! Todos e intensamente: Valdemar, que murió siete meses después; Dupin, en procura de la carta robada; las Sras. de Espanaye, desesperadas en su cuarto piso; Berenice, muerta a traición, todos, todos me eran familiares. Pero entre todos, el Tonel del Amontillado me había seducido como una cosa íntima mía: Montresor, El Carnaval, Fortunato, me eran tan comunes que leía ese cuento sin nombrar ya a los personajes; y al mismo tiempo envidiaba tanto a Poe que me hubiera dejado cortar con gusto la mano derecha por escribir esa maravillosa intriga.” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 872).

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emerged from literature: “I sat down, then, I placed the candle to one side and like The Other, I waited.”59 In addition to the commonplaces of fantastic literature that are revisited there – the maddened, unreliable narrator – the short story ends pointing in another direction: that of crime born in literature. The narrator absolves himself from the crime committed, for his apparent madness, because the crime is not his, the crime belongs to the Other. Literary death and real death intersected in the short story that Horacio had chosen to name his new book. Although he was proud of the short story that had projected him to the public, “El haschich”, he chose to name the volume after the one that mentions the murder of his friend. Who is the Other? – asks a voice in the back of time. A crime born of literature could find no better place than literature itself to be expiated, forgiven, or at least justified. The crime was not his, it belongs to the Other. Edgar Allan Poe’s literary universe offered shelter to the torments of Horacio. After all, what other author had so many characters who killed loved ones, taken by some inexplicable force? Horacio's first insanities were recreational – chloroform, hashish, alcohol, and cocaine – and poetry was his way to revisit them. For the insurmountable insanity of Federico's death something else was needed: it was necessary to narrate. Edgar Allan Poe opened a way for him, a path of consolation, so that the crime would not be horrendous. With his characters brought from the other side of the globe, from a century ago, and even under the improvisation imposed by the urgency of a still primary report, Poe offers solace. That death that inhabited him and that would inhabit him would need to be written again and again, in different ways. For now, it would also be with the words of the Other, until he could definitively find his own voice.

59 “Me senté, entonces, coloqué la vela al lado y como El Otro, esperé.” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 879).

4. RUNAWAY WRITER

When in France four years earlier, Horacio, the poet, the cyclist, the aspiring novelist, was amazed not only by the cars, the crowds, the hustle. As his train moved towards Paris, he wrote down in his notebook the first living testimony of his love of vegetation: Above all, two amazing things, in France: the highways and the cultivated fields. These are worked upon with so much love, so much pensive laboriousity; they understand so well the care and love that this mother earth deserves; they so painstakingly look after the artistic projections of the lines and colors that France looks like a giant carpet that one day, lain upon the world, will carry everywhere the regenerative fecundity of the poet novelist.60

Nature had always seduced him, wild or cultivated. In the city there were bookstores, cinemas, cafes, where the love for literature made its home. Born, however, in the vast Uruguayan countryside, having a life as a farmer was something that never left his mind. As the year 1904 began and, at the same time, he concluded the edition of his book, El crimen del otro, Horacio developed a parallel plan, in order to be able to leave his sister's house: with what was left from his father's inheritance, he was buying some land in the province of Resistencia, in a village called Saladito, where he planned to plant cotton and settle permanently. Horacio already had figured that wealth would not come from literature, but, he hoped, from the vast cotton fields that would surround him. At dusk, he would be able to sit down, a book in hand, his gaze wandering between the 60 “Ante todo, dos cosas asombrosas, en Francia: las carreteras y el cultivo de los campos. Estos están trabajados con tanto cariño, con tanta pensativa laboriosidad; comprenden de tal manera el cuidado y el amor que merece esa tierra madre; se esmeran tanto en la artística proyección de las líneas y colores que Francia parece una gran alfombra que un día, tendida sobre el mundo, llevará a todas partes la fecundidad regeneradora del novelista poeta” (Quiroga, Obras inéditas y desconocidas, 101).

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letters printed on the volume, and the vastness of the field he cultivated by himself. Emilio Urtisberea, the pioneer of Salto, an educated man and a dentist, was the one who filled his childhood fantasies, whenever he appeared at home, with his fortune born of the vast cotton fields of the Chaco Austral, on the banks of the Paraná River. Now, as an adult, not much had changed: he was helping him with the project. Horacio had known for some time that the cheapest lands were in the north of Argentina, in the continuum of virgin forest that leads to Paraguay and Brazil. That was where progress would go, that was where he had to go. As the plan of being a novelist covered in glories had been severely damaged in Paris, it was necessary to advance on other fronts. He planned tremendous success for the Chaco, “where I will stay forever, except for the consequent escapades. I think I will make a great fortune”.61 He still planned tremendous success for the book, as he once wrote to his friend Maitland, “If this book is a big hit, maybe we will see each other sooner.”62 El crimen del otro would be out in March. The trip to Chaco was scheduled for soon after, in April. If the publication were a tremendous failure, he had better be far away – that was what Horacio did not write, but thought. As planned, he leaves for those lonely lands, with no company, no experience, with just the image of his cotton fields, a pig farm, and time to devote to literature and carpentry. His grateful exile. Horacio had taken precautions against the misfortunes that beset him in Paris: having the field at his disposal, he would not go hungry; having the house to shelter, there would be no cost of accommodation. In Saladito, he would not ask for alms, he would have the labor of indigenous peones, who would work hard at low wages. He really did not see how things could go wrong. Moreover, he could even read and write. It was the perfect plan. After those years, loneliness was no longer a problem for him, he thought. He would be in his own company, which is what a writer needs to write. However, something escaped his planning: mourning. Loneliness in Saladito was atrocious and paralyzing. Without being able to count on his sister's affection, the school's daily life, and the city’s agitations, the ghosts of the past and death began to make him company. As much as he had the presence of the peones, he could hardly get along with them, which made him feel even lonelier. Uruguay grew into an

61 “donde quedaré para siempre, salvo las escapadas consiguientes. Creo hacer gran fortuna” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 156). 62 “Si doy un golpe fuerte con este libro, acaso nos veamos antes”. (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 156)

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unavoidable presence, with all its dead – the father, the stepfather, Federico, the older brothers. Horacio could not write a single line. The letter that would come out of his guts, months after a dangerous silence, exposed to himself, in all words, his daily torment: DearMaitland, (...) You complain about your solitude, with your guts dried up outside the water; but if you saw the torment I have experienced in these six months, the daily discouragement, without absolute faith in myself – and what’s sadder, without believing in art any more – convinced that I was dead to write, seated, on a box of kerosene, repeating for whole hours one paragraph of a story, incapable of doing anything else, in the collapse of my whole brave life, shrouding myself with melancholy with my youth of flight and ardent waiting, covering my face with my hands – with no metaphor – undone in pain for what had been. Yes, my friend: I have suffered all the anguish of an individual who loves those things as I do, and feeling nullified for ever, broken at age twenty five. For the past five months I have been unable to write a single line.63

A hard year. Horacio found himself inept for agricultural production: he lost the plantation, he did not know how to deal with the indigenous labor, he interrupted the work in the cotton fields to beautify his garden, plant palm trees, or try to write. It was lean times, with few harvests. In the solitude of the infertile lands, he missed the past and his bohemian life in Montevideo. In his letters, he often complained about the lack of friends, meetings, affection. Horacio always wrote to his confreres of the Consistorio, missing that past that was already becoming mythical. That sort of melancholy, which was composed of old stories, promises of reunion with former literary partners, reminiscences of encounters and mismatches with women, corresponded, in his life as a writer, to complete public indifference, accompanied by anxiety.

63 “Querido Maitland, (...) Tú te quejas de tu soledad, con las agallas resecas fuera del agua; pero si vieras los tormentos que he tenido en estos seis meses, el desaliento diário, sin fe absoluta en mí – y lo que es más triste, sin creer ya en el arte – convencido de que estaba muerto para escribir, sentado, en un cajón de kérosène, repitiendo horas enteras un párrafo de cuento, incapaz de hacer algo más, en el derrumbamiento de toda mi vida valiente, amortajándome melancólicamente con mi juventud de vuelo y ardiente espera, tapándome la cara con las manos – sin metáfora – deshecho de dolor por lo que había sido. Sí, amigo; he sufrido todas las angustias de un individuo que ama como yo esas cosas, y sentirse nulo ya para siempre, roto a los veinticinco años. En los cinco meses atrás no pude escribir una línea.” (Quiroga, Quiroga íntimo, 159-160).

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A too long and too infertile planting season. He received little news from Buenos Aires about his book and saw little flourish in his fields. His promising publications in Gladiador magazine had been interrupted, without him being able to feed them from a distance, since nothing had appeared on the page before him. The big difference of that moment in relation to all the previous ones was that Horacio had become a man who insists: he remained cultivating the field, trying to manage the time between cotton fields and palm trees, adamant in the face of that fearsome blank sheet. But then. Something finally broke that cruel order: in the spring of 1904, after so much drought, so much silence, so much melancholy, he suddenly managed to write a short story and, soon after, with a somewhat absurd idea, something that could turn out to be a brief fantastic short story, or a novel. He threw himself into writing something that, in truth, he did not quite know what it was. It was taking shape, a long and strange story, after so much time without anything prospering. Its name, Los perseguidos. For the young writer he once was, always reticent to sign his own name, those lines that surfaced were surprising as they brought among the characters the name of a certain Horacio Quiroga, accompanied on his adventures by the writer Leopoldo Lugones. A literary affiliation that brought up fatherhood, says the impertinent voice of a psychoanalyst coming from the depths of time. And it was better to run off the couch before one of the savages started to interpret the biographed man.

Planet Lugones In the beginning was a verse, a poem. It was at the end of 1896 when the young musketeers from Salto discovered “Oda a la desnudez”, a poem from Las montãnas del oro, the debuting book by an Argentine poet named Leopoldo Lugones, which would only be published the following year. The poem was a revelation: boldly, it revealed in each line the mysteries of the female body in the form of a pagan mass, with daring poetic images, in unexpected ways, as until then they had only known in the French language: and may you triumph, bare as a host, in the ideal easter of my delight Surrender! The night under its long weightless hair shelters us. I will pulse your body, and at night

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48 your sinning body will be a lire.64

It was astonishing. All that written by a contemporary poet, who shared with them the same language and almost the same homeland. The Argentine man lived a few kilometers away. Horacio copied into his personal notebook, verses that would be read repeatedly at the musketeers' meetings, with renewed intoxication and sensuality. On the following vacation, the boys decided to go to the poet's house, in the city of Barracas, on the way between Montevideo and Buenos Aires, hoping to be received. The young men wanted a poetic north, to know where those accursed stanzas, so close to their lyrical ideals, came from. They wanted to be able to celebrate the erotic and literary event with the living poet. The meeting took place, but it was quite different from what they expected: they imagined that the poet would be an unreachable peak, whose gaze would barely reach them. They met, however, an ordinary man, just a few years older than them, and who was quite welcoming. Leopoldo Lugones received them, talked about poetry and said that the boys had a friend in him. A feeling of complicity was established, in which Leopoldo Lugones came to occupy a position of master. Among them, it was Horacio who felt a more transcendent meaning coming from that visit. As if everything demanded some meaning: his quest for writing, the musketeers' meetings, the emergence of Revista del Salto. Poetry could triumph in those desert places. There was a true poet among them, who shared the same assumptions and wrote in Castilian. Impassioned, inspired, he wrote, in Revista del Salto, an article celebrating the event of poetry, that for him now had a proper name: Leopoldo Lugones is a poet of exalted temperament, whose metaphors go beyond what he wants. He is a symbolist. More than a symbolist, he is a modernist. More than a modernist he is a genius. His characteristic is the strength of expression and his objective is to dazzle. And he achieves it (…) Exaggeration is his habitual form. But he neither seeks nor finds it: he feels

64 “y que triunfes, desnuda como una hostia, en la pascua ideal de mis delicias ¡Entrégate! La noche bajo su amplia cabellera flotante nos cobija. Yo pulsaré tu cuerpo, y en la noche tu cuerpo pecador será una lira.” (Lugones. “Oda a la desnudez”, translated by Juana Adcock).

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it. Expansiveness is in him, his temperament of a fighter. He dreams of a lack and arrives at the crime; he dreams of a note and arrives at the hymn.65

Not satisfied, Horacio wrote a second article, praising Lugones and his youth. He felt that he had found the model of what his own poetry would be. Lugones began to occupy the center of the young man’s constellation: his literature, his opinion, his indications, everything mattered and gained definitive weight. Years later, after the end of Revista del Salto, of the French adventure, the Uruguayan tragedy, and while finally settled in Buenos Aires at his sister's house, it is Leopoldo Lugones who Horacio would look for in order to get some friendly advice to be able to publish his texts in prose. He also counted on him to get a position as a teacher, since the Argentine poet was an Inspector General de Enseñanza Secundaria, Normal y Especial [General Inspector of Secondary, Normal, and Special Education]. If Horacio had a timeless obsession with Poe, he also had another one nearby, with a living model, which is Leopoldo Lugones. In a letter to Maitland in April 1903, when Horacio told him that he had begun to collaborate with the magazine El Gladiador, he soon mentioned Lugones to his friend as his ideal of remuneration: “Lugones begins in this number with a gladiatoresque. They pay him well, which is something I will try to achieve with the next short story.”66 Lines ahead, he showed his pride in being close to the writer: “With Lugones we have become very close; this is how the sad life passes by, waiting for any job, as I’ll barely hold up for another month.”67 Horacio had emulated Lugones in his debut book. Then he wanted to emulate his salary. Like him, Horacio started to publish fantastic short stories. He wanted to have Lugones’s fame and recognition. From him, he

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“Leopoldo Lugones es un poeta de imaginación exaltada, cuyas metáforas van a veces más allá de lo que él quiere. Es simbolista. Más que simbolista es modernista. Más que modernista es un genio. Su característica es la fuerza de expresión y su objeto es deslumbrar. Y lo consigue. (…) La exageración es su forma habitual. Pero ni la busca ni la encuentra: la siente. La amplitud está en él, en su temperamiento de batallador. Sueña una falta y llega al crimen; sueña una nota y llega al himno” (Quiroga, Obras Inéditas y Desconocidas, 64). 66 “Lugones comienza en este número con un cuento gladiadoresco. Le pagan bien, cosa que trataré de conseguir con el próximo cuento.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 149). 67 “Con el Lugones nos hemos hecho íntimos; así va pasando la vida triste, esperando un empleo cualquiera, pues apenas me sostendré un mes más.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 150).

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wanted a job, an opportunity of… he did not know exactly what. But he clung to that idea with a singular impetus. And then an opportunity came at the end of the first half of 1903, in the form of an expedition to the remote jungles of northeastern Argentina: Leopoldo Lugones was supposed to make a trip, sponsored by the Argentine government, to the ruins of the Jesuit missions in the province of Misiones. That opportunity was ideal for Horacio, who, despite all the recent disappointments, was still waiting for a stroke of luck that could change his destiny. The constructed memory of that event supports the version that Lugones invited Horacio to travel with him. The Uruguayan's closest friends say, however, that Horacio invited himself, eager to explore with the master, in the middle of the jungle, what would be the vestiges of the passage of the Jesuits in the sixteenth century, in the ruins covered by the forest and oblivion. Horacio would be the expedition's photographer, who would produce the images for Lugones' book-report, the result of the trip. Horacio's friends–Delgado and Brignole–say that, in a sort of attempt to relive the trip to Paris, Horacio brought a large wardrobe that signaled his being a young man from the high bourgeoisie. He had traveled to France as a poète maudit, but now he seemed to be going to the North like an English character by Jules Verne, perhaps Phileas Fogg from Around the World in Eighty Days, ready for anything, prepared for anything, without losing, however, his superior behavior of someone who is not shaken by anything. A man obsessed with his wardrobe. In addition to his photographic equipment, he brought cigarettes and some devices used to control his frequent asthma attacks. Too much load for someone going deep into the forest, with no trails and no clear route. Before the trip, Horacio did not hide his excitement from the Uruguayan friends to whom he wrote. The route that today separates Buenos Aires from the capital of Misiones, Posadas, can be covered through a good road in about 1,000 kilometers. A little more than a hundred years ago, however, the options were quite different: to depart from the South Dock of the Port of Buenos Aires to the port of Corrientes Province on a steam boat and, from there, take a second boat to Posadas, over approximately six days, three days for the first part and two and a half days for the second one. By train, the likely option for the expeditionaries, the journey was reduced to a day and a half on the rails. All that just to get to Posadas, the capital of the province. From there, the crossing to the last of the missions, San Ignacio, would have to be done on the back of mules, the animal suitable for the trails full of irregularities and bushes, in order to overcome the winding sixty kilometers, where were hidden the traces of what were, centuries before, the

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missions of Santa Ana, Loreto, until the final destination in Argentine. But the expeditionaries went further: If what is wanted is to find something less formless, it is necessary to delve into Brazil and Paraguay, doing difficult journeys where even the food begins to run short. The nearest points are San Nicolás and Trinidad respectively. To arrive to the first, it is necessary to pass the Uruguay in front of the village of Concepción, later travelling seventy kilometers on horseback. The next one has two points of access: on land, from the Villa Encarnación, a Paraguayan city situated in front of the capital of Misiones, travelling seventy km on a terrible road; and on water from the mentioned capital to the port of Trinidad, situated fifteen km away from the ruins. The distances are short; but the lack of horses and the natural retiring nature of a semi-savage population, to whom an Argentinian origin is no recommendation, make of those excursions a true mission. For the rest, it is necessary to carry provisions to any event, because even cassava, native to the region, is usually scarce, with meat being bad and expensive.68

In such precarious conditions, the expedition traveled over the difficult terrain riding mules, but the irascible Horacio refused any mount other than a horse. His will was done and he started to be out of step all the time because, as he was galloping, sometimes he was way ahead of the expedition, waiting for his partners, sometimes he was waiting for them to advance, to soon overtake them. It was not uncommon for him to stray off the trail, get lost, and have to be rescued. Deprivation of food and the need to submit to an atypical diet, such as eating roasted maritacas or parrots, brought, according to Delgado and Brignole, a tremendous improvement to the dyspepsia from which he suffered. As to the asthma, it soon ended up lacking the materials to be treated, as one of the members of the expedition 68

“Si se quiere hallar algo menos informe, es necesario internarse al Brasil y al Paraguay, realizando fastidiosos viajes en que hasta la comida suele escasear. Los puntos más cercanos son San Nicolás y Trinidad respectivamente. Para llegar al primero, es necesario pasar el Uruguay frente á la villa de Concepción, viajando después setenta kl. á caballo. El segundo tiene dos puntos de acceso: por tierra, desde Villa Encarnación, ciudad paraguaya situada frente á la capital de Misiones, haciendo sesenta kl. de malísimo camino; y por agua desde la mencionada capital hasta el puerto de Trinidad, situado á quince kl. de las ruinas. Las distancias son cortas; pero la escasez de caballos y el natural retraimiento de una población semisalvaje, para quien la procedencia argentina no es una recomendación, hacen de aquellas excursiones una verdadera campaña. Por lo demás, es necesario llevar consigo provisiones á todo evento, pues hasta la mandioca, indígena de la región, suele faltar, siendo la carne mala y cara” (Lugones, El imperio Jesuitico: ensayo historico, 263-264).

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hid Horacio’s pack of therapeutic cigarettes, leaving him at the mercy of a future attack that, according to the biographers, never occurred. Everyone was suffering: the city men in the Misiones winter; the ungovernable and arch-urban Horacio in the midst of a landscape that did not respect his status as a disciple of Jules Verne; the local guides among that atypical group. Their coexistence, however, trimmed some differences inside such an heterogeneous group, establishing among them the minimum conditions for tolerance in their exceptional situation. The jungle was doing its work in the city boy, who little by little submitted to its laws, surrendering to his own fascination and stripping himself of his late-century good taste. After those weeks in which Horacio spent his days as a pioneer apprentice, returning to northern Argentina turned from a desire into a possibility and then into an obsession. The following year, Leopoldo Lugones published the result of the trip, the book El Imperio Jesuítico, under the auspices of the Sociedad SudAmericana de Billetes de Banco. In the book, Horacio's photos do not stand out, because the stern author said he did not want to turn his work into a book for tourists. There are explanatory maps, schematic representations of the Jesuit architecture, period images, and just two photos by the Uruguayan man, uncredited. The results of that journey, for Horacio, were neither visible nor immediate, but were gradually produced in him. First there was the impact of the view of the jungle, of those weeks isolated from all urban life: another way of moving, eating, interacting with the environment. Then, history coming out in layers under the thick cover of vegetation. Human life and wildlife were gaining a new dimension for him. Returning to the Argentine northeast became, progressively, an imperative. That desert landscape made sense to him in such a radical way that he understood he had found his place. What he still did not know was the best way for him to be there.

The construction of exile He did not want to go back to his sister's house anymore. Life in Buenos Aires, despite being pleasant, was not what he was looking for. His first impulse was to acquire land in Chaco Austral, in Saladito. That was what he did, as we know. But as the solitary life of a cotton planter wasn't making much sense to him after five months of painful – human and literary – silence, he made the northeast missions reappear in a short story, without its landscapes, in a brief mention, in a scene in which the characters were him

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and Leopoldo Lugones. The long narrative (long for Horacio’s standards) was called Los perseguidos. Horacio in the short story suffered from the paranoid behavior of Díaz Véles, a friend in common. Once, the Lugones in the story turns to the narrator Horacio and tells him: Let’s do something,” said he [Lugones]. “Why don’t you come to Misiones? We’ll have something to do.” We went and came back four months later, he with a full beard and me with my stomach destroyed.69

Misiones in the short story is a name, an absence, a parenthesis in the adventure, that which remains untold. The whole of Misiones becomes, for Horacio, in those years, a silent suspension: although he had promised his friends, he did not write a diary there, nor did he mention it again during his Chaco exile, between 1904 and 1905, nor did he turn it into a setting for a short story. Misiones was the silence when all movement ceases, when all narratives stop. The literary jungle without its form. The world prior to language. His season in Chaco was mainly one of readings. Horacio had taken several French translations of Dostoevsky's novels with him. While there was little life around him, other people's literature was his best company: These days I have just read Humiliated and Insulted, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Idiot. Presently this Russian is the greatest, the most profound writer I have ever read. The last scene of The Idiot is to me the artistic summum. However, I believe that Dostoevsky is not to you by reason of his enormous pressure, since you - also mad - are more for objective madness than for the other kind. In addition, these books are in French. In Spanish I only know The Player, relatively poor as compared to the others, but enough to appreciate it. Read him, if only to know one of the greatest novelists of the past century, and especially, the strangest, most ludicrous and absurd.70 69

“–Hagamos una cosa – me dijo aquél [Lugones]– ¿Por qué no se viene a Misiones? Tendremos algo que hacer. Fuimos y regresamos a los cuatro meses, él con toda la barba y yo con el estómago perdido.” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 896). 70 “Acabo de leer estos días Humillados y ofendidos, Los Hermanos Karamazof y El idiota. Hoy por hoy es este ruso el más grande, el escritor más profundo que haya leído. La última escena de El idiota es para mí el súmmum artístico. No obstante creo que Dostoievski no es para ti en razón de su presión enorme, ya que tú – loco también – estás más por la locura objetiva que por la otra. A más estos libros están en francés. En español conozco únicamente El jugador, relativamente pobre en

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The contact with Dostoevsky offered Horacio the psychic dimension for the universe of his characters. Poe had taught him the lesson of psychosis, of madness that transforms the environment, but, with the Russian author it was possible to explore other layers of the psyche. The writer already had more tools to try to describe a world closer to the one through which he moved. Los perseguidos, his first novel, would be the result of that sewing. Los Perseguidos echoes the title of a French book read by Horacio, Les Possédées. Díaz Vélez, its character, had a sleeping beast in his eyes, which could wake up at any moment. A wild madness, like that of Poe's characters, but which was never fully manifested. The narrative is set in contemporary Buenos Aires and no longer in the diffuse, calculatedly artificial territories of his early stories. A madman lurks in his friend's eyes. A crime is about to happen. Get ready. Leopoldo Lugones, when prefacing the book, said he knew what his friend was talking about; it was, according to him, “the story of a persecuted madman whose real origin I know, which gives me, by the way, a role with a proper name and all, in the very interesting narration”.71 Horacio pursued the literature of his daily life. As he had done in “El haschich”, he wanted to write narratives based on what he lived with his friends, to make his text a little more real and his life a little more literary. Once the Parisian boulevards were abolished, the characters of his short stories would appear on the streets of Río de la Plata. And they would not be dangerous madmen, who wall up friends, murder wives, and stab cats' eyes. They would, indeed, be people willing to do anything, but who do not always act. Horacio wants the boundary between literature and ordinary existence, where the limit fades and it becomes unclear whether it was the domains of literature that opened the doors to everyday life or if it was everyday life that welcomed the deviation from the fantastic short story. This is how Lucas Díaz Vélez, a friend of Horacio and Lugones, a literary character, begins to disturb them throughout the tale with his persecutory paranoia. The narrator himself, trying to test his friend's madness, actually begins to pursue him, which makes him interested, identifying himself in such a way with Díaz Vélez to the point of losing his own wits, of no longer knowing whether he was a normal person, of

comparación con los anteriores, pero suficiente para apreciarlo. Léelo, siquiera para conocer a uno de los más grandes novelistas del siglo pasado, y sobre todo, el más extraño, disparatado y absurdo.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 174). 71 “la historia de un loco perseguido cuyo origen real conozco, lo cual me da, por cierto, un papel con nombre propio y todo, en la interesantísima narración” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 883).

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becoming dangerously and erotically interested in the object of his observation with his devouring gaze: I had a moment of anguish such that I forget to be him all of what he saw: the arms of Díaz Vélez, the legs of Díaz Vélez, the hair of Díaz Vélez, the band on the hat of Díaz Vélez, the weave of the band of the hat of Díaz Vélez, the warp of the warp of Díaz Vélez, of Díaz Vélez, of Díaz Vélez…72

The loving madness. The drunkenness of the narrator's gaze is reciprocated by Díaz Vélez, who also casts interested glances at him where least expected, as in “his eyes stopped at the button of my waistcoat”.73 Then, there is the intimate, physical contact: “We sat at the tiny table, our knees almost touching”74; “We both started laughing, looking away at the same time. Díaz brought the cup to his mouth, but half way there he noticed it was empty and left it. His eyes were shinier than usual and deep circles not a man’s, but diffuse and purple like a woman’s”.75 So the beast appears in those mysterious eyes: ‘As soon as I stand up – I thought with anguish – he will kill me in one shot.’ (...) Díaz, with a sudden shake, turned towards me. During the time it took me to arrive by his side his breath was suspended and his eyes fixed on mine acquired all the expression of a cornered animal that will arrive to him with the rifle in view.76

Horacio's short story maintains the – psychic, erotic, violent – tension, so that his characters do not act. It was the first time he had achieved that 72 “Tuve un momento de angustia tal que me olvidé de ser él todo lo que veía: los brazos de Díaz Vélez, las piernas de Díaz Vélez, los pelos de Díaz Vélez, la cinta del sombrero de Díaz Vélez, la trama de la cinta del sombrero de Díaz Vélez, la urdidumbre de la urdidumbre de Díaz Vélez, de Díaz Vélez, de Díaz Vélez…” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 888). 73 “detuvo la mirada en el botón de mi chaleco” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 889). 74 “Nos sentamos en la diminuta mesa, las rodillas tocando casi” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 889). 75 “Los dos nos echamos a reír, apartando al mismo tiempo la vista. Díaz llevó la taza a la boca, pero a medio camino notó que estaba vacía y la dejó. Tenía los ojos más brillantes que de costumbre y fuertes ojeras – no de hombre, sino difusas y moradas de mujer” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 891). 76 En cuanto me levante – pensé con angustia – me va a matar de un tiro.’ (...) Díaz, con una brusca sacudida, se volvió a mí. Durante el tiempo que empleé en llegar a su lado su respiración suspendióse y sus ojos clavados en los míos adquirieron toda la expresión de un animal acorralado que ve llegar hasta él la escopeta en mira.” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 895).

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effect. He had done it. It was the first fruit coming from his year-and-a-half retreat. Only a month later, in July, did he understand that his task had been accomplished. While he was dedicating himself to the final cotton harvest, he told Maitland that he would go to his hometown, Salto, in the next semester and then to Buenos Aires, where there was the promise of teaching classes in the following year, 1906, which would allow him to return to the capital. The cotton crops had not made a profit, but they had not bankrupted him either: Quiroga would stop before it. That way, he would be able to return to Buenos Aires with one of the seven thousand pesos he had when he started the cotton company. It would be his capital to reestablish himself in Buenos Aires. He tried to arrange with his friend Brignole if he could take him in. Athos, from the Consistorio, was now a well-educated doctor, ready to begin his successful career. He had just returned from Europe and was setting up his office in Buenos Aires, at 728 Córdoba Street. In that place, Horacio would occupy a room that would serve as his bedroom and work office. It was the inevitable end of a little promising career as a rural producer. It was the beginning of an equally difficult career as a writer and teacher in the capital. The cotton planter had not gotten rich.

5. SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION

It is true, Horacio returned to Buenos Aires because of his failure as a cotton planter, but also, to the same extent, because of his confidence in his own writing. After the long season of isolation, he felt that he had finally found a language he was satisfied with. It was worth undertaking new attempts in the Buenos Aires publishing universe. Therefore, it was really necessary to leave Chaco, where there were no readers, no editors, no city, and everything else that sustains a reading circuit. In order to get published and be read, it had to happen in the capital. It was a new beginning for someone who was already getting used to starting over. After vacations in Salto, where he met his mother again, he settled in Brignole's office, went back to knocking on the doors of magazines and newspapers, and resumed giving classes to boot. As a writer, already with some good contacts, a book published in Buenos Aires, and some collaborations in 1903, it was easier for him to start over. His new debut happened in great style, as he managed to publish in newspapers and magazines that were previously inaccessible to him. Right away, his literature occupied a corner of a page of one of the biggest newspapers in the country: his short story “Almas Cándidas” appeared in La Nación on November 2nd and, two weeks later, another short story, “Europa y America”, appeared in the newly emerged, but already prestigious magazine Caras y Caretas. Something new was happening: there was genuine interest in what he wrote, outlets were interested in his short stories, and he had means – and stock – to meet the demand. The first reports – written in Chaco and published in Buenos Aires – were still groping for something. Horacio had renounced being the poet in prose and his short stories sought more realistic themes, but his writing, although good enough, was still in search of its form. “Almas Cándidas”, extremely short, told about a young couple who, when facing the death of their pet dog, refused to bury it; they thought true love could keep loved ones unburied. The animal decomposed before their eyes and the need for burial put an end to the pair's melancholy.

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The other short story, “Europa y América”, with its suggestive title, put into play, with a lot of humor, something related to cultural differences. The story was born in Citá di Torino, on the high seas, on the way to France, and it was time to take revenge on the Genoese men who had bothered him so much. The story told of the arrival of an Italian priest to a place called Dolores de Buenos Aires. The priest took on the task of charging a man who broke the commitment to marry his fiancée after “un largo trimestre de besos” The vicar gave a sermon to the runaway groom, conscientious of fulfilling his role. In the end, astonished, he heard from the sinner that, in those lands, unsolicited advice was not welcome. Horacio narrated, with singular humor, in his new stories, past experiences and impasses. In addition to the few pesos he eventually received for a short story accepted for publication, Horacio continued to live in Lugones’s office as a favor, waiting for his intervention to get him a position as a professor of Spanish and literature, which would earn him about two hundred pesos a month. He returned to the city full of desires and life. Aside from the fugacious loves in Salto and Montevideo, Horacio had never had a romantic relationship that lasted a while. After his sabbatical in Chaco, he began to meet some interesting girls, but it was always necessary to detect in advance the girl's disposition towards the loving arts and, on the other hand, the degree of control of their family members. Horacio often complained to his old friend, Maitland, with whom he allowed himself the freedom to talk about carnal matters, about the sudden disinterest of some imminent conquest, “possibly she did not find in me in the end intentions to marry”.77 One week before Christmas, the panorama had changed: Horacio met a girl who withheld his attention, his desires, and his sexual appetite. When writing a long letter to his friend – in which he talks about the chastity of the bride of a mutual friend and several other fantasies of those whose nerves are on edge and the libido is unbridled – he referred to her: “The girl I have spoken to you of, watches for my desire, continues to move the eye with which I watch her daily, meekly awaiting the fornicatory duo that my eye promises her with a languid wink.”78

77

“posiblemente no me halló al fin intenciones de matrimonio” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 196). 78 “La chica de que te he hablado, por mi deseo bella, sigue moviendo el ojo con que la miro a diario, a espera dócilmente del dúo fornicario que le promete mi ojo con lánguida guiñada.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 203).

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This time, the relationship goes on. The young woman's parents accept him into their home and things looked promising. More than a month later, Horacio had the right to frequently see the owner of his gaze: I visit once a week to the tune of courtship that girl I have spoken to you about. Woe is me, they have just begun to leave us alone, and even so it will cost me no small effort to reach a full kissing session. She has turned out to be of a bourgeois honor such that her initial teasing did not allow to foresee.79

The difficult courtship continues and, two months later, Horacio already has the confidence of both the family and his suitress. The wedding, he felt, was about to take place: That girl I told you about is now my girlfriend, and she believes I will marry her next year. I manage to get them to leave us alone in the living room for five or ten minutes, using that time to kiss her on the mouth and hug her knees, with the proper fruition of my hope. She has a wonderful mouth, the cheeky girl; now she is away, returning at the end of the month.80

Seen from the twenty-first century, the courtship of the teenager, mediated by her zealous parents, shows the effects of sexuality control in what, despite everything, was considered a modern city and one of the most progressive in Latin America. Enjoying the naturalness of bodies was something surrounded by social protocols and marriage, before being a bond of affection, was an authorization for two strangers to free themselves from the shackles that kept them chaste in their parents' homes. The beloved girl returned from the countryside days ago. I visit her two hours per week, the rest of the week I don’t see her at all. All this would be fine if in those two hours they left me alone with her. Barely a couple of minutes – four or six kisses at most – and again the damn mother or sister.

79

“Visito una vez por semana en son de noviazgo a aquella chica de que te he hablado. Ay de mí, recién comienzan a dejarnos solos, y aun así me costará no poco llegar a plena sesión de besos. Ha resultado de una honradez burguesa que sus toreadas primeras no permitían presentir.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 204). 80 “Aquella chica de que te hablé es hoy mi novia, y cree me casaré con ella el año entrante. Consigo que nos dejen solos en la sala cinco o diez minutos, ocupando tal tiempo en besarla en la boca y abrazarle las rodillas, con propia fruición de mi esperanza. Tiene una maravillosa boca la indina; ahora está afuera, volviendo a fin de mes.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 207).

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Chapter 5 The poor girl has a magnificent mouth, in spite of her stupid ideas of modesty.81

While greater intimacy with his future wife was denied, Horacio kept his sex life active with the Uruguayan maid who worked at Brignole's house. The future father-in-law finally determined that the engagement should not go ahead, as he wanted Horacio to give more attention to his little two-yearold brother-in-law. Hope was broken and Horacio's carnal intercourse would continue to be limited to prostitutes, maids, widows, and, in his own words, some “daring lady”, who constituted the universe of sexually available women. On the other hand, there were glances exchanged with some of his students, with no greater possibility of approximation. At least not until something came forward: among the thirty-six students, all women, one begins to look at him in a different way. Moreover, the exchanged looks are sustained a little longer than would be reasonable. Horacio lost concentration when he noticed the fortuitous exchanged glances repeat themselves in a somewhat disconcerting way: “there is a girl who is a disciple at the Normal School who lets herself be looked at too much by me, giving me equally sweet pleasure.”82 It was October 1906, almost the end of the school year and Horacio felt shaken, unable to use with Maitland the joking terms of the sexual universe of his current and unflattering repertoire, such as the verb to mount. He felt like he was losing his balance. As soon as the year was over, he decided to take a vacation far away from there.

A country named Misiones At the end of his first full year of work as a teacher after returning from Chaco, Horacio decided to revisit the Northeast he had known with Lugones: the province of Misiones. He would spend two months there with a friend, Gozalbo, and, who knows, maybe “buy a small farm, under the pretext of fun property. If we do it, Gozalbo would return there to establish

81

“La chica amada volvió del campo hace días. La visito dos horas por semana, y en el resto de ella ni la veo siquiera. Todo esto sería muy bien [sic] si en esas dos horas me dejaran libre con ella. Apenas un par de minutos – cuatro o seis besos como mucho – y de nuevo la maldita madre o hermana. La pobre muchacha tiene una magnífica boca, maguer sus estúpidas ideas de recato.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 209). 82 “hay una chica de discípula en la E.[scuela] N.[ormal] que se deja mirar demasiado por mí, dándome igual dulce placer.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 220).

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himself, and I would go when I could. I’m excited about living a bit of a wild life”.83 After a hard year of work, he believed he deserved that refreshment. The season in Misiones would not disappoint him at all. For the first time, Horacio was traveling to a transformative place, with an established return date: he could enjoy navigating the Paraná River, walking on the red earth, fishing, making contact with coatis, jaguars, anteaters, various birds, without major worries. It was no longer a leap into an abyss with no guarantees. He had not only the roof of the ranch where he was staying, but also a place to return to: with an address, a job, and a magazine – Caras y Caretas – whose editor, Luis Pardo, was happy to receive his collaborations. On that holiday, Misiones took on new importance: it was no longer a first encounter, but a return that confirmed the first intuitions that this was his place. The connection that was being established and the possibility of moving between the two worlds fascinated Horacio. He had again the smell of the land to which he had gotten used to in the Chaco, the sounds of the forest, without the overwhelming loneliness and without having to abdicate the urban universe of literature. He could marry and live there with a woman who was anti-bourgeois enough to accept his proposal. The plan to buy land with Gozalbo was not going to succeed. A property in Misiones could not really be recreational or fun. Because that is where life was actually produced. The wild life. At the end of January, in Puerto Alegre, Paraguay, he wrote with fascination to his friend Maitland, confessing that something powerful had taken place in him, an unappealable love for the “country”, which is how he would come to call the wild territory of the North: This is a country that is devilishly hilly. There are nothing but hills, with the most elemental clearing, hills all the way to the Amazon to the north, idem to the mountain range to the west, idem to Corrientes to the south, and idem to the Atlantic in the east. I list this so carefully because it is surprising the need that is felt here for a little piece of land where there are no trees and creeping vines and lianas, tacuapís, tacuarembós. The river, from San Ignacio here, is surrounded by cliffs of one hundred to a hundred and fifty meters in slopes of four hundred and fifty nine to six hundred and nine, all of them drawing an arch. If it were not for the relief of the manufactured drops, some of them marvelous, it would not be possible to materially live. In terms of heat, from 39º upwards. At night it cools down a lot, and there are no mosquitos. By day, polvorines and barigüis, not many. There are no 83

“comprar una chacrita, so pretexto de propiedad divertida. Si lo hacemos, Gozalbo volvería allí a establecerse, y yo iría cuando pudiera. Estoy loco por hacer un poco de vida brava” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 222).

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Chapter 5 snakes or spiders or scorpions. Wonderful butterflies and toucans. An old black Brazilian, my neighbor opposite, who I’ve gone hunting with, has two dogs called Suspiro and Sol de Mayo. We employed fourteen days’ travel from Buenos Aires, arriving here on the 20th of the present. The other day I saw two parrots fly past, still frightened from Orellana. They are rare here.84

The pioneer manifested himself, enchanted. It was only his second trip to Misiones in three years, and both were so different, but he had already been inescapably taken by the charms of the land. Those six months spent there, whether researching the ruins in the middle of the Brazilian, Argentinean, and Paraguayan jungles, or fishing, hunting, and talking with people there, were enough to plant in his head the idea that it was imperative to return. A country made of forest, a country that was on the border of other countries, and with a river so much bigger than the one of his childhood. He had to go back. From then on, when things were not going well in Buenos Aires, Horacio thought of Misiones. He, who had always had solitary projects, wanted, for the first time, to take people to live with him in that virginal world. Horacio's mother, alone in Salto, and so severely scarred by life, was also nourished by her son's utopia and considered exploring the Argentine northeast as well. “It’s very cold. Deep missionary resources come to snuggle me in this inclemency, and I spend hours ruminating on projects of a sunny and

84

“Este es un país endiabladamente montuoso. No hay nada más que monte, sin el más elemental claro, monte hasta el Amazonas al norte, ídem hasta la cordillera al oeste, ídem hasta Corrientes al sur, e ídem hasta el Atlántico al este. Te enumero tan prolijamente esto porque es sorprendente la necesidade que se siente aquí de un pedacito de tierra en que no haya árboles y enredaderas y bejucos y tacuaras, tacuapís, tacuarembós. El río, desde San Ignacio aquí, está encajonado en barrancas de cien a ciento cincuenta metros en decline de cuatrocientos cincuenta y nueve a seiscientos nueve, todas monteadas. A no ser el desahogo de las picadas de obraje, algunas maravillosas, no se podría materialmente vivir. Como calor, de 39º arriba. De noche refresca mucho, y no hay nada de mosquitos. De día, polvorines y barigüís, no abundantes. No hay víboras ni arañas ni escorpiones. Maravillosas mariposas y tucanes. Un negro brasilero y viejo, vecino de enfrente, con quien he ido cazar, tiene dos perros que se llaman Suspiro y Sol de Mayo. Empleamos catorce días de viaje desde Buenos Aires, llegando aquí el 20 del corriente. El otro día vi pasar dos papagayos, asustados aún de Orellana. Son raros aquí.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 225-226).

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executive life. Mom is willing to buy a pond there, which I would possibly go and run.”85

It doesn't take long for them to make the decision. With the help being offered by the Argentine government, which wanted to populate the inhospitable and sparsely populated region, and with his mother's generosity, Horacio bought 185 hectares in San Ignacio, a town inhabited by a few dozen people, on a plateau overlooking the Paraná River. The transfer to San Ignacio, however, was postponed. It was still necessary to create the conditions to move. Horacio did not want to go before getting married. The short story writer and professor now longed to hear his wedding bells, and his pilgrimage in search of the woman who would accept, at the same time, marriage and the jungle was far from simple. He fantasized if Elisa, one of his students, could be that woman. No, certainly not. He was not even sure if the girl liked him. He often thought that she only teased him out of personal vanity. The girl tortured him, that is what. While trying to let the practical spirit dictate the rules, Horacio was adrift, losing control of his own ideas and decisions. It had been a year since he had met Elisa and, against his own will, he confessed to his friend his discomfort with the girl, who stood out from the indistinct universe of possible women and took on disturbing contours: I’ve been seeing a college girl, just her, the only one I have ever spoken to you about. I have been to her house twice. The bad thing is that, since she’s a foal, she disorganizes my class, requiring me to avoid it, losing in one hour of class what I earn in a whole afternoon. I don’t know how it will all end.86

Elisa, definitely, disturbed him. He could not handle that situation with ease, even more so in his school environment, where he could hardly keep his position. Successive problems left him without payment for a few months, due to bureaucratic procedures that preceded his definitive appointment as holder of the chair, which would only happen that October. “I have very bad spring fever: it has gotten into me in the shape of a student –the same one as always– for whom I feel with the same ridiculous 85

“Hace mucho frío. Hondos recursos misioneros vienen a achucharme en esta inclemencia, y me paso horas, mascullando proyectos de vida solar y ejecutiva. Mamá está dispuesta a comprar una chacra por allá, que yo iría posiblemente a hacer andar.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 230). 86 “Frecuento a una chica normalista, la sola, la única de que te he hablado alguna vez. He ido dos veces a su casa. Lo malo es que, como es un potro, me desorganiza la clase, debiendo para evitarlo perder en una hora de clase lo que gano en toda una tarde. No sé en qué parará eso.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 241-242).

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sentimental exaggerations of eight years ago”.87 He felt again and again like the teenager who, still in Salto, had fallen violently in love with María Esther Jurowski, when he was eighteen. He faced the unshakable resistance of the girl's father, the Polish doctor Julio Jorkowski, and the puzzling signs coming from her mother, an opulent woman named Carlota Ferreira, of many marriages, adventures, and scandals in the peaceful city of Salto. He was beginning to think, more than ever, about the imperative need to write a short story about that situation, or a novel. What horror, he could no longer deal with either the past or the present. As he was unable to write any short stories about his own situation, he became a character in someone else's feuilleton: Moving on to an easier subject, I will tell you that love continues to fatten my liver. Fifteen days ago, one night when I went to a Labardén Conservatoire to watch a certain drama rehearsal, I spoke to the beloved girl from the Teacher’s College, I chatted to her a while, and upon saying goodbye she gave me her gloved hand. Lord almighty! It was the longest, most persevering thing, which her classmates noticed, remaining one of them with her hand outstretched awaiting the final judgment of that silenced, embargoed and deep squeeze. It was such that as our hands separated, the glove made a sound: tack! The whole thing lasted three or four seconds; bring out the clock and realize what a four-second handshake is. I came out from there breathing fire from my nostrils and with my kidneys congested. Courage! It was a long time since that happened to me. And now if you realize that with that girl I had never had love corresponded, I had never been sure if she truly loved me, you will imagine what a delivery like that implies, leaving in the palm of my hand two or three hundred shags enjoyed in beforehand.88

87

“Ando muy mal de primavera: esta se me ha metido en forma de una alumna –la de siempre– por la cual me siento con las mismas ridículas exageraciones sentimentales de hace ocho años.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 243). 88 “Pasando a más fácil tema, te diré que el amor sigue hinchándome el hígado. Hace quince días, una noche que fui a un Conservatorio Labardén a ver cierto ensayo de drama, hablé a la chica amada de la Escuela Normal, charlé un rato con ella, y al despedirse me dio la mano enguantada. Qué mano ¡ánimo! Me la apreté y no se desprendía nunca su mano, ¡Dios eterno! Fue la cosa tan larga y perseverante, que sus compañeras se dieron cuenta, quedando una de ellas con su mano extendida en espera del juicio final de aquel silencioso, embargado, y profundo apretón. Tal fue este que al desprender las manos, el guante sonó: ¡tac! Duró eso tres o cuatro segundos; saca el reloj y date cuenta de lo que es un apretón de manos de cuatro segundos. Salí de ahí echando fuego por las narices y con los riñones congestionados. ¡Ánimo! Hacía mucho tiempo que no me pasaba eso. Y ahora si te percatas de que con la chica esa nunca había tenido real correspondencia de amor,

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The next day, Elisa would tell Horacio that she had received an anonymous note from a classmate, saying that she knew about her affair with the professor. Then, the colleague denounces her to the school board, saying that Elisa and the teacher were seeing each other furtively, and that Horacio was also courting her. It was the scandal the professor did not need. His platonic love becomes public and starts to threaten his job. The school board gets the two students suspended, Elisa and the whistleblower. Professor Horacio was getting more and more entangled in his affairs, in a delicate situation with the school management, while having no idea whether he would settle down. The embarrassment was widespread and there was no longer the slightest condition to go on with that comedy. By then Horacio already suspected that the woman of his life might not be a concrete possibility, or might be dead as a possibility because of her overzealous parents, or some jealous enemies. A woman could always become a mirage. Over the past two years, there had been a succession of beautiful students, willing maids, fiery widows, experienced prostitutes, and the occasional glimpse of love. Horacio, thirty years old, seemed to be lost in deep boredom, in the unexpected return of the wave that always brought him back to the shore, his mouth full of sand on the ground. So, when Ana María appeared the following year, she was just another girl among others, who would look at him with admiration during class; whose enraptured gaze got lost at the wrong time; who showered him with her attention, waiting for some attitude from the experienced teacher that would make her stand out from the crowd. Was that it? Or was it just his fancy? Horacio's mirage women became concrete when he wrote, for the first time, their names. Then the past was erased and he entered again an universe full of expectations. Ana María Cirés was nineteen years old, twelve years younger than Horacio, and had the power to revive in him all his projections, all his fantasies, all his expectations, all his plans for a future life. In love and annoyed with it, he said: “You must know already, then, that I have decided to marry by the end of the year. I believe this act to be one of the stupidest things man can do, as stupid as putting hard things

que nunca estuve seguro de si en realidad me quería, te figurarás lo que es una entrega como esa, dejándome en el hueco de la mano doscientos o trescientos polvos gozados de antemano.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 244-245).

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inside one’s body when hungry. But God knows one and the other things are sought after, hence my joining the herd.”89

An atypical man in the herd After more than three years in Buenos Aires, Horacio wanted to get married and it was not just the result of a passion. There was something inside that pushed him in that direction. A remnant of another time, something that had been deposited and that he did not want, could not, or did not know how to contain. During 1906, his first year after returning from the Chaco Austral, he had begun to entertain the idea of going to Misiones: a summer house at first, then a place where his mother could live. Finally, a place of his own: an outpost in the northeastern forest. During the summer holidays of 1908, he had gone to San Ignacio, and on the family's new land, over the course of three months, with some peones, they built the wooden house where he intended to live later. Was it time for this? – he wondered. Even more so now that he already had experience as an effective teacher and increasingly established himself as a short story writer in Buenos Aires. His short stories appeared frequently on the pages of local magazines such as Caras y Caretas. One per month: a real success. In spite of that, some mysterious clock indicated that it was indeed time. Some learning had been accomplished. On the verge of thirty years of age, he was going to be part of the herd. Arranging things with Ana María’s parents would surely be a cinch. Or perhaps not: when they learned that Horacio wanted to take their girl to live in the forest, in a wooden house, in a place with native people – and not Europeans, like them – where there were no paved streets, electricity, hospitals and access from Buenos Aires took three days, at best, they knew for sure that their would-be future sonin-law was crazy. No. It did not make sense. There was no way. That was nonsense. Ana should break up with Horacio as soon as possible, because it had no future. Not at all. Ana understood the situation and, on the same day, went to talk to Horacio. The girl seemed convinced of the impossibility of making the familiar universe converge with the dream world that her fiancé offered her. Horacio's impassiveness surprised her a little. He seemed to be indignant

89 “Sabrás, pues, que decido casarme a fin de año. Creo sea este acto una de las cosas más estúpidas que puede hacer el hombre, tanto como meterse dentro del cuerpo cosas duras cuando se tiene hambre. Mas sabe Dios que una y otra cosa son buscadas, y de aquí mi ingreso en la grey.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 258).

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that she had not rebelled, that she had not wanted to run away with him, like any valorous feuilleton lady would not hesitate to do. A mature man, Horacio accepted the break up. At first. It did not last long. Soon he became choleric, cursing Ana María, then her parents and up to the fifth generation of French people they came from. Again, it did not last: melancholy came soon. Losing Ana María and the possibility of going with her to San Ignacio annihilated him. He did not know how to deal with the fall of his dream. He lost his footing. He went in search of his friend Brignole, who had welcomed him into his home years before and, unable to keep his composure, wept desperately in his arms, “and he called life a bitch so much, and allowed a glimpse of such extreme intentions, that the friend, fearful, retained him by his side for several days.”90 Ana María was unable to keep the intended break up as well. The young woman became ill, depressed, lost weight, and began to worry her parents, putting them in the uncomfortable position of having to decide which would be the lesser evil: to keep her languishing at home or to give her to the madman. The madman, in turn, invented every stratagem to send letters, to arrange furtive meetings with Ana, even if at a distance, from the window, indicating to her his firm intention to insist on the plan to marry, at all cost. Such advances lasted for weeks. Then Ana María's family gave in. As a condition, they imposed that they move with her, during the year-end holidays, so that they could support her in that nonsense. Horacio's mother was also willing to accompany the couple to the North. The feuilleton adventure gained the family’s protection network, and the parents tried to make that madness something minimally feasible, which did not put the young ones at risk. So they finally got married on December 30 of that year, on the eve of the groom's 31st birthday, and set off in a caravan to the North: in addition to the couple, there were also Ana María's parents, Horacio's mother, and his godfather and friend Brignole, who would stay there for the following month. Anyone, that is, anyone not named Horacio or Ana María, would have no trouble to understand that that foreign couple in Misiones, the writer's successive vacations notwithstanding, would find much difficulty in a world so far from any urban center. Horacio and Ana María, however, were concerned with love’s elations and had no time or interest in what common sense would say.

90

“y tanto llamó perra la vida y dejó entrever propósitos extremos, que el amigo, temeroso, lo retuvo a su lado varios días.” (Delgado and Brignole, Vida y obra de Horacio Quiroga, 181).

6. SNAPS OF THE JAW

Horacio's four years in the Argentine capital came to an end. Now he was going to live in the jungle, on the border of what he called a country, which meant inventing a homeland in the midst of the forest and the animals. Over those four years, as a writer, he managed to step out of the shadows of Darío, Poe, Lugones, and Dostoyevsky. He was more and more recognized for his own style: a realist short story writer, with precise, economical sentences, who published mainly in Caras y Caretas, in the space of a page or a page and a half, mostly haunting stories. A newly married girl, passionate and dreamy, fell strangely ill on the honeymoon and stayed in bed while losing weight and becoming vertiginously pale. A couple in love had children who unequivocally fell ill with meningitis and became mentally disabled; the story is repeated after every new child. He no longer published in friends' magazines, he was a professional writer. The editor made him cut out all the fluff: adjectives, very long descriptions, expendable sentences. Thus, Horacio and Luis Pardo achieved the miracle of making a short and complete fiction fit in the narrow space of the page, with the illustration, the discreet signature, and the title. It was the miracle of condensation, recognized by Horacio himself: Luis Pardo, then editor-in-chief of ‘Caras y Caretas’, was the one to demand in the short story an unheard of degree of severity. The story at the time was no longer than a page, including the corresponding illustration. The only space available to the writer to flesh out his characters, place them in the environment, tear the reader away from his habitual apathy, interest him, impress him and shake him, was a single and narrow page. Better still: 1256 words.91 91 “Luis Pardo, entonces el jefe de redacción de ‘Caras y Caretas’, fue quien exigió el cuento un grado inaudito de severidad. El cuento no debía pasar entonces de una página, incluyendo ilustración correspondiente. Todo lo que quedaba al cuentista para caracterizar a sus personajes, colocarlos en ambiente, arrancar el lector de su desgano habitual, interesarlo, impresionarlo y sacudirlo, era una sola y estrecha

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Then, Horacio mastered the magic number, as he became the master of the single page. He captured the female reader, he captured the male reader, he had strategies, the ones he dominated and the ones that dominated him. One day he was going to turn his profession of faith into a catechism, a decalogue, or something like that. One day he would be the master. What he had learned from obsessively reading Edgar Allan Poe helped, but it was not enough. Then came Chekhov, Maupassant, and the themes varied. Then came his melee with the blank sheet, the comments from the readers, the fierce denial, because silent, from some editors. He gained respect and “El almohadón de plumas”, published in 1907 as two colored pages, two illustrations, showed his prestige. When people started asking him for collaborations more frequently, when he started recommending texts from friends, he felt that his voice was starting to be heard. “Los buques suicidantes”, published two years later, caused inexplicable chills, due to the inexplicable story of the crew of a boat that threw themselves, without reason, into the sea, attracted by death. “La gallina degollada” amazed families when they realized that the danger of death inhabited the family nucleus: the couple who insisted on healthy offspring despite clear evidence that, together, they produced sick kids, serially producing mentally handicapped children. Horacio's poetics distanced itself from “the rambling, affected manner of the 1900s”.92 It did not show the scenes explicitly, but suggested them: “The procurement of the word resembles a bite, and Rubén does not have the decisive, dry snaps of the jaw”.93 Horacio had it. … And he would leave it all behind. He would be so big in Paris and a matter of money, affectation, ruined everything. He would be so rich in the Chaco, until he found out that he needed to steal the money from the peones in order to prosper, he had to treat them like slaves or animals. In San Ignacio now he really just wanted to raise his family, to finally be a man. No more wandering lost between fleeting loves and womanly adventures. He was going to found his own country, he already knew; but, without language, it would be meaningless. He was going to keep his literature functioning at any cost on the other side of the river. From the unfathomable heights of his basalt plateau, a hard land for cultivation, in his tropical página. Mejor aún: 1256 palabras.” (Quiroga, Los “trucs” del perfecto cuentista y otros escritos, 135). 92 “las torceduras de 1900” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 160). 93 “La procura de la palabra se parece a una mordida, y el Rubén no tiene golpe decidido y seco de mandíbula” (Quiroga apud Tarcus, Cartas de una hermandad, 87).

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chalet, with a hastily built carnaúba roof, the wet wood which was already warping and opening crevices that would be even picturesque if, in addition to sunlight, they did not also let the gushing waters penetrate during tropical storms. It was there where he was going to build, like Fitzcarraldo, his precarious dream of civilization. The rush with the roof did not mean he had not planned it: the land, the location, the house, the best time to move, and, most importantly, a love. It took two years to buy the lot, build the house, and move in – and that was the simplest part. A dream that was cherished over time, it had been seven years since he had first arrived in those lands, to find what was left of the Jesuit buildings among the dense forest, to walk through the ruins, and to stick his boots with pleasure in the red, wet earth. There were successive vacations spent by him touring the river, the trails, and finding himself in a new and virginal place. The big challenge was not to come alone. By then, he already knew he would not be able to stand the cold or the loneliness. The months spent between Salto and Paris, suffering through misery and silence, were something he never wanted to repeat. The solitude of Chaco, hardly placated by dogs and letters, sitting on a can of kerosene, were not for him either. There was no possibility of building a life if there was no love. And he had decided that this love would be called Ana María Cirés. He finally anchored his utopia of a natural and authentic life on that basalt floor. His resignation from the cinema, from the café La Brasileña, on Maipú Street, from the bookstores where he went to see French and local novelties. The readings will be lonely, the gramophone, with a few records, including Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, will offer him the compensatory pleasure of no longer being able to attend concerts in Buenos Aires, and the distraction of the uselessness of erudite culture in that wild environment. Halfway between the port on the Paraná River and the small town, Horacio's house stood. Where there was forest there will be fruit trees, palm trees, flowers, mate, peanut, and sugar cane. The distance of about two kilometers between their property and the businesses in the region, the absence of electricity, will give the young couple the full experience of isolation. He wanted, despite everything, to keep writing. In addition to agriculture, architecture, building boats and canoes, it was necessary to forge literature. He had an editor. Whoever has an editor does not need to live among buildings, cars, and books. Whoever has an editor can send texts from a distance and trust that they will be disseminated among readers in the city – to him, the editor Luis Pardo was the man who could make such a utopia viable. His unpublished texts will make that jungle speak and, copied by hand by Ana María, will travel a thousand kilometers along the Paraná River

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until they dock in Buenos Aires, to reach the hands of literate people. Letters have always taken him from one place to another. French poets took him to Paris; Lugones took him to Argentina; Kipling, Defoe, and Thoreau indicated to him that the way was to live apart and be born again. Why not he, who arrived in Misiones because of a Lugones’ commission, be the one to introduce Argentines to the country that no writer has yet written about? He will make that jungle speak. He will paint the jungle in writing and bring it to life in literature. As he will also bring to life his first daughter. After one year, he was the one who took care of the childbirth. To the horror of his mother-in-law, the surprise of his wife, without anyone being able to intervene. Horacio will raise, before a godless sky, the small body of his firstborn, whom he will call Eglé, just like the best designed character – according to his own criteria – in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot, read with passion in the solitude of Chaco. Ending his work as a teacher precociously, in that territory without readers he would leave his marks and transform his home not only into a refuge, but, over time, into the Justice of the Peace’s office, his new function. Anyone from the surroundings will recognize – strangely enough, it is true – that a man of letters lives there. Horacio's name and place will be, from then on and always, those of the uncomfortable, the strange, the wild, the intractable, the razor-sharp. His work will consist of attempts more than results: he will not be the pioneer to bring civilization and establish the city; he will not be the colonist who teaches the natives a European craft; he will not be the missionary who brings a new faith and the conversion to locals. He will be the one to convert everything he touches into text, he will be the homo faber to adapt the inhospitable environment to rudimentary comfort. There will be roofs with endless leaks and several failed repair formulas; baby jaguars growing in his backyard; distilling oranges into a liqueur to be tasted by everyone; an oven for making charcoal; a world changing before his eyes. Horacio, his failures, his attempts. Many years later, when portraying a character in a short story, he will say: I once met a man who was worth more than his oeuvre. Emerson writes that this is quite common in men of character. What my man did, which he considered his definitive work, was not worth five cents; but the rest, the material and the means to obtain it, that hands down cannot be replicated by anyone.94 94

“Yo conocí una vez a un hombre que valía más que su obra. Emerson anota que esto es bastante común en los individuos de carácter. Lo que hizo mi hombre,

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On trees, children, and short stories Let us not get ahead of ourselves, let us go back a few months. Horacio was very anxious. He had been anxious before moving to the jungle. He had given up his life as a dandy, he had given up his life in Buenos Aires, he had given up his adventure as a cotton planter, it could be that he would fail again, that Ana María and he would not be able to adapt to the jungle, and that he would not even succeed as a writer. It did not matter. He was going to take the leap anyway: On the 30th I will be married. You will imagine the slew of thoughts this has brought me. But the truth is I was already mortally tired of my crappy life, between the complicated tools that filled my entire house, and my destroyed stomach – the devil take it. I don’t know how to put it to rest, and it will continue to torment me if I don’t put an end to this. The purpose is to get away from singledom, move house, move country, and go away, with the lizards and woodboring beetles.95

The last precaution was to make an agreement with Luis Pardo, that he would continue to publish his texts. Luis had proposed something even better: that Horacio publish, by deliveries, a new feuilleton, over the course of six weeks. To avoid comments and undesirable comparisons, they would use the pseudonym Fragoso Lima again. A very profitable deal, because if a good story, skillfully crafted to fit the narrow space of the page, took time to write and could only be published once, a feuilleton, on the other hand, with a bloated story, could be in six consecutive editions of the magazine, yielding much more for the newlywed man. It was not the first time they would do it: Fragoso Lima, in previous years, had already published “Las fieras cómplices” and “El mono que asesinó” in that same magazine. Nothing memorable, but very useful to keep the wheel turning. Fragoso was a writer who had the same imagination as Horacio, but he lacked formal refinement: he had neither the conciseness nor the talent for aquello que él consideraba su obra definitiva, no valía cinco centavos; pero el resto, el material y los medios para obtenerlo, eso fácilmente no lo volverá a hacer nadie.” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 238). 95 “El 30 me caso. Supondrás la tanda de reflexiones que me ha acarreado esto. Pero a la verdad estaba ya mortalmente cansado de mi vida perra, entre complicadas herramientas que me llenaban toda la casa, y mi disparado estómago – que el diablo se lleve. No hallo manera de hacerlo entrar en caja, y seguirá siempre mortificándome si no pongo fin a esto. En fin es cambiar de soltería, de casa, de país, e irme allá, con las lagartijas y escarabajos de la madera.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 262-263).

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allusion. With each new episode of the feuilleton, he tiredly reiterated what had happened before, interpolated tedious explanations, raised expectations for what would not come as a surprise. Finally, Fragoso was a typical case of a writer who suffered from an excess of words. Horacio, in turn, thanked him, because through him he paid his personal bills better. So, while the Uruguayan was stepping his boot on the red earth for the first few times, putting the little ranch and surroundings to work, more than a thousand kilometers away, the Portuguese published “El hombre artificial” in the pages of Caras y Caretas. Horacio would only know if everything had gone well when he received the payment notice, in Posadas, or when the letter from the editor arrived. None of the Buenos Aires magazines circulated in San Ignacio. The urgent matters there were to take care of the leaks, negotiate payment with the peones, guarantee the correct planting of the mate, and sow, little by little, the orchard that he had dreamed of. His mother and his friend Brignole finally returned to Buenos Aires, putting an end to the honeymoon. Horacio just could not get rid of his inlaws, always meddling with his household and decisions. They were inconvenient, wanting to show that they knew what was best for the couple's life. The good thing is that, at the end of the day, Horacio locked the doors and he no longer had to deal with his mother-in-law. Everything was going well with Ana, she was already expecting their first child for that year. Her mood had changed and she had some discomforts, but that was how things were, since they were all adapting. Everything was new in the country. The other discovery was the animals, which were revealing themselves little by little in their diversity: the tasty ones, which he hunted; the ones with good fur, which served as gifts to Ana María; the young ones, which he tamed; and the high-flying ones, which he could only admire. The weeks went by so fast, and Horacio did not write much. When he realized it, he had been living there for more than six months. Redeemed from the pains of the past, he decided to write some verses to his editor: The thing is that before today I thought to write to you, to say Everything I’ve been doing In my life of a cowboy. And so you should know I bought a baby cow with its mother and a goat with a devilish kid.

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74 And that I have two horses one sheep, still young a suckling agouti, and a diorama of large callus.96

He was in a state of grace, not just with Ana María, but with the new life he had invented for himself. He felt lithe, fertile, everything was plant and animal growth around him. He would be a father. The story he had written in those weeks told of what he had discovered, spoke of what he considered his greatest intuition: the jungle in which he moved was the same jungle of his ancestors, humans, and primates. He was treading the ground on which the human race had arisen, just as it was, with its thousand-year-old vegetation. Few people thought about it, but it was one of his biggest obsessions. He was also going to explore that land with his pen. That short story, which he baptized as “El hombre terciario”, came out kind of well, but had gotten long, descriptive, more like an article. He managed to publish it, but he was not at all satisfied. He then tried to create a jungle story, but life with Ana María and his mother-in-law did not inspire him with anything appropriate. Living, at that moment, was enough. He was professional though. Instead he concentrated on life in the Chaco and began to tell the story of a man who was bitten by a rabid dog and also developed hydrophobia. He structured the narrative in the form of a diary, as Maupassant had done time and time again. He was more satisfied with this short story, which he named “El perro rabioso”. What he really wanted was for Misiones to become a setting, but it was good that he could have romanticized something from Chaco.

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“El caso es que antes de hoy Pensé escribirle, diciendo Todo lo que voy haciendo En mi vida de cowboy. Y así sabrá que he comprado Una vaca con su cría, Y una señora cabría, Con un chivato endiablado.

Y que tengo dos caballos, Una oveja, chica aún, Un agutí mamón, y un Diorama de grandes callos.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 267-268, translated by Juana Adcock).

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He was going to keep trying. At the other end of the river was the man capable of the magic of getting his stories published. Far, far away. Luis Pardo was his bridge with the urban world and he was also the one who could help him pay for his life, while the money of the first yerba mate harvests did not arrive. He avoided thinking about it, but the financial situation was getting complicated. The money that came from Buenos Aires was scarce. The best case scenario would be to publish a feuilleton every two months, and not one per year, as it had been the case until then. He was going to need credit and he could only ask for it from one person. When he put “El perro rabioso” in the envelope, he was clear with Luis Pardo: Here is a one page article. Along with this request. Would it be possible for you to pay me in advance for a leaflet of five numbers that will go at the start of January? The issue is that certain revenge from a family of tigers, one of whom has been imprisoned, tamed and forced to perform pirouettes in a circus, until it escapes. They stalk and reduce (...), until they catch him. All for the style of the first leaflet I did. If you find it convenient, make me send the money. And what is related to this advance, if you don’t mind.97

He had always been paid for short stories, but now he asked to be paid for an idea. The situation was getting complicated, and he tried to be as clear as possible. It was necessary for Luis to understand that there was urgency in the request. Had he been clear enough? It was better to insist. Four days later, he wrote: “When I asked you for the two hundred pesos on account for the leaflet, I forgot to mention that I was in a tight spot, as our little one is about to be born very soon, and there will be barely enough time to buy him a baby grow.”98

97

“Va artículo de una página. Además va este pedido: ¿Le es posible pagarme adelantado un folletín de cinco números que irá a principios de enero? El asunto sería cierta venganza de una familia de tigres, uno de los cuales ha sido apresado, amaestrado y obligado a hacer piruetas en un circo, hasta que se escapa. Acechan y reducen (…), hasta que los pescan. Todo por el estilo del primer folletín que hice. Si le parece bien, hágame remitir el dinero. Y el relativo a este anticipo, si no lo toma a mal.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 271-272). 98 “Cuando le pedí los doscientos pesos a cuenta del folletín, me olvidé de decirle que tenía apuro, pues el nuestro chico está por nacer muy pronto, y apenas si dará tiempo a que se le compre una ombliguera.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 274).

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Without Luis, he would be lost. All the money comes from Caras y Caretas. The calculation was as simple as it was worrisome: he received around forty pesos per page, and wrote something like three pages a month. In this way, the monthly income would not exceed 120 pesos. Faced with such a scenario, without a sack of yerba mate sold, or even harvested, only the feuilletons could save the still unproductive crop: it would be 400 pesos more per year. He had no other idea at the moment. Initially, he had assumed that it would be enough to maintain the rhythm of publications that he had in Buenos Aires, since the cost of living in San Ignacio, he thought, would be much lower. Over time, as the farm produced, he would be able to sell honey, yerba mate, and peanut candy to supplement his income. Hell was not having any steady salary. Not having the school was a torment. Reality, this unworthy thing, however, continued to contradict his perfect plans. In addition to having no salary, he also had no rest. The holidays would be spent right there in San Ignacio, where he had been coming for the last few years, and they would not represent peace of mind, quite the opposite. Going to Buenos Aires, where he could freshen up his ideas a bit, see his friends, and establish other editorial contacts, was not a possibility. He was already beginning to understand that he would not have the money to go to the capital for the next year. Amongdoubts so numerous and new, the firstborn came to the world by his hands. A new life in his home, a face similar to his and similar to Ana María's. A tiny little animal. An intense affection, not felt until then. Crying around the house. Less hours of sleep. Unthinkable demands. Suspension in the middle of a sentence. New concerns between one page and another. That charming character, who advanced in spite of her co-author. Still anonymous, her father decided that she had to be named after the character in Dostoevsky's book, Eglé: “I am, indeed, effectively a father (...) She is a skinny and wiry, starving and annoying girl. This prevents me from running into the forest and screaming with open arms - I am a father!”99 With Eglé, it finally becomes clear that it would be impossible to live only on the money from Caras y Caretas and the seasonal earnings of a chimerical farm. He felt a brutal rush of adrenaline the first time he realized that the Parisian itinerary could repeat itself: lack of money even for food. It was inadmissible that this could happen: he was no longer the lonely

99 “Soy, certamente, padre efectivo (...) Es uma chica flacucha y forzuda, hambrienta e fastidiosa. Esto me cohíbe de correr ante el bosque y gritar abriendo los brazos ¡soy padre!” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 275).

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young man, he was ten years older, and was responsible for Eglé and Ana María. Failing was not an option. Amidst fears of scarcity, honey production inspired him to write his first fantastic story, finally set in those lands: “La miel silvestre”. In it, a chubby, urban subject, a reader of Jules Verne and on vacation in the woods, got into trouble by stealthily drinking paralyzing honey and being devoured by ants. Fear and dread for readers in civilization. A few extra bucks and recognition for the writer exiled in the tropical country. As Horacio was unable to take care of the family alone, Fragoso Lima came to his aid. He publishes another five-part feuilleton. But even with the extra help, everything falls short of what he would need to live. The winds would begin to blow his fallen sails only some time later, with the arrival of the news: he would be named Justice of the Peace and Civil Registry Officer in San Ignacio, and would receive about 150 pesos a month. It meant that his income would double. He would at least leave the zone of despair to enter one of more bearable dearth. It was a breath of fresh air and, as the wheel kept turning, Ana María was pregnant again. It was necessary to keep planting, keep writing, keep inventing ideas to earn more money, and, meanwhile, dodge those who came looking for the Justice of the Peace. He did not have the patience to make birth, marriage, and death certificates and everything else that the job required of him. Residents always arrived at the worst time, when he was busy with something else, which he unavoidably thought to be more important. So, he simply wrote down the request and the data of the annoying person on a piece of paper so that, as soon as the citizen left, he could bury it in a biscuit tin, from where it would never come out to see the light again. At the beginning of the following year, 1912, the boy was born: Darío. A name also chosen by him, to honor the modernist poet who had influenced him in the early days. Even before there was Lugones, there was Darío. Also, Darío was distinguished from all the others, because, having met him in person in Paris, he had not caused him disgust amid all that affectation of the other Latin Americans. With Darío and Eglé, his puppies, affection and scarcity increased. There was no short story, feuilleton, orange, honey, or peanut candy that would be enough to pay for his life. The solution was to drift away on the banks of the Paraná River, let his thoughts run where they wanted and, when things got too complicated, turn to friends from Salto, who, Horacio soon discovered, were already discussing the matter among themselves. He wrote to Maitland: The second [thing] is more serious. I presume that Brignole made you to understand my financial thinness on this occasion. Otherwise, how would

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Chapter 6 you have known. I’m in dire straits, friend. What would you dare to offer me? I, for my part, would need one hundred pesos gold. A lot, isn’t it? If it doesn’t suit you, send me what is possible. But since it’s true that the Buddha confronted the mosquitoes, and I will end up dressing in San Ignacio your tailcoat of misery, it is true that I will return them to you, but no sooner than eight months to a year. You know what with? Selling – not oranges but their peel. (...) Since the 15th I have a little male, ugly and ridiculous. Ana María sends her regards, and returning them to your good self, she sends a hug. Horacio.100

Difficulties were besetting and literature proved to be insufficient to face them. But retreating was not a possibility. The income was sustained through ups and downs. As fertile and creative as he was, and Horacio was indeed both, he was unable to maintain his own home as he would have liked. Furthermore, the magazines fluctuated in the market. The series of setbacks that prevented a man from being at peace and enjoying the Misiones sunset was incredible. Why did the sun, which daily gilded the waters of the river, become every day another spectacle to be always missed by him?

Sketches of Ana Ana María sympathized with her husband's hardships and, at the same time, felt lost in those inhospitable lands. Intoxicated with love, she had accepted the idea of going to live in the northern jungle, and the truth is that she had not thought much about what that meant, living in the northern jungle: without electricity, far from all of her friends, without being able to talk to anyone about the experience of being a mother, it was like being a prisoner of an unexpected dream. Moreover, her husband had a very strong personality, a variable mood. He was often upset and did not speak to her, at other times he was irritable. He spent more time thinking about literature or ways to make money than 100

“La segunda [cosa] es más grave. Presumo que Brignole te dio a entender mi flacura económica en esta ocasión. Si no, ¿cómo habrías llegado a saberlo? Mal ando, amigo. ¿Qué es lo que te atreverías a ofrecerme? Yo, por mi parte, habría menester de cien pesos oro. ¿Mucho, eh? Si no te va, mándame lo posible. Mas como es cierto que Budha confrontó a los mosquitos, y que acabé por vestir en San Ignacio tu yaqué de los escarmientos, cierto es que te los devolveré, mas no antes de ocho meses o año. ¿Sabés con qué? Vendiendo – no naranjas sino cáscaras de ellas. (…) Desde el 15 tengo un machito, feo y ridículo. Ana María te da afectos, y devolviéndolos a tu buena gente, te abraza. Horacio.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 282).

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talking to her. She felt lonely. It is true that there were moments that made up for the absences, when he let the tenderness he carried with him manifest. Those moments were not rare, but unpredictable: she never knew which Horacio was coming home. She had not been feeling very excited lately either. A terrible melancholy seized her, to the point of no longer being able to understand exactly what her life had become, nor what she still had on her horizon. Being a writer's wife was far different from what she had imagined. She had enjoyed only a little of the parties and public recognition before leaving Buenos Aires. In San Ignacio, nobody considers Horacio famous, just weird. On the other hand, she enjoyed the day-to-day life, had fun, sometimes, copying the short stories out, and felt privileged to be the first one to read them. She also helps with accounting. It was the best access she had to Horacio's world. Together they look at the magazines that arrive from time to time and look at how the stories were printed on the page. Then he cut them out, pasted them onto cardboard and made some corrections, “for the time to republish them”, he said. However, between these moments of joy, there were others of long absence, in which he lost himself staring at nowhere. She had to confess, Horacio was difficult. Sometimes, he was intolerant. When the short story “Los inmigrantes” was published in the magazine Fray Mocho, from the same group as Caras y Caretas, on December 6, 1912, he could not stand the fact that they had changed the name of the region where the story took place. First he complained to her, insinuating that it was she who had made the mistake while copying. Then, to vent, he wrote to his friend Maitland: “There is a brutal error, which it is necessary to save. At the end, where it says ‘a village in Siberia’, etcetera, it should read Silesia.”101 As he was not satisfied, he directed his anger towards the editor: I will first expound upon my complaints. In the article ‘Los inmigrantes’, aside from some small grievances, there was one that was not insignificant: the migrants were from Silesia, German of course. In Fray Mocho it says Liberia. It is so strange, a subject from this country, here! But as my wife’s handwriting must be to blame, I’ll move on.102

101

“Hay un error brutal, que es preciso salvar. Al final, donde dice ‘una aldea de Siberia’, etcétera, léase Silesia.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 301). 102 “Expondré primero mis quejas. En el artículo ‘Los inmigrantes’, fuera de algunos disparates chiquitos, había uno no despreciable: los inmigrantes esos eran de Silesia, alemanes desde luego. En Fray Mocho dice Liberia. ¡Es tan raro un

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Horacio himself was mixing up the regions: Silesia, Siberia, Liberia... but, looking for the culprits, he found it more convenient to blame Ana. Ana does not like to be the scapegoat, the one to receive the first blow of indignation from her husband, nor to serve as a buffer for complaints to the editor. She, of all people, was so thorough in the copies for the magazines. At least the other time, months before, Horacio had noticed that she was more attentive than he, the editor, and Puig from accounting. But what was the use if, as soon as he recognized it, he soon forgot everything? But here, my woman, a self-interested person if there ever was one, and who in this adventure had already begun by hating Puig, began to sniff around here and there around the payroll, reading and re-reading, until she got her way: the note ‘El oro vegetal’, was missing, a matter of grass. And because one hundred pesos were paid for this one, there was the difference, which consists of two hundred pesos in my favor, instead of one hundred. God bless our women! I would not even dare glance at the payroll, convinced of Puig’s infallibility, seeing thus that this evil character makes mistakes against the furthest away and most miserable contributor.103

Ana was always present. The keeper of the dream, the containment of the solitude of failed projects, the one that expands Horacio's possibilities as a writer, acting as a secretary. Because of her, the house was filled with children. She was always present. Horacio knew – although he did not say it – that, without Ana María, there would be no San Ignacio. His project of isolation in the jungle depended on her. He was indeed irritated by the impudence of his motherin-law. He was irritated by the insurmountable difficulty of dealing with the indigenous peones, of making a fair deal that would be kept. He was irritated by the impossibility of the countryside paying the bills, of the countryside always leaving him in a bad situation. He was irritated by the editing errors of his short stories in magazines, which he only saw long after they were sujeto de este país, aquí! Pero como la letra de mi mujer debe de tener la culpa, paso al otro.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 302-303). 103 “Mas he aquí mi mujer, persona interesada si las hay, y que había comenzado en esta aventura por abominar de Puig, se puso a olfatear la planilla por aquí y por allí, leyendo y releyendo, hasta que salió con la suya: faltaba la nota ‘El oro vegetal’, cuestión de yerba. Y como por esta se abonó cien pesos, allí estaba la diferencia, que consiste en doscientos pesos a mi favor, en vez de cien. ¡Benditas sean las mujeres propias! Yo ni me atrevía siquiera a escudriñar la planilla, convencido de la infalibilidad de Puig, viendo así que este maligno sujeto se equivoca en contra del más lejano e infeliz colaborador.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 312-313).

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published, when his lament was already of little worth. Why did he have to earn so little for his short stories? Why was it always a birth in the forest with each new publication? The things in Buenos Aires were not the best either. The Fray Mocho magazine was in a bad situation. Horacio and Ana even counted the advertisements that appear in it and in Caras y Caretas in order to try to understand if Luis Pardo's complaints made sense. They did not understand. Horacio wanted to be patient, but things were going bad.

7. LOVE AND DEATH

When, during an argument, Ana María took poison in a dose that, while not enough to annihilate her immediately, also did not allow for anyone to seek help, Horacio thought of Federico falling in front of him, victim of a bullet fired from a gun held by his hand. That money was scarce, everyone knew. That their married life was going through difficulties, with two small children – aged three and four –, anyone could imagine. That the presence of the mother-in-law, with whom Horacio did not have good relations, aggravated their relationship and left Ana always in the position of having to choose between her husband and her mother, was also not difficult to assume. However, showing what happened on that plateau in the early days of 1915 is something no one dares to do. Those who saw it wanted to forget it. Those who did not see it did not dare to imagine it. Ana María, so young and so mistreated by life in the missionary jungle, could not stand it. She could not stand the northern jungle, the marriage, the children, the husband, her own mother. She could not stand herself. Who shot the bullet? Loneliness, the lack of someone to talk to, the absence of a husband more like the one she had dreamed of one day. Living with the one she had admired as a teacher, loved as a man, and now endured as a boss was not easy at all. That wooden house looked like nothing she had dreamed of for herself. Eglé and Darío wanting her attention. Horacio in a bad mood. The house chores. A snake around the stove. A jaguar by the river in the middle of the afternoon. And no one could leave. She wanted to leave. The only way out was death. A massive dose of poison. Ana was dying. Horacio wanted to remain indifferent, it must have been one of her scenes. Later he was astonished and then desperate. That woman in his arms, bathed in sweat, convulsing as in childbirth, on the verge of expelling herself from life.

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The young woman left the world little by little, over the course of five days. It was February 10, 1915 and Horacio plunged into the most absolute silence.

Versions of the unspeakable Horacio sits down to write. For some years now, his literature has been nourished by life, by his experiences. He does not think much about what he is going to do. He starts writing how it all happened. He does not know to whom he is writing. He will never publish those lines. For a moment, he thinks he is writing to his children, who must know what happened to their mother, to be able to hear her words, understand her reasons. They will grow up orphans and it is only fair that they have at least an image of her, in words. Because there are no pictures anymore. Horacio had torn up every photo, every letter, every piece of clothing, every gift, anything that had belonged to Ana. It was the only way to move forward. He was holding back time. 1915 would never have existed, if not for the words written on that blank paper: the short story, which would be the first not transcribed by her. The unspeakable that was also unpublishable. No one needed to know anything. He erased the tracks. He himself recorded the death certificate in the registry book of the Justice of the Peace. He himself took the body to the municipal cemetery, to a tombstone with only the name of the deceased, without an epitaph, without dates of birth and death, without any religious cross. Horacio was not building memory, but forgetting. It did not matter what her family said, or her friends. No one. Lost in the haze of those facts, the biographer friends, when writing about that death, years later, would say that everything happened eleven months later, on December 15, 1915. The death certificate written by Horacio, resting at the Justice of the Peace office, took a while to come to light. No one heard of it for years. Diligent as Ana María had been, it was the Italian researcher Onelia Cardettini who, in 1987, while passing by San Ignacio, found the death certificate and the date on it: February 10, 1915. More recently, in 2009, journalist Javier Arguindegui, passionate about Horacio's work and who signed his articles as Aguara-í, copied the entire document for posterity: In San Ignacio, on the eleventh day of the month of February of nineteen fifteen, before my deputy Chief of Registry: Ramón Gozalbo of thirty years of age, single, Urugayan, a local resident, declared on the tenth of the current month that at eleven o’clock in the morning Ana María Cirés de

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That 1915 did not exist. It was silence and mourning. Everything was over. There was nothing to hold onto. He lived those months like an automaton, he barely ate, barely worked, barely read, barely wrote. For that reason, to his friends Delgado and Brignole, it did not make the slightest difference whether it was February or December. They lost in the fog the particulars of what had taken place. Not Horacio. Horacio survived that death with great difficulty. After having finished the account of Ana's death, there was no short story worth writing. Literature was useless. Letters were useless. There was no one to talk to. The presence of Darío and Eglé was a daily and disturbing challenge. As much as he wanted to erase everything that had to do with Ana, the memory of Ana blossomed on the children's faces. Oblivious to their father's drama, his cubs wanted attention, food, and care. He moved to feed them and that is what kept him. The only literature of those days were the stories that, with difficulty, Horacio articulated to tell his children: many of them were interrupted because the kids fell asleep, many others were adaptations of well-known stories. But, day by day, came stories that not only pleased Eglé and Darío, but also satisfied the storyteller. Heading towards the end of the year, these were the stories that kept Horacio alive. He thought they were worth steadying, writing, and publishing. It was the only idea he did not take out of his head that miserable year. The only idea, it seemed to him, worth investing in. However, he failed

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“En San Ignacio a los once días del mes de febrero de mil novecientos quince ante mí Jefe suplente del Registro: Ramón Gozalbo de treinta años, soltero uruguayo, domiciliado en la localidad, declaró que el diez del corriente a las once de la mañana falleció en su domicilio la mujer Ana María Cirés de Quiroga. Tenía veinticinco años, era argentina, casada, hija de Pablo Cirés (fallecido) y de Ana María Laguzan de Cirés, francesa, domiciliada en la localidad. Leída el acta la firmaron conmigo el declarante y los testigos Pablo Allain (42), francés y Vicente Gonzalbo (40), uruguayo, domiciliados en la localidad y quienes han visto el cadáver. La causa de la muerte -hemorragia intestinal.” (El Territorio, “El misterio sobrevuela la tumba de la esposa de Horacio Quiroga”).

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– because, when he sat down in front of the blank page, the dead woman intervened. There was no other way. He had to return to Edgar Allan Poe. The North American man was the writer he could cling to in the hardest of times. The one who had made madness and death his métier and who was not embarrassed by excess. Only Poe would support him in that difficult moment. He was going to write about Ana again, but not with the savage rawness of the immediate moment of death. He would turn her into one of Poe’s characters. It was the only way to write about that love and that death and be able to move on. The name? Berenice.

Berenice's extinguished flame It ended up like this. He wrote to Luis: “I’m sending the article, which turned out quite long. Because having written, after one year of a great depression regarding everything, is already a lot for me, I do not place a little or a lot of emphasis on the matter of payment.”105 Who signed those lines was not the one who insisted on each peso, who tried to master his own accounting, and who dreamed of making a living from his writings. It was another one, who had written to not go crazy. For all that, “Berenice” was different. It was proof that after a year of mourning and silence, he could still be a writer. He did not even name the story in the letter to the editor and even called it an article, as if it were not fiction. It was not the first time that he had done this with one of his literary texts. In the letters in which he talked about “Los inmigrantes”, he also called it an article. Let us call it a text. Its name was Berenice.106 “Berenice” had already been a short story by Poe, and Poe was 105

“Le mando artículo, que salió bastante largo. Como el haber escrito, después de un año de gran depresión en todo, es ya mucho para mí, no hago ni poco ni mucho hincapié en la cuestión pago.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 319-320). 106 An erudite note: Érika Martínez, the organizer of the most current edition of Quiroga's complete correspondence, suggests that the “largo artículo” would be “La industria azucarera de Misiones”, whose publication would have taken place in the magazine Fray Mocho¸ number 189, of December 10, 1915, as stated in the Bibliographic Repertoire of Quiroga, established by Walter Rela (1972). However, it was not common for a text to be sent and published in such a short time. In turn, the French critic Annie Boule, in a 1999 publication, in which she rectifies and suggests alterations to some points of Horacio Quiroga: repertorio bibliográfico anotado, by Walter Rela (1972), says that the mentioned article – unsigned – was actually published on November 5, 1915, that is, before Quiroga's letter was sent. Thus, the “largo artículo” to which Quiroga refers, should be “Berenice”, published

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a country to be revisited when one lost one’s sense, wits, and direction. When fate gets heavy, Poe was a somber but welcoming land. Now Berenice was a ten-year-old girl, a character in a narrative en abyme, a story within a story within a story, set in Europe. Horacio's Berenice suffered from a synesthetic disease: she was radically susceptible to art. A song had the power to make her suffer, faint, and make her own body age, as if it had gone through the aftershocks of years of intense emotions. But we, the readers, do not have access to her and do not even know about her sufferings. The story is told third-hand by a friend of Baudelaire's, who had lived the reported experience in Paris. Little by little, we learn that Baudelaire had told the story to a violinist who we finally discover to be Richard Wagner. Wagner, in turn, told the story to the narrator of the report, who finally tells it to us, readers. In a much more subtle homage to the North American short story writer, and much less apparent than what he had done in “El crimen del otro” and “Los perseguidos”, in this short story it is as if Poe’s themes and diction were there as an element shaping his own voice: the catalepsy, borrowed from “The facts in the case of M. Valdemar”; the vertiginous aging learned in “The oval portrait”; and also the synesthetic disease present in “The fall of the house of Usher”. Horacio's story even widened the age gap between couples, with a man in his late twenties in love with a ten-year-old Berenice. Not a child, but a girl, because the character is eroticized by the narrator. Horacio underlined the eroticism of a loving ideal often presented as virginal. Without any euphemisms, the character Berenice performed provocative shenanigans to seduce the pianist: Sometimes I sat at the piano, and it was very strange that Berenice did not start any manouvre between the chairs, until feeling her suddenly two steps away from me, always with her back against the light, and with her immense gaze fixed upon me. She would interrupt me then, and it was in vain for me to address her: she never responded, nor would she stop looking at me.107

in the same Fray Mocho, on December 31, 1915. The writer often referred to his short stories as “artículos” and “Berenice” occupies three pages of the magazine. 107 “A veces me sentaba al piano, y era muy raro que Berenice no emprendiera alguna maniobra entre las sillas, hasta sentirla de repente a dos pasos de mí, siempre vuelta de espaldas a la luz, y fija en mí su inmensa mirada. Me interrumpía entonces, y era en balde que la dirigiera la palabra: jamás me respondía, ni dejaba de observarme.” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 280).

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Beyond the glances, flirting took place in music. It was not uncommon for Berenice to convulse when Wagner played a piece he had just composed on the piano. The more intense the pieces played on the piano were, the more intense Berenice's reactions would be. The first scene was already sensual, and the girl turned into a woman, through a listening that has rhythms and aspects of sexual intercourse: Those twenty minutes of a whirlwind of passion ended up converting a creature into a woman radiant of youth, with eyes darkened in demented fatigue. But the sheet music continued to roll always; her screaming delirious with passion had painful repercussions on my own nerves – all raw – ; and in that increasingly precipitated gallop of love madness howling in wild tones, I felt how Berenice’s body trembled without ceasing.108

The initiatory musical coitus is followed by another scene, without the predominance of sexual jouissance. The early blossoming gave rise to an equally early and vertiginous decline: I suddenly noticed there was no trace of the fourty year old woman, exhausted by a whole life of passion, burnt to a crisp within thirty minutes from the explosion of wild howling that closed the sheet music. Everything had reached its conclusion. In my arms, inert, fainted, in a catalepsy or I don’t know what, I now had a sorry-looking creature, decrepit, covered in wrinkles.109

Body, soul, love, everything grew old, everything was corrupted. The ideal of love became organic matter on the verge of decomposing. More than the fable of the decrepitude of female beauty, Horacio wrote about the destruction of a love, its vertiginous corruption. His seven-year relationship with Ana María, filtered through his obsessive listening of Wagner's Tristan 108

“Aquellos veinte minutos de huracanada pasión acababan de convertir a una criatura en una mujer radiante de juventud, de ojos ensombrecidos en demente fatiga. Pero la partitura avanzaba siempre; sus gritos delirantes de pasión repercutían dolorosamente en mis propios nervios – todos a flor de piel – ; y en ese galope cada vez más precipitado de locura de amor aullaba en alaridos salvajes, sentí cómo el cuerpo de Berenice temblaba sin cesar.” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 283). 109 “noté de golpe que ya no quedaban ni rastros de la mujer de cuarenta años, agotada por una vida entera de pasión, calcinada en treinta minutos por la explosión de alaridos salvajes que había cerrado la partitura. Todo estaba concluido: En mis brazos, inerte, desmayada, en catalepsia, o no sé qué, tenía ahora una lamentable criatura decrépita, llena de arrugas.” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 283).

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and Isolde, resulted in a Poe-like tale in which what was left was earth, mist, shadow, dust, nothing. Untouched then and forever, the beauty to be protected, figured in Horacio's tale through the image of the ten-year-old girl, found in Poe's narrative, its inspiration, another inviolability - that of the beloved woman's grave. Always Berenice. Poe's short story, published in 1853, was not about love, but about grief and loss of reason. In the first paragraph, the melancholic narrator complained about the ambivalence between beauty and ugliness and between peace and pain, in an excerpt I quote from the copy of Charles Baudelaire's translation, which Horacio had in his library: Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform. Overreaching the wide horizon like the rainbow, its hues are as various as the hues of that arch, as distinct too, yet as intimately blended. Overreaching the wide horizon like the rainbow! How is it that from Beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness? — from the covenant of Peace a simile of sorrow? But thus is it. And as, in ethics, Evil is a consequence of Good, so, in fact, out of Joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are, have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.110

Still in Poe's short story, the epigraph by the poet Ebn Zaiat stated that visiting his friend's grave (“amicae”) would bring the solution to the poet's afflictions. If the North American man’s short story led one to believe that visiting the dead woman's tomb was the way out, Horacio's demonstrated, like its author, that the best thing was for a tombstone to be heavy, almost anonymous, and inviolable. “I have little else to tell you. The mother took in those sorry remains of burnt glory, and I have never again heard nor wanted to hear from them…”.111

110 “Le malheur est divers. La misère terrestre est multiforme. Dominant le vaste horizon comme comme l’arc-en-ciel, ses couleurs sont aussi variées, – aussi distinctes, et toutfois aussi intimement fondues. Dominant le vaste horizon comme comme l’arc-en-ciel! Comment d’une exemple de beauté ai-je pu tirer um type de laideur? du signe d’alliance et de la paix une similitude de la douleur? Mais, comme, en éthique, le mal est la conséquence du bien, de même, dans la réalité, c’est de la joie qu’est né le chagrin ; soit que le souvenir du bonheur passé fasse l’angoisse d’aujourd’hui, soit que les agonies qui sont tirent leur origine des extases qui peuvent avoir été” (Poe, Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires, 73). 111 “–Poco más tengo que decirle. La madre se llevó adentro aquel pobre resto de calcinada gloria, y nunca más he sabido ni querido saber de ellos…” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 284).

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Between visiting the tomb and violating it, there was the difficulty of dealing with whom was no longer present, with the absence of the beloved woman. For Horacio, the – vital and narrative – solutions were not clear enough. The work of returning to the already published short story was particularly important in that case. Five years later, when he was going to republish “Berenice” in a book, in the volume El Salvaje, he made several changes to the original text. One of them was to add a phrase at the end of the story, terrifying, of an endless mourning. In the first version, it said: “I know that she, Berenice, continues, as that night, dead whilst alive...”.112 In the second ending, Horacio opted for the young woman's catalepsy, corroborated by the inclusion of a brief newspaper note at the beginning of the story, which says that she had just died. From the perspective of a lost love, however, the phrase “dead whilst alive”, in addition to catalepsy, spoke of an unburied dead woman, a ghost who insisted, an obsession that returned He also wanted to change the name of the story, which would no longer be called “Berenice”, but “La llama”. In his desperate attempt to deal with Ana's death, Horacio made use of the young woman harassed by art, combined with her partner's hypersensitivity. People die of music, literature, and love, Horacio repeats. A woman like that is a flame that goes out too quickly. A woman like that is a flame that goes out too quickly. He had forged for himself a discourse about what had happened and, as much as everything came back, he tried not to think about it anymore. But, beyond those words in the short story and the secret words written about his wife's death, the notes for Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, continue to ring obsessively for Horacio, with devastating effect for the widower, dying continuously without being able to say it.

Inventing another life Widowed at the age of 36, Horacio found himself abruptly thrown out of his utopia, like a child who gets lost not in the crowd, but in the desert. His ideal world had been devastated in such a way as to not allow any replicas. The man who had fallen in love with the young student, whom he had included in his project for a new life playing an absolutely central role, with whom he had had two children, saw her urged to give up everything definitively, putting an end to her own life. 112

“Sé que ella, Berenice, continúa como aquella noche, muerta en vida...” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 284).

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Ana's gesture of refusal. Horacio was faced with a real failure. Not failures of untimely decisions, of the kind that always allow one to go back and take another direction. No. A failure without remission, which forces him to invent another life. The vain gesture of destroying photos, letters, clothes, the wedding dress, was exhausted in itself. The residue and traces of his dead wife haunted him. Having opted for that heavy tombstone, the maiden name, without affiliation, without dates, Ana was left floating in a parallel reality, erasing Horacio's own marks in that story. The two children – Eglé, four years old at the time, and Darío, three – were not strangers to him at all. Those autonomous lives, which had always seduced him, were now exclusively under his responsibility. The two kids, whose names responded to his literary aspirations and daydreams, took on a new dimension: if before they were vivacity, instinct and discovery, now they were mourning, fragility, and dependence. His whole life of literature was fragile. Trying to be Robinson Crusoe in the border jungle and Thoreau in his inhospitable cabin had not been enough. The madness learned from Edgar Allan Poe could give him a syntax for Ana’s death, but could not launch him forward. He was not sure about what to do, nor how. His wild utopia was never a lonely project. He fertilized Ana with the misionera idea and she backed the bet unrestrictedly, because she loved him, because she admired him, because she had never received a look like that in her short life: marriage, children and an ordinary life in the jungle. After giving birth, giving meaning to the cubs, everything had started seeming too heavy to her: the meaningless life in the bushes, in the woods, in the cultivated land. What was really hers there? Everything got mixed up in hard days of hard work, of being a housewife, a secretary, a copyist, an accountant, a lonely girl. Life weighed on her. Eglé and Darío demanded a new meaning for Horacio. Maybe he had not failed completely. Those lives that moved before his eyes, looking at him with Ana’s eyes, said that not everything had come to an end. Horacio let his children roam the plateau, people said, to get them used to the dangers of the jungle, so that they would soon understand their place as prey and predators. He told them the stories of each animal in the jungle, whether ant or jaguar, armadillo or puma, possum or alligator. Never-ending stories for his pups with attentive and eager eyes. Maybe not everything was a failure.

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Story of two man cubs Almost four months after sending “Berenice” to his editor, and seeing it published in the magazine Fray Mocho, Horacio wrote to Luis again. He finally knew what he had to say to him. The project that had been born secretly and furtively was already taking shape: Dear Pardo: Here is a long tale-story for young kids, I think it will be liked. I have eight or ten of those in my head – each half a page long-. If you like them, send word with Romerito to save me the work of writing to you in vain. I write today to Cao, inviting him differently to see if he may want to do a few vignettes for that story. He will do it very well. Until soon, perhaps, regards.113

Writing children's stories, something he had never thought about before, but which had now become almost inevitable. Luis Pardo was surprised by the proposal, but thought it was worth taking a risk. But not right away. Maybe it was not the best thing to have the author of “El almohadón de plumas”, “La gallina degollada”, and “A la deriva” writing for children. He would need to invent another author for that project. After pondering for a few weeks, “Los cocodrilos y la guerra” finally appeared in the May 19, 1916 issue of Fray Mocho. The short story was signed by “El misionero”. The man of uprooting, the one who wandered between cities, houses, countries, projects, was then surprisingly named with a provisional demonym, which removed him from the condition of exile. He assumed the position of master, one who explained to intelligent children everywhere how wild nature works, what the instincts of animals are, how each one of them behaves. All this through great adventures between humans and animals. Horacio expected from his readers what he expected from his own children when he released them into the woods, which must have horrified many in his family: that children experiment and take risks. Dad Horacio had his corollary: that each child should construct the moral of the stories by themselves, if they could. They had to put themselves 113

“Amigo Pardo: Va larga historia-cuento para muchachos chicos, que creo gustará. Tengo ocho o diez de esos hechos en la cabeza – cada uno de media página-. Si le agradan, mándeme decir con Romerito para evitarme trabajo de escribirlos en balde. Escribo hoy a Cao, invitándolo deferentemente a que quiera hacer unas cuantas viñetitas para el cuento ese. Él lo hará muy bien. Hasta pronto, acaso, lo saluda.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 320).

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in the shoes of the animals represented in the stories and think of humans from different positions: as man cubs, but also as wild cubs – parrots, Pampas deer, coatis. The new stories Horacio went on writing had previously been told to Eglé and Darío. He advanced a little uncertainly, but going ahead. Now he bet on Kipling. He was the one who guided him through those lands, through the Indian jungles. The second short story was published on June 9. It was called “La jirafa ciega”. When time came to write the third short story, Horacio realized that it could be interesting to talk about the local animals. He then chose an Argentine frontier landscape and shifted his gaze from the books by the author born in India, in the British Empire, to his own surroundings. On July 14, “Las medias de los flamencos” was published, in which he created and told the myth of the origin of the bicolored legs of flamingos, in the tropical forests. With “La tortuga gigante”, published on August 18, he also brought animals closer to readers, offered them language, made them move in their own narrative universe, by conceiving a sick protagonist, in feverish delirium and on the verge of death, who was saved by a turtle of enormous dimensions, which carried him on its shell from the jungle to the Buenos Aires Zoo. The series, which at the time even had a name, Los cuentos de mis hijos, would be followed by “Historia de dos cachorros de coatí y de dos cachorros de hombre”, which would break the monthly periodicity and appear in another magazine, P.B.T., from the same editorial group of Fray Mocho and Caras y Caretas, only in January 1917. It was the most touching story in the series: a coati, because of his imprudence, was taken captive by a family and turned into a mascot for two children; one day he was mortally bitten by a snake; thus, the little brother, who always went to visit him, becomes, in the eyes of the mother coati, the pivot of an ethical question: should she deprive the human children of their pet or not? Should she confront them with death or not? This mother's surprising decision is to replace her dead cub with his brother, ultimately choosing to lose not one, but her two children in the name of the joy of the human children. The universe of Horacio's narrative – of adventure, wild landscape, death, and loss – was being recreated for children in a surprising way. He reached a style: he made the animals move in natural territories that he already knew so well and promoted adventures with characters who could well be human, but had outstanding traits of humor and cunning. He invented tasty adventures that held the reader's attention.

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Los cuentos de mis hijos encased a lesson: Eglé and Darío engendered those narratives that he had to create for them in the solitude of the jungle. Transforming those experiences of affection into literary material was the knot with which he managed to weave so as not to let himself fall into the abyss after Ana's death. To stay alive and writing.

8. THE MAN WHO COUNTED

In the first months of 1917, still in San Ignacio, on his ranch, all Horacio had were desires and intuitions, both of which were difficult to materialize. He thought that if he continued to live on the plateau, any plans regarding the publishing world would be jeopardized. The time it took for a letter to arrive, the difficulty of finding a possible new editor in a cafe or restaurant, postponed to an unfathomable future the possibilities of skyrocketing his writing career. It was very difficult, from that distance, to nurture his relationships. Besides, at the end of each afternoon, he felt around him all the noise of the jungle getting ready for the dark. And, together with it, the loneliness. He no longer had his friends or his wife. He could no longer bear the torment that isolation and memories produced. At the other end of the river, at the same time, his friends would be having fun. The night in Buenos Aires was just beginning. He missed all that. There, where the bustle of everyday life could help distract him from the trauma, he could also try publishing his short stories. Also, there had been a promise of a position as accounting secretary at the Uruguayan Consulate. His friends told him this, as Baltasar Brum, an acquaintance from Salto, had become Minister of Foreign Affairs of Uruguay. He would be favored by those in power. Moreover, the children were almost old enough to go to school. Soon the limits of what a widowed parent can teach at home would begin to appear. It was time to leave. To publish the imagined books, to gather the written short stories. It was time to leave. Even more so at that moment, when letters did not satisfy him: relations became more distant and formal. Since he had married Ana, he lived much more of the immediate day-to-day life than what he reported in his letters to his friends. He did not feel like remembering anything else about Salto and the memories grew distant; nor did he want to talk about San Ignacio anymore, because he had lost the virginal look of discovery and, after Ana's death, everything was solitude and torment.

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Because of the crisis of the magazines in which he got published, Horacio was already earning less and less. The excitement that made him produce frantically and still dedicate himself to the fields, to the river, was going away. His body missed the city bustle and the possibilities it had to offer. The call of the city screamed louder, as he had just taken a quick trip to explore the environment, to see his friends again, and to think about the opportunities. He missed Aue’s Keller, the German bar on Bartolomé Mitre Street, between Florida and Maipú Streets. There, for instance, the followers of Rubén Darío gathered. Yes, his friends were there, that was where he wanted to live. He sat down at his desk and wrote at the top of the paper: “To be read in Aues and by Pardo, who knows the handwriting.”114 While writing about the past visit and telling things about the daily life in Misiones, his life gained traces of unity. How he wished that San Ignacio were in the confines of Buenos Aires, so that he could move from one side to the other whenever he wanted. Horacio laughed in the letter when talking about the telegram received from friends that same day. In it, the word “Quiroguian” was transformed by the work of a singular listening by the telegraph operator into “quiero ganias”. Lines ahead, he laughed at the adventurous spirit of his son Darío: The following morning we went with the boys to play the heroes on motorbikes, to tremendous success. Since that day they firmly believe that one of these days we’re going to crack our skulls. Today we went with Darío to explore the Yabebirí. A bitch of a road. I took a dive into a marshland and Darío had to take his shoes off and get into the water to push the bike. But as my boy says, ‘this is proper tourism!’.115

Horacio laughed and realized that the farewell was imminent. That life was in the city, that he missed the look of his friends and their conversations. That it no longer made sense to impose that long and endless mourning. He also knew that so soon he would no longer be able to live stories like that: his five-year-old son getting off the bike, smeared with happiness. A 114

“Para ser leída en el Aues y por Pardo, que conoce la letra.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 324). 115 “A la mañana siguiente fuimos con los chicos a hacer los héroes en moto, con éxito estupendo. Desde ese día creen a pies juntillas que un día u otro nos vamos a romper la crisma. Hoy fuimos con Darío a explorar el Yabebirí. Perro camino. Me clavé en un bañado, y Darío tuvo que descalzarse y hundirse en el agua para empujar la moto. Pero como dice mi chico, ‘esto sí que es turismo!’.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 325).

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memorable moment that would not return. He thought that, during the holidays, when he returned to San Ignacio, his children would have grownolder and perhaps even lose their interest in the forest. Darío and Eglé grew before his eyes. The girl was increasingly skilled in the kitchen, helping to prepare dinners: Good thing I had steaks with eggs and fried manioc for dinner, sponge cake and sweet potato jam made by Eglé, and coffee, made by Aureliana. It is 8:30, the sky is thundering with water, and I write under the gasoline lantern, which has three hundred spark plugs (this, for Estuch). We have a cute little coati in our arms, cuddly as a baby, and a bread thief like only he can be. His name is Tutankhamen. This morning I had my first encounter with my snake friends. A coral one, eighty centimeters, and already stretched between eighty pins. (...) I started this afternoon to make a bed for Eglé because the one he uses is the big double bed I had. The elastic has two or three broken steel rods, which suddenly jump to one side or the other of the little mattress. Which is not good.116

Eglé, the assistant cook who helped prepare dinner and desserts and who slept alone in her parents' bed, had just turned six years old. Lines ahead, Horacio tells his friends that there were no women in the region. Not women who interested him. He remembered a girl he had met one day on the steamboat, but he soon understood that any approach was impossible: There is no woman deserving of the name. Which is a bitch. On board, I met a woman from Tucumán, something like that, who embarked in Paraná, bound for Barracón, Misiones. When I arrived here, after six days of travel, transshipments and re-transshipments, she still had three days of steaming ahead, and then three days on mule back, through forty leagues of bush. At

116 “Buena cosa haber cenado bifes con huevos y mandioca frita, bizcochuelo y dulce

de batata hechos por Eglé, y café, hecho por Aureliana. Son las 8.30, el cielo truena con el agua, y escribo bajo el farol de nafta, que tiene trescientas bujías (esto, para Estuch). Tenemos un coatí criado guacho en brazos, mimoso como una criatura, y ladrón de pan como él solo. Se llama Tutankamón. Esta mañana tuve el primer encuentro con mis amigas las víboras. Una de coral, ochenta centímetros, y estirada ya entre ochenta alfileres. (…) Comencé esta tarde a hacer una cama para Eglé porque la que usa es la grande de matrimonio que yo tenía. El elástico tiene dos o tres varillas de acero rotas, que saltan de repente a uno u otro lado del colchoncito. Lo que no está bien.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 326).

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night, sleeping in the bush, with rains like today. Only yesterday had she arrived at her barracks. And she is a teacher there.117

How could he have a love life like that? His own letter was full of arguments to convince himself that it was time to go. With joy, a thousand kilometers away, in the heart of Aue's Keller, his friends would celebrate the anticipation of his return. It was the end: “Goodbye, my friends. Think how nice it is to go and get mail from you scandalizing the country on a motorbike. For the moment, happy as a clam. I wish you all the same, and a hug for each one of you.”118

The diplomat Still on those first months of 1917,119 with the help of his Uruguayan friends, Horacio managed to be appointed Secretary Accountant of the Consulate General of Uruguay in Argentina. With his public job secured, he moved to Buenos Aires, after six years of living in San Ignacio. He had moved to San Ignacio as a passionate young professor, a respected short story writer, who believed he was moving for life. Six years later, he returned as a widower, a still respected short story writer, diplomat, father of two. There was nothing to be ashamed. If the dreams and expectations of the trip had been many, it was certain that he had not completely failed. Horacio was not powerful, he was not envied, but neither could he be seen as someone who failed at everything. The house in which he was going to live was humble and would no longer have the tropical forest for a garden, the Paraná River for a road. He was going to live modestly with his two children in a basement at 164 Canning Street, in two cramped rooms. It was the price of starting over.

117

“No hay aquí una mujer que merezca el nombre de tal. Perra cosa. A bordo, conocí a una tucumana, cosa así que embarcó en Paraná, con destino a Barracón, Misiones. Cuando llegué aquí, después de seis días de viaje, transbordos y retransbordos, ella tenía para tres días de vapor aún, y luego tres días a lomo de mula, por entre cuarenta leguas de monte. De noche, dormir en el monte, con lluvias como la de hoy. Recién ayer había llegado a su Barracón. Y es maestra de allá.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 327). 118 “Adiós, amigazos. Piensen en lo agradable que es ir a buscar correspondencia de ustedes escandalizando al país con la moto. Por el momento, feliz como una uva. Igual cosa les deseo, y un abrazo para cada uno” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 327). 119 Delgado and Brignole, Vida y obra de Horacio Quiroga, 235.

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He had energy for the new venture. Occupying the basement was not exactly a limitation. The germ of the builder that had strengthened in him the willingness to build and modify the environment was fully present. The new house would also be a workshop, or shipyard, and his endeavor would be a boat, a chalana that he would baptize as La gaviota. Furthermore, he had some social prestige, which gave him the possibility of gathering around him not only the friends of past years, but a group of admirers. The small basement would also be used for literary gatherings. He was back. Little by little, Horacio realized that his life was not just in San Ignacio or Buenos Aires: his life was the transit between worlds. If until then he had oscillated between Salto and Montevideo, Salto and Paysandú, Salto and Paris, Montevideo and Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires and Saladito, he now finally settled on the axis between Buenos Aires and San Ignacio. There, a bridge is built, a great bridge, which will make the complex circuit between life, writing, publication, and recognition. All this in the continuous pendulum in which his work and relationships were built. The chimerical chalana was a way of saying that the distance, which would always exist, could be overcome with the effort and tenacity of a man who refused to recognize obstacles greater than himself. What he lacked at that moment? An editor for his future books.

Of love madness and death In 1901, just over a year after his return from Paris, Horacio had published his Los Arrecifes de Coral, an entire book of fin-de-siècle poems that, while having been a pioneering work in Montevideo, was also taken very little seriously by his contemporaries. Three years later, already in Buenos Aires, he published El crimen del otro, to make the transition from the poetic prose writer he had been to the concise short story writer he was becoming. In the next year, 1905, following his readings of Dostoyevsky and Poe, he published Los perseguidos, the long story in which he and Leopoldo Lugones were the main characters. In 1908, already in Misiones, he took a risk, without much repercussion, with the publication of an old love story, the novel Historia de un amor turbio. After these four irregular works, in different genres and not always well received by critics or the readership, Horacio finally had a consistent collection of successful short stories, published over the last twelve years. A set of texts to be envied, which had not previously come to light in book form due to Horacio’s impossibility of dedicating himself to the task, since he was a thousand kilometers away from the capital. Time and the short stories accumulated over the period could, with long patience, reveal their

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relevance years later. As he rummaged through the cardboards with the texts attached in the large file folder, it was more than evident to Horacio that the time had come. The novelist and then young editor Manuel Gálvez heard that Horacio had just returned to Buenos Aires and saw a great opportunity in him. He did not flinch. He went after the bearded man. In his memoirs, he talks about the meeting and the mismatches that occurred afterwards: In 1916 I founded the Cooperativa Editorial Buenos Aires (...) As soon as the Society was founded, I thought of Quiroga and went to his house. We would debut with a book by Fernández Moreno, Ciudad. I wanted the second volume to be by Quiroga. ‘I came to get a book for the Cooperative,’ I told him. ‘And I will not leave if you do not give it to me.’ He answered me that he had a hundred stories published in Caras y Caretas. Most of them covered only one page of the magazine (...) He brought a folder and we chose some of them; but as it was not possible to choose them all at once, he promised to make the book for me very soon. He was a man of his word and he kept his word. He called it Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte (Tales of love madness and death), and he didn’t want any commas between those words.120

An inevitable book emerged, the result of a long wait, which was destined to become a classic: the exercise of fear, purified in works set in bourgeois homes, such as in the short stories “El almohadón de plumas” (1907), “La gallina degollada” (1909), and “El solitario” (1913), alongside other narratives that had wild nature as their setting, such as “Los buques suicidantes” (1906) and “La miel silvestre” (1911). Also, those in which the dimension of the social exploitation of the indigenous peones, who barely spoke Spanish, were highlighted without mincing words, such as “Los mensú” (1914) and “Los pescadores de vigas” (1913). To top it off, there 120

“En 1916 fundé la Cooperativa Editorial Buenos Aires. (…) Apenas fundada la Sociedad, pensé en Quiroga y fui a su casa. Nos estrenaríamos con un libro de Fernández Moreno, Ciudad. Yo deseaba que el segundo volumen fuese de Quiroga. – Vengo a que me dé un libro para la Cooperativa – le dije –. Y no me iré si no me lo da. Me contestó que tenía un centenar de cuentos publicados en Caras y Caretas. En su mayoría abarcaban sólo una página de la revista. (…) Trajo una carpeta y elegimos algunos; pero como no era posible elegirlos todos de una vez, prometió formarme el libro muy pronto. Era hombre de palabra y cumplió. Le puso por título Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte, y no quiso que se pusiera coma alguna entre esas palabras.” (Gálvez, Amigos y maestros de mi juventud. Recuerdos de la vida literaria (1900-1910), 276).

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were still stories in which weeping love, so popular in those times, was accompanied by certain doses of evilness, such as in the unavoidable “Una estación de amor” (1909) and “La meningitis y su sombra” (1917). The late harvest yielded an unavoidable fruit: readers were being presented with the best of a mature writer, whose narratives were inextricably associated with passionate love, often dealing with psychic suffering and self-destruction, the ruthlessness of fate, the dangers of nature – whether in the jungle or in urban and bourgeois life. A type of writing from which it would be difficult to escape, and which would henceforth mark successive generations of young readers in a profound way. More than eight decades after the publication, the Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante would say in front of an audience: I read the stories of Quiroga, all of them, as a teenager, and I believed them all. I was, as you can probably tell, sound of mind but impressionable. Now, even if I was threatened to be dismissed from this conversation I would not read them if they tied me up. You will have guessed that Horacio Quiroga was an addict not only to morphine but to the literature of Edgar Allan Poe.121

The edition of five hundred copies, at two pesos each, sold out quickly. Horacio's expectations were as high as possible but, as the publisher was a cooperative, the publisher withheld part of the profit to pay Horacio's quota. Not a penny of profit or copyright remained for the author, which irritated him deeply. For years, he had been used to being paid for any text he published, and payment was an eagerly desired step in any publication. For him, the calculation was not difficult nor did it contain major mysteries: “Five hundred copies at two pesos is two thousand pesos, he calculated, and added ‘and I have not seen one penny.’” 122 The editor's mathematics, however, was quite different, more complex, and had more variables: 25 copies for the author; 25 for newspapers and magazines; 50 copies purchased by the author, at cost price; 400 copies sold, at 800 pesos, according to Gálvez, “to pay the printer; to give thirty-five percent to the administrator - today they are only satisfied with fifty! -which 121

Leí los cuentos de Quiroga, todos, de adolescente y me los creí todos. Era, ya lo adivinaron, sano de mente pero impresionable. Ahora, aunque me amenazaran con la expulsión de esta charla no los leería ni amarrado. Habrán adivinado que Horacio Quiroga era un adicto no sólo a la morfina sino a la literatura de Edgar Allan Poe” (Cabrera Infante, “Y va de cuentos”, 12-19). 122 “Quinientos ejemplares a dos pesos son mil pesos, calculaba, y agregó: ‘y yo no he visto un centavo. (Gálvez, Amigos y maestros de mi juventud. Recuerdos de la vida literaria (1900-1910), 277).

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was the Bookstore Agency; and to collect the share of Quiroga, who had not paid a single installment. There was no profit left.”.123 At that time, as today, a literature book was usually not a good deal for both the writer and the small editor. At that time, as today, authors and publishers feel exploited, and probably are. Horacio had achieved prestige, but it was still little.

Jungle for children While preparing the publication of Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte, a new project came up for Horacio: a school book, with the jungle short stories, to be adopted by the Uruguayan educational system. There would be well over five hundred copies, he thought, and he, as the author, would be mandatorily and regularly paid. The didactic experience of reading through one of his books. Certainly a product to be spread among many. Horacio envisioned that his children's stories could pull him out of the crisis in different ways. He excitedly told his friend from Salto, José María Delgado, about the project: “I am also very interested that the other friend Mezzera likes the book. I have under his auspices a reading book business - the stories for boys, which I think I have told you about - that I would not wish to let cool at all.”124 As Rodolfo Mezzera was the Minister of Justice and Public Instruction in Uruguay at the time, what Horacio really hoped for was to be able to count on Delgado's influence to transform the short stories into a book series for school reading, to be adopted by Uruguayan schools. The idea seemed perfect, but the plan failed tremendously, as told by Delgado himself years later: Long story short, when his proposal was passed to the school inspectors, these produced it in a lapidary mode: this verb tense was badly placed, this clause made no sense, that repetition of words denoted poverty and bad taste, as a turn it was a veritable slap in the face applied to syntax. To put

123 “para pagar a la imprenta; darle el treinta y cinco por ciento al administrador ¡hoy no se conforman sino con el cincuenta! -, que era la Agencia de Librería; y cobrar la acción de Quiroga, que no había pagado ni una cuota. No quedaba ganancia alguna” (Gálvez, Amigos y maestros de mi juventud. Recuerdos de la vida literaria (1900-1910), 277). 124 “Me interesa mucho también que el otro amigo Mezzera guste del libro. Tengo bajo sus auspicios un negocio de libro de lectura – los cuentos para chicos, de que creo te he hablado – que no desearía dejar enfriar para nada.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 332).

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The destructive opinion that placed the label of inappropriate on Horacio's book, banishing it from the school canon, was not enough to shake him. What was then criticized would certainly one day be valued, even if it took a century: a more autonomous reflection by children and the overcoming of moralizing children's fables. But there was no way to argue with the Uruguayan school inspectors, and the project was buried in the Oriental Republic of Uruguay. Faced with such a blunt refusal, Horacio had no other choice but to talk to Manuel Gálvez, with his tail between his legs, and publish more books through the cooperative. So he did and, at the end of a year of work, in 1918, the Cooperativa Editorial Limitada Buenos Aires released the volume Cuentos de la selva – para los ninõs on the market. To publish the stories in book form, Horacio decided to create a jungle that was totally South American, and no longer universal. Then, “La jirafa ciega” became “La gama ciega” and “Los cocodrilos y la guerra” gave way to more familiar reptiles: “La guerra de los yacarés”. Even without knowing for sure, Horacio was taking a step of no return: despite the immediate need to go back to producing for magazines, with the type of narrative he was developing to tell his children, even despite his more or less clear desires for a lucrative commercial project, a school reading book or whatever it was, he was forging a new language. If reactionary educators were more concerned with humanist values to be transmitted to the next generations, the children who read understood that those narratives spoke to them, from a new standpoint. What was a source of horror to local residents on the plateau of San Ignacio sounded like a transformative innovation in contemporary literature. The book was not only republished, but also translated, something

125

“El caso fue que, cuando se pasó su propuesta a informe de los inspectores escolares, éstos lo produjeron de modo lapidario: tal tiempo de verbo estaba mal colocado, esta cláusula quedaba sin sentido, aquella repetición de vocablos denotaba pobreza y mal gusto, cual giro era una verdadera bofetada aplicada a la sintaxis. Poner aquello entre las manos de los que recién se inician el estudio del lenguaje escrito resultaba pernicioso. Esto en cuanto a la forma, porque, además, el libro desvirtuaba el propósito clásico de la fábula infantil: carecía de moraleja” (Delgado and Brignole, Vida y obra de Horacio Quiroga, 251-253).

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unprecedented for Horacio until then. The South American Kipling was being born, as countless journalists would call him. The first of the translations did not take long and came from the United States: Arthur Livingston was responsible for translating the book into English. The South American Jungle Tales was released in New York in 1922 and then re-released in London the following year. In France, the award-winning writer Francis de Miomandre (1880-1959) translated the book, which was published by Les Arts et Les Livres, in Paris, under the title Contes de la forêt vierge (1927). In 1935, Cuentos de la selva was published for the first time in the first country that rejected it, Uruguay, by Claudio García y Cía Editores. In Argentina, in 1931, some short stories were incorporated into the school book Suelo Natal, written in partnership with Samuel Glusberg.126 Cuentos de la selva was, finally, Horacio's first great commercial success. A success he saw coming, pleasantly surprised. Many other editions were released over the years in several countries. The writer could finally be read across national borders, with relative success, and even received some checks for it. In fact, Horacio had managed to invent another life for himself, that of a widowed father and writer of children's short stories. At least in children's literature, the misionero won the game.

I am a civil servant and this is not my greatest discontentment Horacio, the short story writer, the diplomat, had to strip himself of his intellectual condition because, in practice, his role consisted of the tedious work of a civil servant, who needed to fill out forms during his working hours or, as he was a typist, prepare the letters that were requested. However, Horacio did not strip. He was absolutely inept, and very rarely attended the embassy. It was evident that he held his position because he was favored by those in power. His first biographers made a point of defending him, saying he was not a parasite, but a genius: [Horacio Quiroga] knew that he had been placed there only so that he could devote himself to his work without the constraints of a suicidal narrowness 126 In Brazil, although it was reviewed in Revista do Brasil, by Monteiro Lobato, in the early 1920s, it was only translated for the first time in 1989, in a university edition by EDUFSC, with restricted circulation, by Tania Piacentini. In 2007, I was able to translate it into a commercial edition by Iluminuras and, in the following year, the same edition was approved for a national library program, with 21,000 copies being distributed throughout Brazil.

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(...) If only all statesmen had, as Brum in this case, such a thorough concept of the obligations that the homelands owe to their sons of genius. He was not just another parasite thrown into the budget, but someone who was going to pay for the little he was given by delivering to his country an unfading glory.127

Despite the argumentative turns of his future biographers, Horacio felt, in fact, that he had no obligation regarding the Motherland and his bureaucratic functions. The favor of the State suited him well. He made little money as a short story writer and he knew it would always be like that, so he understood the position of diplomat as compensation. Had it not been for the favors of so many, he would not have made it this far: first it was Lugones, who got him the position of professor; then the group from Salto, that got him the post of Justice of the Peace in San Ignacio; finally, the Uruguayan president himself, who made him Consular Secretary. As a rural producer, Horacio was a failure. So, that was exactly how he was going to live his life, with the help of his friends in power. He himself was not oblivious to the ridiculousness of his situation. He saw himself as a fish out of water and turned his dysfunctional condition into literature. Before returning to Buenos Aires, in March 1917, he had published the short story “El arte de ser buen empleado público”, in which he exposed, not without humor, a certain feeling of guilt and unease at receiving government money for an unfulfilled function and, at the same time, ironically, denounced the very mechanism he relied on to make a living. The writer, that misfit, did not find a place in society, not even when he set out to do so. He would oscillate between being a circus attraction, as Rubén Darío had once exposed in his short story “El rey burgués” or as Baudelaire had done in the poem “L'albatros”: the poet has giant wings and is the king of the skies, but on earth he is a clumsy being, to be ridiculed by all. His heroes knew this, and he himself was discovering the veracity of social anathema, in the worst way. He continued, therefore, keeping his delicate balance as long as possible and, not without some bitterness, laughing about it.

127“[Horacio

Quiroga] sabía que lo habían colocado allí sólo para que pudiese consagrarse a su obra sin los apremios de una estrechez suicidante (…) Ojalá todos los estadistas tuvieran, como Brum en este caso, un concepto tan cabal de las obligaciones que deben las patrias a sus hijos geniales. No se trataba de un parásito más arrojado al presupuesto, sino de alguien que iba a pagar lo poco que le daban entregando a su país una gloria inmarcesible.” (Delgado and Brignole, Vida y obra de Horacio Quiroga, 255).

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Anyone visiting Horacio's house in San Ignacio around 2004 would find in a Civil Registry Book, displayed in the house, from the time when he was still a Justice of the Peace, with a few lines in ink pen, an attempt to write an excerpt for his future novel, Pasado Amor: “‘When I bought this plateau,’ explained Morán, ‘the piece of mountain that you can see there, everyone laughed, because all there was here were some stones and a beautiful view.’”128 The novel was written and published during his second stay in San Ignacio, in 1925. Horacio carried his life using his government jobs to produce his literary work offhand. Eight years later, the Record Book had disappeared, like many other objects. Horacio's old house was still alive, standing, like the landscape of the jungle, and seemed to be managed by employees as competent as he had been in his day, by shy students from the region, by people who barely raised their voices to show or comment on the collection. Time really is circular.

128

“– Cuando yo compré esta meseta – explicó Morán – el pedazo de monte que se ve allí, todo el mundo se rió, porque aquí no había sino piedras y linda vista.” (Quiroga, Pasado Amor, 80).

9. WOMEN OF LIGHT

The financial restrictions imposed by the work of a writer, the costs of raising growing children, the consular demands to be at his job under penalty of receiving disciplinary punishments: none of this stopped Horacio. Quite the contrary, for since he moved to Buenos Aires, he embarked on a series of new writing projects, more or less literary. He took advantage not only of his prestige, but also of his proximity to the editors. As he was in the city, he was able to renew a postponed passion: going to the movies. It did not take him many sessions to finally realize that it was a waste of time to watch a movie and just go home. He then became one of the forerunners of cinema chronicles in the Southern Cone. On September 13, 1918, a little over a year after returning to the Argentine capital, his column on cinema debuted in the pages of El Hogar – a magazine along the lines of Caras y Caretas. From his position as a prestigious writer, he spoke about the nascent art, the actors, actresses, and his passion for the lit screen in the darkened room. There were still no other critics by which to be inspired, the ground of cinema was as untouched as his plateau in Misiones. So Horacio, the pioneer, experimented – when talking about someone he considered a bad actor, like the American George Walsh (1889-1981), for instance, he gave himself the liberties of a chronicler: Today, the name of Jorge Walsh is well known. Single girls dream of him, and married girls dream of such a man for their sisters’ boyfriends. Exclusively because Jorge Walsh is handsome. There is no other reason, not even that of dramatic suggestion, because the boy is a lousy actor, in the common sense of the word.129

129

“Hoy en día, el nombre de Jorge Walsh es harto conocido. Las muchachas solteras sueñan con él, y las casadas sueñan con un hombre así para novio de sus hermanas. ‘Exclusivamente’ porque Jorge Walsh es buen mozo. No hay otro motivo, ni siquiera el de la sugestión dramática, porque el muchacho es un pésimo actor, en el sentido común de la palabra.” (Quiroga, Arte y lenguaje del cine, 169).

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Those spectral figures, so close to the spectators, allowed the most direct speeches, the most explicit criticisms, and brought out the most intense desires, from both the public and the columnist himself. Still on Walsh, Horacio said that the boy's mistake was to change studios, by fault of an unscrupulous manager. After having acted in three good movies, Walsh had the misfortune, as an actor, of stumbling into life with Fox, whose artistic bad faith today stands in stark contrast to the house's first great era. Fox saw what he had in his hands with Walsh, and since the foolishness of girls is as great as the lack of artistic scruples of an entrepreneur, the Fox house decided to trap the female audience by serving him almost naked, doing gymnastics with a great collapse of muscles, for the particular pleasure of the girls (The Desired Island).130

It was necessary to talk about the backstage, to draw attention to what the public did not see on the screen, explain the role of the industry, of managers, to show that actors and actresses, in films, could act in different ways. The magic of cinema, indeed, but also what was behind the scenes of each production. There was a world unfolding around the cinema, behind and in front of the screens. Horacio wanted to show it. And, as the days progressed, the writer discovered other aspects: what happens to each person in the cinema when the light is projected onto the screen and the enraptured gaze of the audience rests on it? Horacio realizes that what was at stake in cinema since its beginnings was the – erotic – seduction of the audience. The bodies were exposed and it was possible to look at them. Diverse bodies of muscular men and young women, never the same ones, in solitary contemplation, because they were unable to return the gaze. Voyeurism in the darkened room. The suspension of social decency, even if momentary. Horacio remembered Baudelaire's sonnet “À une passante” (1861), in which the fleeting beauty of the girl, who furtively lifted the hem of her black dress, left to become indistinct in the middle of the crowd, without the lyrical subject being able to see her beyond those few seconds. Not in the cinema. Contemplation was detained, enraptured, strongly sensual, and 130

“Walsh tuvo la desgracia, como actor, de tropezar en la vida con Fox, cuya mala fe artística de hoy contrasta rudamente con la primera gran época de la casa. Fox vio lo que tenía en las manos con Walsh, y como la tontería de las chicas es tan grande como la falta de escrúpulos artísticos de un empresario, la casa Fox decidió atrapar al público femenino sirviéndole a aquél casi desnudo, haciendo gimnasia con gran derrumbe de músculos, para particular placer de las niñas (La Isla Deseada)” (Quiroga, Arte y lenguaje del cine, 170-171).

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enduring. The transience of convergence gave way to the ecstasy of seeing oneself among arms, necks, breasts, lips, gazes. Bodies. The idealized woman gained the luminous materiality of the cinematographer’s screen. She became available to be seen, repeatedly, as many times as the viewer was willing to pay for the ticket: Around us, by our side, women of inexpressible charm are alive and well, who one day crossed the street or passed by on the streetcar, leaving in our souls the flash of too brief a bliss (...) Why, then, the deep wave of love for the silent stars in which the masculine soul of the movie theaters drowns and continues to drown? (...) the beautiful girl who takes the streetcar takes with her the time we would have needed to adore her. She was our star of Bethlehem for a single second, and the adoration, already at the door of the soul, was extinguished with her brief flame. But the movie star gives us her enchantment, she hands us without any time limit all that is disturbing in her: eyes, mouth, freshness, rapturous sensibility and passion. She is ours, we can admire her, absorb her for forty-five continuous minutes.131

Screenplay, cinematography, directing… sure, sure. In a while. Because now the beautiful Dorothy Phillips, who is particularly alluring to Horacio, is on the screen. A small woman with a sweet look, exposed arms, small lips, she dominates his dreams with an attitude somewhere between youthful and seductive to such an extent that he is not satisfied with going to the cinema to admire her and feels forced to write columns about her, to create a short story with her, to incorporate her into his chronicler signature: Dorothy Philips’s husband. Born in Baltimore, the same city where Edgar Allan Poe died, she was almost the same age as Ana María… It was the time when Quiroga was so passionate about cinema that, beyond the artistic sphere, he began to prevail also in the sphere of illusions and even in the affective ones. He lived, it can be said, in cinema. ‘I belonged to 131 “Alrededor nuestro, a nuestro lado, viven y laten mujeres de inexpresable encanto, que un día cruzaron la calle o pasaron en tranvía, dejándonos en el alma el relámpago de una demasiado breve dicha. (...) ¿Por qué, pues, la profunda ola de amor por las estrellas mudas en que se ahoga y continúa ahogándose el alma masculina de las salas de cine? (...) la hermosa chica que toma el tranvía se lleva con ella el tiempo que hubiéramos necesitado para adorarla. Fue nuestra estrella de Belén un solo segundo, y la adoración, ya a puerta de alma, se extinguió con su breve llama. Pero la estrella de cine nos entrega sostenidamente su encanto, nos tiende sin tasa de tiempo todo cuanto en ella es turbador: ojos, boca, frescura, sensibilidad arrobada y arranque pasional. Es nuestra, podemos admirarla, absorberla cuarenta y cinco minutos continuos” (Quiroga, Arte y lenguaje del cine, 43-44).

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the group of the penniless - he confesses - who go out night after night from the cinematographer in love with a star.’ Thus he became really attached to Miss Phillips with that fantastic, human and original love that he describes in his story. Not for being imaginary - and perhaps for that very reason such a love ceased to seize him with sufficient vehemence to completely fulfill his need to love and dream. One day Iglesias, to whom the confidences of that alienation naturally made him smile, sent him a photograph of Miss Phillips, with a cordial dedication signed by her; everything, it is clear, postage stamps, handwriting and address, more or less crudely forged. Quiroga had not the slightest doubt as to its authenticity, when even the simplest of candid humans would at once have sniffed at the superciliousness.132

Horacio's spectral love made him write a short story about a young South American man who traveled to Hollywood to meet his beloved star. The larger story, however, was the one starring him, of which he was certainly not the most suitable narrator. The person who told it best was the one who was with his father in several film sessions, his son Darío: At the end of the First World War, or perhaps a little later, Horacio Quiroga was living in Palermo, a few blocks away from his sister María, who accompanied him in this second and definitive contact with the screen. Maria had stayed in the city, followed cinema closely, and was in a position to point out to her brother, who arrived from the jungle, the main directors, the best actors and the most important films. Five were the Palermo theaters where he began to go: Palais Bleu, Palais Blanc, Odeon Palace, ABC and Cine de las Familias. All of them were located on Santa Fe Street from Salguero Street to Callao. Of the five, two have disappeared, with only those that were called ‘palaces’ having

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“Era en los tiempos en que Quiroga se apasionó por el cine con tal fuerza que, sobrepasando la esfera artística, entró a imperar también en la de las ilusiones y aún en las afectivas. Vivía, puede decirse, en cine. ‘Pertenecía al grupo de los pobres diablos – confiesa – que salen noche a noche del cinematógrafo enamorados de una estrella.’ Así se encariñó realmente de Miss Phillips con ese amor tan fantástico, humano y original que nos describe en su relato. No por ser imaginario – y acaso por eso mismo – tal querer dejó de embargarlo con una vehemencia suficiente para llenar del todo sus necesidades de amar y de soñar. Un día Iglesias, a quien las confidencias de aquella enajenación hacían, naturalmente, sonreír, le envió una fotografía de miss Phillips, con una cordial dedicatoria firmada por ella; todo, es claro, sellos de correo, letra y dirección, más o menos toscamente fraguado. Quiroga no tuvo la menor duda sobre su autenticidad, cuando hasta el más simple de los cándidos humanos hubiera husmeado de inmediato la superchería.” (Delgado and Brignole, Vida y obra de Horacio Quiroga, 271).

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Chapter 9 survived. I used to go to those theaters too, and in their silver curtains I met Perla White, Ruth Roland and all the heroines of the episodic movies. To be sure, movies were more often called ‘films’ then than now, and theaters ‘biographers’. But the true cinematographer cannot wait for the screening at the corner movie theater of the film that at that moment is being shown elsewhere. Quiroga abandons the neighborhood theaters and goes to the premiere ones. Between 1922 and 1926 the main ones were the Empire, now disappeared, which was on Corrientes between Esmeralda and Maipú. The Esmeralda and later the Gran Splendid also premiered. The latter cinema was, in fact, the one he went to the most. At that time I used to accompany my father when he went there in the afternoon. He usually went at night. I was a kid then, between ten and twelve years old, but I already had very strong cinematographic ideas as far as actresses were concerned. In this respect, and in terms of taste for one or the other, we always differed. When he, for example, showed his enthusiasm for Dorothy Phillips and trumpeted it in the story called, precisely, ‘Miss Dorothy Phillips, My Wife,’ I tried to convince him that Ekatherine McDonald was much more beautiful. I didn't succeed ... but I still believe I was right. After Dorothy Phillips he was moved by Aileen Pringle. This preference was even more inexplicable to me. I found her too much of a woman and too heavy. I put before her, unsuccessfully, May MacAvoy. And also, as in the previous case, I still believe that reason was on my side. In the late silent film days, from when De Forrest was poised to revolutionize the industry, Laura La Plante constituted the Chiroguian ideal of cinematic beauty. We didn't agree here either because, although I found her attractive, I preferred Joan Crawford (...). The last actress of whom I remember hearing him speak with enthusiasm was Norma Shaerer, at the beginning of a career that has lasted until today. In the meantime, more faithful than my father, I was still in love with her…133

133

“Al acabar la primera guerra mundial, o quizá um poco más adelante, Horacio Quiroga vive en Palermo, a pocas cuadras de su hermana María, que lo acompaña en este segundo y definitivo contacto con la pantalla. María había permanecido en la ciudad, seguido de cerca el cine, y estaba en condiciones de señalar a su hermano que llegaba de la selva, los principales directores, los mejores actores y los más importantes films. Cinco son las salas palermitanas donde comienza a acudir: Palais Bleu, Palais Blanc, Odeon Palace, ABC y Cine de las Familias. Todos quedaban en la calle Santa Fe desde la calle Salguero hasta Callao. De los cinco, dos han desaparecido, subsistiendo solamente las que llevaban denominaciones ‘palacios’. A esos cines iba también yo, y en sus telones plateados trabé relación con Perla White, Ruth Roland y todas las heroínas de las películas en episodios.

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It was the first time that the son spoke publicly about his relationship with his father. It was at a conference in Montevideo, at the Universidad de la República, on January 13, 1949, when he gave a commencement speech. Curtain.

Por cierto que entonces se llamaban con más frecuencia que ahora ‘cintas’ a las películas y a los cines ‘biógrafos’. Pero el verdadero cineísta no puede esperar a que proyecten en el cinematógrafo de la esquina la película que en ese momento se está exhibiendo en otra parte. Quiroga abandona las salas de barrio y acude a las de estreno. Entre 1922 y 1926 las principales eran el Empire, ya desaparecido, que estaba en Corrientes entre Esmeralda y Maipú. Asimismo estrenaban el Esmeralda y más tarde el Gran Splendid. A este último cine fue, en verdad, al que más concurrió. En esta época solía acompañar a mi padre cuando iba de tarde. Generalmente lo hacía de noche. Yo era chico entonces, con una edad que oscilaba entre lo diez y los doce años, pero ya tenía ideas cinematográficas muy firmes en lo que a actrices atañía. A este respecto, y en cuanto al gusto por una u otra, siempre diferíamos. Cuando él, verbigracia, demostraba su entusiasmo por Dorothy Phillips y lo pregonaba en el cuento que se llama, precisamente, “Miss Dorothy Phillips, mi esposa”, yo trataba de convencerlo de que Ekatherine McDonald era mucho más hermosa. No lo conseguí… pero sigo creyendo que yo tenía razón. Después de Dorothy Phillips lo conmovió Aileen Pringle. Más inexplicable todavía me parecía esta preferencia. La encontraba demasiado mujerona y pesada. Yo le anteponía, sin éxito, May MacAvoy. Y también, como en el caso anterior, sigo creyendo que la razón estaba de mi parte. En los últimos tiempos de cine mudo, de cuando De Forrest se aprestaba a revolucionar la industria, Laura La Plante constituyó el ideal quiroguiano de belleza cinematográfica. Tampoco coincidimos aquí porque, aunque la encontraba atrayente, prefería a Joan Crawford. (…) “La última actriz de quien recuerdo haberlo oído hablar con entusiasmo fue Norma Shaerer, en los comienzos de una carrera hasta hoy prolongada. Mientras tanto, más fiel que mi padre, seguía enamorado de la misma…” (Cires, Darío Quiroga, “Aspectos poco conocidos de la vida de Horacio Quiroga”, conference at Universidad de la República, Montevideo, January 13, 1939, personal collection).

10. ANACONDA, THIS WOMAN

After the world of cabarets in Paris, of maids in Buenos Aires, of dreams of spectral women in the cinema, of the bourgeois married life, and the solitary life in the jungle, Horacio, back in Buenos Aires, began to see women with different eyes. He began to deal with girls he had never had the chance to meet before: artists, writers, poets, and intellectuals who treated him as an equal. With them, there was not the puritanism of the young students, submitted to the strict rules of the patriarchal family, and marriage, many times, was not even presented as an option. With them, he could laugh, he did not need to impress or maintain a position of intellectual superiority. They were girls in their early twenties who were still children when Horacio left Buenos Aires. A new generation, that seemed rather odd to the one that the bearded man had grown up with. That is how he met the poet and painter from Rosario, Emilia Bertolé; her younger sister came with her, Cora, also a painter. Presented by the then editor Manuel Gálvez, the Swiss-born poet Alfonsina Storni arrived. An actress born in Minsk, Belarus, Berta Singermann, also approached the group. In addition, the young couple of painters Ana Weiss and Alberto Rossi, who also joined the troupe. Horacio, with his prestige, had achieved the feat of having around him both these young people and his friends from Salto and Buenos Aires, veterans well established in life at the time. Among them was the painter and illustrator Centurión, who was already used to being on the pages of local magazines. Also Enrique – or El gato – Iglesias, doctor and prankster, among others. Being good-humored and willing, they gathered to eat, drink, write verses on napkins in cafes and restaurants, to play, and read poetry. Since the cenacles of Salto, Horacio's artistic and intellectual world had been exclusively masculine. So it was no coincidence that the names of the groups were equally virile: Consistorio del Gay Saber, The Musketeers. In this new stage, a suggestive female name emerged: Anaconda – the kilometric serpent of a 1918 short story, “The empire of the vipers”, which appealed to adults and children alike and ended up naming that enthusiastic group of artists. The large snake devoured the past of the misogynistic

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cenacles, the Misiones sadness, and brought forth a joy that infected anyone who saw them. Furthermore, it was coiled, lurking, ready to pounce when necessary. In the short story, Anaconda was the leader of a multitudinous group of snakes and serpents which, thanks to the author's ophidian knowledge, were described in their distinct behavior and abilities. The Anaconda snakes were always ready, critical of social relations and humanity in general. Pantagruelian in their feasts, Horacio's anacondas were willing to literally or metaphorically devour everything that crossed their path. They became the vanguard of vanguards, although they were not recognized as such. They were too old for that, some said. The snake's trail, however, continued throughout the city. It was an emblem that soon became attached to Horacio, that man who had lived nearly a decade in the jungle and who had discovered and experienced things that the others, growing up under sheltered and warm roofs, could not know or assume. It was also going to be the brand of a network of bookstores in Buenos Aires, ran by his friend Leonardo Glusberg, who had always been responsible for spreading the narrative and ophidic legacy of the narrator. The year was 1920 and Horacio speaks excitedly about his troupe when he asked friends to shelter them on a tour through the capital of his country of birth: At that time, and coinciding with my trip, the Anaconda group (something you don’t know about, and which has existed for a year and a half), will go for a four-day trip (I will stay for fifteen days) to that one, and we count on you and even Buero and Brum to entertain us. Anaconda is exclusively formed by: Alfonsina, Centurión, Rossi, Ana Weiss de Rossi, Emilia Bertolé, Mora, Petrone, Amparo de Hicken, Ricardo Hicken, Berta Singermann, Enrique Iglesias and me. All people of art.134

As told by his biographers from Salto, The Anacondaires came to constitute an institution presided over, more or less, by the same spirit of the Gay Saber. No purpose of battle, no preconceived plan, not even that of maintaining our literary vocation; 134

“Para ese momento, y coincidiendo con mi viaje, el grupo Anaconda (cosa que ignoras, y que tiene un año y medio de existencia), se trasladará a pasear por cuatro días (yo me quedaré quince) a esa, y contamos con ustedes y aun con Buero y Brum para que nos agasajen. Forman en exclusivo Anaconda: Alfonsina, Centurión, Rossi, Ana Weiss de Rossi, Emilia Bertolé, Mora, Petrone, Amparo de Hicken, Ricardo Hicken, Berta Singermann, Enrique Iglesias y yo. Toda gente de arte.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 354-355).

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Chapter 10 without, however, having failed to ignite any beautiful initiatives there. It was made up of elements alien to any aesthetic activity, although artists predominated. They met to chat, and, sometimes, to satisfy Pantagruelic hobbies (...) Apart from close friends, many outstanding elements of the Argentine artistic environment, regardless of sex, age or school, went to Vicente López.135

Anaconda would continue, over the years, to leave its mark, changing its meeting places: first a café, then Horacio's new house on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, or the Lange family mansion, or the woods of Palermo. “Well outside the work of the avant-garde - in the serious version of Boedo or the satirical version of the martinfierristas - and ignored by it, the cofrades of Anaconda meet without productive scruples, do not publish manifestos or hold polemics, although many are linked to the magazine Nosotros.”136 From this artistic-affective amalgam, however, strong links will emerge, such as the germ of the creation of the Sociedad Argentina de Escritores (SADE), an entity that would embody some Anacondian ideals: a union for the strengthening of those who try to live off writing. The Sociedad would defend the rights of writers, such as a new copyright law, the extension of the rights of descendants for a period greater than the ten years then in force, among others. Different from when it was founded, like the snake congresses in 1928, SADE would have a serious Leopoldo Lugones as its first president and Horacio Quiroga as its vice president. The rest of the board of directors and founding partners would be the people of Anaconda, plus the writers gathered around the Martín Fierro magazine and leftist magazines such as Claridad and Los Pensadores.

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“Los anacóndicos vinieron a constituir una institución presidida, más o menos por el mismo espíritu del Gay Saber. Ningún propósito de batalla, ningún plan preconcebido, ni aún mismo el de mantener la vocación literaria; sin que, por eso, hubiesen dejado de brotar allí algunas bellas iniciativas. Lo integraban elementos ajenos a toda actividad estética, aunque los artistas predominaban. Se reunían para charlar, y, a veces, para satisfacer aficiones pantagruélicas. (…) Aparte de los amigos íntimos, muchos elementos destacados del ambiente artístico argentino, sin exclusión de sexos, ni de edades, ni de escuelas, acudían a Vicente López.” (Delgado and Brignole, Vida y obra de Horacio Quiroga, 275). 136 “Bien al margen de los trabajos de la vanguardia –en la versión grave de Boedo o satírica de los martinfierristas– e ignorados por ella, los cofrades de Anaconda se reúnen sin escrúpulos productivos, no publican manifiestos ni mantienen polémicas, aunque muchos están vinculados a la revista Nosotros.” (Emilia Bertolé, Obra pictórica y poética, 36).

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Norah’s eyes Anaconda went on stinging, devouring and leaving marks on the behavior of those who saw it. It was inevitable not to give in to its charms. A red-haired teenager, daughter of the Norwegian man Gunnar Lange and the Irish woman Berta Erfjord, before becoming a writer, was already impressed by the voracity of the Sunday snake. Her family's mansion was the stage for celebration meetings. Norah, years later, would remember those atypical gatherings like this: We had nine rooms and a garden of a thousand meters. In one of the rooms there was a hook hanging from a window. It was the birth scale. When we were born, mother weighed us. Now the house is divided in two. On Saturdays the young people used to come. On Sundays we betrayed them with the old people. Interestingly, Saturdays were devoted to intellectual discussions; on Sundays we had fun.137

Norah Lange was then fifteen years old and beginning to awaken to literature. Having a house full of writers and artists on the weekends was for her the possibility of choosing her favorites and forming her own canon. On Saturdays her shy cousin Jorge Luis Borges came, then twenty-one years old and who, having just arrived from a seven-year stay in Europe, was completely out of place. Georgie met at his uncles' house with some intellectual friends, shy and serious people like himself, to discuss the Ultra movement and the homonymous mural magazine, which they were then creating with a single aim: to establish an avant-garde aesthetic movement in Buenos Aires. The purpose of the visits, that Georgie would hardly admit, was that the boy found the Lange house a more cheerful and airy environment than the repressive home from where he came. In addition, because Norah's four sisters and their friends were there, there was some mood for flirting, under the veil of showing off his literary skills. The truth is that Norah was being courted by her cousin, a silly boy, but the girl was not really interested in him. Her libido was turned on in the presence of another couple, with more spirit, more flesh, more passion:

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“Teníamos nueve piezas y un jardín de mil metros. En uno de los cuartos había un gancho colgado de una ventana. Era la balanza de los nacimientos. Cuando nacíamos madre nos pesaba. Ahora la casa está dividida en dos. Los sábados venía la gente joven. Los domingos los traicionábamos con los viejos. Curiosamente, los sábados estaban dedicados a las discusiones intelectuales; los domingos nos divertíamos.” (Lange, Palabras con Norah Lange, 15).

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Chapter 10 Once Alfonsina Storni and Horacio Quiroga had to pay a forfeit imposed by a game: they had to kiss at the same time the two faces of a pocket watch. Quiroga dropped the watch and kissed Alfonsina on the lips. My mother saw them and was very upset. Our favorite game on Sundays was the Martín Pescador. We had more fun than the boys, with the arched arms and the famous question.138

The erotically charged image of Alfonsina and Horacio remained in Norah's mind for years. Horacio had been a sort of literary master for her in those early years. She had chosen him to be the privileged reader of her first short stories. They had in common a fondness for Ibsen. Between them, however, the relationship was formal, epistolary, and professorial. Norah kept for all her life one of the letters she received from the man she always read with interest in the pages of some magazine or newspaper: Dear Norah: I read and return your story. It seems fine to me, for your age and lack of experience with short stories. Perhaps the short story is the art form that requires more accumulation of one’s own feelings; felt almost in the flesh. Keep working, friend, and everything will come. See you soon and best regards.139

Writing was born out of life itself, Horacio told her, and he knew what he was saying. He made an impression when arriving at her house on a motorcycle, one of the first Harley Davidsons that circulated in the region, with the tremendous noise of the exhaust pipes, which drew the attention of the entire neighborhood. Norah's cousin saw Horacio for the first time and realized how much he was his complete opposite: thin, agile, and energetic, he faced the world with his long beard and the manners of someone who knew he was a wild animal behind the social clothes. An antipathy was born there, one which 138

“Cierta vez Alfonsina Storni y Horacio Quiroga tenían que cumplir una ‘pena’ impuesta por el juego de prendas: besar al mismo tiempo las dos caras de un reloj de bolsillo. Quiroga dejó caer el reloj y besó en los labios a Alfonsina. Mi madre los vio y se disgustó mucho. El juego predilecto de los domingos era el Martín Pescador. Nos divertíamos más que los chicos, con los brazos en arco y la famosa pregunta.” (Lange, Palabras con Norah Lange, 16). 139 “Estimada Norah: Leí y devuelvo cuento. Me parece bien, por su edad y poca experiencia del cuento. Tal vez sea el cuento la forma de arte para la que se requiere más acumulación de sentimientos propios; sentidos casi en carne propia. Siga trabajando, amiga, y todo llegará. Hasta pronto y saludos.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 360).

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would last for decades, despite the common taste for literature and, more specifically, for the literature of Rudyard Kipling. Realizing that he had no chances with Norah, Georgie, with certain indolence, abandoned his interests until, according to his biographer, “sometime in March, he discovered that he had fallen in love with Concepción Guerrero”,140 a friend of the family, daughter of Spaniards, who finally gave him attention. Consequently, Georgie had to content himself with Norah being his fellow writer, and he tried to make her his pupil, training her in his lyrical canons. In this way, he integrated her into his avant-garde group and when, in August 1922, he published the first issue of Proa, his magazine, he made a point of publishing three short poems by his cousin. In the two following issues, Norah continued collaborating through the publication of some poems. Between Horacio's prose and Borges's poetry, the young Norah formed a literary taste that, while being aesthetically plausible, would also acquire irreconcilable contours in the local dispute between the groups being shaped. And if that was not enough, some time later, a third element would be added to her circle of affectionate friends, the smiling and good-natured Oliverio Girondo. Proclaimed by Georgie the ambassador of the avantgarde group in 1924, the one that would seek to unite several Latin American artistic groups, Oliverio was introduced to Norah during an outdoor lunch in the woods of Palermo, at the end of 1926. Norah had arrived at the event hand in hand with Georgie and had been introduced to the poet friend who, between one mouthful and another, told her, in an exotic courtship – “there will be bloodspill between us” –141 with a boldness that Borges, over the last five years, as a friend and confidant, had never been capable of. Norah was enraptured by that big-eyed, longhaired poet who lived in Paris for long stretches: “He was larger than life, passionate. And I fell in love with him from that day on. Too bad he already had in his pockets a ticket to Europe. A month after lunch at the Rural he was leaving for Paris on a trip that lasted until 1932.”142

140

Williamson, Borges, a life, 127. “va a correr sangre entre nosotros” (Miguel, Norah Lange: una biografia, 176). 142 “Era vital, apasionado. Y me enamoré de él desde ese día. Lástima que ya tenía en sus bolsillos un pasaje para Europa. Un mes después del almuerzo en la Rural salía rumbo a París en un viaje que se prolongó hasta 1932.” (Lange, Palabras con Norah Lange, 14). 141

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Borges had to settle for going home alone that late afternoon. And little by little he lost Norah to the poet who, by then, had already returned to Paris, where he had a stable relationship with another woman. Girondo, however, continued corresponding with Norah, much to Borges' dismay. At that moment, Norah was going through a new unfolding: she returned to prose; no longer the short prose of her early years, but long, self-referential pieces. She dedicated herself to writing an epistolary novel, based on the letters she exchanged with Oliverio: Voz de la vida, a kind of autofiction in which she enacts her long-distance love. Mila, the protagonist, spends her days close to a dear friend who slanders her absent lover and insistently proposes marriage. The novel ends with Mila leaving for Paris in search of her beloved. The book was published in 1927, a few weeks before Norah herself traveled to Europe, not in search of Oliverio, but of her sister who, in Oslo, had just given birth to her first child. Orphaned at the age of ten, missing her older sister, surrounded by so many men who courted her – because of her beautiful light eyes and red hair, they say – while the only one who truly interested her was on the other side of the ocean, Norah was losing patience with her social environment and with Borges’s guardianship. She disagrees with many of her friend's rigid opinions, his aesthetic and personal reservations towards people she cherishes, like Horacio. Thus, despite Borges' reservations, she continues to attend the Uruguayan's new home, a large house in Vicente López, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, in some of the Anaconda gatherings. Life could be different, and she was already getting tired of the long walks with Borges, which she only took to satisfy him. She could no longer bear the placid and tedious conversation, which he had been offering her for years. She wanted something else, the movement from across the sea. Borges was deaf to her hints and refusals. Borges lived with an intangible Norah, who barely matched the real one. The young woman then decided to fight in enemy territory, with a frankness that she had not experienced until then: she published a short article in the avant-garde magazine Martín Fierro, to see if Georgie would understand her. In it, she accurately characterized the city that emerged from her friend's poems, with some perverse adjectives. She did not want him to be her master anymore, she did not want to have her name always associated with his. The text was named “Jorge Luis Borges thought of something that does not reach the point of being a poem”, and its argument went like this: One day, Jorge Luis extended his verse to us. Great and calm verse, sometimes painful. Alameda of fresh or deep words, that to be placed in the heart, without any rancor of syllable that stalks another syllable. His verses

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give the sensation of being newly written. They are prestige for every courtyard, every street, every memory, and even for every silence, which speaks his voice (...) But a reproach was felt: He has given us in his books a Buenos Aires that is so calm and Sunday-like!143

Hoping she would be well understood, Norah, fed up with everything, left for Oslo. Her trip was announced by the same Martín Fierro magazine, where her book was advertised to readers, in which a character inspired by Georgie was the annoying antagonist. Norah boarded a cargo ship for her month and a half trip with very little money. On board, there were almost no passengers and she was the only woman. There, she began another novel, which for her meant, at the very least, a cry for freedom. It was another work of autofiction, in which Ingrid, a passenger on a ship of the same type, is also the only woman on board and is courted, with greater or lesser intensity, by the captain of the ship, the sailors, and the rest of the crew. While writing the book, completely alone for the first time in her life, without her mother's care, the interested zeal of her friends, or the harassment coming from the Buenos Aires writers, Norah was experiencing her limits. Being desired, courted, harassed by so many was not new to her, what was new was that she was the only one who could defend herself and, at the same time, she could also, in a clearer way, investigate those looks, those clumsy gestures, and her own status as the center of attention. In the diary-like book, Norah turned those unique days into a novel. It was her exercise in solitude and independence, away from everyone who wanted to protect her, marry her, lead her. In the novel, Ingrid went through all the erotic experiences to which she was subjected, without feeling obliged to give in to any of them, and sometimes lamenting the predictability of those who courted her. She was creating, page by page, her own voice, very different from that of the previous book: there was no lover, there was no antagonist. They were just men, far less than interesting, dull men. In the novel, in addition to the defense of women's erotic freedom, another passage stood out: an aesthetic appreciation of Argentine literature,

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“Jorge Luis Borges pensado en algo que no alcanza a ser poema”, and its argument went like this: “Un día, Jorge Luis nos extendió su verso. Verso grande y tranquilo, doloroso a veces. Alameda de palabras frescas u hondas, que a situándose en el corazón, sin ningún rencor de sílaba que acecha a otra sílaba. Sus versos dan la sensación de ser recién escritos. Son prestigio para cada patio, cada calle, cada recuerdo, y hasta para cada silencio, que dice su voz (…) Pero le alcanzó un reproche: Nos ha dado en sus libros un Buenos Aires tan de sosiego y de domingo!” (Lange, “Jorge Luis Borges pensado en algo que no alcanza a ser poema”).

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put in the mouth of a character, the enigmatic and circumspect Stevenson, the only one among those men who did not court Ingrid; the only man who seemed to cultivate a certain indifference, which captivated her. What came out of Stevenson's mouth was the experience of his own freedom, of someone who had produced and pioneered a repertoire of readings based on his own experience and taste, without the intervention of the opinions of others. Stevenson, the Norwegian character, had spent five years living in Argentina, and exposed to the young woman his literary predilections, nothing like those of Borges and Girondo. He read whatever fell into his hands and stated his literary creed to anyone who would listen: I believe in Ibsen and my bedside book in Brand (...) In Argentina, where I was for 5 years, I planned at the beginning to read the books recommended by the people. I knew of Martínez Zuviría, in one sector; of Roberto Arlt, in another; of Soiza Reilly, further on. Of course, I moved away. Reading Arlt, which is very good, I do not tolerate Zuviría and even less, almost nothing, Soiza Reilly. Later I realized that very few have rejoiced with Horacio Quiroga, with a poem by Banchs, and others who are worth a lot to me.144

The passenger of few words, a bachelor, who only talked about literature with Ingrid and who appreciated writers who valued marginality, amorous disturbance, adventures in the jungle, and realism, referred to Horacio's very unique personal constellation – a discreet tribute to a writer who, for her, is also “worth a lot”. An affirmation of her inner universe, despite the successive attempts at colonization imposed by Jorge Luis Borges. After the long trip that had given her the book, which would remain unpublished for some time, Norah satisfied her desire to discover her Norwegian roots and meet her little nephew. She spent nine months with her sister in Oslo and another three in England, where she also had relatives to meet. Upon returning to Buenos Aires, she felt different. More independent, more impatient, more eager to establish her own life in her native capital.

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“Creo en Ibsen y mi libro de cabecera en Brand. (…) En la Argentina, donde estuve por 5 años, proyecté al comienzo leer los libros recomendados por el pueblo. Supe de Martínez Zuviría, en un sector; de Roberto Arlt, en otro; de Soiza Reilly, más allá. Claro que me aparté. Leyendo a Arlt, que está muy bien, no tolero a Zuviría y menos, casi nada, a Soiza Reilly. Después me di cuenta que muy pocos se han regocijado con Horacio Quiroga, con un poema de Banchs, y de otros que para mí valen mucho.” (Lange, 45 días y 30 marineros, 46).

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She resumed, it is true, her friendship with Georgie, who still desired her in his own boring way. Norah, in her new willful way, was still interested in Oliverio. She then attended the Buenos Aires literary circles with greater ease. She met García Lorca and Pablo Neruda in one fell swoop. She enjoyed life, with less and less strings attached. In 1931, already closer to Oliverio, she decided it was time to publish her manuscript of the maritime novel, but her partner Girondo emphatically discouraged her: “Are you going to publish a thing so lacking in substance?”145 It was hard for him, liberal and sensual in his poetry, to accept that novel that narrated Norah's long journey, alone, towards Europe, literary exposing daring ideas – for those around her – about female sexuality. Given the impasse, Norah acquiesced, but did not give up. Two years later, already separated from Girondo, she decided to send the manuscript to an impartial reader, who could give a more accurate opinion, who was not emotionally involved with her, or sexually interested in her. In short, a mere reader. The chosen one was the Galician writer Amado Villar, who, after reading the manuscript, expressed himself with enthusiasm, enunciating an unlikely trinity that included the Argentine president at the time “I believe in God, Irigoyen and Norah Lange”.146 Verdict given, the book went on to publication. The editor of Tor – one of the biggest Argentine publishers at the time – José Torrendal, was excited about the manuscript and wanted to place it in a special collection, whose ten titles would be released simultaneously. This is how “Colección Cometa” appeared in 1933, featuring the same cover, with a modern illustration of a sky full of clouds in which a huge kite was floating. Norah's book was baptized with a provocative title, which certainly had the merit of horrifying, at once, both Jorge Luis Borges and Oliverio Girondo: 45 dias y 30 marineros. At the launch party, the annoyance seen in the character of the work was replaced by a great celebration, with Norah dressed as a mermaid and a vast cast of her writer friends dressed as sailors. Among the many illustrious sailors were Federico García Lorca, Pablo Neruda, and Oliverio Girondo. The prudish Georgie was not part of the celebration and limited himself to a vaguely complimentary review of the work of his friend, with some 145

“Vas a publicar una cosa tan insustancial?” (Girondo apud Lange, 45 días y 30 marineros, 12). 146 “Creo en Dios, en Irigoyen y en Norah Lange” (Villar apud Lange, 45 días y 30 marineros, 12).

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reservations. Horacio Quiroga was not present either, as he was totally oblivious to that circle. The patina of the years, however, would end up making Norah understand her impetuous book as a minor work. In an interview in mature years, she reassessed it as “a superficial book. It also landed in the scrap drawer. All I have left of it is the memory of a party I was given when it was published. For me, it was entertainment”.147 Norah finally married Oliverio in 1943, and her husband replaced Borges as her strict preceptor and intellectual mentor: “Oliverio me obligaba a trabajar ocho horas diarias y leía con mucha severidad do que había escrito.”148 With that new intervention in her forming taste, Norah ended up neglecting authors that had hitherto been her favorites, as well as many of the genres she had already practiced: short stories and autofiction. In the writer's imagination, now a widow and elderly woman, Horacio remained forgotten, except for that first kiss with Alfonsina. Her masters would already be others for her: “I owe to two people everything of value in my work: to Jorge Luis Borges during the years of my initiation in literature; to Oliverio during the rest of my life. If I had not met them I am sure that my works would be very different from what they are.”149 Over the years, Georgie would receive Norah's literary recognition, but never her affection. First, he had to share the girl's literary attention with others, like Horacio, and then he had to give up courting her because of Oliverio. He settled for praising her, prefacing her, remembering her, and nothing else. Nothing but cultivating a calculated disdain for the work of both, to different degrees: Horacio Quiroga and Oliverio Girondo. In terms of carnal love, Georgie's life was sparse, but in the field of resentments, he was skilled in moving them from intimacy to the public sphere, diminishing anyone who made him upset.

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“un libro superficial. También fue a parar en el cajón de los desechos. Solo me queda de él el recuerdo de una fiesta que me dieron cuando se publicó. Para mí, fue un entrenamiento” (Lange, Palabras con Norah Lange, 18). 148 “Oliverio me obligaba a trabajar ocho horas diarias y leía con mucha severidad lo que había escrito.” (Lange, Palabras con Norah Lange, 21). 149 “debo a dos personas cuanto de valor haya en mi obra: a Jorge Luis Borges los años de mi iniciación en la literatura; a Oliverio durante el resto de mi vida. Si no los hubiera conocido estoy segura de que mis obras serían muy distintas de lo que son.” (Lange, Palabras con Norah Lange, 21).

11. IN SEARCH OF BRAZIL

The diplomat is going to travel. After years as a decadent poet, teacher, aspiring rural producer, farm owner, and short story writer in the capital, Horacio finally donned his most beautiful costume again and, as a member of the Uruguayan embassy, went to Rio de Janeiro to celebrate the centenary of Brazil’s independence in the then capital of the Republic. For a few weeks, he left his children and the anacondian poet Alfonsina Storni, then his girlfriend. He was going, in the Uruguayan delegation, accompanied by his friend Alberto Brignole who, like him, carried out diplomatic functions. Brazil had always been a diffuse presence for Horacio. Black peones overflowed from its edges, arriving in Argentina speaking a border language: it was like this in “Las fieras cómplices”, from 1908, a feuilleton signed by Aquilino Delagoa, as well as in the uncanny short story “Un peón”, published ten years later. Brazilians, when they appeared in Horacio's reports, came with the mark of subalternity and exploitation, being called monkeys, negroes, and morenos by their bosses. They were always poor characters, who could only rely on body strength and cunning to survive while working in the extraction of wood, in yerba mate plantations, and meeting the inhuman demands of the bosses. Brazilians did not differ much from Paraguayans – indigenous or mestizos – who performed similar functions. Paraguayan peones, also exploited, cursed their bosses, either out loud or muttering: “gringo de añámembuí”. Horacio's other Brazil was that of a Lusitanian past, of an empire whose region had been part of the Cisplatina Province at some point. These echoes reached him in the name he chose for himself, Aquilino Delagoa. Brazil, which he had once seen in the distance, in the first months of 1900, when he passed through Cabo Frio on his way to Europe, and caught a glimpse of the Brazilian coast. And the same Brazil that, months later, on his frustrated return home, he contemplated with apparent indifference. Brazil, that huge land, also full of jungles, had always existed as a parallel reality, never too close or inviting for the diplomat he was now trying to be. Above all, Rio de Janeiro, the capital, in frantic activity, ready

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to receive delegations from all over the world, had never been on his horizon. It would finally become tangible and he had to be prepared. Not only with his formal wear, but also with readings. A friend, translator and critic of La Prensa, a connoisseur of Brazilian literature, had become Horacio's consultant on Brazilian affairs. He recommended reading a writer he had translated the previous year, a certain José Monteiro Lobato, and even offered him a copy of Urupês. His name was Benjamín de Garay. The book that fell into his hands had an enchanting power. On the other side of the border and in another language, Horacio found a brother, someone similar to him. He was fascinated by that series of short stories and immediately wrote to the writer from Taubaté to introduce himself and greet him: It is not common in these countries to come across people to congratulate wholeheartedly, as is the case with you. Very happy, then, to be able to do so, your colleague Horacio Quiroga greets you with deep esteem.150

The impact of Urupês in Argentina had been huge. Freed from the shackles of national chronologies, some good readers pointed Lobato as the initiator of an avant-garde revolution in Brazilian literature. The poet Nicolás Olivari said: The initiator of the revolution was Monteiro Lobato. His book Urupês was the cry of Ipiranga of Brazilian literature. With his verbal processes – harsh, caustic, shocking – in violent contradiction with the mellifluous sweetness of old French prose, he created our artistic creed, which deep down, unconsciously, is regionalism. (...) That was it, then: the beginning of the great battle that we, modernists, would fight.151

For Horacio, reading books that came from the other side of the border felt as if the insurmountable rivalries between writers from different groups 150

“No es común en estos países tropezar con personas a quienes felicitar de todo corazón, como es caso con Ud. Muy contento, pues, de poder hacerlo, lo saluda con honda estimación su compañero Horacio Quiroga.” (Quiroga, Nuevos Papeles Íntimos, 33). 151 “O iniciador da revolução foi Monteiro Lobato. Seu livro Urupês foi o grito do Ipiranga da literatura brasileira. Criou com seus processos verbais – híspidos, cáusticos, chocantes – em violenta contradição com a melíflua doçura da velha prosa francesa, o nosso credo artístico, que no fundo, inconscientemente, é o regionalismo. (...) Então, era isso: o início da grande batalha que travaríamos nós, os modernistas”“ (Schwartz and Alcalá, Vanguardas Argentinas: anos 20, 250-251).

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lost their meaning, and the texts regained their condition of ink printed on the page, demanding from readers a relationship without positions given a priori. Even so, in Buenos Aires, during those years, the young poets of the avant-garde, like Borges and his friends, began to give the generation of writing proletarians such as Horacio a derogatory silence or some indirect provocations, as is the case with an advertisement published in the first issue of the second season of Martín Fierro magazine: “If you consider that collaborating in the large newspapers implies talent, do not read MARTIN FIERRO.”152 At the same time, it is necessary to recognize that neither Lobato nor Horacio were willing to step down from the privileged position both believed to have reached in order to meet the boys whose aesthetics were not at all familiar to them. In Brazil, Monteiro Lobato had even berated the young painter Anita Malfatti in his devastating article “Paranóia ou mistificação”, published in 1917 in O Estado de S. Paulo. Horacio, on the other hand, limited himself to silence. He had no interest in intervening as a critic or authority in the cultural field. When asked, of course, he answered, as he did in interviews, but with evasive sentences, as when he said it was too early to mention names. Thus, in 1922 and on the eve of coming to the Brazilian coast for the first time, Horacio was not interested in reading the young Brazilian poets that had caused so much stir that year with the Modern Art Week, between February 11 and 18. What he really wanted was to get acquainted with Os Sertões, by Euclides da Cunha, and it did not matter that he was not going to go to Minas or the Brazilian northeast. Moreover, the idea was to enjoy that new country with his newly arranged wardrobe. His dandy spirit was reawakened, and was different in every way from the wild soul he had been chiseling in San Ignacio. The diplomat put the savage to sleep.

Good children of Kipling Months before, Horacio and Lobato were still exchanging first books, initial flatteries, and sharing their favorite readings. On October 6, 1921, Horacio wrote to his Brazilian friend, expressing his satisfaction for having Brazilians reading a copy of Irremediablemente, a book of poems by Alfonsina Storni, released in 1919, which he had sent to Lobato. In the same 152

“Si Ud. juzga que colaborar en los grandes diarios supone talento, no lea MARTIN FIERRO” (Martín Fierro, February, 1924).

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shipment, he had also forwarded two of his books: his debut as a children's short story writer – Cuentos de la Selva – and the recently released El Salvaje, from 1920. Always restrained in his words, Horacio was full of praise for Alfonsina, happy with the good repercussion reported by Lobato: “I liked that Alfonsina Storni was of your liking. She is one of the best writers we have here. Of course the analogy between you and I is very evident. Particularly when it comes to the shyness in dealing with emotions. Good children of Kipling, in the end.”153 In that same letter, he sent two copies of his book Anaconda to the Brazilian writer. Lobato swiftly turned the literary shipment into work and, instead of writing the usual letter thanking and commenting on the books received, he chose rather to write a review in the newly acquired Revista do Brasil, in his hands since 1918. Lobato's speed was so surprising that, when Horacio wrote him the aforementioned letter, the reviews had already been published. In issue 69, of the previous month, whoever opened Revista do Brasil would find out about some of the books that appeared in Río de la Plata: Cuentos de la Selva and El salvaje, by Horacio Quiroga, were highlighted. Lobato praises Horacio a lot: for him, praising Horacio was praising himself, such was the resonance he also found between their works. Thus Lobato compared Cuentos de la Selva to his A menina do nariz arrebitado. The review, however, was not signed. Lobato repeated a procedure already used by Poe in his time: to publish an anonymous review of his own book. The illustrious writer Horacio Quiroga does not disdain writing for children. (...) When reading his ‘Cuentos de la selva’, one cannot escape the parallel that is imposed with Monteiro Lobato, the author of ‘Narizinho arrebitado’. The conception of children's literature is, in both, despite the distance that separates them in the world and the differences in nationality, education and others, exactly the same. Both understand that only the marvelous can seduce the childish soul, that only things that are familiar to them can live for them and that only those same things can teach them about life, educating feelings and spirit.154 153

“Me gustó que Alfonsina Storni los haya agradado a Uds. Es una de las mejores escritoras que tenemos aquí. Claro que es muy evidente la analogía entre Ud. y yo. Particularmente en el pudor para tratar los sentimientos. Buenos hijos de Kipling, al fin y al cabo.” (Quiroga, Nuevos Papeles Íntimos, 34). 154 “O ilustre escritor que é Horácio Quiroga não desdenha escrever para crianças. (...) Ao ler os seus ‘Cuentos de la selva’, não se pode furtar ao paralelo que se nos impõe com Monteiro Lobato, o autor do ‘Narizinho arrebitado’. A concepção da literatura infantil é, em ambos, através da distância que os separa no mundo e das

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With much more restraint, Irremediablemente (1919), by Alfonsina Storni, was commented on, with the straitlaced editor and reviewer being careful to avoid the spiciest passages in the book, in verses such as those in the poem “Hombre pequeñito” (“tiny man, I loved you half an hour, / do not ask me for more.”). Given Lobato's calculable discomfort with Alfonsina's book – which, he imagined, would be shared by the local readership –, he opted for an infallible strategy: picking one of the more conventional poems and quoting it at length. In his critical appraisal, he limited himself to highlighting the poet’s “estranha eloquência” [odd eloquence], influenced “pelas modernas tendências poéticas” [by modern poetic trends]. The contrast will be more evident for those who today leaf through the magazine and read Lobato's text dedicated to Horacio, dealing with precisely the Anaconda copy he received. The text was published in May 1922. The literary love of the man from Taubaté for the short story writer from Rio de la Plata was loquacious: “This book of short stories belongs to the family of outdoor literature, which has Rudyard Kipling as its highest representative. It is only done by men who have 'lived life', because there are those who dream of it or only know of it in confined areas, visible from the windows of an office.”155 When talking about Horacio, Monteiro Lobato spoke of a literary close relative of his who, unlike him, had not limited himself to the farm, to the rural environment, advancing towards the jungle and bringing from there what others could not. Lobato highlighted the affinities between them, but had a kind of extra admiration, because he saw in Horacio's literature a courage and fearlessness that his own personality lacked. Lobato continued: His text “has the charm of wide landscapes, full of sun, blows of wind, where man is part of the environment, in perfect integration. (...) Demonstrating there, as in previous books, his strong ability to 'psychologize' the lives of animals, Quiroga begins to play with human creatures in the other short stories — and reveals himself to be a complete writer. No element is missing from his

diferenças de nacionalidade, de formação e outras, exatamente a mesma. Um e outro compreendem que só o maravilhoso pode seduzir a alma infantil, que só as coisas que lhe são familiares podem viver para ela e que só essas mesmas coisas lhe podem ensinar a vida, educando sentimentos e espírito” (Lobato, “Cuentos de la selva”). 155 “Este livro de contos pertence à família da literatura ao ar livre, de que é Rudyard Kipling o representante mais graduado. Só a fazem os homens que ‘viveram a vida’, porque há o que a sonham ou só conhecem dela os trechos confinados, perceptíveis das janelas de um gabinete” (Lobato, “Anaconda”).

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It was the best of worlds: there was mutual affinity, admiration. What was missing? Just that Monteiro Lobato offered to translate Horacio in Brazil, and publish it through his Editora do Brasil. Lobato, always quick, had exactly the same idea: to publish “Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte” in Portuguese. Moreover: Horacio’s book would be in a collection of Argentine literature. Once the project was done, Lobato tried to advance the proposal through his friend and translator Benjamín de Garay, whom Lobato had entrusted with dealing with Horacio about the business. Diligent, Lobato told Garay that the translation was already complete, carried out by the Brazilian writer Lila Escobar de Camargo, the young author of Caracteres femininos. When Benjamín looked for Horacio, he was surprised, but not positively. With the experience of previous times when a possibility of gain had turned into nothing, as in the case of the publication of “Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte”, by Manuel Gálvez, Horacio wanted to cut the middle man. He preferred to deal directly with the head of the publishing house. How come the book was already translated without him having been consulted? And why, after all, was it necessary to involve a third party in the business, if they could get along by themselves just fine? The turbid terrain into which Horacio found himself entering forced him to write directly to Lobato and deal with things clearly. If his profession of faith since arriving in Argentina was to treat his craft as a writer with professionalism, there was no reason for it to be different in Brazil. Lobato had a magazine, he had a big publisher. He would not let him down. He would certainly pay him what was fair. He wrote: My dear Monteiro Lobato: - I have just received a letter from my friend Garay in which, announcing that “C. de A. y de M” [Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte] has been translated by Ms. Camargo, he asks me for authorization to publish this translation with your publishing house. As you once spoke to me about this very thing, I would be more than happy to 156

“tem o encanto das paisagens amplas, cheias de sol, batidas de vento, onde o homem faz parte do ambiente, numa integração perfeita. (...) Demonstrada aí, como em livros anteriores, a sua forte capacidade de ‘psicologizar’ a vida dos animais, passa Quiroga nos demais contos a jogar com criaturas humanas — e revela-se um conteur completo. Nenhum elemento falta às suas composições; o equilíbrio é perfeito, a observação, exata, a escolha de elementos, sempre justa, o tema, sempre original” (Lobato, “Anaconda”).

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discuss this matter directly with you, as seems reasonable to me. Garay tells me that this translation has no pecuniary aspirations in this regard. I don't have very high ones either, my friend, although as a professional, and a poor one at that, I am flattered when I get a few pesos. In this editorial matter, I leave it to your discretion as a colleague and editor what I can get from a problematic profit. It is not this detail that will hinder my kind relationship with Brazil, with its publishing house and with the lady who kindly translated the book. I would not want our friend Garay to misunderstand this, and I will write to him to clarify the point. But since you are the possible publisher, and I am the author, I think it is reasonable that you and I should discuss the matter directly. A few lines from you on the subject would flatter me very much.157

Horacio makes it clear how serious the matter is for him by taking the issue of publishing the book as an international diplomatic issue, which has to do with his friendly relationship with Brazil. There is no room for doubt about how much it is essential for him to be paid for the publication, and he even treats with subtle irony the fact that Lila Escobar de Camargo, the translator who does not want to receive a penny for her work, had done the translation on her own initiative. It was evident that it was Lobato who had asked the young woman for the unpaid work and who then, with the translation ready, used her free work to encourage Horacio to also act with generosity and detachment. However, not frontally, but through the mutual friend. The Uruguayan man refused to take the bait. He was a professional writer. Thus, with Lobato's plan having failed, the book was, at first, postponed, and neither of them would, for the time being, bring up the subject again. 157

“Mi estimado Monteiro Lobato: – Acabo de recibir una carta del amigo Garay en que, anunciándome haber sido traducido “C. de A. y de M” [Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte] por la sta Camargo, me pide autorización para publicar dicha traducción en su casa editora de Ud. Como Ud. me habló alguna vez de eso mismo, tendría mucho más placer en tratar este asunto directamente con Ud., como me parece razonable. Me dice Garay que la sta traductora no tiene aspiraciones pecuniarias al respecto. Tampoco las tengo yo muy grandes, amigo, bien que como profesional, y pobre, me sienta halagado cuando consigo unos pesos. En este asunto editorial, dejo a su criterio de colega y editor lo que pueda tocarme a mí de una problemática ganancia. No es este detalle el que va a poner una traba en mi amable relación con el Brasil, con su casa editora y con la señorita que tuvo a bien traducir el libro. No quisiera que el amigo Garay malentendiera esto, y le escribiré aclarándole el punto. Pero siendo Ud. el editor posible, y yo el autor, creo razonable que entre Ud. y yo se trate directamente la cosa. Unas cuantas líneas suyas al respecto, me dejarían muy halagado.” (Quiroga, Nuevos Papeles Íntimos, 35).

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Despite this, in Revista do Brasil the possibility of the book did not die. Two months later, already in issue 73, of January 1922, Lobato published a short story from Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte, translated by Lila Escobar. It was precisely the first story in the book, the nouvelle “Una estación de amor”. The translation occupied thirteen of the hundred pages of the magazine and was preceded by a brief presentation: This is one of the most beautiful short stories by the remarkable Argentine writer H. Quiroga. We owe the translation to the beautiful spirit of Miss Lila Escobar de Camargo.158

Lobato was evaluating how he was going to proceed with the Horacio Quiroga project in Brazil. At that moment, in his bookstore, he already offered, in Spanish, copies of other books by the author – many of which he had already reviewed in Revista. In the following issue, 74, of February 1922, it was possible to see that Cuentos de Amor de Locura y de muerte, El Salvaje, Anaconda, Cuentos de la Selva, and Las Sacrificadas were already available to the customers. The Brazilian edition of Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte, however, seemed to have been postponed.

Oscar Mendes, a Quiroga reader Monteiro Lobato spread books, his own and by others, Brazilian and foreign ones, translated or not, through all of his available distribution channels: the magazine, the publisher, and the bookstore. With enviable precision, those copies reached significant readers. Among Lobato's readers and customers, who owe him part of their education, was, in those years, the young Oscar Mendes (1902-1996) from Recife, in northeastern Brazil. A law student at the faculty of Largo São Francisco, he was one of the readers avid for news who bought copies from the Lobato’s bookstore. His copy of Anaconda was acquired in June 1924, when he was 22 years old, a long time before he became the translating machine that made him famous, having signed more than two hundred translations. Oscar kept Quiroga’s book with him until the end of his life. After Oscar died in 1996, the family sold his library to a second-hand bookstore. During those years, in downtown São Paulo, it was not difficult to find his collection spread across the various bookstores. One would come

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“É um dos mais belos contos do notável escritor argentino H. Quiroga. A tradução devêmo-la ao formoso espírito da senhorita Lila Escobar de Camargo” (Lobato, “Una estación de amor,” 17).

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across, for example, the pocket edition of Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, carefully highlighted by its former owner in red pencil. So, wandering around downtown, at the end of the twentieth century, on a Saturday afternoon, I came across a copy of Anaconda at a second-hand bookstore called O Belo Artístico, at 100 Líbero Badaró Street, for just eight reais (about six dollars back then, it was a steal). The attendant, from the Brazilian Northeast, erudite, did not miss the opportunity to comment on the volumes he sold. Being the fearful young man that I was at the time, I feared that he would realize the inestimable value of that first edition and suddenly decide to raise the price. At the counter, with my ten reais bill in hand, I watched as he looked me in the eyes and then looked at the book, finally declaring his verdict: “Anaconda... A snake!”. Already relieved, I became the heir to Oscar Mendes’s copy of Anaconda. This book, which I now have before my eyes, proves to have been well preserved in its secular trajectory, having traveled through different cities and countries until now, but it also bears Oscar’s reading marks. According to his own annotation system, he marked “-” for the vast majority of short stories and a distinct “x” for only three texts: “En la noche”, “La lengua”, and “Dieta de amor”. The mystery and idiosyncrasies of marginalia. “La lengua” is a fantastic short story in the classic mold: a paranoid man tells the tale from Hospício de las Mercedes, in Buenos Aires, and reports his adventures with the bigmouths and the tongues that haunt him. Horacio himself, from the second edition on, decided to suppress the story. “En la noche” narrates the crossing of a merchant couple through a mighty Paraná river, which almost costs them their lives; in this short story, the narrator ends up making an apology for the effort to the detriment of results. Finally, “Dieta de amor” is a humorous and urban short story about a young man who, in order to be accepted by the family of his love interest, is put on a diet composed exclusively of tea by his father-in-law, a shrewd nutritionist, who knows that it will result in the boy’s complete inaction. These are the three stories that disappointed him somehow. Did Oscar, years later, when translating Edgar Allan Poe's short stories from French, remember his Uruguayan reader, the author of Anaconda? Maybe, although it is not the most Poesque book by Horacio. Nor would that exclusive volume by Oscar be translated nationally until well into the twentieth century, when, in 1987, the carioca Angela Melim published, at the invitation of Editora Rocco, the first Portuguese version of the work, the one that the new avid readers in the country could have in their hands. She was an English translator and was invited to do the job.

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In the now distant 1920s, a brave Monteiro Lobato, however, kept alive the idea that a book by Horacio would come to light during those months. He fed the readers' faith with an advertisement printed in issue 80, October 1922, announcing the coming launch of Biblioteca Sul-Americana: This collection will consist of careful editions of the best works that appeared in South America and will practically start the company's approach program. It will begin with “Facundo”, by Sarmiento, with works by Galvez, Quiroga, Lynch, Salaverri, Barrios, and all the great representatives of Spanish-American literature.159

The collection really began the following year, with the publication of the classic 19th-century essay Facundo, by Argentinean Domingos Faustino Sarmiento; in October 1924, the translation of Nacha Régules, by Manuel Gálvez, was published.160 However, the following year, the worst happened: Monteiro Lobato's publisher went bankrupt and the plans were put on hold. Horacio Quiroga, in book form, remained unpublished in Brazil and Miss Lila Escobar de Camargo's manuscript remained wandering among folders for years on end, out of the reach of eyes that knew its value and could rescue it.

Other Brazilian magazines Horacio's book, translated by Lila, however, was in front of her for a while and under her control, without the prospect that Lobato would release it. It was a shame to do a job and, in addition to not being paid for it, not even seeing it published. Receiving the nickname of “the fair-spirited one” from the editor of the magazine did not improve the situation for her, who had already received, in 1921, a reception full of reservations for her debut book, Caracteres femininos. She then sent more short stories by Horacio to other magazines. On February 24, 1922, her translation of the short story “La insolación” appeared on the pages of issue 18 of the Rio de Janeiro magazine Ilustração Brasileira. Horacio arrived in Rio de Janeiro in print seven months before 159

“Esta coleção se comporá de cuidadosas edições das melhores obras aparecidas na Sul-America e iniciará praticamente o programa de aproximação que tem a empresa. Iniciar-se-á com o Facundo, do Sarmiento, dará obras de Galvez, de Quiroga, de Lynch, de Salaverri, de Barrios e de todos os grandes representativos da literatura hispano-americana” (Lobato, “Eduardo Barrios – EL HERMANO ASNO”, 145). 160 Ribeiro 2008, 83.

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his visit in person with the Uruguayan delegation. Thus, people from Rio learned about the story of the dog Old, who had frequent encounters with Death, who was visiting the property to take the alcoholic owner away. The images, as the title of the magazine indicates, were the strength of the publication, which was concerned with displaying features of cities in different regions of Brazil, natural accidents, photos of works for the celebrations of the centenary of Independence, pavilion projects, all with high-quality, large-format photographs. It was necessary to seduce foreigners with the beauties of Brazilian lands. The story, printed on two pages, was also accompanied by two large photographs, one of Lila and the other of Horacio, both of the same size and with the same emphasis, giving the translator an unusual visibility not only in those times, but in any other time or country. Lila and Horacio were accompanied by a short story by a young man from Minas Gerais, Carlos Drummond, a chronicle about “Oscar Wilde's vice” and a report on Madame Blavatsky, the creator of Theosophy. The magazine was the official organ of the Executive Committee of the Centenary of Independence [Comissão Executiva do Centenário da Independência] and also reproduced the autographs of foreign authorities, who celebrated the festivities. Among them, Baltasar Brum, Uruguayan president, Schulthess, president of the Swiss Confederation, and Albert I, king of Belgium. Horacio's short stories continued to appear in the Brazilian press. Four years later, in 1926, two more translations would appear. Both, however, do not name the translator: in Jornal das Moças, the short story “La mancha hiptálmica” was printed in April. As the text is part of Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte, it is assumed that it is the work of tireless Lila. In September, the Rio de Janeiro newspaper Correio da Manhã published the children’s short story “Las medias de los flamencos”. In the Brazilian version, the explanatory fable of the origin of the red-black legs of the flamingos was cruelly distorted in the host city of the Flamengo football team: instead of flamingos, the protagonists of the short story will be… storks. It was named “As meias das cegonhas”.

The mute and the loquacious Thus, when Horacio docked in Rio on Monday, August 28, 1922, aboard the Principessa Mafalda, he was not a completely unknown author. He was far from being famous, but Lila's translations and Lobato's publicity had already opened up the environment for an initial contact.

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The delegation had left Buenos Aires for Rio just over three weeks earlier, on August 5. When they arrived, the city was already celebrating, receiving several delegations, but still hurrying to, at the last minute, finish what could not yet be concluded in the capital of the Republic: Hotel Glória, the city's first five-star hotel, had been opened less than two weeks ago, on August 15. It was there where the Uruguayan delegation, and many others, stayed at the invitation of the Brazilian government. Rio was the capital of the world: In those days, as in Paris in 1900, the Universal Exhibition was taking place. Horacio celebrated the coincidence, having for himself something of the predicted laurels he had dreamed of more than two decades before: he was pampered by the press, gave interviews and was praised as a great writer. His friend Brignole, who accompanied him on the trip, would praise the diplomatic portent that his wild friend had become: (...) when they arrived in Rio - which had become the center of a hundred international delegations - they had to take lessons to adjust to protocol, none of them paid much attention to the diplomatic instructor from Itamaraty. He was the embassy's first pupil in matters of solemn gestures and palace evolutions, so much so that he became the prompter who was reminding his colleagues 'sotto voce' what should be done during solemn occasions.161

Horacio left other marks in the national press in those late 1920s. With different degrees of detail and pomp, his visit to the country did not go unnoticed by local journalists. Through the press of the time, it is possible to follow the steps of his Brazilian journey. The Uruguayan delegation, like all the others, was closely followed by journalists. The carioca newspapers were reporting on the Uruguayan delegation as a whole and Horacio Quiroga was generally cited as a secretary. A few of them, however, paid attention to the inescapable fact that he was a recognized writer in Uruguay and Argentina. O Jornal published, even before Horacio's arrival, in the August 24 edition, a generous and humorous profile of the writer. In a short summary of Horacio's life, the article alluded to his time in Chaco as a rural producer: 161

“(...) cuando llegados a Río – convertido en centro de cien delegaciones internacionales – tuvieron que tomar lecciones para ajustarse al protocolo, ninguno prestó mayor atención al instructor diplomático de Itamaraty. Fue el primer alumno de la embajada en materia de gestos solemnes y evoluciones palaciegas, tanto que se convirtió en el apuntador que iba recordando ‘sotto voce’ a sus compañeros lo que debía de hacerse en los momentos solemnes.” (Delgado and Brignole, Vida y obra de Horacio Quiroga, 257).

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He was not successful in this first industrial trial and returned to Buenos Aires, narrating then in magnificent short stories, of fine literary work, the impressions that his spirit had received in the lands of northern Argentina.162

Soon after it follows with a jibe from his Argentine contemporaries: “This Quiroga – it was said in Misiones – loses his money in the crops and recovers it in Buenos Aires, telling how he went to ruin.”163 Correio da Manhã had also interviewed him upon his arrival, without managing to extract any memorable statement from him. Shy and sparse of words, although he enjoyed the trip, Horacio did not seem comfortable enough to risk speaking the foreign language. After a few days, Horacio, between interviews, celebrations, and diplomatic commitments, wrote to his friend Lobato, informing that he would be heading to São Paulo on September 19, and that he hoped to be able to have “unos cuantos días extra-diplomáticos”164 with him. Two days later, in another message written on a sheet of paper with the hotel's letterhead, he let his expectations for the meeting show: “My dear Lobato: You will be seen around here, or should we go and wait in San Pablo for that? You will imagine how anxious I am to see your face.”165 Overcoming the more than four hundred kilometers that separate the two cities was not an easy task a century ago, and Horacio would need to do it because Lobato was involved in his editorial work. The Uruguayan writer's shyness among strangers made his stay somewhat painful. During his time alone, he let his thoughts get lost in other latitudes. In the luxury of Hotel Glória, his thoughts migrated from the possible editor and friend in São Paulo to Buenos Aires. There, among the Anaconda friendships, he felt at ease, without the stiffness of protocol, the endless events and celebrations in a language in which, although he understood it, he could not speak without faltering and stuttering. 162 “Não logrou êxito nesse primeiro ensaio industrial e tornou a Buenos Aires, narrando então em contos magníficos, de fino lavor literário, as impressões que seu espírito recebera nas terras do norte argentino” (O Jornal, O secretário da embaixada uruguaya no centenário, 3). 163 “Este Quiroga – dizia-se em Misiones – perde o dinheiro na cultura dos campos e recupera-o em Buenos Aires, contando como se arruinou” (O Jornal, O secretário da embaixada uruguaya no centenário, 3). 164 “unos cuantos días extra-diplomáticos” (Quiroga, Nuevos Papeles Íntimos, 39). 165 “Mi estimado Lobato: Se le verá por aqui, o deberemos esperar ir a San Pablo para ello? Supondrás las ganas que tengo de verle la cara.” (Quiroga, Nuevos Papeles Íntimos, 38).

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The face of one of the anacondas was sketched in his memory, the one that seemed to him the prettiest and most attractive: Emilia Bertolé, painter and poet from Santa Fe. In Anaconda's atmosphere of celebration and camaraderie, it was common for them to go to the movies together, with Emilia's younger sister, Cora, and often in the company of Alfonsina, Horacio's partner. The collective camaraderie, the lunches and dinners, the parties and get-togethers, always took place amidst a lot of laughter, with the occasional embarrassment caused by Horacio when he drank too much alcohol, but, in general, with a lot of cordiality. When he wanted to go to the cinema, to have dinner, or to eat empanadas, the Uruguayan would write to both sisters at the same time: Dear friends: This morning my destination was the walkway and the place is impossible with humidity. Because it is necessary on the other hand to buy the empanadas that have already been purchased, we propose to you that we eat them at home tonight. (...) Meanwhile, since it is known that only young people set foot in my home (!) I would ask that we humbly sacrifice your mother this time and in honor of the aforementioned regime.166

In the Nababesque solitude of the Hotel Glória, Argentine empanadas took on a different flavor, and Horacio thought of eating them in another company. Not at the group event, but in the intimacy of the one whose image was being formed in his memory. He sat down to write and the words that emerged ventured beyond the limits of friendly affection and seemed to want to settle in the most delicate zone of the possibilities of erotic intimacy: Dear blonde comrade: Very tired of this diplomatic hassle which, as you know, is not my forte, I have very fond memories of you, and all of ours, and I think of the anacondian gatherings that are to come. On the 19th I move on to Sao Pablo, and I will be in Buenos Aires towards the 5th of October. I will speak enthusiastically about you. If you

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“Amigas: “He ido esta mañana al destino del paseo y aquello está imposible de humedad. Como es indispensable por otro lado comer las empanadas ya adquiridas les proponemos ir esta noche a comerlas a casa. (...) Entre tanto, como es sabido que en mi casa no pisa más que gente joven (¡!) les pediría sacrificáramos humildemente a su mamá por esta vez y en honor al régimen mencionado.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 363-364).

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are interested in this fact, you are the only woman I have written to. Feel proud, therefore, of your comrade’s old friendship.167

Involved as he was with Alfonsina, Horacio's insinuations announced complications for the relations in the group for the next few days. With the letter in the sea and the image of Emilia in his thoughts, Horacio arrived in São Paulo, no longer so much as a diplomat, but in a condition that made him a little more comfortable – as a writer. Contrary to his expectations, the delegation would arrive two days earlier in São Paulo. They all stayed downtown, in the now extinct Hotel Terminus. Also of great luxury, the hotel had opened just over a month earlier, on September 1st, due to the celebrations of the centennial. Imposing, it was located at 576 Brigadeiro Tobias Street, on the corner with Washington Luis Avenue, in the region that was beginning to be remodeled with the recent inauguration of the Municipal Theater, where, months before, the Modern Art Week had taken place. In 1923, Hotel Esplanada was also inaugurated in the region, and it was habitually attended by a still wealthy Oswald de Andrade, the poet who would dedicate the famous verses of his “Balada do Esplanada” to it. After the official celebrations in Rio were over, the delegation could finally get rid of the protocols. While there were still commitments, most were literary events. It was then possible to make incursions to other places and institutions, where there were no heads of state. They visited a farm in Itapetininga, the Butantan Institute and, on Sunday night, September 25, 1922, Horacio was invited to a dinner in his honor. In addition to Monteiro Lobato, whom he finally met for the first time, there was the translator Benjamín de Garay and a very heterogeneous group of Brazilian writers, ranging from modernists of the Week of 22, such as Menotti del Picchia, Guilherme de Almeida, and Oswald de Andrade, to integralist right-wing writers, such as Plínio Salgado; there were also others who are less remembered today, such as Cyro Costa, René Thielier, and Agenor Barbosa. 167

“Compañera rubia: Muy cansado ya de este traqueteo diplomático que, como usted sabe, no es mi fuerte, me acuerdo de usted con gran placer, y de todos los nuestros, y de las próximas anacondadas. El 19 sigo para San Pablo, y estaré En Buenos Aires hacia el 5 de octubre. Charlaré de muy buena gana con usted. Por si le interesa el dato, es usted la única mujer a quien he escrito. Enorgullézcase pues de la vieja amistad de su compañero.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 363).

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On the occasion, Lobato gave a long and witty speech in homage to Horacio, in which he highlighted his talent as a “snakephile” and the fact that he was “mute”, that is, that he imposed the right to remain in silence as a condition for participating in the banquet: Just one more word. Quiroga does not speak, he only writes. And the condition he imposed on the threat of being eaten was that of being mute as a fish, or rather, mute as an anaconda – like a mute anaconda, as the ones he romances and the ones he lives with in Buenos Aires speak volumes. Gentlemen! Drink this glass of snake antivenom to the health of the great Uruguayan short story writer.168

Lobato's text was reproduced in full, two days later, by Correio Paulistano. The journalist, alien to Argentine and Uruguayan commonplaces regarding Horacio's shyness and stutter, and perhaps wanting to make a good impression both on his readers and on the Uruguayan man himself, said in his article that, after Lobato's intervention and the applause, the Uruguayan would have replied “in a wonderful stretch of smooth and brilliant prose”169, asking permission to join another embassy besides the Uruguayan, the embassy of thought, through which the two peoples could approach each other. Alberto Brignole, the friend who was part of the entourage, and who had certainly not read the newspaper, had a version that was quite different from the one given by the journalist from Correio Paulistano, which he reported not without a certain perverse pleasure: A single bitter trance had to pass and it was literature’s fault. What happened was one day he was invited to attend the reunion of a society of literary people. He was not able to refuse, despite avoiding any show of academic pomposity like the plague. They sat him down, naturally, at the podium, against his will. Everything transpired quite well as long as he could, from the heights of his seat, pass the time cradling his beard from time to time, with his face fixed on the speakers and his soul elsewhere. But

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“Mais uma palavra, apenas. Quiroga não fala; escreve somente. E a condição que impôs à ameaça de ser jantado foi essa de ficar mudo como um peixe, ou melhor, mudo como uma anaconda – como uma anaconda muda, visto como as que ele romanceia e as que convive em Buenos Aires falam pelos cotovelos. Senhores! Bebam à saúde do grande conteur uruguaio, este copo de soro antiofídico” (Correio Paulistano, “Os intellectuaes paulistas offereceram um jantar ao notavel escriptor uruguayo”, 4). 169 “num maravilhoso trecho de prosa tersa e rútila” (Correio Paulistano, “Os intellectuaes paulistas offereceram um jantar ao notavel escriptor uruguayo”, 4).

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suddenly, an academic got up, and, after highlighting what it honor it was to have the illustrious author of “El Salvaje” and “Anacoda” present there, he was undone in dithyrambic glosses on his oeuvre. (...) Finally, the academic he had next to him began to dig his elbows into him and demand ‘You must say some words.’ ‘I don’t know how to speak,’ he replies. ‘Even if it’s just a couple of words.’ ‘I wouldn’t be able to articulate one.’ And the spectacle had to be brought to an end, amidst the general bewilderment of an audience that left the venue as if they had attended the panegyric of a fraudulent celebrity.170

The two images of Horacio, both the brilliant and the mute ones, hover before our eyes. Somewhere along the broad spectrum is a more credible image of the scene, where Oswald's good-natured glee finds a point of contact with Horacio's circumspection, articulated with some kindness by the host from Taubaté. They would have gotten along fine, for sure, but it is not difficult to imagine that Horacio would have refused to take part in a public speech, in a language he could not speak. Lobato had been generous and, with humor and tact, alluded to the personality of his new friend. Being in a foreign language country only increased the desire for mutism and the embarrassment of not knowing how to handle an intellectual conversation. In Brazilian newspapers, what remained was a successful image of Horacio's passage through Brazilian lands. Horacio took some very relaxed moments with him in the company of Lobato, Lila, and 170

“Sólo un trance amargo tuvo que pasar y fue por culpa de la literatura. Sucedió que un día lo invitaron para asistir a la reunión de una sociedad de gente de letras. No pudo rehusarse, a pesar de que huía de cuanto trasuntase a academia prosopopéyica, como de la peste. Lo sentaron, naturalmente, en el estrado, contra su voluntad. Todo se deslizó muy bien mientras pudo, desde lo alto de su sillón, dejar transcurrir el tiempo mesándose de cuando en cuando la barba, con el rostro fijo en los disertantes y el alma en otra parte. Pero, de repente, un académico se levantó, y, luego, de hacer resaltar la honra que significaba tener allí presente al ilustre autor de “El Salvaje” y “Anaconda”, se deshizo en glosas ditirámbicas sobre su obra. (…) Por fin, el académico que tenía al lado comenzó a codearlo y a exigirle: ņ Usted tiene que hablar. ņYo no sé hablar, le responde. ņ Aunque sea dos palabras. ņ No sabría articular una. Y hubo que darse por terminado el espectáculo, entre en desconcierto general de un público que se retiró del recinto como si hubiera asistido al panegírico de una celebridad fraudulenta.” (Delgado and Brignole, Vida y obra de Horacio Quiroga, 258).

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Benjamín de Garay and, as a souvenir, he took a photo of the three of them taken during a meeting in a park in São Paulo. The Uruguayan delegation finally said goodbye to the country on October 1st, a fact duly reported, once again, by the diligent Correio Paulistano. Revista do Brasil would still give repercussion to the visit, in its last edition of the year, when it would reproduce, once again, Lobato's speech. Horacio's memory in Brazil, which was beginning to take shape, did not, however, have many more people to carry it forward after Monteiro Lobato and Lila Escobar de Cabral were no longer available for that pioneering work. Times were quiet until Angela Melim's pioneering translation of the book Anaconda appeared, sixty-five years later.

Language effects The trip produced in Horacio the desire to write to Emilia. To see her. It produced mutism at times when he was urged to speak Portuguese in public. It produced embarrassment, but that timid muteness, leagues and leagues away from Brazil, produced something else as well. The language he lacked was replaced, somewhere else, by an epistolary loquacity. As a diligent student, as a dear friend, Horacio wrote a letter full of tenderness, marked by memories of his trip to Brazil. What had not come to him in spoken words – rock, glitter, mute snake – gushed seductively in the writing: June 14 – 1923 My great brother Lobato: I will write to you in this beautiful and tropical language so you can appreciate the huge advances that I made in writing. Aymé, brother! If only you were the great Rosalina and my eloquence – even grammatical – would be more graceful than it will seem to you. Anyway, here it goes. I did not receive the books that you announced by letter. Do not be so upset like cousin Lisboa, who promised, promised... and did not send her Hindu verses. I am sending HISTORIA DE UN AMOR TURBIO to you now; a copy to you, and another to cousin Lila, begging you, brother, to make sure that she gets the copy that is dedicated to her. I do not know anything about this girl. Maybe she is mad at me. Why? The eternal female mysteries. The newspapers inform me that Garay is sick. And I remember another time when the same friend was a little sick, and whose treatment you told me about. Say hello and tell my dear friend that, in another mail, I will send a copy of amor turbio to him. Anyway, brother, it seems to me that I am still talking at that table on the public walkway, with Camargo’s anaconditas. Language effects… You want to make a great fortune, and you will get it (!) but do not forget to, sometimes, think of building a big house, with rooms for guests, so that

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the miserable brother who writes to you can go and stay for ten days at your excellent property. And on the account of literature. Why do I not receive REVISTA DO BRASIL anymore? And a big hug, brother, H. Quiroga171

The letter, woven with the mediation of the language a little heard, a little remembered, a little invented, and patched up with something from the native Castilian, built another Brazil, one of its own, different from the one before his departure: Os Sertões, by Euclydes da Cunha, no longer make the image of that land imagined for so long. Having been with a writer friend, and with two translators – Lila and Benjamín – poured Horacio into a joyful wandering between languages, which made these meanders a territory in which he was neither an exiled nor a foreigner. Just three years later, Horacio would write the short story that would give the title to his most important book, Los desterrados. He fed on the experience of that trip: the speech of the protagonists, two Brazilian peones, who spoke the essentials of communication in other stories, now spoke the 171

Junio 14 – 1923 Meu grande irmao Lobato: Eu vo a escriver a vossé en esa bella e tropical lengua irmá, para que vossé pueda gostar dos grandes adelantos feitos por o infrascripto. Aymé, irmao! Fosse vocé tam sequer Rosaliníssima entào que lee, e a minha elocuencia – até que a grammatica – fosse muito mais engracada do que parecerá a vossa mercede. En fim, lá va. Nao recivé os livros que vossé me anonciou por carta. Nao fique vossé tan cossoador como a prima Lisboa, que prometeu, prometeu... e nao mandóu sus versos hindúes. Eu mando agora a vossé a HISTORIA D'UM AMOR TURBIO; um exemplar para vossé, e otro para a prima Lila, rogándole a o irmáo faça chegar a ella o exemplar que le está dedicado. Nada sei de issa menina. Tal vez está zangada comigo. Por qué? Os eternos misterios femininos. Os journaes informan-me do que Garay está doente. E viene-me o recuerdo de uma otra vez que o mesmo amigo estuvo doentinho, e cuya terapéutica vossé me contou. Salude e diga a o caro amigo que en otro correio enviaré-le um exemplar do amor turbio. Como quiera, irmao, paréceme que esto falando todavía n 'aquela mesa do paseio público, con as anaconditas de Camargo. Efeito da língua... Vossé quere facer uma grande fortuna, e conseguirá-lo (!) mais nao dexe, de quando em quando, de pensar en fabricar uma grande casa, con cuartos para huéspedes, afim de que o misero irmao que lhe escreve, poda ir a hospedarse dez días na excelsa finca de vossé. E a conta da litteratura. Por que nao recevo mais a REVISTA DO BRAZIL? E um grande abrazo, irmao, H. Quiroga (Quiroga, Nuevos Papeles Íntimos, 44-5).

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essentials of the subject. Their language was the land of their childhood, the place they dreamed of returning to. In the 1925 story, Joao Pedro and Tirafogo had a life, had a language, had saudades. The two old Brazilian peones, exiled, walked deliriously with the desire to return home, the mother tongue emerging, in gusts, never as it had been one day, but studded with the Castilian that had remolded it. A difficult, endless journey somewhere else: – I already arrived there, my compatriot… – he said. Tirafogo did not take his eyes off the land. – I saw the land … It is there… – he murmured. – I arrived – replied the dying man anyway –. You saw the land. And I am there. – What it is… Joao Pedro – said Tirafogo –, what it is, is that you are dying… You did not arrive! Joao Pedro did not reply this time. He had already arrived. For a long time, Tirafogo lay face down on the wet ground, moving his lips from time to time. At last he opened his eyes, and his features suddenly enlarged in an expression of childish glee: – I’ve arrived, mommy!… Joao Pedro was right … I will go with him!…172

In the short story “Los desterrados”, Tirafogo and Joao Pedro died on the crossing, unable to get anywhere. Horacio, on the other hand, had found a Brazil.

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– Eu cheguei ya, meu compatricio… – dijo. Tirafogo no apartaba la vista del rozado. – Eu vi a terra… E lá… – murmuraba. – Eu cheguei – respondió todavía el moribundo –. Vocé viu a terra. E eu estó lá. – O que é… seu Joao Pedro – dijo Tirafogo –, o que é, é que você está de morrer… ¡Vocé nao chegou! Joao Pedro no respondió esta vez. Ya había llegado. Durante largo tiempo Tirafogo quedó tendido de cara contra el suelo mojado, removiendo de tarde en tarde los labios. Al fin abrió los ojos, y sus facciones se agrandaron de pronto en una expresión de infantil alborozo: – ¡Ya cheguei, mamae!… O Joao Pedro tinha razón… ¡Vou com ele!… (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 634).

12. ALFONSINA AND THE SAVAGE

When Horacio returned from San Ignacio to Buenos Aires, in the first months of 1917, Alfonsina was already there. The poet had arrived in the city five years earlier and had already published her first two books: La inquietud del rosal and Irremediablemente. A Swiss woman, daughter of Swiss parents from Canton of Ticino, her parents brought her to the province of San Juan, Argentina, when she was four years old. There, her father Alfonso had already worked with his older brothers, before she was born, in the establishment of a beer, ice, and sparkling water factory. Pioneer in the region, the beer Los Alpes was relatively successful. Being melancholic and indolent, however, Alfonso went on losing himself to alcohol. That man produced his own poison. His wife realized that the situation was getting delicate and tried to save her husband in many different ways. Moving from city, country, continent, however, did not improve that situation, which was already showing signs of its irreversibility. The new daughter they had, again in Switzerland, and who was named after her father Alfonso, gave some new strength to that broken man. He found the courage to return to Argentina and resume his business. It happened four years later, in 1896. Thus, the girl Alfonsina grew between languages: she first entered the realm of language by listening to Swiss Italian, her mother tongue, until she arrived in Argentina, where she got used to hearing Castilian. The country was the new land where, still at the age of four, she ended up being surprised by her cousins on the doorstep, intently reading a book upside down. She became the object of the boys' laughter. They did not understand that the girl’s play was not one of reading but of inventing her own stories in imagined languages. In those early times, precociously, a book was not to be read, but written. In the midst of a whirlwind of changing languages and countries, Alfonsina learned from her mother – a teacher – the French that would soon come from the poetry of Baudelaire, Verlaine, and others who would push her towards letters, theater, and music. With her father, she discovered bohemia, when he decided that the family should move from San Juan to Rosario, where he would open the Café Suizo, where Alfonsina, as his co-

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worker, would wash the dishes, wait on tables, and get to know the distant and dreamy man her father was. It was not long before Alfonso, so young, succumbed to drunkenness, before reaching the age of fifty. The daughter, who was only sixteen at the time, had her mother's support for her life as an artist and decided to accept an invitation to tour Argentina, as an actress, in a theater troupe. Art was, more and more, occupying the center of that girl's life. She learned the classic dramas by staging them. At the same time, she was harassed by men and soon learned to fend for herself. She returned home, graduated as a rural teacher and became a kindergarten teacher in Rosario. She gave vent to her desires and some air to bourgeois etiquette, becoming the affair of a congressman, getting pregnant, and not wanting anything from him. She left for the capital, where life would be less impossible and she could raise her son. She worked as a clerk at a pharmacy, as a psychological writer – she wrote letters to the customers of the olive oil factory asking them to buy more and more of their products – and, between one advertisement and another, she wrote the verses that she would publish in her first book, La inquietud del rosal. In 1919, when she met Horacio, he was a 40-year-old widower with two children close in age to her son Alejandro: the girl Eglé was eight and the boy Darío was seven years old. Alfonsina, thirteen years younger than Horacio, a single mother, suffered from the stigma of not having married. Being a strong-willed poet, generous, and available for life, with an ironic look and smile, she had the profile to be part of Anaconda, but not only that. They fell in love.

Love under words In order to evoke a story of love or friendship, we are forced to resort to correspondence, that is, to the moments when the protagonists do not see each other. A relationship in praesentia – a life together – is likely to appear less important than a correspondence with a distant friend. The most intense and decisive moments of an existence are perhaps those which have left the fewest traces.173

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“Pour évoquer une histoire d’amour ou d’amitié, on est contraint de s’appuyer sur la correspondance, c’est-à-dire sur les moments où les protagonistes ne se voient pas. Une relation in praesentia – une vie commune – risque d’apparaître moins importante qu’une correspondance avec un ami lointain. Les moments les plus intenses et les plus décisifs d’une existence sont peut-être ceux qui ont laissé le moins de traces” (Peeters, Trois ans avec Derrida, 63).

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He was a short story writer, she was a poet, but they never wrote a single letter to each other that reached the future. That is how close they were. Where do one’s loves fit and, when they fade, where are their traces left? Horacio and Alfonsina loved each other, but never got married. Today it would be said that they were boyfriend and girlfriend. Or lovers, for even if they were free, a social sanction hung over them. Alfonsina, courageous as she was, had already in her debut book published some verses in which she said she was the wolf who confronted a herd of sensible women and claimed to have a son, the fruit of lawless love. Fearless and independent, she attracted Horacio. That solitary, skittish, mysterious man who made writing his way of being in the world; who, thin, small, and muscular, rode a noisy motorcycle and hid behind an abundant beard. That man attracted Alfonsina. In the eyes of the good society of Rio de la Plata, they would be a cursed couple: three children subjected to those shameless people. That single woman, with the obscene verses, was not welcome even in the house of Horacio's friends. How many of those bourgeois mothers would have read her verses “Little man, I loved you half an hour, don’t ask me for more”? When Horacio went to Salto, not only did he have to go unaccompanied, but he also had to explicitly warn about it in his letters, like the one he wrote to José María Delgado, a lifelong friend: On Thursday the 27th I will be there, for various reasons, and lonely as can be. I warn you of this so that you notify your wife. I do the same today communicating to Brignole, just in case your wives pounce on me. If we don’t meet for lunch, I would like to spend some good times with you. Let me know as soon as you can, and warm regards.174

Alfonsina only revealed her son's existence in the most intimate circles. Even after ten years together in Anaconda, the Russian actress Berta Singerman reported in her memoirs that she learned of Alejandro's existence in Rio de Janeiro, where the poet made a stopover going to Europe: Alfonsina had a biological child, whose existence even we her closest friends were unaware of. Perhaps she kept it hidden for some time because she was a teacher, and a single teacher with a child, in those years, and even till this day, had and has difficulties. 174

“El jueves 27 estaré en esa, por diversos motivos, y solo como un hongo. Ésto lo advierto para que lo comuniques a tu mujer. Hago hoy igual comunicado a Brignole, no sea que me coman vuestras esposas. Si no a comer, quisiera pasar un buen rato con ustedes. Infórmame en seguida, y un buen abrazo.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 360-361)

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Chapter 12 We met her son, Alejandro, years later, while I was doing one of my seasons in Río. We lived in the Palace hotel. Early one morning the telephone rings. My husband answers and I hear him say: ‘Alfonsina, what are you doing in Rio?’ Alfonsina explained that she was in transit with the steam travelling to Europe and she added: ‘I’ve brought you a surprise, can I come up’ ‘Come up quickly,’ my husband replies. He opens the door and in comes Alfonsina with a boy. She looked at us swimming and said: Guess who I’ve brought for you…? My son. We were flabbergasted. And then more serious, she added: My son Alejandro. I’m going to Europe with him. And that’s how Alfonsina showed us and had us meet Alejandro, who by that time would be around eighteen years old.175

The poet, as the disconcerting encounter suggests, had invented an alternative form of family organization for herself. A single mother, she had a maid who took care of the house and helped her with Alejandro: she was Fina Grosso and was considered by him, throughout his life, as his grandmother. Alfonsina took care of her son between teaching and writing articles for newspapers and magazines in order to make a living. And she educated him with her values of independence and solidarity in a way that would have horrified her contemporaries. This is how Alejandro remembers his mother, years later: I remember, it was one Christmas Eve. We were walking along and on the street there was a drunk man with several bottles around him. My mother gave me $5 to give him. I looked at her, confused. She said: ‘today, on this date, you have me and I have you, we are together, so we lack nothing, but

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“Alfonsina tenía un hijo natural, cuya existencia ignorábamos hasta sus mejores amigos. Quizá lo ocultó durante un tiempo porque era maestra y una maestra soltera y con un hijo, en aquellos años, y aún hoy día, tenía y tiene sus problemas. “Conocimos a su hijo, Alejandro, años más tarde, mientras yo realizaba una de mis temporadas en Río. Vivíamos en el hotel Palace. Una mañana temprano suena el teléfono. Mi marido atiende y le oigo decir: ‘Alfonsina, ¿qué haces en Río?’ Alfonsina explicó que estaba de paso con el vapor en viaje a Europa y añadió: ‘Les traigo una sorpresa, ¿puedo subir? ‘Sube rápido’, le respondió mi marido. Abre la puerta y entra Alfonsina con un muchacho. Nos miró sonriendo y dijo: “– ¿A que no saben quién les traigo…? Mi hijo. “Nos quedamos de una pieza. Y ya más seria agregó: “– Mi hijo Alejandro. Me voy con él a Europa. “Y así fue como Alfonsina nos mostró e hizo conocer a Alejandro, que por aquel entonces tendría unos dieciocho años.” (Singerman, Mis dos vidas, 235-236).

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he is alone. If he is happy with wine, getting drunk, let him do it. I am not here to judge.176

Alfonsina remembered her father, who, even next to her, her siblings, and her mother, felt terribly alone. Why not bring joy to those whom there is no other way to approach? She knew those who suffered in silence. And that was why Horacio attracted her, because she knew the one who showed himself in the cracks of his muteness. Her son sensed this inaccessible place where Horacio and she found themselves, which did not please him at all. That bad-mannered bearded man. He was so different from his mother's other friends, like Quinquela, who painted pictures, and even from writers like Capdevila and Gálvez, who visited her at home. It was different with Horacio. The only compensation was that his best childhood friends came with him: Darío and Eglé, who was like a sister to him.177 The poet was always clear with Alejandro about who his father was and introduced them, so that he could understand from an early age his condition as a natural son. The situation was anything but simple. Any steps taken outside of marriage, the core of the bourgeois family, were unacceptable. A story of a friend of Alfonsina, during those same years, ended tragically. It also concerned a natural son. In 1928, at the age of seventeen, Píton Botana discovered that, although his father, Natalio Botana, had registered him, in fact he was the son of another relationship, lived by Salvadora when she was still a teenager – that is, a few years before she became the owner of the newspaper Crítica. For Píton, who was being for the first time introduced to that reality, it was like contemplating horror and death. And he did not have the means to deal with the truth, as his brother tells: Píton entered our room and told me that Salvadora had just proved to him that he was not the son of Natalio. She had given birth to him when she was 16 years old, before meeting daddy. He, Salvadora assured, was the son of Dr. Pérez Colman. Natalio had given his surname and had made him his favorite just to take him away from here. So my brother Píton laughing nervously hugged us with that strength of a boa constrictor that gave him his nickname. He kissed us and shot himself with a nickel revolver. 176

“Me acuerdo, era una Noche Buena. Íbamos caminando y en la calle había un hombre borracho con varias botellas a su alrededor. Mi madre me dio $5 para que yo le diera. Yo la miré como desconcertado. Ella me dijo: ‘hoy, en esta fecha, vos me tenés a mí y yo a vos, estamos juntos, entonces nada nos falta, pero él está solo. Si es feliz con el vino, emborrachándose, que lo haga. Yo no estoy para juzgar.” (Santoro, “Entrevista con Alejandro Storni”). 177 Santoro, “Entrevista con Alejandro Storni”.

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Chapter 12 (...) I easily erased dead Píton, from my mind. What took a long time was the image of his forehead bleeding from the impact with the green glass fountain, but my whole life I have continued to search the white cuff of my shirt for a drop of blood.178

Despite her bourgeois background in Switzerland, where, on her mother's side, she had ancestors in politics, poetry, and the church, Alfonsina was poor, and thus in no way subject to social codes and institutions like the upper class. She forged her relationships in her own way, apart from prejudices and labels, and had in Horacio a partner she could count on to build a unique relationship. Around them, however, social bewilderment produced silences: from close friends, who respected the relationship; and from the others, who were silent in horror at that aberration. Whether on one side or the other, Horacio and Alfonsina did not fit in the voices of their contemporaries. The biographers José María Delgado and Alberto Brignole formed the queue of the silent ones and in their voluminous biography of Horacio, along its 404 pages, Alfonsina’s name does not appear even once.The other Uruguayan who succeeded them, Emir Rodríguez Monegal – after twenty years of writing and rewriting Horacio's life –, only in his final book, El desterrado, from 1968, dared to dedicate a couple of paragraphs to Alfonsina, which draw from letters exchanged between the writer and José Maria Delgado: thirty years after the death of the subject, the shame had diminished, but only to a point. Already at the end of the twentieth century, the writer Pedro Orgambide, in 1994, places Alfonsina alongside fleeting loves, in the disputed terrain of widowhood prior to Horacio’s second marriage – some innuendos concerning Emilia Bertolé, Norah Lange, and Alfonsina Storni. He attributes to Alfonsina the responsibility for having corrected and helped the writer to improve his theater play, Las sacrificadas. 178

“Píton entró en nuestro cuarto y me contó que Salvadora le acababa de probar que no era hijo de Natalio. Ella lo había parido cuando tenía 16 años, antes de conocerlo a papito. Él, aseguró Salvadora, era hijo del doctor Pérez Colman. Natalio le había dado su apellido y lo había hecho su predilecto solamente para quitárselo a ella. Entonces mi hermano Píton riéndose nerviosamente nos abrazó con esa fuerza de boa constrictora que le dio el sobrenombre. Nos besó y se pegó un tiro con un revólver niquelado. (...) Borré fácilmente a Píton muerto, de mi mente. Lo que tardé en quitarme fue la imagen de su frente sangrando por el golpe con la fuente de vidrio verde, pero toda mi vida he seguido buscando en el puño blanco de mi camisa una gota de sangre.” (Botana, Memorias: Tras los dientes del perro, 36-37).

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Recently, at least two authors have decided to dedicate a literary text to the couple: first, Ana Atorresi, with her Un amor a la deriva. Horacio Quiroga y Alfonsina Storni, in 1997. Even more recently, the Portuguese playwright Ricardo Cabaça follows the same path and writes his play Storni-Quiroga, in 2017, in the melodramatic register of a feuilleton, placing the two creators and a third entity, Anaconda, in the mad love of youth. It should be noted: there is little precise information regarding Horacio's arrival in this territory called Alfonsina. Everything was personal and furtive, like the lines dedicated in the memoirs of acquaintances: the kiss seen by Norah Lange, a kiss seen on the street by César Tiempo, the innuendos in Enrique Amorim’s memoirs, like “Horacio didn’t write to anyone. However, when it came to Alfonsina, he had reasons to write to her”.179 Only a few parts of this journey became public knowledge. The caresses, the time shared, the intimacy are not narrated. About what was said between the two, what guaranteed the permanence of their relationship over time, outside institutions, whether it was desire, friendship, or affection, there is not much to tell. The silence about what happened between 1919 and 1925 is as eloquent as the impossibility of reporting it.

Deliberate silences What can be said precisely is that Horacio prepared tagliolini with tomato sauce; Alfonsina, when she cooked, made arroz a la suiza. Alejandro Storni, the son, many years later, already in the twenty-first century, had this tasty gastronomic memory of the couple. Still, he avoided saying there was an affair. He limited himself to saying that they were friends and included the painter Centurión in those intimate meetings to completely contradict himself in the following sentence:180 “My mother never would have married Horacio. I didn’t like him and she would have never contradicted me.”181

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“Horacio a nadie escribía. Sin embargo, a Alfonsina tenía porque escribirle” (Amorim, El Quiroga que yo conocí, 59). 180 “Con respecto a Quiroga no sé si hubo un idilio, había un grupo. Se reunían y Quiroga hacía tallarines con tuco, Alfonsina arroz a la suiza y Centurión, (que hizo bellos cuadros), lo que tuviera a mano.” (Fontanini, “Alejandro, hijo de Alfonsina Storni...”). 181 “Con Horacio, mi madre nunca se hubiera casado. Él no me gustaba a mí y ella nunca me hubiera contradecido.” (Fontanini, “Alejandro, hijo de Alfonsina Storni...”).

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Decades went by and yet his feelings remained on edge. Devoted to his mother, Alejandro only gave interviews about her at Café Tortoni, on Corrientes Street, where Alfonsina used to get together with other habitués, leaning against the piano, to recite poems to those who were present. All was said in the silences of the son. Just like years before, in Horacio's letters to friends, much was also said in the excitement that the circumspect writer dedicated to the newly discovered poet. When José María Delgado was going to make his debut in literature with Relicario, Horacio advised him: Please do come when your when your book is ready, and while we’re at it I will get you to talk with Storni, who showed me something about shooting with you, and whom I showed something of yours; she wants to meet you. Reply to this one, to know if you’ve received it or not.182

José María needs to give himself some respect. How does he want to write poetry in 1919 if he does not even know how to read Alfonsina's work properly? – wondered Horacio, indignant. Two weeks later, he insisted, and from the shipment he had received of José María's books, he sent a copy to Alfonsina. Even before José María could decide whether he wanted to send the poet a book, Horacio himself informed: “Yesterday I was here for an hour with Storni, whom I gave a book of yours, an account of which you will send her. I think if you carefully reread El dulce daño, you will fully reconcile yourself with the lady.”183 Horacio defends Alfonsina before his friend as he had never defended even his own work, Emir Rodríguez Monegal once observed.184 Alfonsina is something new for Horacio, a woman of letters with whom he has a relationship without the mediation of idealizations. She is not one of the young women he fantasized about in his stories and letters, not one of the women who are part of his more conventional sexual escapades, but an artist who occupied an important place alongside other writers whom he respected. Horacio's insistence with Delgado regarding Alfonsina is inversely proportional to the silencing of the poet's name in the writer's future biography. She is profusely absent, as a lover, as a friend, as a contemporary 182

“Anímate venir cuando esté pronto tu libro, y de paso te pondré en charla con la Storni, quien me enteró del tiroteo contigo, y a quien enseñé alguna cosa tuya; quiere conocerte. Contesta a esta, a fin de saber si la recibes o no.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 339-340). 183 “Ayer estuve una hora aquí con la Storni, a quien di un libro tuyo, cuenta del que le mandarás tú. Yo creo que si vuelves a leer con detención El dulce daño, te vas a reconciliar de pleno con la dama.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 344). 184 Rodríguez Monegal, El Desterrado: vida y obra de Horacio Quiroga, 181.

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poet, as a partner in Anaconda. For so many, however, Alfonsina was the silence, the omitted word, the precocious caesura of the verse, the censorship.

The voices No. Let us not write a feuilleton with Alfonsina and Horacio, not even one signed by Aquilino Delagoa. The couple was always there, dating in the city, while so many people, never fully understanding what it meant, rushed by on the tram and saw them in their life together, perhaps during a kiss There are not a few fleeting images, recorded not without some prudisheness: After an accidental encounter [Quiroga] asked me to accompany him to visit Lugones. Shortly after stepping off the tram we bumped into Alfonsina Storni. Quiroga rushed headlong towards her and kissed her on the mouth. Then he gestured at me with his hand to come closer. He introduced me and said goodbye to me right there.185

says César Tiempo, editor of Horacio's last book, about the first time he saw them together. While Alfonsina did not leave written letters to Horacio, whenever she could, she addressed him publicly with admiration and affection. When, in November 1926, the magazine Babel, on the initiative of its director Samuel Glusberg, dedicated a special issue to the writer, the poet was one of those invited to discuss Horacio's work. The text ambiguously shows, more than traits of his writing, aspects of his personality. Alfonsina spoke of the man she knew closely: This writer, more than a man of adaptable, sunny temperament, refined by civilization and the brilliant combing of libraries, is a stump of the earth, having risen upon it to observe nature in its total game of met interests, with avid, scrutinizing eyes, impressed and jealous of every sensation of strong colors.186 185

“Después de un encuentro accidental [Quiroga] me pidió que lo acompañara a visitar a Lugones. A poco de bajar del tranvía tropezamos con Alfonsina Storni. Quiroga se abalanzó a su encuentro y la besó en la boca. Después me hizo señas con la mano para que acercara. Me presentó y se despidió de mí allí mismo.” (Tiempo, Cartas inéditas y evocación de Horacio Quiroga, 24). 186 “Este escritor, más que un hombre de temperamento dúctil, solado, afinado por la civilización y el brillante cepillo de las bibliotecas, es un muñón de la tierra, levantado sobre ella para observar a la naturaleza en su juego total de encontrados intereses, con ojos ávidos, escudriñadores, impresionados y celosos de toda sensación de fuerte colorido.” (Storni, “Horacio Quiroga”).

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Nature, in Alfonsina’s words, is a female body: A sincere lover of nature and his great talent as a writer comes to him for having possessed nature, in his devoted and frequent contact, as if it were a woman.187

Although their relationship was built in the city and everyday life through the cafes, cinemas and bars of Buenos Aires, what united them in literature and public texts were images full of wet earth, rivers, trees. Everything Alfonsina wrote about Horacio had the smell of wilderness. Meanwhile, Horacio's short stories also recalled his experiences in the North, or came up with others, all of them taking place in that clod of land that he called his country. Four books were the result of that vertigo: El salvaje (1920), Anaconda (1921) and El desierto (1924). The jungle was mostly remembered, except for the few opportunities in which he managed to escape to San Ignacio, which was increasingly difficult, since now he had to go to Montevideo for consular meetings. During those eight years in the city, Horacio's life became more and more urban. He thought about San Ignacio. He wanted to go back there and, at the beginning of 1925, he heard again what his contemporary Jack London, in a book from 1903, had named “the call of the wild”.

The call of the wild As soon as Alfonsina heard Horacio’s half-proposal, spoken with difficulty, she did not know what to say; she felt a chill run down her spine, followed by a heatwave in her armpits and an emptiness in her belly. It was as much an announcement as it was a desperate plea: he was going back to San Ignacio and he wanted to go with her. Horacio was the first man she had ever loved who had loved her back, her companion in the city, her lover, and her literary partner. The children got along with each other, which was no small feat, and they enjoyed a life in common among the Anaconda comrades. San Ignacio was a wild fantasy, a remote habitat where Horacio had finished forging himself as a man and as a narrator. She had always wanted to be a part of that world, as much as she feared it. She knew, very little, it is true, of Ana María's death, and she

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“Enamorado sincero de la naturaleza sus grandes aciertos de escritor le vienen de haberla poseído, en su contacto rendido y frecuente, como a una mujer.” (Storni: “Horacio Quiroga”).

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feared that everything would reawaken when they touched the red earth of Misiones together. Alfonsina was thirty-two years old and that was the first proposal for a common life she had received. It was not a bourgeois marriage, it was not an adventure. It came from the lips of the man whom she respected as few others. She was touched by the proposal. But what would become of her? Such a large renounce: to give up teaching poetry, the literary soirées her notoriety as a poet, which was growing. Her fifth book, Ocre, was about to be published, her mature work, in which she believed so much… And she would leave it all for that? She knew how much Horacio had written in Misiones, but she also knew that he had not published a single book. It was too far from Buenos Aires, and she still had a few books to write and make it happen, it was too high a risk. She liked to bet, it is true, but maybe that was going too far. What would it be like to lose the freedom that the two of them had, to exchange social gatherings for the snoring of jaguars at dusk? Alfonsina was so free and, suddenly, she ran the risk of starting to feel captive to a proposal to which she hardly knew how to respond. She talked with mutual friends, exchanged confidences with them, and asked for advice. From her conversation with the painter Quinquela Martín, only one emblematic phrase remains “With that madman? No!”188 No. To end in refusal the love they had lived and the days they had shared. That was not why she declined. If she were younger, if she did not have a poetic work unfolding and a child, she certainly would have gone. That request was seductive. But at that point in her life, she could not give up everything for a man. Her family had crossed the ocean in search of another life, she herself had come from Rosario to Buenos Aires to have her son, to have her work, and she would never give up anything for a man, for a love, even if both were named Horacio. There were days of anguish, but she stood her ground. She said that she could not go. That she was so sorry, that she really wanted it, but she could not go. Horacio swallowed hard. Horacio understood. Without her, that plan did not make any sense for him. He could not go alone. At the same time, between them, they knew that, in that moment, something had been lost.

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“¿Con ese loco? ¡No!” (Delgado, Alfonsina Storni: Una biografía esencial, 119).

13. GENEROUS IN LOVE

For my part I am or believe I am hard of nose, (...) long of legs, wide of soles, yellow in complexion, generous in love of impossible calculation, confused of words. (Pablo Neruda)

In the rush of days, facing whatever restrained their affections, Horacio and Alfonsina had yet another point in common: a verse by Neruda defined them. They gave vent to their emotions, even those that were the most inconvenient, extemporaneous and out of place according to the good norms of urbanity. The symbol of beauty seemed to be incarnated in the age of seventeen, the number that seduced them. Alfonsina, in 1927, when she was thirty-six years old and her relationship with Horacio was already over, had a disconcerting conversation with the young writer Manuel Mujica Lainez one day: I met Alfonsina Storni when I was seventeen years old, at aunt Pepa Lainez’s Fiesta de la Poesía, which gave rise to prestigious relationships. At the time I used to visit her in her tall and small apartment on Córdoba and Esmeralda. She was a lot older than me, disheveled and willful. An admirable poetess, no doubt, but the nuances escaped me. I stopped going, or rather, I snuck away from her house, scared, on the day she wanted to kiss me (…)[:] ‘I consider a man a friend after kissing him’.189 189

“A Alfonsina Storni la conocí cuando tenía yo diecisiete años, en la Fiesta de la Poesía de la tía Pepa Lainez, que dio origen a relaciones prestigiosas. Solía visitarla yo por entonces, en su alto y pequeño departamento de Córdoba y Esmeralda. Era muchísimo mayor que yo, desgreñada y vehemente. Una admirable poetisa, sin duda, pero los matices se me escapaban. Dejé de ir, o mejor dicho, me escabullí de su casa, espantado, el día en que quiso besarme (…)[:] ‘Yo considero amigo a un hombre después de haberlo besado’.” (Delgado, Alfonsina Storni: Una biografía esencial, 152-153).

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Horacio and his friends, more than once, have also lost their way in the face of youthful beauty. In her memoirs written in maturity, Berta Singerman, the young Russian actress who had joined the group, remembered the unforgettable day when she had the literature of Rio de la Plata at her feet: From those gatherings I remember a funny anecdote. One night we met not at the studio [of the painter Emilio Centurión] but at the house of Centurión’s parents, who were away. He took advantage of the occasion to organize a small party for the Anaconda group. He opened plenty of bottles of excellent wine and there was drinking in abundance. Quiroga and Enrique [Spinoza], who almost never drank, were soon ‘tipsy’. I was soon amazed looking at three men kneeling before me: Quiroga, Enrique and Centurión. And the three of them swore again and again ‘I am the one who loves you most’ (…) At that point I was seventeen years old and Quiroga was already a mature man.190

At peace with their bodies, free, and intoxicated by the beauty of youth, this was Horacio and Alfonsina's relationship with their surroundings. There were times, however, when sensual appreciation caused one of them to slip on the edge of a ravine. This is what seems to have happened with Horacio, at the end of 1922, with Emilia Bertolé. Since Horacio had written to her from Hotel Glória more than just good-natured messages to eat empanadas, go to the movies with the group, or similar events, things had changed. Emilia was magnetic. It did not matter that she was 28 and not 17. She had come alone from her native Rosario to try to make a living in Buenos Aires. She worked as a portraitist for the Buenos Aires bourgeoisie and lived in hotels. She had no place to stay, had not been married, and did not intend to commit herself to marriage. As a daughter of Italians, she was free from the shackles of society and local prejudices. She graduated in Fine Arts and painting was what mattered to her. She had arrived in the city six years earlier, by chance: her father, Francisco, met Gregorio Aráoz Alfaro, a prestigious doctor from Buenos Aires, one day at the Rosario Norte train station. As they talked, the doctor 190

“De esas reuniones recuerdo un hecho gracioso. Una noche nos citamos no en el estudio [del pintor Emilio Centurión] sino en la casa de los padres de Centurión, que estaban de viaje. Este aprovechó la ocasión para organizar una pequeña fiesta para el grupo Anaconda. Abrió muchas botellas de excelente vino y se bebió en abundancia. A Quiroga y a Enrique [Spinoza], que casi nunca tomaban, se les ‘subieron’ pronto las copas. Al rato estaba yo azorada mirando a tres hombres arrodillados ante mí: Quiroga, Enrique y Centurión. Y los tres juraban y perjuraban ‘yo soy el que más la ama’ (…) Tenía yo entonces diecisiete años y Quiroga era ya un hombre maduro.” (Singerman, Mis dos vidas, 44).

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learned about the talent of the award-winning Emilia. He then decided to invite Francisco's family to the Argentinian capital so that the young painter could paint a portrait for them. Francisco naturally accepted. In May, the Bertolé family arrived in Buenos Aires, stayed at Hotel Internacional and were introduced by the Araóz family to the high society of the time. Between the luxury of hotels and the luxury of the bourgeoisie, the girl envisioned a possible life for herself. Once the portrait was finished, her father returned and she was authorized to stay in the capital, in a more or less provisional life, bouncing from painting to painting, but, above all, living from her own resources. In a short time, she was able to pay for the family's trip to the capital. She felt independent; however, paradoxically, she also felt more and more attached to the obligations of supporting them. As she settled in, Emilia realized that the blonde woman she had met in her city had become a great poet when she saw that the girl's debut book, El dulce daño, had been released. She excitedly told her sister Cora: If you knew, in an old Pebete I read some poems by Alfonsina Storni, who would say she is the girl I met in Santa Fe! What a poetess!191

She has the urge to meet her, to know, after all, how to become an artist like her. Emilia was willful and went ahead. Six months after her arrival, she entered two of her paintings at the 1916 Salón Nacional: the portrait of the wife of the doctor who welcomed her and the painting Mi prima Ana. That choice was not fortuitous, as it was representative of her métier: original works commissioned by the high society. Only the second painting was accepted. Going beyond the wealthy families of Buenos Aires, Emilia’s entry into the art world allowed her to get to know local artists and bohemian life. It was when she found out not only her own aspirations, but also the limitations that being a woman implied at the time: “If I were a man, another bohemian like me would not exist on mother earth.”192 Around that time she met Emilio Centurión, a painter who was about her age and who made a living as a portraitist, illustrator, and caricaturist in Buenos Aires magazines, such as Caras y Caretas and Plus Ultra. That was

191 “Si vieras, en un Pebete viejo leí unas poesías de Alfonsina Storni, ¡quien diría que es aquella chica que conocí en Santa Fe! ¡qué poetisa!” (Emilia Bertolé, Obra Poética y Pictórica, 39). 192 “Si fuera hombre, bohemio como yo no existiría en la madre tierra.” (Emilia Bertolé, Obra Poética y Pictórica, 34).

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how Emilia found out that he was illustrating the stories of a writer who lived near Misiones. Upon meeting Centurión, Emilia became a young Anaconda. Eager for the bohemian life among artists, for intellectual dialogue, for the exercise of poetry, sharing space with people she admired, she was soon accepted by the troupe. Because she was with Alfonsina, Berta, and her sister Cora, she felt less isolated: she now had not only an artistic family to be a part of, but also a group of female artists with whom to share anxieties and difficulties. Emilia had something in common especially with Alfonsina: she enjoyed the game of seduction. She always had a few suitors around her, whom she would neither let go nor get too close. She enjoyed being desired. Those who wanted or desired her were distressed by her ambiguous promises. One of them, Sandro Berra, a doctor and her suitor between 1920 and 1921 wrote her one day in a desperate letter: “You cannot have a person within reach without wounding them with your nails.”193 Another one, César Pico, also a doctor and her suitor, between 1921 and 1927, on the verge of exasperation, almost at the end of his many and persistent expectations, told her: “It has already been over six years, Emilia. It’s time to define the nature of our friendship.”194 But the girl had nothing to answer. That was the price to be on her side: not getting too close and remain waiting. In 1922, chance offered Horacio the image of an Emilia without any suitors. From Brazil, the memory of the painter was engraved in his mind. When he returned, at the end of the year, despite Alfonsina, he invested in the painter, but did not know how to deal with her intricacies, her nuances, or her charms. He fell in love and idealized her. He got lost. For Horacio, ambiguity was attractive in short stories but, in life, it made him fall, skid, be at the mercy of the tigresa de unhas negras e íris cor de mel [black-nailed tigress with honey-tinged eyes]. A disaster, nothing less, was about to befall that man who had always made a point of spreading an image of balance and self-control among his peers. Captive, passionate, and reactive, Horacio no longer knew how to act towards Emilia. He got to the delicate point of not even knowing how to address her anymore. His vanity, heightened sensitivity, and hardly controlled aggression turned this relationship into hell.

193

“Usted no puede tener una persona a tiro sin que la hiera con sus uñas.” (Emilia Bertolé, Obra Poética y Pictórica, 47). 194 “Ya van más de seis años, Emilia. Es tiempo de definir el carácter de nuestra amistad.” (Emilia Bertolé, Obra Poética y Pictórica, 47).

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In a letter that was more like an unusual abstraction, he tried to define his own behavior towards the girl, as he no longer even knew how to act in search of reconciliation: When I am hurt I almost never say what I should say, more or less true. But always the limit; instead of reconciling, I attack. I forget I am not writing a book, and that is how we end up later, me and the little person I have spoken to. Forty times a rhyme by Bécquer has come to mind: ‘You were the hurricane’ etcétera.195

Affected by the damage from the one who had broken his wings, Horacio was worried. Amidst the hurricane and the mental storm, a name came to him, that of the only one who could understand his situation: “Only Alfonsina suspected and suspects always that I was dancing on pieces of broken glass.”196 And if she understood him, why not Emilia? “And why did you, as a woman, not mollify me with a single gesture or a single word, and a drop of courage so that you would suspend your contortions and I would leave my position as a spoiled young man?”197 He got tangled up. Such power he attributed to that woman: “A single understanding glance can suffice for an entire evening.”198 By finishing the letter, Horacio used the expedient that had best served him throughout his life: to settle in writing what he could not handle in person and aloud. He finally confessed, the young man who was not even seventeen, in this case, was himself, not Emilia: Thank God, I have found, like a seventeen year old young man, the key to these endless stories: reconciling by letter what unconfuses a misunderstanding when present. I am sure that I will be by your side the one of the first days.

195

“Cuando estoy herido no digo casi nunca lo que debo decir, más o menos verdadero. Pero siempre el límite; en vez de conciliar, ataco. Me olvido de que no estoy escribiendo un libro, y así quedamos después, yo y la personita con quien he hablado. Cuarenta veces me ha venido a la memoria en los últimos tiempos una de las rimas de Bécquer: ‘Tú eras el huracán’ etcétera.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 369). 196 “Sólo Alfonsina sospechó y sospecha siempre que yo bailaba sobre pedazos de vid rio.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 369). 197 “¿Y por qué usted, como mujer, no me apaciguó con un solo gesto o una sola palabra, una gota de ánimo para suspender usted sus contorsiones y dejar yo mi posición de muchacho malcriado?” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 371). 198 “Una sola mirada de comprensión puede bastarnos por toda una noche.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 371).

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If you are too, let’s erase these two months, with a sign that begins from the inauguration of the Salon: ‘To be continued…’.199

He wants a fresh start, but he does not know where to start from. Perhaps adding a feuilleton-like ending was not the most effective of means. Emilia did not seem willing to make peace. Horacio felt uncomfortable in the unlikely role of a clumsy teenager, so different from the diplomat who had written to the poet from his luxury suite at Hotel Glória. The correspondence definitely stopped. It was a no.

Why did I not get married? Alfonsina, after all, did not go to the jungle with Horacio. Emilia did not engage in a relationship with the bearded man. Horacio, despite the many singularities that made him unique in the Rio de la Plata landscape at the beginning of the twentieth century, also longed to hear his wedding bells. Generous in love, a bon vivant, and a widower. Despite all this, he wanted to get married. He wanted to go back to San Ignacio. Once again, he wanted to dirt his nails with the red clay of his country. Not them. Emilia continued to be an upper-class painter for years on end, until the following decade, little by little, displaced the academic artistic taste that she used to win over her clientele, leading her to dedicate herself to advertising and illustrating magazine covers. In 1939, in an interview to Estampa magazine, at a time when this sort of question was still being asked, she explained to readers why she had never married: I would already be married if I had found the man that would take me suddenly, who, for example, as I left my house would grab me by the arm taking me without further ado to the civil register. Numerous and inconceivable details of the nuptial apparatus would have been saved. I don’t see myself in a family room being the bride or waiting for my nervously betrothed, tearing up lace handkerchiefs. I would not be able to endure suggestive congratulations from matchmaking ladies for whom a relationship is a never-ending source of commentary. Nor the solemn arrival 199

“Gracias a Dios, he hallado como un muchachito de dieciséis años la llave de estas eternas historias: conciliar por carta lo que desconfunde un malentendido de presencia. Estoy seguro de que voy a ser a su lado el de los primeros días. Si usted lo es también, borraremos este par de meses, con una leyenda que arranque desde la inauguración del Salón: ‘A continuar…’.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 372).

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Emilia abhorred it all and, as a recognized artist, she said it from the height of her 36 years, on a double page, surrounded by seven photos of her in the privacy of her home. Years before, and in many interviews, Alfonsina had also been repeatedly asked to justify her singleness to society. When she went to Madrid for the first time, in 1930, in the company of a Bolivian friend, the teacher and reciter Blanca de la Vega, the reporter asked her: “Why have you not married? “Because when I was able to, I didn’t want to, and now… Well, don’t mentally complete the sentence, now I don’t want to either.”201

Months later, in the pages of El Hogar magazine, now a little more patient, she decided to give the longer version in an important interview: As you will know, a person such as myself, who has been in touch with life in such a direct way, such a virile way, shall we say, could not live, think, act, like a little girl stuck between the four walls of her house; and my literature has had to reflect this, which is the truth of my intimacy; I have had to live as a man; I claim for myself the morality of a man. What experience has given me is, to me, superior to what things have been said to me by what surrounded me. On the other hand, with tht I do nothing but anticipate the woman who will come, because all the feminine morality is based on the current economic regime. Our society still rests upon the family; the family upon the male authority; it is he who legislates, that is,

200 “Ya estaría casada si hubiera encontrado el hombre que me tomara de improviso,

que, por ejemplo, al salir de mi casa me sujetara de un brazo llevándome sin trámites al registro civil. Quedarían salvados numerosos e inconcebibles detalles del aparato nupcial. No me veo en una sala familiar haciendo la novia o esperando a mi futuro nerviosamente, desgarrando pañuelitos de encaje en las alternativas de la espera. No podría sufrir felicitaciones sugestivas de señoras casamenteras para quienes un noviazgo es una fuente inagotable de comentarios. Ni tampoco la llegada solemne del novio, de zapatos lustrados y polainas blancas, empuñando el correspondiente ramo de flores… Todos esos conocidos momentos del noviazgo, me parecen el antídoto del amor.” (Emilia Bertolé, Obra Poética y Pictórica, 43-44). 201 “– Por qué no se ha casado usted? – Porque cuando pude no quise, y ahora... Bueno, no termine la frase mentalmente, ahora tampoco quiero. (Ruano, “Alfonsina Storni y Blanca de la Vega en Madrid: dos mujeres, un repórter y sus fantasmas”).

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who orders the facts in an intellectual way and provides sustenance. But if the woman provides the sustenance and does not depend on any man, and can penetrate and overcome with her intelligence the legal network of her system that imprisons her, she will acquire, automatically, the rights of man, which in my opinion are preferable for being greater and of a higher moral than the female ones.202

Anaconda indeed brought together the most lucid female artists. Generous with love. Zealous to keep themselves free from patriarchal subjection. Those women, with their sensitivity, lucidity, positions, and avant-garde left Horacio stepping on embers.

202

“Usted comprenderá que una persona como yo, que se ha puesto en contacto con la vida de un modo tan directo, de un modo tan varonil, digamos, no podía vivir, pensar, obrar, como una niña metida en las cuatro paredes de su casa; y mi literatura ha tenido que reflejar esto, que es la verdad de mi intimidad; yo he debido vivir como un varón; yo reclamo para mí una moral de varón. Lo que la experiencia me ha dado es para mí superior a cuantas cosas me ha dicho lo que me rodeaba. Por otra parte, con ello no hago más que anticipar a la mujer que vendrá, pues toda la moral femenina se basa en el régimen económico actual. Nuestra sociedad, todavía descansa en la familia; la familia en la autoridad del varón, que es quien legisla, es decir, quien ordena en forma intelectual los hechos y quien provee el sustento. Pero si la mujer provee el sustento, y no depende de varón alguno, y puede penetrar y superar con su inteligencia la red legal en que su sistema la aprisiona, adquirirá, automáticamente, derechos de varón, que a mi modo de ver son apetecibles por ser mayores y de más alta moral que los femeninos.” (Civit, “Alfonsina Storni, que ha debido vivir como un varón, reclama para sí una moral de varón”).

14. ON THE JUNGLE WITHOUT HER

It was 1925 and Horacio left for San Ignacio again. Few people understood his stubbornness in returning to the jungle. How long would the trip last? What was he going to do there anyway? No one dared to answer. Circumspect and mysterious, there was no way to know. Every time Horacio departed, the die was cast. Maybe he would stay there for a lifetime, maybe for a few months. Alfonsina had not wanted to go with him. Although she loved him, she did not see herself as a character in that script. It made no sense to her that insistence on abandoning, together, what each of them achieved in the country's capital to plunge into a jungle that, while seducing her through Horacio's mouth to the point of invading her poetry, did not convince her at all as a life option. Horacio, on his side, then had to say goodbye to that woman with whom he had shared an important part of the last few years, the one who had been his most lasting love: shared texts, movie sessions, dinners, the kids growing up… the end. Horacio needed to go. He could not suspend his departure. He had a painful burden waiting for him in San Ignacio, which he had to lay on his back and carry to some destination. He went in search, in the jungle, of nothing less than his redemption. Without Alfonsina, everything was going to be harder. Horacio himself suspected, in advance, that he might not stay for long, but he had to try. He worked hard for that departure. He had no less than forty-three articles ready to be periodically published in Caras y Caretas: short stories, articles about literature, and – for the most part – brief texts from the series De la vida de nuestros animales. That last one was his newest golden goose: a true minimal encyclopedia of Northern animals, with their peculiarities and idiosyncrasies. One descriptive chronicle per animal, with some occasional narrative traits. If everything was so right, why the hell would he have to stay? He did the math: a series of books published, with great success, even more short stories and film chronicles in magazines, children's stories, his work as a diplomat that balanced his life and, beyond all that, a certain fatigue. He missed his farm by the river, the closer contact with the animals – although

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that was not really what moved him. He was 46 years old and wanted to revisit that land where the promise of happiness and failure had shown limits so tenuous that, for him, they were still invisible. Yes, he was going to leave. He lent his house on Agüero Street to a young writer friend from Salto, Enrique Amorim, who was intending to settle in the capital anyway. He left, like a ghost. And, also like a ghost, he stayed in Buenos Aires: his texts continued to appear in the magazines, his house, his books, everything was up and running. He was in both places at the same time, hoping the trip might bring him some peace.

Ocre Alfonsina was also moving. Now she would go to Cuba Street. Meanwhile, she finalized the organization of her new poetry book, her first in five years, Ocre. Since the end of the previous decade, she had also become famous as a chronicler: she wrote about the women who were emerging on the public scene – typists, clerks, seductive teenagers, feminists, or those looking for a match –, all portrayed through her critical eye. She wondered aloud about the place of women in society: whether women should vote, whether they should wear skirts, and so on. Alfonsina was the daring poet, who hurled challenges and questions. And who, finally, had left Horacio to face himself, so that he could also wonder about his own life. In Ocre, Alfonsina, with a different diction and another voice, recalls Horacio, her history with him, from the Saturday they kissed to the final refusal. Without names and unceremoniously, she wrote a sonnet: You, who never will be.... It was a Saturday, and the kiss was but a whim, a man's whim, audacious and fine, but it seemed so sweet and masculine to my heart, a wolf with wings. It's not that I believe, I don't, if your soul's poise appeared divine in my drunken eyes. I know this wine is not for me, yet the dice rolls... I am already the woman never taken you the tremendous male who wakens and is a torrent that widens to a river,

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and curls as it runs towards the sea. Ah, I resist, but you have all of me, you, who will never be all mine.203

In the poem, which is also a river, Alfonsina, once again, announces her rejection of marriage – “you, who will never be all mine”. The lover laments the fact that she will never be fully embraced, but also affirms a form of free love, of full surrender and a complete lack of ownership. Having forged her life in freedom, having been recognized by everyone for it, Alfonsina could not own anyone. And she could only give herself in her own way, without being anyone's possession as well. Losing her partner, however, hurt her. She often thought about him. She kept seeing him around the city and, when the lack was too severe, she used to go to the house where he was not anymore to visit him, to confirm his absence. On one occasion, the lights were on and filled her with a strange hope. Had Horacio returned? She furtively opens the door, there is indeed someone in the library. That is his exclusive territory. He had returned for sure, and without telling anyone. Feeling hopeful, with her legs trembling, Alfonsina walked towards the room with the books. She gently opened the door and saw, to her dismay, that the man sitting at the table was not Horacio, but Enrique Amorim: The room of mysteries was the library, which Julia [the maid] in order to relieve her responsibilities and work less, kept closed. (...) It was there that 203

“Tú, que nunca serás… Sábado fue, y capricho el beso dado, capricho de varón, audaz y fino, mas fue dulce el capricho masculino a este mi corazón, lobezno alado. No es que crea, no creo, si inclinado sobre mis manos te sentí divino, y me embriagué. Comprendo que este vino no es para mí, mas juega y rueda el dado… Yo soy ya la mujer que vive alerta, tú el tremendo varón que se despierta y es un torrente que se ensancha en río, y más se encrespa mientras corre y poda. Ah, me resisto, mas me tienes toda, tú, que nunca serás del todo mío.” (Storni, Ocre, 12).

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Alfonsina Storni caught me writing, the day that she appeared without announcing herself, of course. She had walked along Agüero street and she wanted to have news of Quiroga.204

In fact, Horacio was going through a time of deep silence. He did not write to her as he did not write to anyone else. Like his more stubborn characters, he wanted to come to terms with his past. He was a ghost in Buenos Aires, where he was not but, in San Ignacio, he was the time traveler, who encountered the ghost of Ana María Cirés willingly, so that she could finally forgive him. It was on a walk through the village that he found the Palacios, his Venezuelan neighbors, who were close during that tragedy. On one of the visits, he recognized their daughter, whose name was also Ana María and who was still a child when he left. Meeting the Palacios again brought back a series of memories that had been left in the shadows. But a torrent of memories was updated when he saw Ana. That girl had once lingered for a long time watching Horacio carry Ana María Cirés in his arms, during her last moments. Ana María Palacio. Horacio had allowed himself to be disturbed by that look of discovery, but he had kept it deep inside, along with the whole disturbing story of his wife's death and everything else he had made a point of forgetting. When he contemplated the girl, that blank stare was back, brought by a woman who seduced him with the possibility of healing him of the trauma. Time really seemed to have receded, as he was presented with a new chance to recover his crooked past. Horacio assured himself that he was in love. That Ana María Palacio was the woman of his life. The girl also seemed willing to become the redeemer of the seductive writer. Together, in furtive encounters, they clung to the erotic and almost mystical eagerness of a necessary encounter. But the past did not return only to Horacio and Ana. The girl's parents, who had accompanied the final moments of Horacio's marriage, when things were not going well, when there were fights with his mother-in-law, the wife's unhealthy melancholy, until the tragic outcome, did not want any of that for their daughter. They knew that the only thing to do was to keep their daughter apart from the eccentric writer. It was necessary to close the

204 “El cuarto de los misterios era la biblioteca, que Julia [la sirvienta] para aliviarse responsabilidades y trabajar menos, mantenía cerrado. (...) Fue allí que me sorprendió escribiendo, el día que apareció sin anunciarse, por supuesto, Alfonsina Storni. Había pasado por la calle Agüero y quería tener noticias de Quiroga.” (Amorim, El Quiroga que yo conocí, 58-59).

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doors of the house to the foreign widower, so that he would not become a threat against them too. For Horacio, the insidious script, already experienced so many times with other young women repeatedly kept away by their zealous parents, now had an absolutely new character: that thing he called love, that was awakened in himself by the young Ana, was as powerful as the idea of overcoming the traumatic death of his wife. There was no reason to back down. Ana María Palacio loved him back and could turn the world, that is, San Ignacio, back into a less miserable and infertile place. Reliving his youth, Horacio exchanged with the girl furtive love letters in the hollow of a dead tree, invented tricks and codes to hold nocturnal encounters, fleeting kisses, inconsequential dreams, and, like magic, the body that was then heading towards half a century of existence was nourished by that long-lost freshness, by that new promise of life that made him feel invigorated. The Palacios responded to the writer's advances with more and more restrictions. Horacio's visits to the family household were becoming less frequent. On the other side, Ana María suffered more and more sanctions, until she was forced to give in completely to family authority. The parents decided to take her to the house of relatives, in a place unknown to Horacio, until the flame cooled down. Suddenly and with a brief note, Ana María said goodbye to Horacio, who felt that departure and the disappearance of his beloved with an intensity comparable to the pain of the death of his homonymous love. This time, however, the weight of a marble lid weighed even more heavily on him. He was the one who was buried and he had only the consolation of his memories and the abyss of his endless melancholy: once again loneliness, rejection, abandonment and grief. His days were haunted by trauma. Concerning his life, Horacio had only the profound silence caused by when everything stops and is updated before him, or the unappealable immobility of the trauma. Once again, everything for him stopped still. He did not want to write letters, he felt ridiculous at the slightest possibility of going to his old friends to tell them that for the umpteenth time he had fallen in love with the freshness of a young woman and her promise of life. Nor did he want to write to Alfonsina. These were days of prostration, witnessed by no one but the cleaning lady. Every time she returned, she wondered if she would find her master alive. She tried to make conversation with him but he would not say anything. A sepulchral, frightening silence. That man was dry of life and words.

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The weeds were taking over the property surroundings. The only reason the house did not deteriorate more was that she at least cleaned, uselessly, week after week, the red dirt that was depositing itself on the furniture, the few books, and the floor. It was after weeks in that haunting situation that she saw, after so long, that Horacio was typing something on his machine. From then on, the clatter of the keys never ceased and filled the atmosphere of the house with that frantic activity. The master was writing a book again.

Pasado Amor Who can I trust with my pain? – wondered a character by Chekhov. No one was available to hear the story of his son's death, until he, in despair, could only find solace in talking to his own horse. Horacio lived a story that his friends did not really care about. He did not feel like telling it in a letter because it wasn't a frustrated love affair. It was his last lost hope. But, on second thought, maybe he could tell it in literature. Yes, the intricate paths of that personal plot could yield a text. This time not a short story, but a novel. That past that harassed him at every move towards Ana, an Ana that overlapped the other. The two Anas who ultimately disappeared like some perverse magic. Love, madness and death making themselves present. Saying it in writing, through narrative, would give him some serenity, some direction. It might make a few pesos too. It was not a single-effect story, it was not one of the short stories he had learned from Poe. It was a feuilleton novel, in every sense of the word. On those days of unforeseen doublings, Horacio had decided once and for all to be Aquilino Delagoa. To be himself the author of his feuilleton. Why not? At that point in his career, neither magazines nor publishers would say no to him. He had prestige in Buenos Aires, he was at the top. So it would not be difficult to publish the feuilleton about his emotional distress in some major outlet in the country. There was no reason to hide behind a pseudonym any longer. He would leave his mark. His feuilleton was going to be called Pasado Amor. Women inhabit the writer's memories just as women inhabit the narrator's speech in the feuilleton. A narrative that, like few times, he wrote to himself, giving name and movement to his own ghosts. In the solitude of Misiones, he narrated his exercise around the nameless abyss, of failures, guilt, and death. Of love, commercial, literary failures; of

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guilt for Ana’s, Federico’s, his stepfather’s, and his father’s deaths. Deep inside, he mulled over the endless alternative paths he could have taken at some point to prevent the worst from happening. Loneliness and pain tore up his arguments. It was necessary to write. First, a protagonist. An urban, suffering, mysterious man. Morán, who returned to Misiones after the death of his wife. Upon meeting the family of Peruvian neighbors, the Iñíguez, he sees the teenager Magdalena who was just a child when he left. Magdalena, now 17 years old, looked at Morán and relived a scene from the past that neither of them could forget: Morán remembered then – he relived as if a thousand years had not passed since that afternoon – the unreachable stubbornness with which Magdalena stared at her wife lying in the cot, when the day before her death Morán took her outside for fresh air. And the expression of almost scared intensity with which she followed Morán, when he, when dusk had already fallen, lifted his wife in arms like a child and took her inside. I had not remembered that again. Now transported to that expression of what was then a child in the eyes of the current woman, and he remained pensive, though he would not cease from making a huge effort with the hand drill.205

She was the only one who understood him. She was the only one who could save him from himself and redeem him from his past. Morán advanced blindly, with an excess coming not only from the passion that affected him, but also from a hope that – ten years later – the melancholy over the death of his wife could come to an end. Magdalena loved Morán back. She had fallen in love as well, seduced by the possibility of becoming the woman who could redeem him from his incurable pain. Virgin Mary. She addressed him, more than once, in her letters, as “my sweet child”.206 205

“Morán recordó entonces – revivió como si no hubiera pasado desde aquella tarde mil años –, la inacabable fijeza con que Magdalena contempló a su mujer tendida en el catre, cuando el día antes de su muerte Morán la llevó afuera a respirar. Y la expresión de intensidad casi espantada con que siguió a Morán, cuando éste, ya caído el crepúsculo, levantó en brazos a su mujer como a una criatura y la llevó adentro. No había vuelto a recordar eso. Ahora transportada aquella expresión de la que era entonces una criatura a los ojos de la mujer actual, y quedaba pensativo, sin dejar por eso de esforzarse duramente sobre el berbiquí.” (Quiroga, Pasado Amor, 37). 206 “chiquito mío” (Quiroga, Pasado Amor, 71 and 88).

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Love was acquiring spiritual contours. Redemption: Only a woman with an immaculate body and a spotless soul could express herself that way. Here is your destiny – murmured Morán with profound tenderness –. Not in vain do you possess your thirst for kindness and the immeasurable longing in your gaze. My Magda, eternal light of my life.207

While the amatory vortex was infrequent in Horace's texts, the religious one did not even exist. His characters often laughed at religion. The intercrossing of both was unprecedented and did not fit the author's calculatedly restrained form. The feuilleton, however, welcomed the experiment, which was more existential than formal. In the novel, as a counterpoint to a spiritual Magdalena, there was a certain Alicia, made entirely of flesh and sensuality, and whose family would very much like her to marry the prestigious intellectual. As in a romance novel, Morán visited Alicia's house five nights in a row, regularly captive to the desires of the flesh, and, despite the lack of impediments, and the desire of both, he managed to hold his urges, in a demonstration of virtue and high purpose: In the five nights that followed, Morán did not skip a single one at Hontou’s. And like on previous occasions, the excitement was expressed with the same language as love. And Alicia, drunk and fainted, found only in the immensity of her joy the strength to resist.208

Alicia and her mother, living in a village where everything is known about everyone, were well aware of Morán's affair with Magdalena, but they kept insisting that he marry Alicia. Among this myriad of women, the feuilleton brought another one, who really could be a colleague from Anaconda: the Norwegian neighbor, Inés Ekdal, married. Interesting woman, she is the opposite of the local mindset: unsubmissive, autonomous, and intelligent. She treats Morán with affection and camaraderie. They were always careful not to hurt the sensibilities of 207

“Sólo una mujer de cuerpo inmaculado y alma sin mancha podía expresarse así. “He aquí tu destino – murmuró Morán con profunda ternura –. No se posee en balde tu sed de bondad y el insondable anhelo de tu mirada, Magda mía, eterna luz de mi vida.” (Quiroga, Pasado Amor, 56). 208 “En las cinco noches que se sucedieron, Morán no faltó una sola a lo de Hontou. También como en las veces anteriores, la excitación se expresó con el mismo lenguaje que el amor. Y Alicia, ebria y desfallecida, sólo hallaba en la inmensidad de su dicha fuerzas para resistir.” (Quiroga, Pasado Amor, 84).

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their neighbors with material for gossip. Because Morán really liked to enjoy the presence and sharpness of that woman from Norway. Their dialogues are ambiguous and suggestive, giving certain readers the desire that Morán could get rid of the girls and dedicate himself to that woman who strayed from Catholic conventions. Inés had no shame about her body and was completely different from bourgeois damsels who were dependent on their parents and feared God. Inés had something of Norah, Alfonsina, Emilia – women who let themselves be seduced while seducing the writer, although they did not, in the end, admit to giving in to the rigidity that would prevail in their private life. The autofictional feuilleton was on the pages of one of the largest newspapers in the country, La Nación. Day by day, between April 5 and 17, 1927, the readers would follow, without much interest, that unknown version of Horacio Quiroga. Pasado amor was atypical in every way. When republished as a book, some time later, it was the writer's biggest commercial failure, with a mere forty copies sold in bookstores. It did not matter. Horacio wanted to sign the feuilleton, he wanted to publish it as a book. It was not enough to write to elaborate, nor to publish to earn a few pesos. Readers needed to know that the unfortunate story was his. That this was his version of the facts, that something of that brutal death needed to come to light for him to have some peace with himself. It was an attempt to make amends with his own fears. He had already tried a novel once, also from one of his experiences: the book was called Historia de un amor turbio, it was published in 1908, and was equally rejected by the public. To try his hand again at the long form, twenty years later, was his way of dealing with another extreme situation, another situation that had knocked him out. After coming to Misiones without Alfonsina, after facing the mirage of Ana María vanishing, the ground opened up once again, and Horacio had to face failure and death. And he did not get rid of guilt this time either. The book's final move was ingeniously perverse. Magdalena's family bluffed and told Morán that they had thought better of it, that they had reconsidered. Yes, the daughter could marry him if she wanted to, but she would have to give up living with them, her parents. In this way, they placed the weight of decision on the girl's shoulders. She, who, like every teenager at the time, had been brought up to decide nothing. Even so, Morán felt that his chances were growing. He would get to marry Magdalena. Meanwhile, Alicia wrote to him, saying that she already knew that he was getting married, but asking him to come and see her one last time

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anyway. Morán hesitated, assessed the situation, considered the bond he had with Alicia and, unable to comply with his lover's request, gave her an evasive answer, promising that he would visit her in a few days. On the verge of marriage and full of childish hopes, Morán received a brief letter from Magdalena, in which she confessed her impossibility to stand up to her parents and, irrevocably, broke up with him. In the middle of the five lines of Magdalena's letter, the eloquent expression that disarmed Morán's ideals and utopia of redemption: “I am convinced that there is no salvation for us.”209 With that, Morán's fear that Magdalena's and her family's religiosity would ultimately lead her to do her parents' bidding was fulfilled to his detriment. Then, Morán received another piece of news, even more brutal. Alicia had committed suicide. In the context of the feuilleton, the news was hard for Morán, but it echoed much more stronglyover the author of the story: it is never said in the novel what was the reason for the death of Alicia, the teenage lover. On the other hand, we know the circumstances of the death of Ana María Cirés. Morán, when he got to Alicia's house, found not only the young woman's corpse, but also her mother in tears, who told him unambiguously: Yesterday [Alicia] sent for you… you didn’t come. She knew you were getting married… But only yesterday did she find out you were leaving… and she wrote to you. I think, Don Morán… you are a man, and you know what you’re doing… But I think… that if you had come… for a minute just to see her… my poor daughter would still be alive!... There are sufferings whose essence cannot be analyzed due to the tumultuous energy of their motives. But when that pain is wholly made up of remorse, and that remorse is linked to a persistent doom, anything can be expected from this man, except for him to feel – once more and again – a murderer.210

209 “Estoy convencida de que para nosotros no hay salvación.” (Quiroga, Pasado Amor, 100). 210 “Ayer [Alicia] lo mandó buscar… usted no vino. Ella sabía que usted se casaba… Pero recién ayer supo que usted se iba… y le escribió. Yo creo, dón Morán… usted es un hombre, y sabe lo que hace… Pero yo creo… que si usted hubiera venido… un momento nada más a verla… ¡mi pobre hijita viviría todavía!... Hay sufrimientos cuya esencia no se puede analizar por la diversidad tumultuosa de sus motivos. Pero cuando ese dolor está constituido todo él de remordimiento, y este remordimiento está ligado a una persistente fatalidad, puede esperarse cualquier cosa de este hombre, menos la de sentirse – otra vez y de nuevo – un asesino.” (Quiroga, Pasado Amor, 104).

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Although the narrator forgives Morán, Horacio had not forgiven himself. In creating that scene at the end of the book, he actually wanted to talk about the “persistent fatality”, bequeathing to readers the power of forgiveness, so essential to him. It was impossible for Horacio to live with that persistent suicide, which endlessly repeated itself to him. He was continually falling back in love with the same young Ana, and the same young Ana was always dying, no matter her name – whether it was Ana or Alicia. The very short final chapter was blindingly clear. It brought us Morán on the steamboat that would take him away from the jungle in the North. Only the narrator’s voice is heard: From on board the steamship, which, without sounding the horn and under the heavy rain seemed to always flee from Misiones, Morán directed his gaze towards the foggy hill towards the village of maté tea (...). He desired, offered, trusted his truncated life to a redeeming happiness: religion, stronger than a huge and pure love, had denied him it.211

Horacio, in the reckless mouth of the narrator, blamed the Catholic mindset, not realizing that it was also the same shape that gave the contours of his love for Ana. Horacio was coming on the boat with Morán, fed up with attempts at redemption and, worse, worn out by them. In the final sentence of the feuilleton, an attempt to tell himself he was ready for the future: He had invoked Destiny a hundred times, like an invincible Divinity. He could from now on rest at ease: the misfortune of his was met there.212

Horacio, just like Morán, was leaving Misiones. The solutions were precarious, but they were the feasible ones. He would not dare to say, like Morán, that the fatality was really fulfilled. At least he came back a little lighter.

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“Desde la borda del vapor, que sin pitar y bajo la lluvia cerrada parecía huir para siempre de Misiones, Morán dirigió los ojos sobre el monte brumoso hacia el pueblo de la yerba mate (…). Deseó, ofreció, confió su vida trunca a una felicidad redentora: la religión, más fuerte que un grande y puro amor, se la había negado.” (Quiroga, Pasado Amor, 106). 212 “Él había invocado cien veces al Destino, como a una invencible Divinidad. Podía quedar en adelante tranquilo: la fatalidad del suyo quedaba cumplida allí.” (Quiroga, Pasado Amor, 107).

15. FAME IN REVIEW

Expelled from the jungle of Misiones, from the traumatic past, from the painful and sterile present, Horacio returned to Buenos Aires. Wild nature was going to have to be limited to the space of his short stories and, at most, to the new house where he would live. Upon arrival, he decided that he did not want to continue living in the middle of the city, on Agüero Street. If he was going to stay in the capital, at least he should have a place that would remind him of Misiones, where he could keep some animals: the coati Tutankamon and the deer Dick were his children's favorites. He found such a place on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, in the city of Vicente López. There he landed with his Noah's Ark on the banks of the Rio de la Plata, from where he certainly did not feel the ancient breeze of the Uruguay River, which he had known from his childhood in Salto, but something of an aquatic charm nevertheless came to him. Living near the river was a must, discovered through San Ignacio’s horizon. There, from his backyard, he saw the Paraná River in the distance. Vicente López was interesting: few houses, lots of green, and close to the river. It was not difficult to get to Buenos Aires by train, as it was only twenty kilometers from downtown. It was, in any way, possible, pleasant, and convenient. Alfonsina began to participate in literary saraus in the newly opened basement of Café Tortoni, organized by the painter Quinquela Martín. She was becoming increasingly famous in the city, filling theaters with her poetry. Life followed its course and they were not so close anymore. Darío, then a teenager, already had a job. He had started to work in one of Leonardo Glusberg's Anaconda bookstores. One day, Horacio went with his friend César Tiempo to visit his son at the bookstore, which was close to Congress Square. They spent a long time there, talking and looking at the books, until they said goodbye to the boy. Proud of his son, he left with César and they walked down the street. While praising the boy, some blocks ahead, on the corner of Rivadavia Avenue and Montevideo Street, Horacio put his hand in his overcoat pocket and, surprised, pulled out an extremely rare copy. It was a fundamental book

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in his life: it was the first of edition of Leopoldo Lugones’s Las montañas del oro – the book that made him confirm his vows as a poet when he read “Oda a la desnudez” with his friends from Salto. In a burst of fury, he dragged Tiempo back to the bookshop, gave his son a memorable lecture, saying that he could not betray his boss's trust with such a prank, that he was very ashamed and disappointed in him. Finally, he put down the book and walked off stomping and talking to himself. After a long soliloquy of indignation, says César Tiempo, his face softened: Darío is mad. He always goes off on an impulse. In his scale of values the first place is occupied by the heart. An ugly thing for facing life. I would like to offer him an apology for the nonsense I said to him.213

Los desterrados In early 1926, Horacio was collecting stories for a new book. That book was going to be different. He was thinking of carrying out a proposal that Anton Chekhov had once imagined, but had not come to fruition: a volume composed of several autonomous short stories, but which kept some reiterations among themselves, both in landscapes and in characters. Misiones had already existed for Horacio for years, both in his life and in his literature. The time had come to have his Misiones book, with the men and women he had met in that country turned into characters. More than an adventure, more than a short story with unity of effect, each tale would contain a profile of some person coming from other lands, from Buenos Aires, Brazil, Europe, to make an eccentric trajectory in San Ignacio. Horacio would describe and narrate those who, like himself, were enchanted by the territory alien to the presence of the State, where ruins reigned. He would tell the stories of those who arrived there and let themselves be seduced by the most diverse promises: of wealth, of self-annihilation, of letting go of urban and civilized life. Actually, the short stories already existed. His job would be to give them some unity among themselves. He modified their beginnings, creating cross-references between the stories, and was soon achieving the effect of suggesting, through the whole of the texts, a singular territory, a region in literature.

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“– Darío es loco. Se va en impulsos. En la escala de sus valores el primer lugar lo ocupa el corazón. Fea cosa para afrontar la vida. Me gustaría pedirle disculpas por las burradas que le dije.” (Tiempo, Cartas Inéditas y evocación de Horacio Quiroga, 22).

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In the end, he ended up with eight short stories, separated into two parts, in the manner of Brazilian Euclydes da Cunha and others who still kept in themselves some remnants of the 19th century spirit: part I – the environment; part II – the types. The book began with its most famous character, in a short story called “El regreso de Anaconda”. In it, the kilometric snake that had made Horacio famous returned, years later, to the Misiones jungle and, in the company of its colleagues, wanted to reconquer the Paraná River – taken by men – for wildlife. The end of the story was one of unparalleled beauty. To open the second part of the book, Horacio chose a short story that he had published in the previous year, “Los proscritos”, about two Brazilian peones who, after a lifetime in the jungle of Misiones, decided to return to Brazil. Those two Brazilians, now speakers of Portunhol instead of Portuguese, were the owners of the nickname that would give title to the short story and also to the book: “Los desterrados”. The first paragraph was going to be a collective celebration of those singular subjects who inhabited the Misiones universe: Misiones, like any region on the border, is rich in picturesque characters. They tend to be extraordinarily, those who similar to billard balls, have been born with effect. They normally play banda music, and they take off to the most unexpected places. Thus, John Brown, who had been just to look at the ruins for a few hours, stayed there for 25 years; doctor Else, who the distillation of oranges led her to mistake her daughter for a rat; the chemist Rivet, who went out like a lamp, too full of carbonated alcohol; and so many others who, thanks to the effect, reacted in the most unexpected way.214

Misiones, the remembered jungle. Each of the published short stories that made up the new book had been written miles away from their natural habitat. The scenes that remained in the author's head, the stories he had heard, and many others he had invented: Los desterrados was sum and decantation. At a distance. Everything had been written in the semi-comfort of Buenos Aires and then published in magazines or newspapers in the same 214

“Misiones, como toda región de frontera, es rica en tipos pintorescos. Suelen serlo extraordinariamente, aquellos que a semejanza de las bolas de billar, han nacido con efecto. Tocan normalmente banda, y emprenden los rumbos más inesperados. Así Juan Brown, que habiendo ido por sólo unas horas a mirar las ruinas, se quedó 25 años allá; el doctor Else, a quien la destilación de naranjas llevó a confundir a su hija con una rata; el químico Rivet, que se extinguió como una lámpara, demasiado repleto de alcohol carburado; y tantos otros que, gracias al efecto, reaccionaron del modo más imprevisto.” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 626).

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city, between December 1919 and July 1925. Quite a while. Horacio's life was growing long as Anaconda itself. His publisher, for some time now, was no longer Manuel Gálvez's cooperative. Horacio had had a good experience with his last book, El desierto (1924), with his friend Samuel Glusberg, who, expanding the family book business with the Anaconda bookstores, founded the publishing house Babel in 1922 – an acronym for Biblioteca Argentina de Buenas Ediciones Literarias. Samuel, a visionary, had just signed a partnership contract with the Spanish publisher Espasa Calpe that allowed him to distribute his books in Spain. When Horacio agreed with him to publish Los desterrados, it was decided that the printing of all the material would be done in Spain, in order to lower costs. The first edition was printed in Madrid on July 31, 1926, making it the first time that Horacio's short stories could be bought and read in Spain and in Rio de la Plata at the same time. He had never had one of his books published in such a professional way. Gálvez's cooperative was a local enterprise with an important role in consolidating Horacio's work in book form, but Samuel Glusberg had a degree of ambition and professionalism that allowed for higher flights: in addition to his brother's publishing house and bookstore, there was the magazine Babel, which he ran, while also collaborating with outlets such as Caras y Caretas. Although decisive books – such as Ricardo Güiraldes’s Don Segundo Sombra and Roberto Arlt’s El juguete rabioso – were being published with Samuel Glusberg's production, dissemination, and circulation scheme in that same year, that would definitely be the year of Horacio Quiroga. While Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte had had an initial print run of five hundred copies, the new book increased its circulation exponentially: just three months after its initial publication, more than three thousand copies of Los desterrados had already been sold. In the October 2 edition, Caras y Caretas featured a four-page article on Horacio Quiroga's daily life in San Ignacio. Despite the fact that he had not lived in the jungle for several years, the magazine created a spiritual profile of him in that environment. The report began with a half-page photo of Horacio and his two children, followed by the suggestive caption: “Los protagonistas de El desierto, diez años después”. “El desierto” was the short story in which Horacio most fully portrayed an aspect of the death of Ana María Cirés: the widower's days of mourning with his young children in the jungle, worried about the consequences of an insidious infection in his foot, which spread throughout the body and

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intensified the man's delusions. Published in the first days of 1923, in the Atlántida magazine, the short story portrayed the protagonist's widowhood in a subtle way. The author of the article on Caras y Caretas, Enrique Espinoza, said unambiguously that it was an autobiographical story, while at the same time respectfully keeping a unique silence about Ana María Cirés. Espinoza was a generous friend of Horacio. More than that, Espinoza was the pseudonym of his interested editor Samuel Glusberg. Omnipresent, voracious, and with a unique commercial acumen, the same Espinoza would publish, in the following month, as Samuel Glusberg, the 21st issue of Babel. Revista de Bibliografía... entirely dedicated to Horacio. The edition, which was concerned with building an effigy in life, sought nothing less than the writer’s consecration. The cover featured a photo of Horacio accompanied by the hyperbolic words, in capital letters: “EL PRIMER CUENTISTA DE LENGUA CASTELLANA”. On the following page, in three columns, a biographical note on the writer, first giving an account of his literary influence on contemporaries and then his trajectory since birth, highlighting his Argentine origin: although he was born in Salto, his father was from the western side of the Rio de la Plata. No mention was made of the vicissitudes of his past, and the same applied for every other text in the magazine, which once again demonstrated Enrique/Samuel's care in safeguarding his friend's intimacy. He was fully on the plane of the literary effigy, that is for sure: the foreign man of letters consecrated in life. Several colleagues of his generation signed texts, poems, or testimonials to give him praise. Right on the following page, there were statements by Leopoldo Lugones, Roberto Payró, and Alberto Gerchunoff, all older than Horacio. Then, other contemporary peers: Benito Lynch, Arturo Capdevilla, Rafael Alberto Arrieta. Next, a whole critical page by Alfonsina Storni, accompanied by a poem by Juana de Ibarbourou, two of his anacondian colleagues. On the center pages, a translation by Eduardo Mallea of the review by Ernesto Montenegro, a Chilean critic established in the United States. Montenegro had published the article “Horacio Quiroga, literary kin of Kipling and Jack London” in The New York Times Book Review, the previous year, on October 25. It was a long critical text that approached Horacio’s last four books: three of them re-released by Babel publishing house – Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte, El desierto, Historia de un amor turbio – and, separately, in the original layout of the American newspaper, the book released by the Agencia General de Librería – Anaconda.

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In the edition of the Argentine magazine, some excerpts from Montenegro’s original, which could give rise to good discussions, were removed in the name of the ideal of consecration of the writer. There was nothing, therefore, of what was mentioned as “Spanish masculine pride”, which could lead to passionate duels; nor the lack of verisimilitude of short stories such as “Miss Dorothy Phillips, mi esposa”. Anyway, Samuel Glusberg's editing of the Montenegro article purged it of any polemics that might give rise to debate. The counterpoint would depend on national writers and editors. The page headed by the title “Una visita a Horacio Quiroga y varias opiniones” manages to show another side of Horacio, carefully softened by the strategically chosen word: “opiniones”. First, a statement by the editor Manuel Gálvez, responsible for publishing Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte. His image of Horacio, after their break, was not at all generous: Few writers feel the nature of things and beings as intensely as Quiroga, and that’s why his stories have a colourfulness and an originality that are so extraordinary. He lacks tenderness and emotion; and he writes a prose that is rather incorrect, resulting, in part, from his need to synthesize and cram his paragraphs to the extreme. But on the other hand he possesses a tremendous potency in imagination and a rare mastery in producing sensations, especially horror.215

Those accusations that he wrote badly were becoming more and more frequent. The label was almost commonplace against writers who, like him, incorporated into their literature the voices of the language heard on the street, whether in Buenos Aires or in San Ignacio. The young Roberto Arlt was beginning to publish in those days and was already called semi-literate. Horacio, on the other hand, just wanted his stories to “breathe life”. As the positive and complimentary judgments grew, so did the accusations against him, to the point that Horacio was forced, more than once, to publish articles in which he made his profession of faith as a short story writer and portrayed his vision of literary language. In one of these, he showed his degree of commitment to his own fictional world:

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“Pocos escritores sienten tan intensamente el carácter en las cosas y en los seres como Quiroga, y por eso sus cuentos tienen un colorido y una originalidad tan extraordinaria. Carece de ternura y de emoción; y escribe en una prosa harto incorrecta, resultado en parte, de su afán de sintetizar y apretar sus párrafos hasta la exageración. Pero en cambio posee una gran potencia imaginativa y una rara maestría para producir sensaciones, sobre todo de horror.” (Gálvez, “Una visita a Quiroga y varias opiniones”).

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Narrate as if your story was of no interest other than for the small environment of your characters, of whom you could have been one. Not in any other way can one obtain life in a short story.216

The narrator, for him, definitely had nothing to do with the enlightened man of the 19th century, who narrated from his office the hardships of life happening outside, separating himself from the universe of his characters with a different language and a different worldview. Horacio became the snakes he narrated, as he became the peones and the hunters. And there was a language for it, impure, mingled, and living. However, Horacio already knew by then that defending his style was not enough. The price of fame achieved with the type of literature he produced meant receiving other attacks, to which it was not possible to respond. Manuel Gálvez, in addition to criticizing his style, attacked his personality. It did not escape Horacio how the critic twisted the phrase to say that it was not the text, but the writer himself who “lacks tenderness and emotion” and that the following sentenced was also directed at him: “possesses a tremendous potency in imagination and a rare mastery in producing sensations, especially horror”. Yes, Horacio, the cold, insensitive man, who aroused horrendous sensations, and who also could not write correctly and without extreme conciseness. There was nothing to be replied to Gálvez. All he deserved was silence and oblivion, and that was what Horacio did, he let Gálvez talk. On the same page of the magazine, the writer Luisa Israel offered a short account of a visit to Horacio. With her writing, she mimicked a horror story, in which she arrived at the writer's house with the premonition that she would find something terrible. Such an impression was confirmed by the sight of the skins of snakes exposed on the walls. Lastly, she tried to mentally establish the connection between the objects found and the Uruguayan's work, with the following result: We penetrated the house. We penetrated with caution, with the restraint of someone who is about to find something strange, something different; with the sensation of waiting to discover a little fear… Effectively, in the darkness of the interior, which seems darker still from the vivid lights of outside, we glimpse, nailed to the walls in laborious arrangement, a profusion of snake and serpent skins, of all lengths, all widths, all colours, We know that he himself has given death to the most fearful yararás… and we meditate. We 216

“Cuenta como si tu relato no tuviera interés más que para el pequeño ambiente de tus personajes, de los que pudiste haber sido uno. No de otro modo se obtiene la vida en el cuento.” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 1273).

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Chapter 15 think of his ouvre… we seek a correlation between the cold skin of the serpent and the cold terror he awakes in us.217

Israel wanted to make literature by comparing the cold skin of the dead snake – did she touch it? – with the cold dread produced by the writer’s work, a cold dread that she turned into a character in her account. Her portrait was the fruit of her experience reading Horacio's stories, more than of what came from the man in front of her. Curiously, her text ended without any dialogue with the writer, as if he were a spectral presence, a modern Nosferatu. Aside from that dysphoric page, Horacio was pleased with what he saw. He was celebrated like never before. On the back cover, a large advertisement for his books. With the exception of his first three works – Los arrecifes de coral, El crimen del otro, and Los perseguidos, all sold out and which Horacio did not consider republishing – there were eight other books available: Historia de un amor turbio (in a new, corrected edition), Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte, El salvaje (with two thousand published copies), Cuentos de la selva, Las sacrificadas, Anaconda (with two thousand copies), El desierto (also with two thousand), and the new and recently published Los desterrados, already over three thousand published copies, with less than five months of publication. Horacio, like his work Anaconda, had arrived where he had always wanted to be. Not bad.

The boys of the fancy street Who is afraid of Horacio Quiroga? The readers of his horror short stories, such as “El almohadón de plumas”, “La gallina degollada”, “La cámara oscura”, and who else? In Buenos Aires, some writers of the new generation admired him, such as Robert Arlt. Twenty-two years younger than his idol, Roberto had released his debut novel that same year, El juguete rabioso, an urban narrative such as had never been done before in Rio de la 217

“Penetramos en la casa. Penetramos con cautela, con el recogimiento del que va a hallar algo extraño, algo diferente; con la sensación de esperar descubrir un poco de temor… Efectivamente, en la penumbra del interior, que más obscuro parece por el vivo resplandor de afuera, se divisan, clavadas en los muros en laborioso acomodo, una profusión de pieles de víboras, y de culebras, de todos los largos, de todos los anchos, de todos los colores. Sabemos que él mismo ha dado muerte a los más temibles yararás… y meditamos. Pensamos en su obra... buscamos una correlación entre la piel fría de la serpiente y el frío de pavor que nos infunde.” (Israel, “Una visita a Quiroga y varias opiniones”).

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Plata, in which the affected bourgeoisie – the one in Horacio’s own stories – was at the center of the scene, but the poor, the children of migrants, and other marginalized people. El juguete rabioso and Arlt's other novels would do to the Buenos Aires city what Horacio had done to the Misiones jungle: to reveal its singular types, its language, its marginality, and the stories that had remained silent until then. Arlt himself, in one of his super popular chronicles of those years, Aguafuertes Porteñas, paid homage to Horacio, paying him tribute as a great writer: The other night my friend Feilberg, who is the collectionist of the strangest stories I know, said to me: ‘Have you not noticed the lit up windows at three in the morning? See, there you have the argument for a curious note. And immediately he delved into the nooks and crannies of a story that would not have been turned down by Villiers de L’Isle Adam or Barbey de Aurevilly or the bearded Horacio Quiroga. A magnificent story related to a lit window at three in the morning.218

However, it was not all roses. In the younger generation, there were those who were strongly uncomfortable with Horacio, precisely those who had already had contact with him at Norah Lange's house, on Tronador Street: boys like Jorge Luis Borges and Eduardo Mallea, people who were pleased with another vision of literature and the literate’s way of being. Nothing farther from a man like Horacio than a boy like Georgie. The young avant-garde, as Beatriz Sarlo remarked, presented themselves as “the new” and all those who represented previous generations should be duly set aside: thus, they attacked in their beautiful and cheerful magazine, Martín Fierro, old-school writers, such as Manuel Gálvez. They were ambiguous in relation to Leopoldo Lugones, who financially supported the publication; they had a singular respect for Rubén Darío, having once published an article against the popular editions of the Nicaraguan poet's

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“La otra noche me decía el amigo Feilberg, que es el coleccionista de las historias más raras que conozco: – ¿Usted no se ha fijado en las ventanas iluminadas a las tres de la mañana? Vea, allí tiene argumento para una nota curiosa. Y de inmediato se internó en los recovecos de una historia que no hubiera despreciado Villiers de L’Isle Adam o Barbey de Aurevilly o el barbudo de Horacio Quiroga. Una historia magnífica relacionada con una ventana iluminada a las tres de la mañana.” (Arlt, Aguafuertes porteñas, 72).

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work, with precarious layout and printed on newsprint, that were sold in the suburbs. They said it was a disrespect to his memory. As for Horacio, they dedicated a monumental silence to him. On the rare occasions that he appeared on the pages of Martín Fierro magazine, it was to be satirized. The lateral and satirical mentions were almost always of a personal nature. For them, Horacio was the rude man, the man who spit on the ground, the womanizer. Regarding his literature, they suggested that he was a mere imitator of Kipling. In issue 43 of the magazine, published on August 15, 1927, they dedicated a burlesque epitaph to him: “He wrote dramatic stories Sorrowful to the extreme Like ink in the bloodstream He made alligators and wild boars Lions and bears speak. The jungle itself was laid at his feet Until an English author's conceit (Kipling's) dotted his i's And crossed all his t's.”219

It was their way of responding to the praise in the article about Horacio, by Ernesto Montenegro, in The New York Times Book Review, published in the Horacio tribute issue of Babel magazine, translated by Mallea himself, a member of Martin Fierro. While in the New Yorker article Horacio was celebrated as a relative of Kipling, in the satirical epitaph, he was demoted to the status of an imposter, a cheap imitator of the British writer. The ill will of the Buenos Aires avant-garde cliques manifested itself in gaudy colors. The triumphant arrival of Martín Fierro, with its young writers in their twenties, had fully hit Horacio’s pride. They wanted to impose their aesthetic agenda on Argentine literature. They said no more 19th century 219

“Escribió cuentos dramáticos Sumamente dolorosos Como los quistes hidáticos. Hizo hablar leones y osos Caimanes y jabalíes. La selva puso a sus pies Hasta que un autor inglés (Kipling) le puso al revés Los puntos sobre las íes.” (Martín Fierro, “Parnaso Satírico”, 374).

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belletrism, which Horacio did not agree with either. They had their eyes wide open for the European avant-garde, which Horacio saw from afar and with only relative curiosity. Thus, aesthetically, Horacio would not be their natural enemy, except for the fact that he was already established (or old), recognized by many, famous, and published in major newspapers. Horacio was one of the writers to oppose. The pages of Martín Fierro, a large format magazine, were a feast for the eyes: sculptures, paintings, caricatures that forced readers to re-educate their eyes. Young Argentines Silvina Ocampo, Emilio Pettoruti, Xul Solar, and Norah Borges shared the space with European artists who were about Quiroga's age: Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, among others. The aesthetic stance proposed by those young people was remarkable. But they not only wanted to open a flank in the aesthetic of the period, they really wanted to be the ground zero of the Argentine twentieth century. The process would be gradual, but Horacio felt that, at the peak of his career, in 1926, increasingly strong questions began to emerge, against his figure, his writing, and everything he represented. For the first time, for him, being a successful, popular, translated, honored writer became more of a heavy burden than something to which be grateful. He was in the space that others wanted to occupy. The following year would start timidly. Horacio gave start to a series of pieces about scientists, artists, and various adventurers, in which some characteristics that the writer considered heroic and exemplary were highlighted. The discoverer of anesthesia, Horace Wells, the biologist Louis Pasteur, the writer Edgar Allan Poe, the composer Richard Wagner, among others, were there. When he thought about publishing the series, Horacio Quiroga was – like Rubén Darío with his Los raros – naming the most visible bodies of his personal galaxy, made up not only of literati, but also of scientists, adventurers, pioneers, and dreamers. With that, food for the year was guaranteed, as the publication of Pasado Amor in book form went unnoticed. With an old, well-known, and unattractive text, the volume did not take many people to the bookstores. Horacio is a short story writer. Horacio is a short story writer. Horacio is a short story writer… – a mantra that was repeated in the readers' minds and made them not have much interest in the little romantic novel. After all, even Aquilino Delagoa could write a text like that.

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Dissecting grudges Years passed, many of them. On the pages of a personal notebook, a writer's diary, there were some verses, those secret ones, which will not be known, unless after death, when everything is already silent: Horacio Quiroga. One needn’t work hard, if you’re in vogue: such is the fame of Horacio Quiroga…220

Horacio had already disappeared from the world of the living for more than four decades. His fame, however, was being consolidated in that country and in others, and, even after so long, it continued to bother the writer who, unconforming, used some of his idle moments to dedicate his cruel little verses to Horacio: “Inexplicable. “Quiroga. Hopeless. “Want to be a writer, and you’re a fan of Horacio Quiroga? “You may want to make a noose out of that toga.”221

They were like the poems in the Obituaries of Martín Fierro, written more than half a century ago. But they were not. When Martín Fierro began to be published in its second period, in 1924, the owner of the intimate diary was a ten-year-old child. It is true that reading the magazine helped to forge his personality, along with a lot of English literature and an unavoidable admiration for Georgie. The man who wrote the verses was Adolfo Bioy Casares, already in his sixties, who, even though he was the author of the classic novel about the charms of cinema – La invención de Morel – kept within himself the desire to achieve perhaps even greater glory. While the promise did not come true, he kept the habit of cursing against writers from the present and the past who represented bad literature to him, who had unavoidably become more 220

“Horacio Quiroga. No importa ser chambón, si estás en boga: lo demuestra la fama de Horacio Quiroga…” (Casares, Descanso de caminantes: diarios íntimos, 89). 221 “Inexplicables. Quiroga. Sin esperanza. ¿Vas a escribir y admira a Horacio Quiroga? Dejamos a tu alcance banco y soga.” (Casares, Descanso de caminantes: diarios íntimos, 204).

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famous than him – whether they were Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Roberto Arlt, or Horacio Quiroga. On the one hand, he was bothered by the space of these vile and rough writers, since he knew he was superior to everyone, even though he had chosen in life to live, comfortably, in the large shadow of Jorge Luis Borges. Georgie had the sparks he valued: the style, the wit, and an elegant misogyny. With Borges, Adolfo was in the company of an equal, although the taste for sex and for concrete adventures was something that radically differentiated them. Adolfo presented himself to the world as a seducer, very different from the withdrawn Borges. So much the better: in this way, he felt superior to his master at something. When Bioy met Borges, around 1931, the avant-garde flames had already cooled, but not the desire shared by both to strengthen, in the local panorama, the defense of an elite art. That same year, Victoria Ocampo founded a magazine that, although being called Sur, had its eyes turned to the North, in an exercise of aesthetic Europeanism that excluded popular writers – such as Alfonsina Storni, Horacio Quiroga, Roberto Arlt. The duo was delighted with the project and played an active role in it. Among the compatriots, Silvina Ocampo, José Bianco, Eduardo Mallea, and others, were the ones who fit in the magazine. It was also there that the doors were opened for a young bearded man, an admirer of Quiroga and Poe, but also of jazz and boxing, to publish one of his first short stories, “Casa tomada”: Julio Cortázar. At the beginning of his journey, Bioy, fifteen years younger than Borges, began, fascinated, to sniff out Georgie. They wrote a yogurt add together and, later, detective stories and movie scripts. His identification with his friend was to such an extent that Bioy felt he had found in Borges resonance for his reservations against Horacio: a hatred that they began to nurture in intimacy over the years. With the same unceremoniousness with which he wrote verses to the bearded man, Bioy built, over more than half a century, a monumental diary of 1660 pages, in which he (un)scrupulously recorded, with almost daily regularity, his conversations with Georgie. The monumental register goes from 1947 to 1989, when Borges finally said his final words, never recorded by his friend. From a merciful edition, which reduced the doorstopper to 691 pages, keeping only the literary conversations, I reaped a succulent fruit: an afternoon tea in 1963, dedicated to discussing the literature of Horacio: Monday, 27th May [1968]. He has the worst opinion of Quiroga. We read “El almohadón de pluma”, extraordinarily weak. BORGES: “Reading that story is unhealthy; it persuades the reader of the impossibility of writing.

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Chapter 15 For each succession of three words, there is a change of subject. Sometimes he makes use of the pronoun él; sometimes we think that who entered the room is the carpet. The construction of the story is not better. Many details at the beginning have no reason for being there in the end; there is a lot of architecture, but the characters seem alone in the world, with no family or friends. The maid, who appears at the end, did not exist until that moment. The author suffers from the mania of placing the subject at the end of the phrase, which produces unstimulating moments of suspense, in which one no longer knows to whom corresponds what one is reading. To conclude, there is one paragraph, which does not seem to be part of a story, but the recommendations of a newspaper for housewives. Then we read two stories from Los desterrados: “El hombre muerto” and “La cámara oscura”. The plot of the first is not that of a short story, but of a poem; the second, despite some ambiguities, is poor; but the truth is that both are well written, especially if compared to ‘El almohadón de pluma’. BIOY: ‘I think some time must have passed between the publication of the first and the second two; during that time, Quiroga learned how to write.’. BORGES: ‘What we can see is the will to write short stories. To write them, even without ideas, without a plot, without anything.’222

The two gentlemen in shirt sleeves, sitting in front of a plate of biscuits, with their cups of English tea, scrupulously say that it is the day to renew the vows of self-affirmation, scolding the Uruguayan's bad taste literature. Georgie, then, willing to exercise his rhetoric, tried to find everything that 222

“Lunes, 27 de mayo [de 1968]. Tiene la peor opinión de Quiroga. Leemos “El almohadón de pluma”, extraordinariamente débil. BORGES: “Leer ese cuento es poco saludable; persuade al lector a la imposibilidad de escribir. Para toda sucesión de tres palabras hay un cambio de sujeto. A veces recurre al pronombre él; a veces uno cree que quien entró al cuarto es la alfombra. La factura del cuento no es mejor. Muchos detalles del principio no tienen ninguna razón de ser al final; hay mucha arquitectura, pero los personajes parecen solos en el mundo, sin familia ni amigos. La sirvienta, que aparece al final, no existió hasta ese momento. El autor padece de la manía de colocar el sujeto al final de la frase, lo que produce momentos de suspenso poco estimulantes, en el que uno no sabe a quién corresponde lo que va leyendo. Para concluir, hay un párrafo, que no parece de cuento, sino de recomendaciones de un periódico para las amas de casa. Después leemos dos cuentos de Los desterrados: “El hombre muerto” y “La cámara oscura”. El argumento del primero no es de cuento, sino de poema; el segundo, a pesar de algunas ambigüedades, es pobre; pero la verdad es que ambos están bien escritos, sobre todo si se los compara con ‘El almohadón de pluma’. BIOY: ‘Creo que habrá pasado un tiempo entre la publicación del primero y de los segundos; en ese tiempo Quiroga aprendió a escribir.’. BORGES: ‘Lo que se ve es la voluntad de escribir cuentos. De escribirlos, aun sin ideas, sin argumento, sin nada.’” (Bioy Casares, Borges, 355-356).

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seemed negative to him in the short story. On the other side of the table, an always youthful and anxious Adolfo betrayed his own phlegm when he considered that the two final stories were well written, ending with a comment that displeases – in one fell swoop – Horacio and Georgie: “during that time, Quiroga learned how to write”. After the tea and buttered biscuits were finished, Adolfito would sit down at his desk and, reliving the pleasures of the afternoon, carefully and minutely recorded his conversation with the master. He felt vindicated, like the child who had been told by his mother, after being teased by his friends at school, that he was indeed the most beautiful boy on the face of the Earth. Horacio had a prominent place in the constellation of the two Argentines: a shooting star that had gotten into their shoes. Renewing a youthful Satirical Parnassus when one is already a grown man, a recognized, awardwinning, translated, internationally famous writer, shows the importance of Horacio in Bioy's intimate universe. But what about Borges? What was it necessary to keep on claiming, under the veil of disqualification? At that table there was no room, not even cookies, to continue the conversation. There were those who said that perhaps the best place was on a divan. But it did not take any Freud to see that Georgie had become entangled in subtle plots. His reading of “El almohadón de plumas” was revealing. The story, published in Caras y Caretas, in the Buenos Aires family magazine, touched on points susceptible to his bourgeois pudency, and its success transformed it into a classic of fantastic literature from Rio de la Plata to the point that, without such disruptive passions, it would certainly appear in Antología de literatura fantástica, organized by Georgie, Adolfo, and Silvina in the 1940s. Well, if Santiago Dabove was there, with his “Ser polvo”, it was essential that at least “El hombre muerto”, “El espectro” were there, in addition to the uncomfortable “El almohadón de plumas”. But the pudency that blushed Borges’s cheeks forced him to exclude it. “El almohadón de plumas” was sexual, the subject was both exposed and hidden, like the purloined letter on top of Dupin's desk. The account veiled Alicia's defloration and mortal bleeding on her honeymoon.

Georgie in the pillow On July 13, 1907, when the story was first published with the title “El almohadón de plumas”, Georgie boy was only seven years old. The opening sentence of the text said:

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Chapter 15 Her honeymoon was a grave idyll, much more than what she had feared.223

This blunt beginning, proper of a horror story, would be modified ten years later, when the short story would reappear in book version, in Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte. Georgie was then 17 years old and living in Switzerland. Horacio was looking for more subtlety, with another sentence, much more synthetic, suggestive, and ambiguous: Her honeymoon was a long shiver.224

With the new version, the shiver that one might expect from the anticipation and consummation of the first sexual experience was replaced by the shiver of horror stories. The lover turned into a monster. Sex, into something worthy of shivers. That was the version Georgie read when he returned from his European tour with his family. The theme disturbed him. Georgie himself would avoid referring to sex in his thousands of pages. When he did, it was aseptic and lateral, as in “La secta del Fénix”; when he was more explicit, he portrayed Emma Zunz, the protagonist of the eponymous story, in which the virgin gives herself to a foreign sailor to forge a rape; finally, “Ulrica”, said to have been inspired by Norah Lange, is a diaphanous and specular relationship. Malaise. Thus, to him the story of the newlyweds Jordán and Alicia was uncomfortable, unpalatable, as told from the perspective of the young woman's frustration, in the concentrated space of a few months after the wedding, in a large, white, and cold house – an environment and period that coincided with Alicia's illness and death, under circumstances only clarified at the end of the short story: the dizzying sucking of her blood by a bird parasite hidden inside her pillow. A very synthetic short story that, however, gave Georgie some margin to say that it lacked unity, because “many details at the beginning have no reason for being there in the end”. Ricardo Piglia, a great admirer of the short form, in his “Tesis sobre el cuento”, said: A short story always tells two stories. (…) The classic short story (Poe, Quiroga) narrates story 1 in the forefront (…) and constructs story 2 in secret (…) The art of the short story writer consists in knowing how to codify

223

“Su luna de miel fue un idilio grave, mucho más de lo que ella había temido.” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 97). 224 “Su luna de miel fue un largo escalofrío.” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 97).

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story 2 in the gaps of story 1. A visible tale hides a secret tale, told in an elliptical and fragmentary way.225

Georgie did not want or could not see the second hidden tale in that short story and complained about that blind spot, attributing inept writing to Horacio, without being able to confess what was unbearable for him. In the short story, the visible one, the surface tale, of course, was that of Alicia's honeymoon and illness, which led to her death, to the astonishment of her husband Jordán and the doctors, in the always white, cold, and illuminated mansion where they lived. The story, however, did not end with the death of the protagonist. A later scene added new data to the story: a parasite, supposedly responsible for Alicia's death, was found in the girl's pillow. Anyone who read the story and went back over their own steps would return from the creature in the pillow to the moment when Alicia fell ill and never got up again, halfway through the tale. The end, therefore, did not send the reader back to the beginning of the short story, but only to its middle. And that is probably why Georgie complained, saying there were elements from the beginning that are never picked up again. In the final paragraph, the narrator – in a scientistic tone – explained the nature of the strange parasite, naturalizing for the reader that aberration that could be considered implausible. Something was lacking, insisted Georgie. For if the parasite explained the young woman's cause of death, it did not solve the problem posed at the beginning: Alicia’s honeymoon. Without considering that the honeymoon presupposes, in the cultural context of the story, sexual initiation and bleeding from defloration, one is unable to move forward. The horror of sex. The analogical and subtle passage that gave unity to the short story was the following: the bride was bleeding because she had sex on her honeymoon. Sex with her husband was traumatic and she fell ill. Hence the parasite – hot and warm – is the substitute for the icy husband in the story. Alicia could not stand Jordan's touch. When he got physically close, when he touched her, she cried, she trembled. There is more than one scene like this: “(...) with deep tenderness, he passed his hand very slowly along her head, and Alicia immediately burst

225

“Un cuento siempre cuenta dos historias. (…) El cuento clásico (Poe, Quiroga) narra en primer plano la historia 1 (…) y construye en secreto la historia 2 (…) El arte del cuentista consiste en saber cifrar la historia 2 en los intersticios de la historia 1. Un relato visible esconde un relato secreto, narrado de un modo elíptico y fragmentario.” (Piglia, Formas breves, 71-75).

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into tears, throwing her arms around his neck. She cried for a long time, all her fear silenced, crying louder at the slightest caress from Jordán.”226 When Alicia – already sick – suffered from her hallucinations, she trembled once more when recognizing Jordán: “Alicia looked at him in a strange way, looked at the carpet, looked at him again, and after a long time of stupefied confrontation, she came to. She smiled and took her husband's hand in hers, caressing it for half an hour, trembling.”227 That was a really strange love nest. Georgie wanted the social lives of the characters, their families, anything that would take his eyes off a failed honeymoon and sex. Alicia, in her horror of sex, also abdicated the “strange love nest”228 that is her home; she leaves the “dreamed childishness”229 and the “old dreams”230 and starts to live “asleep”231. She exchanged the house for the bed, and the bed for the pillow, where something was sucking her, vertiginously. Alicia, at the height of her illness: “She didn't want her bed touched or even her pillow fixed.”232 She safeguarded the bed - her place of sueño - and the pillow on it from the external environment. There is a passage in the short story in which Alicia, already somewhat delirious in a scene of horror that could be compared to sexual ecstasy – eyes wide, mouth open in a mute scream, nostrils and lips glistening with sweat –, finally screams her husband’s name twice while still staring at the anthropoid monster that had appeared in her vision on the rug; to which Jordán replied: “It’s me, Alicia, it’s me!”233. After a few moments of “stunned confrontation”234, Alicia comes to herself and begins to caress her husband’s hand, trembling. 226

(...) con honda ternura, le pasó muy lento la mano por la cabeza, y Alicia rompió en seguida en sollozos, echándole los brazos al cuello. Lloró largamente, todo su espanto callado, redoblando el llanto a la más leve caricia de Jordán.” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 98). 227 “Alicia lo miró con extravío, miró la alfombra, volvió a mirarlo, y después de largo rato de estupefacta confrontación, volvió en sí. Sonrió y tomó entre las suyas la mano del marido, acariciándola por media hora temblando.” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 99). 228 “extraño nido de amor” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 97). 229 “soñadas niñerías” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 97). 230 “antiguos sueños” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 97). 231 “adormida” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 97). 232 “No quiso que le tocaran la cama ni aun que le arreglaran el almohadón.” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 100). 233 “¡Soy yo, Alicia, soy yo!” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 99). 234 “estupefacta confrontación” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 99).

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Alicia's payment to fulfill her desire for tenderness and warmth was her own blood. That new love nest was hot and red – the bottom of the pillow was completely different from the icy mansion where she used to live with her husband. Alicia had exchanged Jordán for the creature, and neither of the two endings in the story – Alicia’s death and the narrator’s scientistic explanation – would be able to give closure or shed light on one of the central problems raised by the narrative: the incommunicability between the young couple, solved by Alicia's voluntary surrender to the vertiginous suction in another love nest. The narrator's final explanation silenced about what could not be said, but left an insinuation: These bird parasites, tiny in their usual habitat, attain under certain conditions enormous proportions. Human blood seems to be particularly favorable to them, and it is not uncommon to find them in feather pillows.235

Under certain conditions, says Horacio's narrator. The second story, hidden, is one of such unique conditions. Sexual. The narrator took Alicia's silence for himself and carried out the unspoken: about the marriage, he said nothing. What is revealing inhabited this silence: the silent violence and the traumatic potential of an act in which, without the feather of fantasy, sex and death are easily intertwined. Georgie could not hear this second story and complained about his own deafness, attributing it to Horacio, through the night of time.

235 “Estos parásitos de las aves, diminutos en el medio habitual, llegan a adquirir en ciertas condiciones proporciones enormes. La sangre humana parece serles particularmente favorable, y no es raro hallarlos en los almohadones de pluma.” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 101).

16. MEETING A WOMAN, REPEATING A LOVE

Some years are short, while others are endless. For that man, 1926 never ended. Before the Earth went all the way around the Sun, he released his fundamental work, which was the synthesis of what he had been doing, and he was recognized for it, while his texts continued to appear in different places: United States, Brazil, France, and the Kingdom of Bohemia, in what is currently the Czech Republic. Horacio was back in the present: his strange exorcism of the past in San Ignacio had enabled him to make new bets. Even before infinity ended, he would find a new love. Properly installed with Eglé and Darío in the country house in Vicente López, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, his eyes would wander out the window during the train trips to the capital, but sometimes they would stay inside the carriage as well. It was on one of these trips that he met a girl with a penetrating and mysterious look. Her name was María Elena Bravo and she was nineteen years old. She was Eglé's friend and they were about the same age. Horacio, at 48, had a look that rarely met his interlocutors and that could give rise to any reaction, except indifference. When Horacio saw María, he understood, in advance, that he would have problems. Eglé would feel terrible to see her father courting her colleague. María's parents would make a scandal, as he had witnessed so many times, and everything would be difficult. Everyone would wave through the skies of Buenos Aires the flag of an obscene age gap, of Horacio's widowhood, of his fifty years of life. Would Horacio be willing, once again, to face all that for the mirage of a woman? The answer did not take long to come to him: yes, of course he was as willing as ever. Romantic love was a nightmare from which he would never awake. When confronting María's gaze, he allowed himself to be taken over by this woman of disturbing beauty, inquisitive gaze, a river of possibilities. María, for her part, was not alien to the wild appeal of Horacio's sad, clear eyes. It was true: he was adrift again.

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Things went according to the script and Eglé, who should not like to see her father hanging, too friendly, around her school friend, played up her part and ended up not liking that situation at all. Horacio approached María as a friend, and that bothered his daughter even more: they had in common a predilection for Wagner – who did not? – and the love for literature. He lent María his books and gave her the newly published edition of Los desterrados: “To Miss María Helena Bravo, with a respectful and cordial homage from H. Quiroga. 30 – XI – 26”.236 María Elena's readerly appetites – she who preferred to write her name without an H – increased to keep the flame of her interest in Horacio burning. That was her way of being with him without having to justify herself too much to her friend. The girl joined the Asociación Wagneriana de Buenos Aires, a classical music club, which the writer frequented with his family on a weekly basis, in order to attend concerts. María and Horacio could already furtively see each other between performances, to the scandal of his daughter and anyone else who caught sight of them in some secluded spot in the club. María's parents had no problem in playing their role in the drama: they should initially be frontally against the encounters – and they were indeed. Soon, it would be up to them to forbid their daughter from seeing the writer. That is what they did. The final resort, of course, was to send María to Montevideo to stay out of that writer, that neighbor, that old man’s harmful gaze. The zealous parents did not deviate at all from the well-known script. Horacio, in turn, experienced in the art of passionate acting in forbidden loves, reacted as had already become usual in situations like that. He resisted, with ever more ingenious stratagems to make their encounters possible. When he heard that María was going to Montevideo, he sent her a box with paper sheets and envelopes, so that they could continue their correspondence without major difficulties. There was no way to stop them. The attraction was fulminating and reciprocal. The parents, over time, realized that it would not be all bad to accept their daughter's desire, after all, Horacio was a respectable widower, writer... an artist. He was far from being their first option, but he was still an acceptable alternative. They complied. Eager and not knowing for sure in which chapter of his life he was, whether he was experiencing new love or repeating one from the past, Horacio threw himself into the task as never before, and this required energy 236

“A la señorita María Helena Bravo, respetuoso y cordial homenaje de H. Quiroga. 30 – XI – 26”. (Handwritten dedication by Horacio Quiroga in a copy of Los desterrados).

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from him. María, surely, was not like the others: she was not a little girl to be impressed by anything he said. She was ambitious, she enjoyed comfort, and expected a man like Horacio to live up to her high expectations. When they started talking about the convenience of living together in Misiones, María was seduced by the idea, but made it clear that she was not going to live in a wooden shed. It was necessary to have some of the comforts of civilized life: a solid house, with piped and heated water, and minimum conditions to raise the children who would come. Horacio understood. He would need to try harder this time. María was not like the girls of past generations: she was willful and did not bend to restrictions that seemed absurd to her. Horacio felt as if he were dating an anaconda, with the difference that María was willing to marry him. In the end, everyone gave in: Eglé, for having to be her friend's sisterin-law; María's father and stepmother, for having a son-in-law almost the same age as them; Horacio, for giving up an immediate departure to San Ignacio. For the time being, they would all live in Vicente López, trying to smooth out the rough edges of a relationship that was far from simple. It was time to sow. The following year would start with Horacio trying to raise some money. His friend Isidoro Escalera, his neighbor in San Ignacio and the one responsible for the maintenance of the farm, the house, and the plantation in his absence, had suddenly become his interlocutor of choice. It was necessary to rebuild paradise. In addition to talking about their yerba mate plantation, the orange grove from which they produced liqueur, the peanut candy and other small things, they would talk about renovations and ways to raise capital: I received your letter, with details and expenses from the damn territorial tax. Let me know if you received the plants, and send me back the forms of that operation so there is no inconvenience. The reason for being a little short on cash is that I’m getting married, Don Escalera. The bride in question is a close friend of Eglé’s, since she is very young, and as blonde as a baby. It will be for August or September. And although I am not very generous, I need a few things at home for this somersault. You must know her already, since she knows you already quite well through us.237 237

“Recibí su carta, con detalles y gastos del maldito impuesto territorial. Avíseme si le llegaron las guías de la yerba, y envíeme de vuelta formularios de esa operación para que no haya transtorno. El motivo de andar un poco urgido de plata, es que me caso, don Escalera. La novia en cuestión es íntima amiga de Eglé, pues es muy joven, y tan rubia como la guagua. Será para agosto o septiembre. Y aunque no soy muy rumboso, siempre necesito unas cuantas cosas en casa para tal salto mortal.

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The lovers were in a hurry and anxious, and did not even care to respect the deadline set by themselves. The initially planned date – August or September – ended up being anticipated by the eagerness of their desires: they got married on July 16, 1927. Years later, María would remember that distant Saturday morning and how she and Horacio met: Sometimes, I also remember the day when we were married. It was a Saturday morning, since we went for lunch to my father’s and step-mother, with Eglé, Darío and my sister Haydée, who is two years younger than me. Also, my father’s brother came, Clodoaldo, and Horacio’s witness, the Iglesias cat, his doctor and close friend. Then we headed to the house where I had already met Horacio with his two children, his canoe, his motorbike and his books. In that house everything began lending me books and writing in one of his, as a dedicatory: ‘From here until eternity’.238

Those were happy years. The improvised wedding, since Horacio was an atheist and averse to any religious ceremony, took place with a discretion that corresponded to the man. They signed the papers and María, as usual, changed her name: now she was María Helena Bravo de Quiroga. No photographic records of that day remain, if any even existed. Those first years, however, were recorded on film, by the work of the filmmaker from Salto and friend of Horacio, Enrique Amorim. He filmed, in tribute to his friend, a barbecue at Horacio's house. A precious short film, in 16mm, approximately 3 minutes long. In the film, at the end of 1928, it was possible to see the whole family at the house in Vicente Lopez: Horacio, María Elena, their daughter Pitoca, born on April 14 of that year, Eglé, and Darío. Everyone glowed. Eglé smiled at the camera and took great pleasure in moving in the manner of a silent film actress. Horacio, also smiling, played a song on the guitar that we can only imagine, in a voice that reaches us through decades. Soon, he reappeared: having a smoke. He was hammering a stake into the dirt floor to better hold the large barbecue skewer. Horacio, Ya la ha de conocer usted, pues ella lo conoce ya bastante a través de nosotros.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 381-382). 238 “A veces, también recuerdo el día en que nos casamos. Era un sábado por la mañana, ya que fuimos a almorzar a casa de mi padre y mi madrastra, con Eglé, Darío y mi hermana Haydée, que es dos años menor que yo. Además, vino el hermano de mi padre, Clodoaldo, y el testigo de Horacio, el gato Iglesias, su médico y amigo íntimo. Después cruzamos hasta la casa donde yo había conocido a Horacio con sus dos hijos, su canoa, su moto y sus libros. En aquella casa todo comenzó prestándome libros y anotando en uno de los suyos, a modo de dedicatoria: ‘Desde ahora hasta la eternidad’.” (Quiroga. Historia de un amor turbio).

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with his arms around María, kissed her on the mouth in front of the camera and pulled her towards him. She, passionate and shy, laughed before Amorim's gaze. A restless coati resisted standing still. Amorim used part of those images to inaugurate his Galería de Escritores y Artistas de 1928 a 1959. For the gallery, year after year, he took pictures of his distinguished friends: Walt Disney, Federico García Lorca, Pablo Picasso, Jorge Luis Borges, and many others. A gallery made entirely of memories, with the bodies of his friends recorded in light. So many years later, every time the narrow strip of film runs in front of the light beam, that joy lost a century ago starts to move again. Some people say they are dead. For my part, I say they are happy, kissing and smiling, with their looks and gestures still as fresh as in the first time.

Bills to pay For Horacio, getting married again meant restarting a life that was not only emotional, but also economic and logistical, and creating the conditions so that Pitoca, his youngest daughter – whose official name was the same as her mother, Maria Elena – could bloom. To that end, he had an ongoing project to publish a series of writings, which he had started when travelling to San Ignacio in search of answers to questions that he had not managed to formulate very well. Thus, he was already reaping its first fruits: Heroísmos, De la vida de nuestros animales, and the chapters of Pasado Amor, in addition to a series of film chronicles that he published at a faster pace than ever before. With the machines running in his favor, Horacio believed he was protected from trouble and able to support, with relative ease, his new family. He could not, however, anticipate a stronger blow that was coming: with the rise of the Riverista Party to the presidency in Uruguay, which his friends from Salto were opposing, Horacio's employment began to take on a fragile and dangerous character. At the end of the previous year, the Consul General of Uruguay in Argentina, Carlos María Gurméndez, oblivious to his personal happiness, sent a memorandum to the Minister of Relations of Uruguay, Rufino T. Domínguez, complaining about the conduct of consul Quiroga. A storm was brewing above Horacio, who was accustomed to favors from those in power to keep his literary production going: (...) I will now present the situation of the Associate Consul, Mr. Horacio Quiroga. This gentleman had been in an obviously irregular situation for some time, since his attendance at the Office was fleeting, spending days and days without showing up to fulfill his duties. (…) A few days ago, pressured

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by numerous notes that had to be addressed, I asked Consul Etchegoyen who in the Office knew how to typewrite, he then indicated Mr. Quiroga and Mr. Varzi. Mr. Varzi immediately set about his task, but Mr. Quiroga tried to refuse to carry it out, mentioning his status as consul and the inferiority of the work, which he considered depressing for his reputation as an intellectual. However, at my request, he did it. But today he refused to do so, invoking the same reasons.239

The story was not new either: the fragile balance of the writer's life was based on the favor of magazine and book editors and on public jobs, likewise achieved through personal affection felt towards him, to which Horacio responded equally passionately. His writing and getting pusblished depended, in turn, on his readership, on the aesthetic taste of the time, and, therefore, on his sense of adequacy, often tested on the fine line between pleasing and provoking the reader. The art of seduction and of survival. His love relationships were based on passionate love and not on the firm and consolidated values of bourgeois homes. His agricultural production in San Ignacio was based on experimentation, on attempts to produce new flavors – the orange wine was too acidic for the porteños, but went well with the people from Misiones; honey was scarce and he ended up giving all of it to his friends. Everything was unstable, moving, precarious, and ephemeral. The changes in politics, both in Uruguay and in Argentina, were strongly felt in those interwar years. Horacio was not alien to the rains and thunderstorms that affected him as a literary person and, in the set of texts he wrote about the writer's craft, he spoke of literary taste as a mechanism linked to a stock market, defended his work against new aesthetics as if he was before a court that could condemn him forever, while also rehearsing decalogues, manuals, sets of tricks full of humor and irony, as if he were creating a theory of the short story. In those texts, he experienced the height 239

“(...) paso a exponer la situación del Cónsul Adscripto, señor Horacio Quiroga. Dicho señor se encontraba desde tiempo atrás en una situación evidentemente irregular, ya que su concurrencia a la Oficina era fugaz, pasando días y días sin presentarse a cumplir sus cometidos. (...) Días pasados, apremiado por numerosas notas que había que dirigir, pregunté al Cónsul Etchegoyen quienes en la Oficina sabían escribir a máquina, indícandome entonces a los señores Quiroga y Varzi. El señor Varzi se puso de inmediato en tarea, pero el señor Quiroga pretendió negarse a cumplirla, aduciendo su condición de cónsul y la inferioridad del trabajo que consideraba depresivo para su reputación de intelectual. No obstante, a mi pedido, lo realizó. Pero hoy se ha negado a hacerlo, invocando los mismos motivos.” (Delgado and Brignole, Vida y obra de Horacio Quiroga, 318-319).

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of someone who dominates the form, although he realized that he did not dominate the moods of politics, aesthetics, and time. Horacio moved as best he could. Objectively, the situation was not easy, but there was still an aggravating factor – Horacio no longer had much more patience: “Time is too brief in this miserable life to waste it in an even more miserable way”,240 he said in a writing in which he defended short and precise texts. He had already lost friends, family members, and loved ones. He knew what he was saying. He was unwilling, despite the good reasons of his keeping his job, to be a typist at the consulate, he wanted something else and did not have the time for it. He was in love, he thought of his home, of the texts he still had to write, of his desire to venture into the writing of film scripts. He no longer had the time or inclination to be obedient. Common sense, by the way, had never seduced him. He was a man of excess. His practical side led him to once again try his hand at a book to be adopted by the State in Argentine schools. Unlike Cuentos de la selva, which received such a bad reception from reviewers in the previous decade, he attempted something more palatable and to the taste of the pedagogical model in vogue. In order to do so, he teamed up with someone who, in addition to understanding what was going on and being well connected, had a business sense: his editor Samuel’s brother, Leonardo Glusberg. Together they created a book that was the antipode of Los desterrados: from conception to title. The new experience, or venture, was going to be called Suelo natal. Unlike the usually rootless characters from his short stories, who were always on the move, always out of place, he now came up with stories marked by a slight sense of nativism and of belonging. The abstract concept of a homeland, however, was replaced, already in the title, by that of soil – the fertile land where people walk, where they plant. The texts were not of the same quality as his other children's series, but they were not terrible either. They served their purpose and still bore some traces of his authorial work. And it worked! The book was approved and, from 1931, it was going to be adopted by 4th year students of Argentine schools. A relief, a breath of air, and satisfaction. But it was still not enough. As the situation at the Consular Office deteriorated, Horacio knew that he would not be able to keep the precarious juggling of his finances going for long. It was necessary to leave. Then he thought of an idea to get away: he asked to be transfered

240

“El tiempo es demasiado breve en esta miserable vida para perderlo de un modo más miserable aún” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 1190).

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from his position as consular secretary in Buenos Aires to become the Uruguayan Consul in Misiones. As the shrewd biographer Emir Rodríguez Monegal clearly understood, there was not much demand for a Uruguayan consul in the northern jungle, but, at the same time, it was a cordial way of fixing the situation, one that was honorable for everyone involved. For Horacio, above all, it was the possibility of fulfilling his desire to return to San Ignacio, now that Eglé and Darío had already completed their schooling and were already grown adults. He would save the rent money paid for the house in Vicente López and return with his family, in its new configuration, to his much-desired land. María, who had been seduced by that man with an adventurous past, with his library full of books bound in burlap and snakeskin, gave signs of excitement with the idea of experiencing wildlife. It was time to touch and feel the scent of the jungle that was already so familiar to her from Horacio, Eglé and Darío’s conversations, and from the stories she had read. Old Horacio, however, bruised by past failures, spoke skeptically to his friend Escalera about María's excitement: Regarding my trip to that one, all depends on my wife’s spirits. She is mad about going; but I worry that, once there, she won’t find herself the slightest bit at ease. She is a city girl, who completely ignores what difficulties are. We’ll see.241

In order to deal with the resistance from his wife that he was foreseeing, Horacio began to plan a series of improvements to the house in San Ignacio for as soon as they got to their inhospitable country: he would extend the second floor of the brick house he had begun to build. He would erect the best facilities: running water, a swimming pool, and tiles on the floor. It might take time, but time was not an issue for him. He felt eternal. He only lacked capital. It was a long, delicate fencing, full of strokes and feints. María herself, in an interview half a century later, would say different things about how she experienced that expectation of moving to the North: Reflecting upon our move to Misiones – says the writer’s widow – I understood the sensation that Horacio must have had after we married. In general, nobody saw the deed too kindly. On the street, Horacio’s figure

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“Respecto de mi ida a esa, todo depende del ánimo que tenga mi mujer. Ella está loca por ir; pero yo temo que, una vez allí, no se halle en lo más mínimo. Es una chica de ciudad, que ignora totalmente lo que son dificultades. Allá veremos.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 393).

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With Uruguay's generosity to Horacio having diminished so much, the outlook was no longer promising. It was necessary to leave. “The truth is that city life is more and more hard for me”,243 said Horacio to his friend Escalera in a letter from July 21, 1931. The Argentine political situation also deteriorated: the elected president, Hipólito Yrigoyen, suffered a coup led by General Uriburu. There were purges, summary executions. Local politics became polarized and some former companions of Horacio, such as Manuel Gálvez and Leopoldo Lugones, sided with the coup leaders. The bearded man, on the other hand, was against the regime, even signing a letter for the release of Salvadora, the anarchist owner of the newspaper Crítica, who had been arrested while her husband, Natalio Botana, had been exiled to Uruguay. Times were not easy and the plans to return to San Ignacio were becoming definitive. Horacio then wrote to Escalera announcing that his son Darío would be at the forefront of the new project. The young man was supposed to take the train to San Ignacio with his friend Aurelio and both were going to settle in the family home. As young as they were, they took on a plan that had already been Horacio's when he went to Chaco in 1904: to become rural producers. Millionaires. A patient father, Horacio, who already knew that script, politely asked Escalera to lend a hand so that Darío could learn more about working in the fields, grow stronger, and gain some sense of responsibility. As for his own departure with María, he was peremptory when he said that everything had been decided, but, at the same time, he was evasive when dealing with the duration of their stay. Horacio wanted to go to San Ignacio with María, but not at any cost. He calculated that moving in with her could mean ruining the relationship and, in advance, he considered returning with her, if necessary: 242

“Al reflexionar sobre nuestro traslado a Misiones – dice la viuda del escritor – comprendí la sensación que debía tener Horacio después de casarnos. En general, nadie había visto con buenos ojos lo hecho. Por la calle, la figura de Horacio era muy llamativa y cuando yo estaba embarazada de la nena, levantábamos a cada paso un sinnúmero de gruesas bromas. Eso debió resultarle muy incómodo hubo de apresurar nuestra partida.” (Quiroga, Historia de un amor turbio). 243 “Lo cierto es que me pesa cada vez más la vida urbana” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 409)

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To my decided trip in any case by mid-December, is added now another more promising perspective: our move to that one for an indefinite amount of time, of one year at least. I would rebuild my life there, with a spare for the house, banana trees, chickens, etc. If this works, as I hope it will, the departure will also be by mid-December, but then we would stay forever. I am over the moon with that perspective.244

Living in Misiones again, after so many failed attempts, was like a rebirth and redemption, but the fear of failure presented itself and made the prospects dance before him: un año por lo menos... para siempre. So that the stone house could receive a larger family, Horacio had already started to carry out the renovation and expansion project of the property in August. His plans would move forward when, in December, he obtained his transfer as Uruguayan Consul in Misiones. He had to believe that things would work out. The truth is that the doors in Buenos Aires were closing, and he feared that his relationship with María would not survive in San Ignacio. If the marriage failed in the jungle, he already knew intimately: he had nowhere to return. A little distressed by these thoughts, one day, while driving his Ford Model T through the streets of Buenos Aires, Horacio ended up losing control of the steering wheel and overturned his own car. In the accident, he injured one of the worst body parts for a writer: his right hand. He was not badly hurt, it is true, but he was terrified at the idea of losing a few fingers on his right hand. The recovery was long and painful. There were months of immobilization and, after that, his hand refused to respond. Movements did not return as expected. Horacio could not write. If with his arm still immobilized he could accept this anathema, which required patience, things then changed: having his arm at his disposal but knowing it was weak haunted him. His hands refused to hold a pen and write properly. He did not know what to do. Physiotherapy gave very slow results, and he only managed to draw a few scribbles after a long time. It was a long year of storms, without literature and without the money it guaranteed. Fortunately, soon the fingers through which so many texts had already passed began to give more satisfying responses: 244

“A mi decidido viaje de cualquier modo para mediados de diciembre, se agrega ahora otra perspectiva más halagüeña: nuestro traslado a esa por tiempo indeterminado, de un año por lo menos. Reharía mi vida allí, con refacción de la casa, bananal, gallinas, etcétera. Si esto sale, como espero, la partida sería siempre para mediados de diciembre, pero entonces nos quedaríamos para siempre. Yo estoy que vuelo con esa perspectiva.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 393).

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Chapter 16 Happily these last few days my hand has improved a great deal. I think that by late December I will have recovered some mobility and I will be able to leave. (...) The blessed hand is costing me, between treatments and having suspended my writing, around eighthundred pesos.245

He could not move around comfortably, or take care of himself, or change cities whenever he wanted, or even write a paragraph when a story popped into his head. He was limited and dependent on others. Going to San Ignacio, despite everything, was still a hope, somewhat utopian, of returning to a dignified life: The interesting thing is that when I am there I will be widely comfortable for money with my wages.246

A whole year without publishing a single line. The only literary novelty was a text that had already been written before the overturn, “La serpiente de cascabel”. For the next short story to come, a series of conditions had to be fulfilled: recovering his movements, moving to Misiones, and settling down. None of it happened before the end of 1932, when La Nación published a text that was so literal that it needed no comment – “El regreso a la selva”.

The return For someone who writes for a living, and who writes what has been lived, it took a whole year in San Ignacio to write the story of his return. The caravan of love landed in those lands in the early days of 1932, more precisely on January 10, which meant that Horacio, María, and Pitoca said goodbye to the Argentine capital with the year-end festivities, not knowing when or whether they would return to Buenos Aires. That time was particularly definitive for Horacio: he was just over fiftythree years old, his hands were atrophied and he already knew how many scars a wrong move in life, a radical choice, could cause him. When he saw “El regreso a la selva” published almost a year later, he thought that story

245 “Felizmente estoy en estos últimos días muy mejorado de la mano. Creo que a fines de diciembre habrá recobrado ya algún movimiento y podré irme. (…) La dichosa mano, me cuesta, entre curaciones y suspensión de escribir, alrededor de ochocientos pesos.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 413). 246 “Lo curioso es que cuando esté en esa andaré bien holgado de plata con mi sueldo.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 413).

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might never have existed. It was his first narrative in a long time. He had written his own experience, without many veils, without much mediation. The text, in the end, had the unusual character of a chronicle. His story, told as it had happened: a man who returns to the Misiones jungle, after fifteen years, with his wife and daughter. The man who has an injured hand, which prevents him from writing, but not from killing a jararacussu that prowled around the house to his wife’s astonishment. The man who pounces on the snake and vanquishes it. At the end of the extermination, everyone realizes that the serpent was pregnant: several snakelets come out of her womb. The astonishment is multiplied. The predator is transformed, for an instant, into a mother – like herself – but the sinister offspring that emerges from her belly renews and multiplies María Elena's fear. The young woman does not know what to feel. The boundary between Horacio's read and lived stories is now erased, so that reality becomes vertiginous. She sees the Paraná River on the horizon. The floor disappears. Maria cannot contain herself. Impressed by her husband's strength in killing the snake, she knows that she is living a short story by Horacio Quiroga, but does not understand her place in it. And she does not know how it will end either. Thus began the writer's account: After fifteen years of city life, well or badly endured, the man returns to the jungle. His way of being, thinking, acting, link him indissolubly with it. One day he left the hills with the same violence that today reunites him with them. He has paid his debt with his feelings as a father and his art: he owes nothing. He returns, thus, to seek in live without restraint from nature the free play of his constitutional right.247

It was no longer a short story like the ones before, it was a hybrid between testimony and tale. Because he, Horacio, had changed a lot. He could no longer write, as in other times, about the women of Misiones – as in Pasado Amor – nor about the men – of Los desterrados: he had already written all those accounts. The person who most surprised him at that moment was himself and the unfathomable nature that surrounded him. People then interested him less 247

“Después de quince años de vida urbana, bien o mal soportada, el hombre regresa a la selva. Su modo de ser, de pensar y obrar, lo ligan indisolublemente a ella. Un día dejó el monte con la misma violencia que lo reintegra hoy a él. Ha cumplido su deuda con sus sentimientos de padre y su arte: nada debe. Vuelve, pues, a buscar en la vida sin trabas de la naturaleza el libre juego de su libertad constitucional.” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 1167).

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than ever. Their personal odysseys, after he had gone through an important part of his own, no longer made him want to write. He was inaugurating his wild chronicles. He was going to call them Croquis del monte [sketches of the forest]. The forest would be the protagonist of his living pictures: Horacio could already narrate the adventures of the ancestral flora, fauna, and even a can of gasoline. If he pricked up his ears, he could hear the sound of rocks growing; if he sharpened his sense of smell, he would smell ancient dinosaurs in tiny ginkgo biloba leaves. “El regreso a la selva” exposed, more than once, the doubt that haunted both its protagonist and its writer: they did not know if the wife and daughter would adapt to the wild life. He did not want another conflict of love and death in his life, like the one that ended Ana María's life. He was feeling happy and whole going back in the jungle, but fear harassed him. We – or almost all of us – had long been initiated into the tropical environment. We could not hope for any novelty from the change of life, ours being so well known. However, my young wife and her extremely sweet daughter opened their eyes for the first time to the sun of Misiones. Anything could be expected in such poor conditions for the struggle except the perfect equilibrium demonstrated by one and the other faced with the constants of our country. Mother and daughter seemed to enjoy a long and clean immunization, which perhaps the bonds of blood and affection will explain to a great degree.248

Horacio did not know how much loves could endure, and even his question, under the transparent veil of that literary page, concealed in its royal plural the fact that he wanted to throw the reader away from the flock of fears that haunted him. How long could love withstand self-imposed adversity? The scene with the snake brought the greatest clash between bourgeois urban life and the economy of life in the jungle. In those days, predators were eliminated – snakes, jaguars, and others that put people's lives at risk. And it was not strange that the family was present at those moments. 248

“Nosotros – o casi todos nosotros – estábamos desde largo tiempo iniciados en el ambiente tropical. Ninguna novedad podíamos esperar del cambio de vida, harto conocida nuestra. Mas mi joven mujer y su tiernísima hija abrían por primera vez los ojos al sol de Misiones. Todo podía esperarse en tan pobres condiciones para la lucha menos el perfecto equilibrio demostrado por una y otra ante las constantes del nuevo país. Madre e hija parecían gozar de una larga y prolija inmunización, que acaso los lazos de la sangre y del afecto expliquen en gran parte.” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 1167).

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Hunting was communal, it was part of the family economy. The narrator himself did not hide his curiosity to know what would be his wife's reaction to her initiation into his rituals. “I should note that my wife had not yet seen a snake. To her, as for all city people, that little animal was the symbol of tropical danger. I was, thus, interested in finding out the reaction that said snake, small or monstrous, would awaken in my wife.”249 Half a century later, the María Elena who had witnessed it all, and not the character in the story, still remembered the scene and would recount in vivid colors that distant afternoon when she took her first and most decisive step into the wild: ‘Upon arriving to Misiones for the first time’ continued her quick woman’s voice ‘and seeing the disaster that had become, Horacio proposed that we do a tour around the house. (...) At the foot of a huge tree’ said María, ‘at one end of the plateau, Horacio killed in one blow the yarará that had 23 babies about to be born. Until that point, I had never seen a snake.250

The literary snake was killed with a bamboo blow by the narrator, after being lifted into the air by the protagonist's son, in the presence of his wife and daughter. Afterwards, the serpent was dissected, so that the leather could be used to decorate the walls of the house, or adorn purses, books, wallets. From the dissection comes the disturbing scene, even more so than the sudden – and expected – appearance of a snake in the bush: the female was pregnant. For Horacio, just as it was necessary to show all that to his wife, it was also necessary to narrate the dissection in detail for his city readers. That was his pact with nature, to keep it alive in the eyes of people from the city: There, still wrapped in a thin gauze that was what was left of the original egg, squirmed in the maternal womb 23 yararás about to be born. Some of them opened their mouths when solicited, ready to bite, and to kill. There 249

“Debo advertir que mi mujer no había visto aún una víbora. Para ella, como para todas las gentes urbanizadas, aquel animalito era el símbolo del peligro tropical. Interesábame, pues, asistir a la reacción que dicha víbora, pequeña o monstruosa, iba a despertar en mi mujer.” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 1168). 250 “– Al llegar por primera vez a Misiones – prosiguió su rápida voz de mujer – y ver el desastre en que se había convertido aquello, Horacio me propuso que diéramos una vuelta por los alrededores de la casa. (…) Al pie de un gran árbol – dijo María – en un extremo de la meseta, Horacio mató de un golpe a la yarará que tenía veintitrés crías a punto de nacer. Hasta ese momento yo nunca había visto una víbora.” (Quiroga, Historia de un amor turbio).

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It was a dreamlike scene: after killing the huge animal, fear was multiplied. The heroic act of exterminating the large jararaca needed to be replicated twenty-three times, with each of the many snakes that moved across the floor, spreading themselves to thoroughly exterminate all the offspring. The moment of heroism was already over, and now it was just a matter of following all necessary steps. The serpent's egg manifesting itself in all its immense literality. Horacio's narrator sighed with relief. He concluded that the tests had been successful. That the wife was finally initiated into that harsh environment: We returned home, satisfied, since a delay of a few short hours in catching the mother yarará would have infested us with twenty four snakes that wing of the hill that serves us as a park. My wife seemed satisfied by the tranquility with which she had endured the first onslaught of the jungle, despite that reptile being, which as far as I know, was the first she had seen in her life. On my part, I returned with my soul full of peace. The draught and the snake had at last placed their definitive seal on my recovered health.252

The image of the killing was, however, imprinted in María's soul. She had inevitably discovered that she was no longer in Buenos Aires, nor in Vicente López, that she was – definitely – too many days away from what her life had been until then. María wondered, secretly, if that trip would have a return and, at least at that moment, she did not know what to answer. She took a deep breath and looked resignedly at her new life in Misiones.

251

“Allí, envueltas aún en una tenue tela que era cuanto quedaba del huevo original, revolvíanse en el seno materno 23 yararás ya a punto de nacer. Algunos de ellas abrían la boca al ser solicitadas, prontas a morder, y a matar. Eran veintitrés, todas iguales, pues las medidas tomadas acordaron de 29 a 30 centímetros para cada una (…) Hoy la extensa prole descansa en un gran frasco de alcohol, a cuya concavidad sus lacios cuerpos se han ajustado dócilmente.” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 1168). 252 “Regresamos satisfechos a casa, pues un retardo de breves horas en sorprender a la yarará madre nos hubiera infestado con veinticuatro víboras esa ala de monte que nos sirve de parque. Mi mujer mostrábase también satisfecha por la tranquilidad con que había resistido el primer embate en la selva, no obstante ser aquel reptil, según creo, el primero que veía en su vida. Por mi parte, regresaba con el alma plena de paz. La sequía y la víbora habían puesto por fin su sello definitivo a mi recobrada salud.” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 1169).

17. ALL LEAVES BELONG TO THE WIND

The man who landed, convalescing, his hand paralyzed, in San Ignacio in the early days of 1932 was a tired man. A writing proletarian, his life had been, until then, a frantic task of producing texts at all costs – short stories, feuilletons, film chronicles, biographies, children's texts, literary reviews – to earn part of his livelihood. Horacio needed to rest. Money should yield, multiply, and be enough for life in San Ignacio. His friend Glusberg, who had turned Revista Babel into La Vida Literaria – in which Horacio had often published texts on figures as diverse as José Carlos Mariátegui, Xul Solar, and William Henry Hudson – had given up on the project. For the first time, Horacio did not want – and practically could not – publish. What he needed was to lay his eyes on a landscape without language and spare himself from saying. There were now other younger people who occupied his post in the big city: Roberto Arlt, who admired him without being his acquaintance, had debuted as a novelist in 1926, the year of his own prime, and had already been working at the crime section of the newspaper Crítica; in those days, that young man with an incessant production published an endless series of stories dealing with the manners of his time and place called Aguafuertes porteñas, linked to so many other short stories, plays, novels, and travel and political chronicles, which flooded the pages of newspapers and magazines from the capital. At that moment in his life, orchids already interested Horacio more than the characters in San Ignacio: When looking through my literary archive (...) I noted one hundred edited stories and sixty two that were left forgotten. The sum of a hundred and sixty stories, which is an enormity for one man. Include something, like the double more or less literary articles, and you will agree that I have the right to resist writing more. If in said quantity of pages I did not say what I wanted, it is no longer the moment to say it. So it is.253 253

“Al recorrer mi archivo literario (…) anoté ciento ocho historias editadas, y sesenta y dos que quedaron rezagadas. La suma de ciento sesenta cuentos, lo que

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With injured and tired hands, Horacio is the man who refuses to continue writing. His hands refused the literary work then, but they were still active for killing snakes, renovating their stone house, building a small pool for his daughter, paddling, planting, and clearing land. That is what he wanted. Life demanded another meaning for that man who, at fifty-three, already considered himself a little too old for the entanglements of art and publishing life. While Horacio was thinking about stopping, the vigor, beauty, and youth of the wife he had chosen to accompany him on the journey back to the North clamored for movement. At first, none of this had been an obstacle. The couple lived well and, throughout that year of 1932, she had not written a single line to her friends in Buenos Aires or Salto, except to invite them to spend some time in the jungle. San Ignacio was the place to be. Indeed, for the first time in so long there was nothing to tell and, at the same time, there was peace. Nature, the presence of María Elena and Pitoca, the many tasks required by the farm, the income that came from the modest mate plantation, added to the consular income, all this interested Horacio. It filled his time and was enough. By his side, María experienced those first months of marital happiness like a long vacation in an exotic country. Everything was new: sleeping and waking up in the middle of the woods and having her husband all to herself, without having to share him with the demands of social and professional life – but also without the cinema, the theater, the concerts. She discovered what it was like to navigate the Paraná River and saw Pitoca's happiness running through the orchard. At the end of the first year, however, the repetition of the same and the absence of her friends began to weigh, except for the incidental presence of Eglé. It was nice to have a familiar face from her former life, though their friendship had lost much of its freshness and trust after her close friend became her stepdaughter. Gradually, life with Horacio, whose mood varied from sweetness to silence remarkably quickly, was becoming less attractive to her. The couple, who had always gotten along so well, began to show some wear and tear. The lack of a common horizon, the absence of urban life, and the age gap decided to impose themselves. One day, after an argument, the hardest they've ever had, Horacio got into his Ford and drove away aimlessly. María had been talking about the es una enormidad para un hombre solo. Incluya usted algo, como el doble de artículos más o menos literarios, y convendrá usted en que tengo mi derecho a resistirme a escribir más. Si en dicha cantidad de páginas no dije lo que quería, no es tiempo ya de decirlo. Tal es.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 435-436).

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possibility of spending some time together in Buenos Aires, saying that she missed her father, her sister, the city. That she felt lonely and was bored to death in Misiones. That it was not fair that they did not have the right to go back to normal life once in a while. Horacio retorted, impatiently, saying that she did not understand that it was not that simple, that they did not have the money, that their income would not be worth in Buenos Aires what it was worth in San Ignacio. That she could not be so selfish. That she needed to understand. This went on for minutes on end. Fed up with the endless conversation and running out of patience, Horacio slammed the door and left her talking to herself. Almost bursting with indignation, exhaustion and boredom, María Elena took her daughter by the arm and went with her to the port to take the first steamboat back to the capital, without warning, without regrets, and almost without any suitcases either. She needed movement. Upon returning, Horacio felt the blow: coming across the empty house was strange, because it took him back to his worst moments in San Ignacio – the terrible silence of the year after Ana María's death, meaninglessness thrown over everything. What María had given him then, without knowing it, was a small crack from which to see a hell that he thought was already buried and cold, almost non-existent. No. It was still burning. He took a deep breath, let his guard down, and sat down to write to his wife. Through his tormented handwriting, he wanted to restore her presence, address her as if she were there, as if they had not offended each other like that, as if the fiber of the dream had not apparently been frayed forever. Querida Mariuchita: Without waiting for a letter from you, I begin this one to start informing you of my day to day life. It is true that when I ran in the car towards it, I believed I would find you here. But it was very hard to find your empty bed, idem the baby’s and the general air of abandonment and absence of those occasions. To top it off, Jorge tells me that he couldn’t find anything with our absence. ‘It seemed that the house was on its own’. And the cold, Mariuchita, and loneliness. Anway, now I start to think that sooner or later, I will see you again.254

254

“Querida Mariuchita: Sin esperar carta tuya, comienzo esta para irte enterando día a día de mi vida. Lo cierto es que cuando corría en el coche en dirección a ésta, creía que te iba a encontrar aquí. Pero muy dura cosa fue hallarme tu cama vacía, ídem la de la nena y el aire general de abandono y ausencia de esas ocasiones. Para remate, Jorge me dice que no se hallaba nada con nuestra ausencia. ‘Me parecía que la casa estaba sola’. Y el frío, Mariuchita, y la soledad. En fin, ahora me pongo a pensar que más tarde o más temprano, te veré de nuevo.” (Quiroga, Nuevos papeles íntimos, 71).

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The letter was long, and the hour and a half it took him to write it made him feel as he was in contact with María again. Some comfort. Horacio took a deep breath again. He wanted to convince himself that she was going to come back. They loved each other, for sure. It was just a crisis. She was going to come back. María actually came back. She brought Pitoca. But something had changed. They both knew it would be like this now: she could leave. She had achieved it. Her autonomy as a woman of the 1930s. That would be the couple's new agreement: to spend time with her family, in Buenos Aires or Montevideo, whenever she wanted. Her absences from then on would not be rare. It was the way to keep the relationship alive. María refused the position of submissive woman that Ana María had accepted without major problems two decades before. The time she was going to spend in Buenos Aires would not only be spent with her family, but also to act as Horacio's agent, solving problems that he would certainly not solve with the same efficiency through letters. A little astonishedly, he told his friends about his new arrangement, such as María's feat of successfully contacting an editor and bookseller who could boost sales of his school book, Suelo Natal: “My wife, who spent this summer in Buenos Aires, found a way to be in talks with Perotti.”255 Not everyone, in fact very few, could understand the new configuration of Horacio's marriage. And not a few other friends from Salto dedicated ungenerous, even harsh words to María, without any embarrassment in judging that woman who had dared to exercise wide autonomy. Delgado and Brignole rose in a tragic chorus that crosses the ages, in the pages of their biography, synthesizing in a cantilena the anathema against María: “her love with Quiroga came, without being false, more from the attributes than the essential”; “she was a good little girl who, influenced by vanity, had stuck to a literary Hercules”; “dazzled young woman”;

255 “Mi mujer, que anduvo este verano por Buenos Aires, halló modo de estar al habla con Perotti.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 439).

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“None of his Marías had managed to understand him, and the last one, no doubt, least of all”; “After a few trial years, María Elena will become only a problem whose solution he will face with serene coldness”256

Burned at the bonfire of words coming from her husband's childish friends, María had already been judged and condemned in advance. Horacio, unlike them, knew that it was always possible to start over and try to do things differently. His stories narrated famous failures in which the tenacity of the protagonists was always the highest point. Like them, Horacio did not give up easily either. Some people even considered him obstinate.

The potatoes burn Time ran differently in the northern jungle. It was not the rhythm of closing editions of the city's newspapers. One could always try to do things in a different way. And Horacio’s atypical family really tried. Horacio, María Elena, Darío, and Eglé strived to make life work their way. The first years of their return, for Horacio, were a period of transforming the Misiones land into increasingly fertile soil for the production of mate, sugarcane, peanuts, and oranges – to be resold either in natura or as molasses, peanut candy, and orange liqueur. Horacio used to send samples to his friends, to “aceitar y edulcorar sus amores”, as he once said in a letter to editor César Tiempo. He also used to sell the products, sometimes earning reasonable sums. At the same time, he devoted himself to making the house more habitable for his family and also for the friends who sometimes came to visit: the new flowers planted attracted birds and spring was undoubtedly the most beautiful time of the Misiones plateau. Eglé, in her condition of having been doubly betrayed by father and friend, in the discreet exuberance of her early twenties, could hardly find someone in the limited local offer of marriageable men. She ended up 256

“su amor por Quiroga provenía, sin ser falso, más de los atributos que de lo esencial”; “ella era una buena chiquilla que, sugestionada por la vanidad, se había prendido de un Hércules literario”; “joven deslumbrada”; “Ninguna de sus Marías había llegado a entenderlo y la última, sin duda, menos que ninguna”; “Después de unos años de prueba, María Elena pasará a ser sólo un problema cuya solución encarará con serena frialdad” (Delgado and Brignole, Vida y obra de Horacio Quiroga, 330; 331; 340; 342).

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meeting a certain Jorge, from a French family like her mother's, a Lenoble, a neighbor small landowner. Jorge was not very attractive to her, but he was not totally uninteresting either, and he was available, and looked at her generously. Well, the French landowner was all around her, flirting, insisting, and not being completely unpleasant. Horacio did not think he was too bad either. She decided to be content with him and see where this could go. They decided to get married at the end of 1933. Darío, on the other hand, hypersensitive and wilful, continued his attempt to follow in Horacio's footsteps: he secretly wrote some literary texts that, from time to time, he fearfully showed his father. His comments were laconic and sometimes positive: he should keep insisting, his text was not bad. While he did not become a literary genius, the boy continued to take care of his duties as a peón, administrator, and rural pioneer, no longer believing, however, that the future could hold great things for him as a farmer. Becoming either rich or a great writer were no longer options as feasible as he had been cherishing. He really wanted, after all, to be better than his father in what his father was, as he himself understood, insurmountable. María Elena was restless and exhausted between the tasks of taking care of Pitoca, Horacio's unstable mood, and the desire to be in Buenos Aires again. She missed the capital both spatially and temporally. It was not only the desire to change places that mobilized her, but also the desire for a change of status. She wanted to be able to once again enjoy the pride of being the wife of Argentina's greatest writer. In San Ignacio, people could barely read. Everything was boredom and stillness. Horacio, who had arrived happy and apprehensive in San Ignacio, began to suffer more than enjoy these new days. Everyone around him seemed to be struggling to fit into someone else's dream, and the pumpkins themselves resisted fitting inside someone else's coach. Having moved to San Ignacio affected the lives of each member of the family in different ways. It was not possible to know how long they were going to endure. As if the complexity of house life was not enough, the politics of the Southern Cone, despite them being so far from centers like Montevideo and Buenos Aires, did not exempt them from suffering unthinkable setbacks. Just as Argentina had suffered a coup a few years before, with Colonel Uriburu coming to power, Uruguay, on March 31, 1933, had also undergone its own coup d'état: President Baltasar Brum, aligned with Horacio's influential friends, after resisting the seizure of power by the coup leaders with a revolver in his hand, ended up committing suicide on his own doorstep. He had preferred death to surrender.

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Horacio would suffer the consequences of that death months later: in April of the following year, the Uruguayan government did not hesitate to declare his resignation, causing him to lose the right to his post and salary as consul. Once again, after so many falls, he saw himself with an uncertain future and on the verge of running out of money. Everything was coming down slowly and insidiously. Feeling his own virtual misery with desperation, from the distant jungle, Horacio tried to mail requests for help. He aimed at two targets: through the support of his Uruguayan and Argentine friends, to find some way to recover his position as consul; and, as this might take a while, he was also trying to publish again in magazines and newspapers in Buenos Aires, to guarantee his livelihood. Back to literature, then. What he was experiencing, he knew with painful certainty, was no longer his peak as a writer. Far from Buenos Aires, far from 1926, his words were worth less. The boys from Martín Fierro and Proa had grown up and spread themselves across the newsrooms of the main newspapers and magazines in Buenos Aires. Many of his old friends, like himself, were already moving towards retirement. Thus, Horacio needed, as never before, people who were active and willing to support him behind the scenes, despite the fact that he no longer had the glow of public recognition – a safeguard against the storms – or the closeness that kept relationships alive. The situation was delicate. Who would take sides for him, in the magazines or behind the scenes of politics, was something he secretly asked himself in each letter he sent. However, it did not take long for the answers to come. The Sociedad Argentina de Escritores – SADE –, which he had helped to create, came to his defense with a letter addressed to the new president of Uruguay, coup leader Gabriel Terra. The letter was signed by Roberto Giusti – the editor of Nosotros magazine, whom Horacio had known for a long time –, by Arturo Cerrentani, and by his close friend of those last years, César Tiempo. The three men, on behalf of SADE, textually requested Terra: (...) again see a solution chosen, no doubt, because the accumulation of tasks that absorb the attention of the Chancellery, has not allowed it to notice the person who is wounded with it: Don Horacio Quiroga, author of admirable books which your Excellency is aware of. This Writer of race, reputed to be

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It is an honor, Mr. President, to have a writer on your consular staff, even if he refuses to use the typewriter. Even if he is skittish. In the absence of a state policy for artists, at least welcome him into the treasury. They did not say it, though they wished to. What they did want and were able to say was that, if Horacio wanted to, he could have assumed Argentine citizenship, but he preferred, however, “(...) to remain, within his worthy poverty, loyal to his land”.258 It was up to him, the coup plotter, the usurper of power, nothing less than to repay this supposed fidelity to the country. It was the possible letter, written against the discourse of morality, that made Horacio a worm who took advantage of the State, a self-important writer who did not even write about Uruguay, but about forgotten corners of the western side of the Rio de la Plata. The possible letter, however, was unsuccessful. Horacio was left without a job, without a salary, and almost without horizons. He only had a final card to play: to apply for retirement. And, for this mission, he entrusted his lawyer and friend Asdrúbal Delgado. While he waited for the situation to be solved, he turned to his second target: the Buenos Aires press. He needed someone to publish his stories again, but even that would not be easy. His friend and editor Luis Pardo, who opened doors for him at Caras y Caretas, Fray Mocho, and other outlets owned by the group, who allowed him to be Aquilino Delagoa whenever necessary, died in February 1934, putting an end to the decadeslong collaboration. Without those who always looked out for him, Horacio started to face a series of refusals. The writer Eduardo Mallea, who belonged to the group of the magazine Martín Fierro, had become, since 1931, responsible for the cultural page of La Nación, exercising “a soft dictatorship on Argentinian

257

“(...) revea una resolución tomada, sin duda, porque el cúmulo de las tareas que absorben la atención de la Cancillería, no le ha permitido reparar en la persona a quien se lesiona con ella: don Horacio Quiroga, autor de admirables libros que V. E. conoce. Este escritor de raza, reputado como el primer cuentista de nuestra América, ha sido despojado de una representación consular que honraba a él y a su patria por igual.” (Delgado and Brignole, Vida y obra de Horacio Quiroga, 344). 258 “(...) mantenerse, dentro de su digna pobreza, fiel a su tierra” (Delgado and Brignole, Vida y obra de Horacio Quiroga, 344).

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letters”259. He, of course, represented a huge obstacle for Horacio to continue publishing in that newspaper. The only text that Horacio had published during those years was the short story “Las moscas” in the July 7, 1933 edition of El Hogar. Things were hard. Really hard. Horacio's last editorial hope was his fellow countryman Natalio Botana, owner of the newspaper Crítica, who had offered him the possibility of publishing one text per month, at a much lower rate than those he had become accustomed to in his prime. To meet the demand, he planned to publish a series of hybrid chronicles, something between narrative and description, which had as a setting the only place in the world that mattered to him at the time: Misiones. They were the texts that he had begun to conceive as soon as he returned to San Ignacio, the Croquis del monte. So, between November 1934 and January 1935, “La guardia nocturna”, “Tempestad en el vacío”, and “La lata de nafta” appeared in the Botana newspaper. It was not enough, but at least it served to awaken a bitter and somewhat resigned smile in him, with the possibility of returning to the literary circuit: Crítica pays me one hundred pesos – what I requested. Idem El Hogar, to which I sent a relato, and idem La Prensa, which I have just made arrangements with, for the same price. The price of an old whore, as you can see. The truth is that I call it relato or whatever that may be; but not a cuento.260

The almost promising wind soon died down, became a breeze, and then still air. Magazines wanted the writer he had been, not the writer he was. His motionless, formally daring paintings were not pleasing the readership. Crítica would soon stop publishing them. To make matters worse, he was asked that future collaborations be twice as long, no longer a thousand, but two thousand words. Horacio, of course, said it was not a problem as long as they paid him double for the new commission. Once they had arrived at an impasse, and once the dialogue was interrupted, he would no longer publish there.

259

“una suave dictadura sobre las letras argentinas” (Monegal, El juicio de los parricidas: la nueva generación argentina y sus maestros, 34). 260 “Crítica me paga cien pesos – lo que pedí. Ídem El Hogar, al cual mandé ya relato, e ídem La Prensa, con la que acabo de arreglarme, a igual tarifa. Tarifa de puta un poco vieja, como ve. Mas lo cierto es que yo llamo relato o lo que fuere a eso; mas no cuento.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 462).

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It occurred to him to ask César Tiempo, the president of the Sociedad Argentina de Escritores, for help to intercede with the newspaper, in order to at least rescue the originals of his text “Su olor a dinosaurio”, which was gathering dust on some forgotten table, in the distant editorial office of Crítica. Well, he tried, but El Diario did not want him as a collaborator either. He had to be content with El Hogar and La Prensa. It was time to send letters, desperate requests to friends from SADE, from Uruguay, from magazines, from newspapers. Everything was hardship, silence, vague promises, or indifference. Whenever the setting changed, no one remembered to let him know. It was old age coming. Having to ask for retirement put the end of a professional trajectory before him. At that moment, like never before, his nationality came to surface: movement, rootlessness and exile have always characterized his jungle characters. As for him, he had adopted “the country” Misiones as his homeland, but he was, in fact, a Uruguayan writer in Argentina. He had already realized for some time that this made him a foreigner on both sides of the Rio de la Plata. He had gone into exile, more or less voluntarily, after having killed his friend Federico Ferrando. With that, his history as a decadent poet belonged in the past. Some Brazilian and not a few Argentine newspapers called him an “Argentine writer”. At Sociedad Argentina de Escritores, which he had helped to found, it was unequivocal. In every petition to the Uruguayan government, Tempo, Giusti, and others invoked his eastern nationality as an argument. It was fundamental for Horacio to reach and recover every hidden fiber of his Uruguayan nationality, if he really wanted to retire, if he wanted to have some rest. He had to deal with his exile, with his ghosts from the eastern side. He could not get out of his head his surprise when, a few years earlier, the influential literary critic from his native country, Alberto Zum Felde, in his Proceso Intelectual de Uruguay, from 1930, had refused to analyze his work after 1901 because he understood that it had more to do with Argentina: “But, having lived since then in Argentina, and linked to its literary environment in such a way that chronicles and critics count him as Argentinian, – and him having accepted that intellectual citizenship – his oeuvre and personality no longer belong to the history of our letters”.261 261

“Pero, radicado desde entonces en la Argentina, y vinculado a su ambiente literario en tal forma que en crónicas y críticas se le cuenta como argentino, – y habiendo él aceptado tal ciudadanía intelectual – su obra y su personalidad no pertenecen ya a la historia de nuestras letras” (Felde, Proceso Intelectual de Uruguay y crítica de su literatura, 41).

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That violent banishment in such an important work had astonished Horacio. It was necessary to go back over his lost steps, to achieve some synthesis that accommodated him in relation to the many comings and goings of his life so far. In the midst of such caviling, Horacio's gaze was lost on the blue cover of a book on the table. Under the title and author of the work, subtle white lines, like a radar screen, draw concentric circles emitted from two radiating poles, accompanied by the names of the two capitals of the Rio de la Plata. The point of convergence was the cover itself. He had never been very close to the author, Carlos Vaz Ferreira, a philosopher, nor to his sister, the poet and pianist María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira, both from Montevideo. What caught his attention was not exactly the author, nor the title, Sobre feminismo, but the concept and idea of the publisher: Sociedad Amigos del Libro Rioplatense, Montevideo-Buenos Aires. He picked up the book, which had not captured his attention before as it did at that very moment. It had been sent by César Tiempo. His friend had commented on the publisher and had even invited him to prepare a volume for it. Horacio, then, had not paid it much attention. The book he had in his hands was the first volume in the publisher's collection, and could be purchased by subscription. Thus, the reader was assured that “for the first time in the history of Rio de la Plata books we see the miracle of seeing the money of the reader pass to the hands of the author, as legitimate retribution – always whisked away, always reduced, always lessened – by the effort of his thought”.262 Yes, he had come across what was obvious. He had to be in that collection. It was his chance to rebuild his trajectory and also a way to get some money. He had stories from many years ago, which ended up being put aside, which never reappeared after first being published in the press. He could write another thematic book, like Los desterrados, as the synthesis of the terror and the uncanny that ran through all his work. César Tiempo, always him, his bastion of those last times, should be his new editor. Horacio found himself excited, both with the publishing house and with the editor. Editing one of his books with César would even be a way of paying him back for his efforts with the Uruguayan government. He wrote immediately:

262

“se cumple por primera vez en la historia del libro rioplatense el milagro de ver pasar el dinero del lector a las manos del autor, como retribución legítima – siempre escamoteada, siempre reducida, siempre menoscabada – por el esfuerzo de su pensamiento” (Tempo apud Ferreira, Sobre feminismo).

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Chapter 17 I leave therefore in your powerful hands this sorry affair. Everything is paid: I have a volume ready for your publishing house, whose existence I was unaware of. (…) It is with great pleasure that I repay in small part your gallantry in my regard, offering you the edition of Más Allá, a collection of stories of hallucinated atmosphere, somewhat more so than that of Miss Callandrelli. There are eight or ten stories, most of them short. In truth, it is the only thing I have left from so much writing. Such a book will come in handy for your publisher and your name, as I am the perfect man from Río de la Plata.263

Perfect. He would go from exiled to binational. Again with the cooperatives: the sea is turbulent, even for a fish as big as he had been until recently. Resorting to César Tiempo was to be able to show his gratitude to that man who cared about him and who, as an editor, had created an editorial cooperative as a way to face the political crisis and the editorial crisis that came from it, in those years during a regime of exception.264 He made up his mind: the book would exist and be published that same year. No more nationalities! Being rioplatense is definitely the idea that pleases Horacio the most, as if he had suddenly found, as he had always sought, the right adjective: National contest: why don’t you sponsor, those of the Río de la Plata, the absolute Rioplatinity in literature, and its derived award: Being, as you are in Montevideo, on a sentimental train about it, the moment has now arrived to taste the fraternal sentiment. It would do me well, it goes for yours and also for you, since there is no lack of candidates in your catalog. Something to think about.265

263

“Dejo pues en sus poderosas manos este lamentable asunto. Todo se paga: tengo listo un volumen para su editorial, cuya existencia ignoraba. (…) Con gran placer retribuyo en mínima parte su gallardía a mi respecto, ofreciéndole la edición de Más Allá, recopilación de relatos de atmósfera alucinada, algo más que de la señorita Callandrelli. Son ocho o diez cuentos, la mayor parte breves. En verdad, es lo único que me queda de tanto escribir. Tal libro vendrá al pelo para su editorial y su nombre, pues soy el perfecto rioplatense. (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 423-424). 264 Rodríguez Monegal, El desterrado: vida y obra de Horacio Quiroga, 270. 265 “Concurso nacional: ¿por qué no patrocinan ustedes, los de la Rioplatense, la rioplatinidad absoluta en literatura, y su derivado premio: Estando, como están por Montevideo, en tren sentimental al respecto, llegado es ahora el momento de probar el sentimiento fraternal. A mí me convendría, va de suyo, y también a usted, pues no le faltan candidatos entre sus editados. Es de pensarlo.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 461).

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The man who wrote short stories with titles such as “Los inmigrantes” and books such as El Salvaje, El desierto, and Los desterrados; the man for whom the adjectives of belonging only served for children's literature – Suelo Natal – unexpectedly pulled from his sleeve a pride forged in maturity, that of belonging somewhere, with the immensity of a wide river, with the insurmountable differences of its distant banks. A place to call his own, in its heterogeneity, in its division. The conjunction produced effects. César convinced Alberto Zum Felde, who was on the advisory committee of the cooperative, to preface Más allá. With that introductory text in the book that returned Horacio to Uruguayan literature, without removing him from Argentine literature, it was possible to notice something: the damage caused by the narrow nationalist thinking then in vogue. A true reckoning with its literary origins, Más allá wanted to be a work of closure worthy of his trajectory of wandering. Horacio was exultant. However, when it fell into the hands of critics, the synthesis, the repertoire, the language, everything was rejected. The search could go forward in time, twenty, thirty years later, and words would still not be kind. The writer's greatest critics, from both sides of the Rio de la Plata, reproached him for the book, casting an anachronistic anathema aiming to reach him in the world of the dead and explain that his decision, made in the already distant year of 1935, was a mistake. On the Argentine side, at the end of the 1950’s, Professor Noé Jitrik was concise: “The publication of Más Allá (a compendium of old tales) means a step back, a return to the phantasmagoric patheticism that still subsists in Cuentos de amor, de locura y de muerte.”266 A decade later, on the Uruguayan side, Emir Rodríguez Monegal, who had devoted himself to Horacio's work for over twenty years, often republishing his texts about him with slight variations, would be even more categorical: The work itself does not stand those homages. There some short stories are collected which in their majority (one might suspect) have been the remnants from earlier compilations. (...) It is a frustrated book although it reveals, in a way that is utterly heartrending, the ghosts that haunt the writer. (…) None of these stories has properly achieved it. Within Quiroga´s production they 266

“La publicación de Más Allá (reunión de cuentos viejos) significa un retroceso, una vuelta al patetismo fantasmagórico que todavía subsiste en los Cuentos de amor, de locura y de muerte.” (Noé, Horacio Quiroga: una obra de experiencia y riesgo, 44).

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Chapter 17 barely represent the exploitation of subjects he cared about but done almost at the level of a women’s weekly (…) There is no reason to reproach him for having written them. In the end, he needed to live. But he should not have collected them in a book.267

Experts consider the book dead and buried. More than that, they deem it stillborn. It should never have been published, said Emir. Even though, for Uruguayan readers, who had little access to Horacio's recent production, the collection was a great novelty, and even in Argentina, for the new generations, there was no repetition. What was at stake for Rodríguez Monegal and Jitrik was that they expected Horacio had taken another path: they expected he had advanced in the research of denotative reality, of labor relations, of the exploitation of man by man, as presented in Los desterrados. Thus, Más allá was for them a work of decadence, which transformed his literary trajectory into a parable. For Rodríguez Monegal, Horacio ended badly, with his back turned to art. The writer, on the other hand, no matter how much he mastered handling a poetics from beyond, could not hear those future voices that condemned him. Even if he could, it would not be like him to follow someone else's prescriptions. He had traced his path through other engines. The book, it is true, took unexpected turns and was consistent with the choice to go deeper into the universe of Edgar Allan Poe, the gothic novel, spiritism, all that. At times, it made use of contemporary resources, such as the dreamlike and delirious experience of the short story “Las moscas”, published two years earlier, which placed readers in front of an avant-garde narrative set in the tropical forest, which revisited the argument of “El hombre muerto”. In the preceding short story, initially published in 1920, a rural worker, after weeding the banana grove, tripped and accidentally stabbed himself with the machete in his stomach. In “Las moscas”, alone in the woods, the protagonist suffered a spinal cord injury. The two different ways of

267 “La obra misma no soporta estos homenajes. Allí se recogen algunos cuentos de distintas épocas que en su mayoría (cabe sospechar) han sobrado de anteriores recopilaciones. (…) Es un libro frustrado aunque revela, en forma por demás desgarradora, los fantasmas que acosan el escritor. (…) Ninguno de estos cuentos está logrado cabalmente. Dentro de la producción de Quiroga representan apenas la explotación de temas que le importaban pero hecha casi en un nivel de semanario femenino (…) No hay que censurarlo por haberlos escrito. Al fin y al cabo, tenía que vivir. Pero no debió haberlos reunido en un libro.” (Rodríguez Monegal, El desterrado: vida y obra de Horacio Quiroga, 271-272).

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narrating in the two stories were the two extremes of Horacio's trajectory: the first, “El hombre muerto” linearly narrated the agony and hardships of the dying man; the replica, “Las moscas”, shattered the protagonist's subjectivity into a series of landscape elements, in an analogical and surrealist experience. The disapproval of the future ghosts of Noé Jitrik and Emir Rodríguez Monegal would never bother Horacio, but the same certainly could not be said of the contemporary voices that harassed him and caused turmoil. Eduardo Mallea, former member of the Martín Fierro group and, in those years, “central figure in the literary field”,268 working both in La Nación and in Sur magazine, was the first one to write about Más allá. Horacio's expectations were not very good. After so many years without publishing, and with the poor reception of Pasado Amor, he really did not know what to expect. From the moment the originals left his hands, each step of the production process diminished his control over the outcome of the book's making. As much as he closely followed the establishment of the text, sent dozens of letters to César Tiempo, and minutely corrected the original, after a certain moment, everything became uncontrollable, surprising, unexpected. The book, once finished, with its yellow cover, surprised him. It was a graphic work very different from that of Glusberg at Editora Babel. The volume screamed modernity and made it clear that, in the 1930’s, books were no longer the same as they were in other times. Why then would they be read in the same way? It haunted Horacio. After so many years, he feared it. As a man with a controlling personality, he suffered. Miles away from Montevideo and Buenos Aires, where the book was just starting to circulate, he had no way of closely monitoring the reception. He had no friends in the newsrooms. He had nothing. Thus, when he received the March 3, 1935 issue of La Nación and read the unsigned review of his book, what prevailed was indignation and impotence: The author of ‘Extraordinary Tales’ [Edgar Allan Poe] has bewitched the youth of Quiroga with its morbid fascination for the weird and hallucinatory; then not even the burning hot sun of Misiones has been capable of the exorcism that will unbewitch the bewitched (...) If he feel what he writes – Poe, his teacher boasted about writing coldly – it may be that Quiroga does nothing but share his feelings, which, in his apparent sadism, 268

“figura central del campo literario”.(Podlubne, Escritores de Sur: los inicios literarios de José Bianco y Silvina Ocampo, 81).

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Chapter 17 of which nothing exist but that profound need to express the deepest feelings that is the purest source of artistic production. But, whatever the explanation or justification for such attitude, it is no less indisputable.269

There Horacio was being subjected to a moral judgment by an alleged humanist who believes that literature is an appendix of the Christian catechism and should, therefore, transmit edifying values. Instead of analyzing the book, the critic devoted himself to inquiring about the figure of the author and giving him a clumsy diagnosis of his own creation. Eduardo Mallea and his literary column were influential. And he was the one who guided what others would write about the book in other newspapers. Horacio suddenly found himself tied to an open-air psychiatrist's couch, amidst anonymous reviews, moral judgments, and psychologizing analyses. For someone who had known the glory of public recognition, it was frustrating. There was nothing left for him to do but complain from a distance, since he did not even have the influence to discuss with his friends another point of view about the book. Horacio, in short, did what writers who are far away do: he raged, he wanted to kill or be killed, but, in the end, what was left for him was to vent in his letters: “A good comment, that of [Antonio Soto] Boy. Not so good that of La Nación. There are in that house some poisoned mice who do not forgive that I am the author that is interesting to read.”270 Boy was from Spain; Antonio Soto, who wrote about him in the newspaper El Plata, was from Montevideo. But it did not matter that Boy gave the book a positive review. He was angry at the biggest newspaper in his Buenos Aires, where he had collaborated for so long. Mallea had written, expressing his ill will: “some of the short stories that are irresistibly, at times irritatingly, captivating”.271 Hate grew inside him: 269

“El autor de ‘Historias Extraordinarias’ [Edgar Allan Poe] ha embrujado la juventud de Quiroga con su morboso afán por lo raro y lo alucinante; luego ni el mismo ardiente sol de Misiones ha sido capaz del exorcismo que desembrujará al hechizado (...) Si siente lo que escribe – Poe, su maestro, blasonaba de escribir a frío – pudiera ser que Quiroga no haga sino compartir sus sufrimientos, que, en su aparente sadismo, no existe sino esa profunda necesidad de expresión de los sentimientos más hondos que es la fuente más pura de producción artística. Pero, cualquiera que sea la explicación o justificación de tal actitud, ella no es menos indiscutible.” (Mallea, “Más allá”). 270 “Bien el comentario de [Antonio Soto] Boy. Menos bien el de La Nación. Hay en esa casa unos ratones envenenados que no me perdonan el que yo resulte autor interesante de leer.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 471). 271 “algunos de los cuentos irresistiblemente, por veces irritantemente cautivantes” (Mallea, “Más allá”).

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Dear Tiempo: Having arrived your letter on the 16th, and received the papers from Uruguay. We can see that people persist along the path marked by La Nación: pathology, etc. It is somewhat a shame to see so much incomprehension in a book called Más Allá. Would they rather I talk of the races?272

He saw himself cornered, none of his short story books had received such acid reviews. He was exposed, under attack, with no one defending him: “I suspect that La Prensa entrusted the review of Más Allá to some retard. Difficult to believe they do not protect their new collaborator at least a little.”273 A few months ago, he had published in La Prensa the sketches “Los hombres hambrientos”, in March, and “La hormiga minera”, in April. And he would continue to collaborate throughout that year. In his impotence, he screamed: they are killing, they are destroying my book, and why is it that no one comes to my aid? No one was coming to his aid. That book meant a lot to him. It was not, as some said and some would say, just a work to raise some money. It was a representative part of his trajectory: “I have affection for these short stories, as many of them express what is in me of somnambulic. I am especially pleased with ‘El padre’”,274 he had written to César Tiempo during the editing process. It was a tale that reported the extreme afflictions of a father who imagined all kinds of situations that his teenage son, who had gone out hunting alone, could go through. During the editing process, he decided to change the title to “El hijo”. It was certainly one of the stories that Mallea had referred to as “irritatingly captivating” in the book. Despite the attack that Horacio felt he was a victim of, Más allá won third place in the Montevideo municipal literature prize. Financially, it 272

“Querido Tiempo: “Llegada su carta del 16, y recibidos los diarios del Uruguay. Vamos viendo que la gente persiste en la pauta dada por La Nación: patología, etcétera. Apena un tanto tanta incomprensión en un libro que se llama Más Allá. ¿Pretenderán que hable de carreras?” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 477). 273 “Sospecho que La Prensa confió la crónica de Más Allá a algún retardado. Difícil creer que no proteja un poco a su nuevo colaborador.” (Tiempo, Cartas Inéditas y evocación de Quiroga, 44). 274 “Le tengo afecto a estas historias, por expresar muchas de ellas lo sonambúlico que hay en mí. Me place singularmente ‘El padre’” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 433434).

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yielded him five hundred pesos, which was the equivalent of five collaborations in the press in those years. The amount came as an advance, and César Tiempo had to borrow money to pay Horacio: “We already know what happened with the publication of Más allá, his latest book. I had to call a friend, the writer and landowner Santiago C. Olivan, author of Laya Guapa, to get the five hundred pesos I sent to San Ignacio.”275 The book definitely was not a great commercial success, it did not save Horacio from personal penury. It had helped him, in some way, to be welcomed back into Uruguayan literature – that third place in the municipal prize was a timid belated recognition, but it was something. After the peak of his popular success, not many people were willing to offer him a hand. His difficult personality and skittish behavior were partly responsible for this. When one of President Terra's ministers wrote to the lawyer Asdrúbal Delgado, who was interceding on behalf of the writer, he made a point of making clear to the man from Salto the reasons for his lack of good will: Today I have received a letter from the never well pondered friend Quiroga in which he asks me, at his request, for a certificate from the Consul General stating his current marital status and if so, to send it to you.276

Without friends, he would be lost. It was tough, but retirement finally came, still in 1935. Horacio was informed of his appointment as Honorary Consul, a position with the symbolic salary of fifty pesos a month, just so that he could be entitled to retirement. The procedures, however, were endless: Etchegoyen informed Horacio that, living abroad, he would have to pay a tax of around 40% on his earnings. This made his friends and himself still have a lot of work to do until the end of the process, which would only happen in May 1936. All those troubles wore him down day by day. It seemed like he would never have peace again.

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“Ya se sabe lo que ocurrió cuando la publicación de Más allá, su último libro. Tuve que recurrir a un amigo, el escritor y hacendado Santiago C. Olivan, autor de Laya Guapa, para conseguir los quinientos pesos que le giré a San Ignacio.” (Tiempo, Cartas inéditas y evocación de Horacio Quiroga, 16). 276 “Hoy he recibido carta del nunca bien ponderado amigo Quiroga en la que me pide, a su solicitud, un certificado del Cónsul General en el que conste su estado civil actual y en caso afirmativo se lo envíe a Ud.” (Letter from Martín Etchegoyen to Asdrúbal Delgado, December 10, 1935. Collection of Uruguayan National Library).

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The winter of my time It was not just María, nor just the critics, nor the editors of Buenos Aires newspapers and magazines, nor just the new Uruguayan government, nor the general that lead the coup in Argentine. It was not even the scorching hot weather of San Ignacio. No. There was something else, worse, insidious, that was beginning to unsettle, irritate, consume him. His body had been making itself adversely felt for some time: urinating had turned into a troublesome activity. Horacio felt pain and difficulties. He did not really know what was going on. Even so, he joked and took things on their bright side: It seems that my urinary complaints are improving. I still have an exasperating slowness to begin urinating, which is reduced little by little. The functions somewhat adjacent to this one, are always magnificent, and according to the warning that a friend of age made to you about this, and I believe it was Doctor Navarro277

he wrote in a letter to his friend Asdrúbal. Everything was going well, the fearful optimist repeated to himself. His body was getting old, this is true. Those were strange times. Eglé had already given up trying to live in Misiones. Her marriage had been a failure and, after three months, she ran away, leaving the lands she had inherited from her mother to her husband Lenoble; by then, she was already living in Buenos Aires and trying to get a job. Darío continued trying to make a living in the forest, being hired by a company, setting up ranches in the Candelária region, together with the painter and engineer Carlos Giambiagi, a friend of the family. Horacio and María were by themselves again, without the passion of their early days together, without the warm embrace of fame and public recognition, without the attractive landscape of Buenos Aires, with a Horacio who was beginning to show signs of physical fatigue, and with an income that insisted on waning. The problems were endless. María was the optimist then, firmly expecting a turnaround in their financial situation. She believed that things were going to get better. Horacio was surprised by his wife's positive thinking: 277

“Parece que mis achaques urinarios van mejorando. Me queda todavía una lentitud exasperante para comenzar a orinar, que disminuye poco a poco. Las funciones un tanto adyacentes a esta, magníficas siempre, y de acuerdo con las advertencias que te hacía un amigo de edad al respecto, y creo que el doctor Navarro” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 491).

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“At home we are well; María always trusting that a turn in fate will allow her to spend a season there. I don’t expect so. We are still about receiving the first pension quota. Financially, therefore, rather delayed.”278 He, who had seen all his fortune plans sink, believed that one day he at least would be able to receive his pension. He accumulated bills at grocery stores and his mood only got worse. He continued to collaborate with his sketches of the forest for La Prensa, with whom he could barely get along. From the release of Más allá to the end of that year, he managed to maintain an average of one collaboration a month. It was the frequency of the best times. It was what it would always have been, had it not been for the collaboration of some editors who truly respected him, especially Luis Pardo and Samuel Glusberg. To tell the truth, it was what he had managed to get. When Horacio did the calculations, he was startled by the result: Dear Tiempo: I reread your letter, which I thought I had answered, and I stop at its end, where you wish me health and humour. The one, regular, the other, awful. The financial issue, my eternal weakness. Consider that since Montevideo I have not been sent one peso since the 15th June 1934. The pension seems about to be received, but meanwhile I don’t have a penny. At least they send me everything I will be due by then, or if they send it in time, before the shops here close their doors to me. A terrible thing that has me in a dark mood. And with a family (...)279

Horacio's financial hardship was becoming a current issue among his close friends. Even though he had not asked anyone for help, he received a check from his friend Ezequiel Martínez Estrada around those times. It was October. The money came as a blessing, even for an atheist like him. 278

“Por casa andamos bien; María confiando siempre en que un vuelco de la fortuna le permitirá ir a pasar una temporada en esa. No lo espero. Aún estamos en percibir la primera cuota de la jubilación. Económicamente, pues, muy atrasadillos.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 492). 279 “Querido Tiempo: Releo su carta, que creía haber contestado, y me detengo en su final, donde me desea salud y humor. La una, regular; el otro, endiablado. La cuestión económica, mi eterno débil. Calcule que desde Montevideo no me han remitido un peso desde el 15 de junio de 1934. La jubilación parece que está a conseguirse, pero entre tanto no tengo un centavo. Siquiera mandan todo lo que me deberán para entonces, o si me envían a tiempo, antes que los boliches de aquí me cierren las puertas. Perra cosa que me tiene de humor negro. Y con familia (...).” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 503).

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In the midst of that hellish situation, his joys were mainly literary and parsimonious: in addition to the publication of the book that year and the municipal award, he could say goodbye to the year 1935 with the satisfaction of receiving a letter from a reader who, after reading his “Frangipane” sketch, about the perfume of the plant of that name, had felt so seduced that he had written to the Posadas Agricultural School to request a sample. Someone had understood that his love for nature was then a love of vegetation. People and animals already interested him less.

The last pages When retirement finally came, it felt strangely belated. María could not stand his bad mood any longer. He, on the other hand, could no longer stand her or anyone else. The pains to urinate had increased, and spending the day with that pressure on the bladder pushed him to the limit. Horacio had become little less than intractable. Financial hardship had also hit him to the core and not even hist retirement money could repair the damage done. Between him and María, there was always a “when” before, there was always an “if”. Living with Eglé and Darío made the environment more pleasant, there was always the possibility that conflict would be eased. With the eldest children gone, each one in search of their own life, and with the high temperature of the first years of marriage subsided, little seemed to remain of a common horizon. The hardship of life in Misiones, the economic hardship, and Horacio's physical condition aged irrevocably their relationship, which lost its meaning. At that moment, before them, the only plausible thing was separation. Both understood it. But even that did not dampen the inescapable fall: My wife has been back for a week; and her little taste for living in the countryside, already exasperated in the last times has become irresistible. As she is not totally here – even with her husband and home – and I don’t feel at ease in urban life, an impasse with no way out has developed. Neither her nor I should sacrifice ourselves. There is no other solution than total separation: divorce.280

280 “Mi mujer ha vuelto hace una semana; y su poco gusto para vivir en el campo, ya exasperado en los últimos tiempos, se ha tornado irresistible. Como ella no se halla totalmente aquí – aun con su marido y hogar – y yo no me hallo en la vida urbana, se ha criado un impasse sin salida. Ni ella ni yo debemos sacrificarnos. No queda más solución que la separación total: divorcio.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 551).

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The renunciation of love, the dream, the ideal, due to the realization of the impossibility of continuing together. María was still the woman Horacio had fallen in love with, but he was no longer the same. In another time, he could propose that they both return to Buenos Aires, he would invent another literary project, he would mobilize the Buenos Aires media. He would start from scratch. He had always been an adventurer, willing to start all over again. At that moment, however, no matter how much María emanated each of the qualities that had made him fall in love, he could not anymore. He no longer had the strength or means to start over. His body ached. He should let her move on and he knew it. María had not stopped loving Horacio either and did not want to get divorced. He was the man who had initiated her into the arts of love, literature, film, and music. He was the father of her daughter. But he had become a man that was impossible to deal with, in a place that was impossible to live in. She was not going to get divorced, but she could not stay another day with him in Misiones. Horacio was deteriorating. María Elena needed to break free from that prison, and it was not his fault, nor hers, nor anyone else's. So María left. She took Pitoca and settled in the family home in Buenos Aires. A long silence fell over Horacio, only broken by the attempt, in a letter, to explain to his friend Ezequiel Martínez Estrada what he was going through. He had traveled to Misiones with his wife and three children a few years before. Suddenly, he was completely alone. He tries to make a more accurate calculation of his situation, in a set of sentences in which he began by judging his wife and ended by judging himself: How tremendous and complicated is all this! There are a hundred mortal reasons to condemn and another one hundred to excuse, but I’m a solitary man, it’s the truth. My excess personality - as my wife says - makes me feel chains in the slightest obstacle to my will.281

It was not cinema, it was not María. It was him, an exposed nerve. A man at his limit. His pains undermined him and brought out his worst. His time was short, so was his patience. Around him, his close relationships, as with his dear daughter, also deteriorated:

281

“Qué tremendo y complicado todo esto! Hay cien razones mortales para condenar, y otras cien para excusar. Pero yo soy un solitario, es lo cierto. Mi exceso de personalidad - como dice mi mujer - me hace sentir cadenas en la más ligera traba a mi voluntad.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 566).

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There have been two cases: me and my daughter Eglé, that we are heading for divorce. Before my conscience I am sure that we both are acting as we should.282

Horacio begins to realize that he is not less interested only in his wife – his love of the last eight years – he is less interested in humanity. The idea that had been in his mind since 1934, two years earlier, of writing about politics in those years during the rise of Nazi-fascism in Europe, would continue to torment him: take a stand or let it be? The answers varied: If this possessed Earth does not act against it, we would be rich today. I am also treating the yateís factory. The truth is that Martín and Cía have asked me for a thousand nougats to start with. I believe, also, as you do, that it is better to do any of these things before writing for Crítica or wherever. I feel, like this and everything, that I will have to do it. I have already promised a contribution to Crítica Magazine for a hundred pesos the article, etc.283

The writer was tired. A new project that popped into his head no longer went to paper with the same ease. He wondered a thousand times if it was really worth getting it started. Mess with politics, take a stand, or be silent? The question haunted him: Uriburu, Terra, Hitler – those people disgusted him. Horacio knew that each of those figures deserved a thousand libels from his pen. But was it worth it? Did he have the energy to channel his anger at that scum? He also knew that, for publishing texts about politics, there were not many options left in the press besides the newspaper that was sympathetic to the anarchists, Crítica: For three times I have requested confirmation of availability for me, and I am yet to do it. I am tempted sometimes to do a liberal thing, since it is certainly the only organ where that would have a place. Hitler has me mad.284 282

“Ya van dos casos: yo y mi hija Eglé, que vamos al divorcio. Ante mi consciencia estoy seguro de que ambos procedemos como debemos.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 551). 283 “Si este endemoniado Tierra no procede en contra, hoy estaríamos ricos. Estoy tratando también la fábrica de yateís. Lo cierto es que Martín y Cía, me han pedido mil turrones por semana para empezar. Creo también, como usted, que más vale cualquier cosa de estas antes que escribir para Crítica o donde sea. Siento, así y todo, que tendré que hacerlo. He prometido ya colaboración a Crítica Magazine por cien pesos la nota, etcétera.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 431). 284 “Por tres veces he solicitado confirmación de disponibilidad para mí, y todavía estoy por hacerlo. Me tienta a veces una cosa liberal, por ser ciertamente el único

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The pain finally spoke louder, the madness subsided, and Horacio ended up talking about tropical plants, not Nazism. Subsistence, ethical positioning, and exhaustion were combined as the same thing. Nature stripped of blood, where love could be more placid and less blunt. He needed to rest. He was too tired. Thus, in September 1935, what readers in Buenos Aires would read from Horacio's pen would not be a libel against totalitarianism, but a question that made him turn in on himself, as if he were turning his back on the world of people: My position of that of a man who before nature asks himself if he has planted what he should, when he already wrote what he could.285

His next texts would be, almost without exception, about the vegetal world. His declared renunciation, which had begun only with urban life, was extended to humanity in general. His time of contemplation became increasingly devoted to flowers and plants. He had sought in them a way to beautify the house, to make the inhospitable plateau more attractive to his love, but, at that moment, the realm of plants took on another dimension. Even his imagined trips gain new contours and destinations. It was no longer on his horizon to revisit Buenos Aires, home to his work, friendships, and loves. Nor did his gaze turn to Salto or Montevideo. He wanted to return to the road, to the river, to the tracks. His desired and chimerical destination was Asunción. Editors, friends and women were not waiting for him there, only the possibility of a new vegetal love: And not knowing why, this reminds me of your ephemeral act in Paraguay, where I am planning to go for November, if I can, almost with the exclusive objective of seeing and bringing plants, which today constitute my great love. Give me some information about the country, that is, about Asunción, where I am planning on going exclusively, for five or six days. I am seduced by the cheapness of current life there, favorable for tired pockets such as mine.286 órgano donde eso tendría cabida. El Hitler me tiene caliente.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 434). 285 “Mi posición es la de un hombre que ante la naturaleza se pregunta si ha plantado lo que debe, cuando ya escribió lo que pudo.” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 1180). 286 “Y sin saber por qué, esto me recuerda tu actuación efímera en el Paraguay, donde pienso ir para noviembre, si puedo, casi con el exclusivo objeto de ver y traer plantas, que constituyen hoy mi gran amor. Dame algún dato sobre el país, es decir, sobre Asunción, adonde pienso ir exclusivamente, por cinco o seis días. Me seduce

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In his June 1935 sketch of the forest, Horacio dedicated himself to describing plants as if they were children, with their fragility, their demand for care, their need for temperance, and their difficulty in adapting. The Poinciana regia that populated the new avenues of Asunción, never visited but so desired, and whose name in Spanish he could not remember, were also recently planted on his plateau. In that introspective vegetal odyssey, the gardener-narrator ended up coming across a Chinese bush, the ginkgo biloba, which called his attention for its strength, resistance and ancestry: Its giant leaves smell like dinosaurs. It is truly perceived by the man who once dreamt with the secondary monsters. The sensations suffered before this ghost of a plant are not new to him. He also lived before the great rains deposited the thick delugian lime. (...) The man dreamt, but the plant lives and screams still the contact with the scales of the monster in the heavy fog. Before this no doubt millions of centuries. But also millions of years ago everything passed, trilobites, ammonites, dinosaurs, burying with them all kinds of plants with their orders, families, genuses, and species, with the exception of a single one and of a single witness: ginkgo biloba, which survives and persists vibrant of renewed sap, in the soft dew of a contemporary dawn.287

It did not matter how much Horacio wrote, evoked the scent of the frangipane, exchanged an attack against Hitler for the lyrical description of a storm in the middle of nowhere, made lyrical a plant leaf, and compared it to ancient dinosaurs touched by the contemporary twilight dew, none of that would be enough. The contemporary world, on which he had turned his back, was no longer willing to pay him a single peso for his green raptures. It would be necessary to knock a thousand times on the doors that used to

la baratura de la vida actual de allá, propicia para un bolsillo exhausto como el mío.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 496). 287 “Sus grandes hojas huelen a dinosaurio. Netamente lo percibe el hombre que alguna vez soñó con los monstruos secundarios. Las sensaciones que sufre ante esta planta fantasma no son nuevas para él. También él vivió antes que las grandes lluvias depositaran el espeso limo diluviano. (…) El hombre soñó, pero la planta vive y grita aún el contacto con las escamas del monstruo en la niebla espesísima. Hace de esto sin duda millones de siglos. Pero hace también millones de años que todo pasó, trilobitas, amonitas, dinosaurios, sepultando consigo toda una clase de vegetales con sus órdenes, familias, géneros y especies, con excepción de una sola, y de un solo testigo: la ginkgo biloba, que sobrevive y persiste vibrante de savia renovada, al suave rocío de un crepúsculo contemporáneo.” (Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 1179).

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open with generosity. He no longer belonged to his time. Between both, one had aged.

18. THE MAN FROM THE PAST

Reason and common sense were not enough in the face of the inevitable. They are never enough. Just as it was not enough for him, Horacio, to take the initiative to formalize what seemed to be the next step to be taken. María left on a Thursday, the 18th of June of that unpromising year of 1936. Horacio knew it was the best thing to do. However, there were times when the best was unbearable: I have remained alone. María and the baby left the day before yesterday. The crisis, thus, happened. But not without confrontation from one and the other part, as nine years of life in common, of which seven of love, are hefty. I have not had the courage to deprive my wife of her daughter, her only great love. (...) I have been left in great pain from the last scene of farewell, when she cried and cried in my arms until the heart was poured out.288

Suddenly, writing had become essential again. Absolute loneliness had befallen that man. He threw himself frantically and without hindrance at the paper. His interlocutor, in addition to himself, was the writer friend from Bahía Blanca, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, whom he had met in Vicente López and with whom he had gotten closer in recent times. Ezequiel was the friend who had sent him money without him having to ask. He was generous and attentive. When the crisis arrived, he became his closest friend. Horacio threw himself into an unprecedented confessional spiral, in which he began to undress in front of the one he began to call his “younger brother”, the one he thought capable of accepting his pains, his memories. Estrada was an essayist and was almost twenty years younger than Horacio. 288

“Me he quedado solo. María y la nena se fueron anteayer. La crisis, pues, se produjo. Pero no sin desgarramiento de una y otra parte, pues nueve años de vida en común, de los cuales siete de amor, pesan mucho. No he tenido valor para privarla a mi mujer de su hija, su único gran amor. (…) He quedado muy dolorido de la última escena de despedida, cuando lloró y lloró en mis brazos hasta volcar el corazón.” (Quiroga, Quiroga íntimo, 561-562).

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Those lines, written from San Ignacio, dealt with a unique moment in his life. He was completely alone at the age of fifty-seven, reliving everything that came back in a whirlpool of memories sweeping away everything in its path. He relived Ana's death in María's departure. Loneliness and meaninglessness. His ailing body, the difficulty to urinate and the pain left him in even greater fragility. When the past haunts you, Horacio, and both love and your body fail you, what is left? He had not published anything since the beginning of 1936. The retirement money he then received from the government came with some retroactive installments in addition to the initial one; while the lump sum was not large enough to pay his debts, it at least freed him from needing to keep chasing magazine editors. The mad rush was over. Eglé and Darío now lived in Buenos Aires; María and Pitoca too. What might seem like the expected time to rest was coming true: he no longer rushed to write, to publish, to retire, he no longer needed to do everything he could to improve his surroundings for María. However, that was not just it. He had been thrown, in jolts, in front of himself, when no one expected anything else from him. A painful and traumatic loneliness. Like the coati in one of his paintings, Horacio obsessively investigated something that was burning in his belly. He did not know if his ailment came from his body or soul, from a past that came en masse to torment him. As the times in which people lived had really changed, he was finally beginning to become the man of the past, a dweller of lands where ancestral plants flourished and where, in a timeless graze, dinosaurs roamed the land. The final crisis with María threw him into a bottomless fit of melancholy. When Ana María died, he went silent; he did not write letters or short stories. Only the secret account of those horrendous events. Now all he had was Ezequiel and his days were of solitude, regrets, and writing: of the much he remembered, of the little he lived, he spilled it all over the paper. As had happened to Berenice in his homonymous story, in those letters he was visibly growing old, growing so old that he was already starting to face death.

The book of days The death he faced was not frowning at him, but it was instead a woman who was waiting for him, indifferently, a few corners ahead. Before crossing paths with her, Horacio was considering the writing of his next book – his memoirs, along the lines of Axel Munthe’s The Story of San

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Michele (1929). He barely realized, however, that he was already writing it, haphazardly, in spurts, through the successive letters whose writing took him hours, all of them addressed to his friend Ezequiel. In the thread that connected him to the present, there was a fact that, although unexpected, was not disputed nor did it generate major controversies. The doctors of Posadas all said the same: they were unanimous in diagnosing the need to further investigate what was happening to his prostate, and the best place to do it was Buenos Aires. Everything in his life seemed to be already over, but there was one task left: he would need to spend some more time in the capital. At Hospital de Clínicas in Buenos Aires, the well-known and respected surgeon Doctor Arce could take care, diagnose, and cure him. Horacio was eventually convinced he had to see him, but he decided that he would only go on spring. The idea of traveling in winter, of being cold in a city that was no longer his, without having his own house, was unbearable. It was necessary to wait at least three months, by the fireplace, brooding over the past with a warm body, before leaving for the capital. What really weighed on him was leaving, for the third time, the land of his choosing, to stay in the big city, far from his plants, the ones carefully cultivated with his own hands. He felt as fragile as ever and the return to Buenos Aires felt like a crossing akin to those endless days at sea on the way to Paris. He still feared the risk of losing his flowers and foliage to ants, to the weather, to the relentless grass. During the months of that winter in the jungle, in the midst of anxiety and waiting – for the trip, for spring, for the cure, for Buenos Aires – Horacio intuited, but he had no clear idea about the reason for his suffering. Maybe it was not just the benign prostatic hypertrophy, which affected so many men at that age. But he could not determine the reason. Some insidious evil, with which he lived and which was still unknown. Maybe he was just missing María, her beauty, her seductive look, her youth, her joy, which gave his life different contours. But no. He remembered, with some difficulty, that he already felt these pains when María was there. What could it be? Missing Pitoca also tormented him. He had already built so many things for the girl – cars, swimming pools – and he was waiting for the time to tell new stories of the jungle, as he had done in the past with Eglé and Darío. The older cubs were also not there. When could he see them again? In three months, of course, as he was going to Buenos Aires in three months. It is hard to think while feeling so much pain. Darío was trying to fill the void left in the pages of Buenos Aires with his own short stories. Eglé was working at Crítica, in search of the

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independent life that women were now allowed to aspire to. Horacio, why wait so long to go back to Paris, I mean, Buenos Aires? He gnawed at the thought of the man he had been, the outdated writer, as he was considered by many. He needed some stoicism in order to look the other way, to not fall into the traps of oblivion. How many times had he not been the parricide? His gaze was fixed on the horizon, on the certainty of a grand future. But everything was an illusion that it would end up on the ground again, or in the inaccurate flight of flies. The question returned: Horacio, when did you become a writer? And on that topic: it would be worth presenting one day this particularity of mine (chaos) of not writing if not pushed to do so by finances. I have been like that since I was twenty nine or thirty years old. There are people who do it as a natural way to offload, others who do it for vanity; I write for inferior motives, that much is clear. But the curious thing is that no matter the reasons for my writing, my prose would always be the same.289

In your letters, Horacio, you are raw. Why do you think people do not care about your Croquis del monte? They want the blood you have accustomed them to taste. That crack, Horacio, that abyss that you touch today. There will not be a memoir, you and I both know. Your memories are those letters that you scribble, do not touch up, and send to the stunned eyes of the boy Ezequiel. You do not travel, Horacio, and you procrastinate. Your excuses are endless: that cold you had never felt so intensely, the ants that would come, some plant that you wanted to see taking root before saying goodbye to the place. Horacio, the ants are already everywhere. You become entangled with the problem of where you are going to stay, endlessly negotiating with Eglé whether she or Ezequiel will shelter you. You and I both know that all you want is Eglé's forgiveness. The girl is finally free from you. Freed from her bonds, she begins to experience new loves and friendships. A thousand kilometers away from you. Maybe now she will be less skittish, maybe now, Horacio, with you in this state, at least you can say in your letters what she wants to hear from you. 289

“Y a propósito: valdría la pena exponer un día esta peculiaridad mía (desorden) de no escribir sino incitado por la economía. Desde los veintinueve o los treinta años soy así. Hay quien lo hace por natural descarga, quien por vanidad; yo escribo por motivos inferiores, bien se ve. Pero lo curioso es que se escribiera yo por lo que fuere, mi prosa sería siempre la misma.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 606).

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[Lenoble] is a good kid, when one is determined to not see in him anything but what goodness there is in every walking being. But my daughter did perfectly well in divorcing him. This daughter of mine Eglé is once again beginning to be the daughter of before. Mutual hard knocks are bringing us closer. I am pleased to be going to see her around October, month when I will leave almost inevitably.290

The negotiations never end. There are weeks and weeks of letters exchanged, between comings and goings. Almost a month later, Horacio, you are still telling your friend: It seems to me that my daughter Eglé will bring me with her during my brief stay there. We have exchanged a few letters, along the lines of: Her: ‘You gaught me once what it is to be a father’. Me: ‘As always one concludes by going where one is understood, I am returning to you, guagua’... For some tales, you will see the place that these kids have occupied in my life.291

But something came across to your children. Eglé works at Crítica, she is sentimental like you, intractable like you, and she is also dedicated to writing. Darío takes his first steps as a short story writer and decides to take a most dangerous path, with no guarantees. Yes, something of yourself came across to both of them. Spring is coming, Horacio. And you talk to Escalera, your neighbor and caretaker, and ask him to take care of the house’s upkeep, to supervise the maid who will clean the house, so that she keeps the plants watered and does not let any orchid die of thirst. You know how to be objective when you want to. You had already asked this before, you would keep repeating yourself later, by letter, because you suffer from not being able to be there, from having to abandon every routine in the house, every plant, every animal, every corner of the plateau.

290 “[Lenoble] es un buen muchacho, cuando uno se propone no ver en él sino lo que de bueno tiene todo ser andante. Mas mi hija hizo perfectamente en divorciarse de él. Esta mi hija Eglé comienza a ser de nuevo la hija de antes. Mutuos aporreos nos van aproximando. La voy a ver con placer allá por octubre, mes en que iré casi indefectiblemente.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 573). 291 “Me parece que mi hija Eglé me llevará consigo durante mi breve estadía en esa. Hemos cambiado algunas cartas, al tenor de los siguientes: Ella: ‘Me enseñaste una vez a saber lo que es un padre’. Yo: ‘Como siempre concluye uno por ir a donde lo comprenden, estoy volviendo a ti, guagua’… Por algunos relatos, se dará usted cuenta del lugar que han ocupado en mi vida esos muchachos.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 581-582).

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He would leave. The cold was not going to go away. The pains were not going to go away. María’s absence was not going away. He felt sick and, even though spring was just over a week away, Horacio did not want to leave and postponed the trip until the last moment: I am still unwell; the urinary difficulties are on the rise. I am starting to fear what they they do not tire of giving as my prognosis: any acute retention, that forces me to the catheter. (...) Now I face the monumental problem of letting this go. And my plants! You cannot imagine what is for me the almost certainty that despite all the instructions I will leave the maid – a pearl, as you know –, the ants will do me perhaps irreparable harm. I have said to her: ‘Be certain, María, that I will cut your throat if you let a single of my plants get eaten’. And she, convinced: ‘You won’t cut my throat, sir’.292

The ants, the plants, the orchids, the intense bond created with that portion of land, in which an intense life was forged, as close to nature as he could conceive. None of that would be enough to stop him. The body asked for help. Loneliness was wreaking havoc. He finally got on the steamboat and left for Buenos Aires to do whatever was needed.

Spring Horacio arrived in October and Spring arrived with him. He left his promised land, his wildlife utopia behind, and checked into Hospital de Clínicas in Buenos Aires, the city where, after all, he had spent most of his life. The city from which he always ended up leaving, but to which he always ended up returning. It was October 2. He was back. The old Hospital de Clínicas, built in the last decades of the 19th century, was no longer in its heyday. Located in the block formed by Córdoba Avenue and Junín, Paraguay, and Andes streets (which would later change its name to J. E. Uriburu), the building was inspired by the Friedrichshain Hospital, in Berlin, and other European buildings of the time.

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“No sigo bien; las dificultades urinarias aumentan. Comienzo a temer lo que no se cansan de prognosticarme: cualquier retención aguda, que me fuerce a la sonda. (…) Ahora tengo el monumental problema de dejar esto. ¡Y mis plantas! No se figura lo que es para mí la casi certeza de que a pesar de todas las instrucciones que dejaré a la sirvienta – una perla, como sabe –, las hormigas me harán daño tal vez irreparable. Le he dicho a aquella: ‘Tené la seguridad, María, de que te degüello si me dejas comer una sola planta’. Y ella, convencida: ‘No me va a degollar, señor’.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 619).

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It was the triumph of science and medical knowledge over disease and death. However, when Horacio arrived there to be admitted, times were no longer golden. The hospital suffered from a lack of budget. In an attempt to reduce this insufficiency, at the beginning of the decade they had even proposed that the patients themselves paid a fee for their care, proportional to their salaries and the cost of treatment. The idea was soon abandoned. That fifty-year-old building, almost the age of the illustrious patient, was the place where Horacio was hospitalized. Installed in room 4, he was optimistic about his treatment. Despite the discomfort when urinating, the pain, the diagnosis of an enlarged prostate, he trusted the surgery, which would be performed by Dr. José Arce, a recognized surgeon, intellectual, and congressman. With the successive and obsessive appointments he had in Misiones, with all the postal conversations with his doctor friends, with what he had gathered from encyclopedias, Horacio believed he knew the details of his own case. He pondered that his illness was more functional than organic. What really worried him was the risk of having to use a catheter to deal with the painful urinary obstructions. The first days were hellish. Late at night, there he was screaming in pain in bed, due to a bladder retention and a urinary tract infection that had already turned into nephritis. When they put the urinary catheter in, as much as it hit his vanity in full, it was at least a chance of sleeping in peace, after months without prolonged sleep, as he then realized. Room 4 became his home. There was no clear indication of when the procedure would be performed. “Regarding the imminence or remoteness of the operation (if it does take place), regarding the diagnosis itself, I have heard not a word”,293 he complained in a letter to Asdrúbal Delgado. The doctor did not say much. He did know that they would have to wait until the infection subsided before the surgery could be performed. If anything had improved, it was the fact that he was no longer the lonely man who spent, in pain, days without seeing anyone. He continued writing letters, it is true, to friends in Salto or to Escalera, in San Ignacio. But he did it in the intervals between the many visits he received. Eglé and Darío came every day, and it was a joy to see them so grown up and autonomous. María was also always with him and, as he said in a letter, “he looks after me like in the good old times”.294 He could also see Alfonsina again, after almost

293

“Sobre inminencia o lejanía de la operación (si hay lugar), sobre el diagnóstico mismo, no sé palabra” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 626). 294 “me atiende como en los buenos tiempos” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 629).

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ten years away from her, and it was good to have her smile lighting up the room. He needed his friends, he needed patience. Doctor Arce had promised, a few more weeks and he would be able to go through surgery. Weeks? A whole month at that hospital? – Horacio was surprised. Those were not the plans he had made when he came from San Ignacio. But then again, what were plans to his life? Very little, all things considered. Everything came out differently. There was no other way. He had to be patient. October ended with the initial bladder surgery that was expected. Three doctors participated in the procedure: Arce, Cassinelli, and Ivanissevich. Soon afterwards, Horacio was told that a second one would be necessary, as the urine was septic and the wound had become infected. The only verb they offered him was “to wait”. His testicles were examined, the doctors looked at each other and all they asked of him was patience. Horacio was patient. He comments in a letter that he could not be in better hands. The hardest part was over, he was sure of it. He would never feel all that pain again, all that suffering. No longer would his body treat him like that. Then November came in with spring wanting to turn into summer, and he finally felt better. He was able to get up and walk through the hospital corridors again, feeling the weakness of having spent almost two months in bed. “My health does not prosper as I would like, but I cannot complain.”295 It was necessary to be optimistic. One day at a time. At least he could already walk. He even managed, in mid-November, to take a walk around the city, have lunch with some friends, and, at the end of the tour, “returning here at 5, without any fatigue”.296 He felt stronger. Surely his body was recovering. That season was lasting much longer than he had imagined, but it was not the end of the world. He was going to leave the hospital feeling well, walking, and resume life. His garden would not be left unprotected that time. At the end of the month, he wrote, just in case, to his neighbor and former son-in-law Jorge Lenoble, to send news and also to ask him to take a look at his house. It was important that he helped take care of everything. After so many weeks away, it was possible that Escalera had been a little careless. He did not want to have surprises for the return that already seemed closer and closer:

295

“Mi salud no prospera lo que desearía, pero tampoco me quejo.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 631). 296 “retornando a las 5 aquí, sin fatiga ninguna” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 632).

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I have been wanting to give you my news for a while now. As you will know from Darío, I still have a while left before I am fully cured. It may be that between the past operation and the one I still must undergo, some time will pass. Then I would go there for at least a few months. I have seen here in my way some magnificent plants. Now I can walk a little and I go out every day for a while. Still very weak. Send me news of your projects, always an interesting point for me. If you go to my house from time to time, have a look to see how María is doing. I will be very grateful. Happiness, Lenoble, and a good squeeze of the hands.297

On those unlucky days, Horacio was preparing himself to live. After eight weeks in the hospital, and feeling relatively well, he focused on the outside world. As he did not always have the strength to walk around the city, he strolled through the hospital gardens, as the building was also known for the careful landscaping of each pavilion, where “magnolias grew, Cape jasmine, roses, laurels, foxglove, passionflower, camphor trees, jacaranda trees, various species of conifers”,298 a vegetal exuberance that offered the man something of his garden at the Misiones home. Walking through that garden, going to visit Alfonsina from time to time, hearing news about the good living biped who had married his daughter, knowing what those who followed life regardless of his ailments were doing, made Horacio more confident of his recovery. What he had were hopes and signs that he interpreted as best as he could. Safe and accurate words did not come from the doctors’ lips, as he would like. The time for the patient to participate in the treatment, even being able to give opinions, had not come yet. What Dr. Arce gave him was some hope, which kept him looking forward to better days in that transitory life in the hospital. 297

“Hace ya rato que deseaba darle noticias mías. Como sabrá por Darío, tengo todavía para rato antes de estar curado del todo. Pudiera ser que entre la operación pasada y la que me deben hacer todavía, transcurriera un tiempo. Entonces iría a esa por unos meses siquiera. He visto aquí de paso algunas plantas magníficas. Ahora puedo caminar un poco y salgo todos los días un rato. Muy débil todavía. Deme noticias de sus trabajos, punto siempre interesante para mí. Si va de cuando en cuando a casa, eche una ojeada para ver cómo se porta María. Se lo agradeceré mucho. Felicidad, Lenoble, y un buen apretón de manos.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 632). 298 “crecían magnolias, jazmines del Cabo, rosas, laureles, plantas de digital, plantas de pasionaria, árboles de alcanfor, jacarandaes, varias especies de coníferas” (Pergola, “Historia del Hospital de Clínicas: Dos edificios, una institución”).

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Printed traces When he had already seen all the flowers, talked to all his friends, visited those who were more accessible, Horacio devoted himself to literature. As a writer, reader, or literary agent. He went through the crime novels that fell on his hand, did some light reading. He also wrote, with unstable hand and tenuous handwriting marking the page with his pencil, a sketch of the time when María was still with him: his adventure of planting Brazilian pineapples in the jungle of Misiones. He rested from this lyrical activity through another, more arid one: acting as an agent, trying to intercede for his friend Maitland, from Salto, with César Tiempo, asking him to consider the possibility of publishing a book on Uruguayan history in his Sociedad Amigos del Libro Rioplatense. When all that stopped, Horacio's thoughts, affected by the medication and the pain, wandered between the more than a thousand kilometers from his San Ignacio and the other five hundred that separated him from his native Salto. The people from these two regions were present in the panorama of his soul. Distance was not just about space, but also had to do with what time had taken, what had been experienced by another body, younger and more vigorous. The present in the Clínicas, with that alien and painful body, was when he tried to make repairs to some plots. Letters from a farmer to Lenoble and Escalera, wanting to preserve nature through the power of language; letters from a long-gone youth to friends from Salto, Asdrúbal Delgado, and his brother José María. Throughout his life, he had never cut ties with those with whom he took his first steps in literature. One day after his 58th birthday, La Prensa printed another croqui del monte, after more than a year of literary silence. It was called “La tragedia de los ananás”, a confessional narrative chronicle that recounted his attempt to make some pineapple seedlings from Pernambuco grow in the jungle of Misiones. The typist at La Prensa could not believe it when he received the originals, written in an almost invisible, disturbingly weak handwriting, which had to be deciphered generously, with the editor’s help. In the story, the indelible mark of someone who does not resign to the conditions imposed by nature and rebels against it. Even if it is a matter of making the foreign fruit grow in a hostile environment, even if he himself does not come to taste its desired flavor.

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Scribbles in a notebook This biographer walks down an aisle at the back of Biblioteca Nacional de Uruguay. In the literary archives sector, the archivist hands him some folders. Horacio's last writings, apart from his letters, are oddly provoking, through their non-literary character. He kept a small notebook with him in the hospital, in which he made personal notes. A small notebook that, of course, was never published. It interests very few or almost no one: a writing that is intimate without being confessional, that is ordinary, banal, and reveals very little. But it is something to be kept, because they are the scribbles of a writer. What can there be of transcendental in the calculations and telephone numbers of someone who suffers to pee? The final object, between monument and merewaste, is archived there, for those who want to see it, at the bottom of a folder in the archive of Biblioteca Nacional de Uruguay. Whoever cataloged it brought it together with two other of the author’s notebooks, these being much older, from 1900, which report his trip from March to May, from Salto to Paris. The criterion, as arbitrary as any – Private notebooks? Black cover notebooks? Notebooks from the beginning and end of life? – speaks of the ordering impulse that moves us. Ordering the facts of a life, as arbitrary as cataloging a dead person’s objects. The science that begs for criteria, theories, and methods. The short story writer, his calculations, and his pee. The biographer does not know what to do with such residue. Horacio is so alive in those notes, so close. The irony of the archivist – A man? A woman? – was to put the things together in that folder, tying two ends of the private life of someone who became a public person. At one extreme, the notes of the twenty-two-yearold Uruguayan who travels first class to Europe, living a fin de siècle dream, and records in an orderly handwriting every detail of the incursion that, he believes, will open up a new world for him. The predestined one. At the other end, thirty-six years later, an old man holds a pencil and struggles to slide it across the page in his thin, tired handwriting: lists, telephone numbers, addresses, various scribbles, illegible thoughts interrupted by an involuntary fingerprint left by a greasy and soiled hand, from his time still in Misiones. Some biographer who came before, when handling those juvenile notebooks, saw a book in them. He understood that there was something there that deserved to come to light, to the public eye. It was thanks to his Apollonian, ordering, judicious spirit. He saw it well. His name was Emir Rodríguez, and it was he who revealed, twelve years after Horacio's death,

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his only trip to Europe, the trip of the dandy who returned in rags, looking down on the city of light. The clear, orderly, and well-designed letters of the Parisian diary, abruptly interrupted by the lack of paper, contrasted with the intricate lines of the notebook of his final years. Being smaller, badly preserved, already without a cover, ordered by chance and necessity, that notebook seemed much older than the centenary Uruguayan notebooks bought in the last breaths of the nineteenth century. The Argentine notebook captured the meaninglessness of days in a different way, when writing is prosthesis, appendix, memory. It does not want to write a narrative, it does not want to convert the one who writes into a protagonist of some promising future. It presents itself as both sphinx and banality: an unsettling thing. A shock, a hope, a fright. Bills to pay, money to receive, telephone numbers, buses, doctors, stores, Europe. Everything is so transitory, as is the indelible imprint of Horacio's thumb, fixed on the page when everything tends to disperse. “Anyway, believe me that, feeling sick like this, the memory ends up a little cloudy.”299 The first pages, written in 1936, when the symptoms of the disease were beginning to get stronger, bear different names and addresses, such as that of a doctor from Prague, with his respective address, all written in someone else’s handwriting. Or maybe it is something else. A theater play with a doctor from Prague? Something to see with María at the theater when the Buenos Aires season resumes. Names, addresses, stores in Buenos Aires and Paris are mixed up. Why are we always stuck in this jungle? Horacio, we need to go back to the city, I met you under Wagners’s light. It's not fair for us to end up here, in the middle of nowhere. How difficult it is to reconcile so many wills. What if we went to Paris. If coup leader Terra had not taken away my job, my salary, we would be rich. Who knows, maybe with my retirement money, if they pay it all off at once. If all else fails, we will at least see the flamboyants – that was the name! – of the new avenue in the center of Asuncion. Pages later, with a firm and strong handwriting, the name of Rojas, the director of the Buenos Aires Botanic Garden. His love for vegetation during his last moments. No explanation needed. Read “La tortuga gigante” again, the first short story you read in 1999, when Teresa said that there was this excellent short story writer, that if she had not studied Piñera, it would have been Quiroga. There follows a single writing of philosophical nature about the spiritual life, almost illegible because it is so tenuous, just like his 299

“En fin, quieran ustedes creer que con este malpasar la memoria queda medio turbia” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 626).

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authorial writing in those times. In it, Horacio's big, immense thumb stands out. A mark of his body on the page. The writing of flesh. “He has taught us that blood is the best ink”,300 repeats Ezequiel. Three blank pages to rest the eyes from the forest of signs and scribbles. The list of personal contacts of his journey in Buenos Aires begins. María has a new address. He can no longer write Mariuchita because his eyes would fill with tears, it would be inappropriate. Now she lives at a friend's sister's house, at 1320 Mexico Street. That four-story building that is still standing, where the writer Baldomero Fernández Moreno also lived. I saw it myself in 2019 when I passed by there, before the new Spanish flu pandemic. Mariuchita was not there. Gustavo Caraballo, the director of the 1917 film Federación o Muerte, said he wanted to meet me, but I do not remember whether he came or not. Last week was so hard. He could adapt one of my short stories for the cinema. One of my scripts that I could not turn into films. What I need is a doctor. Doctor Arce never says anything anyway. Pedro F. Funck, relative of Arturo, a doctor friend of Gato Iglesias. Alfonsina’s name was on the page. Her phone number: 31 0839. My darling, it is your name that returns, pages ahead. On the other visit, Alfonsina, you yourself wrote your name and phone number at the top of the page again. Just below, in firm letters, contrasting with the thin line of other occasions, I write the number of the bus line that takes me from the hospital to your house: “Colectivo 32. Retiro – H. Clínicas”.

En la noche In addition to lifelong friends, children, loves, absences caused by the impossibility of being by Horacio's side in his final days, a man emerged. With a misshapen face, he had become a guest at the hospital just like the writer and, at a certain point, he decided to take his mattress to Horacio's room. His name was Batistessa and a relationship of singular complicity was established between him and the writer. When other friends were not around, when María was not there, when it was not a reasonable time for any visit, then Batistessa appeared. Batistessa had an enormous swelling that disfigured his face and deprived him of social contact. He lived in the hospital because it was impossible for him to work and because, he believed, at some point a doctor would be able to invent a cure for the disease he did not even have. He talked to the writer about any subject, because lonely Horacio really needed company in that new and strange everyday life, which had already 300

“Él nos ha enseñado que la sangre es la mejor tinta” (Estrada, Mensajes, 33).

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lasted for countless weeks. With Batistessa, he celebrated his 58th birthday, on the last night of 1936. That night, he remembered that he had been hospitalized for almost three months. After three months there, and already going through the month of January, he told his friend more or less what he was going to say, hours later, to his friend Asdrúbal Delgado, his official spokesman in Salto, exuding optimism. It was his ultimatum to return to San Ignacio: I continue to improve a lot in my general state, but not the local. It seems that the removal of the prostate is still a little far away, despite its persistent inflammation. As a consequence, I will stay here till the beginning of March, waiting for Arce. If by then there is no place for the second operatory time, I will return to Misiones, to return here after a prudent time. I have found out – and see – that with the vesical catheter one can perform perfectly for everything. It’s cheating, of course, but what can you do!301

Doctor Arce had gone on a trip to the United States shortly after the surgery in October, and had not yet returned. Horacio depended on his words to take his next steps. He believed that, until the end of February, he would be able to undergo surgery. He wrote to Isidoro Escalera to send the news and speak of his many expectations: “I can’t wait, my friend, to return there, imagine, four and a bit months in hospital!”302 And so January passed with no news, neither general nor specific. If there was anything good about that impoverished everyday life, it was being able to visit Eglé and Darío whenever he wanted. María was working at the hospital then and it was great to have her around, without the troubles of their difficult relationship. She, however, was getting more and more sulky, and he could not understand why. He wondered if he had given her some rude answer, but he could not figure anything out. She lacked even the energy to argue, but anyway, the two of them were getting along pretty well lately. Yet María was sad, and although she tried to hide her sadness, she

301

“Prosigo mejorando mucho de estado general, pero no tanto del local. Parece que la extirpación de la próstata está un poco lejana aún, por persistente inflamación de la tal. En consecuencia, demoraré aquí hasta principio de marzo, a la espera de Arce. Si para entonces no hay lugar para el segundo tiempo operatorio, regresaré a Misiones, para volver aquí después de un tiempo prudencial. He averiguado – y veo – que con la sonda vesical se puede desempeñar uno perfectamente para todo. Es un embeleco, desde luego, ¡pero qué hacer!” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 633). 302 “No veo el día, amigo, de volver a esa, imagínese, ¡cuatro meses y pico de hospital!” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 635).

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could not. Since the day he was no longer able to walk again, she sunk into unfathomable loneliness, and he did not know the reason why.

María’s silence What was not said to Horacio by Doctor Arce was told word for word to his ex-wife, who was being consumed by that unspeakable piece of information. “Doctor Arce, before departing for the United States, warned me that he would not live more than a few months. But Horacio was kept deceived telling him that when this doctor returned he would intervene on the second part of the prostate operation.”303 As had always been the case, although they loved each other, Horacio's story did not coincide with María's. While she enjoyed each day of being next to the man for whom she had nurtured and continued to nurture such contradictory and intense feelings, he, on the other hand, was confidently awaiting the improvement he believed was destined for him. However, neither the improvement nor the surgery came. And February surprised him with more pain, more discomfort, more weakness. Eczema all over the body, difficulty walking, burning, itching. The body screamed its fatigue. He had few resources left: he wrote a last letter to his friend Estrada, in which he complains about his health and says he misses not his time in San Ignacio, but another, much more recent time: On the other hand, I deplore like a paradise lost those days when I could walk, so recently! Everything is relative. But almost five months of hospital is too many, even with the endurance I have displayed for several months. Until another happier one, dear Estrada. Write to me when you need to get something off your chest – as is my case. Love to your people, and a big hug.304 303

“El doctor Arce, antes de partir a los Estados Unidos, me previno de que no viviría más de unos meses. Pero a Horacio se lo mantuvo engañado diciéndole que cuando regresara este médico intervendría la segunda parte de la operación de próstata.” (Bravo apud Perrone, Viaje al país de Horacio Quiroga). 304 “Por otro lado, deploro como a un paraíso perdido aquellos días en que podía caminar, ¡hace tan poco! Todo es relativo. Pero casi cinco meses de hospital son mucho, aun con el aguante de que he hecho gala varios meses. Hasta otra, más feliz, querido Estrada. Escríbame cuando le haga falta desahogo – como es mi caso. Cariños a su gente, y un fuerte abrazo.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 635-636).

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Horacio did not have much patience with fate. Before that unforeseen worsening, he had made plans with Delgado and Brignole to visit Salto, a city he had not returned to in decades. His wife, María, said that he had bought a new hammer and nails, a subject on which, in the times of love, he even talked about in his letters to her, when she was in Montevideo and he was in San Ignacio. Horacio told María that, on those days when he was struggling to recover his health, what he really wanted was to return to San Ignacio and at least have, in the humid air of the jungle, watching the Paraná River flow, better conditions to improve his condition. It was his new plan: to return to San Ignacio before the surgery. And, when he got better, he would see his friends in Salto again. Those who have their affections spread across different cities are only sure that they will have to travel. However, all that was taking too long. Doctor Arce never returned. Things no longer made sense. At the pace he was going, getting worse more than he was getting better, Horacio started to get suspicious of that story about the second part of the surgery. He took advantage of the visit of the famous Dr. Ivanissevich, who had come to assess him. Weakly, but firmly, he asked him to close the door. The doctor sensed what was coming and wanted to comfort Horacio, at a time when the truth was not something to be shared with a critically ill patient. Before the surgeon could even articulate a merciful and coherent speech, Horacio was clear: he wanted the truth, no matter what it was or how much it hurt. He had the right to know. Ivanissevich took a deep breath and prepared himself for what he had not learned at the Medical School, telling a terminally ill patient his real health condition. Horacio was finally able to understand his situation. Livid, Ivanissevich left the patient's room. It seemed that, in this whole situation, he was the most affected. Despite the eczema, which made it difficult to walk without pain, Horacio decided that he needed to gather strength and take a walk through the city streets. He went to Eglé’s home. They had tea together, in one of his daughter's orange mugs and, when he said goodbye, he managed to hug her with the intensity of when she was small enough to fit in his arms. He also visited other friends. He could not meet his son Darío. He took the solitary walk of men who, having already crossed all limits, know they are free. Some say he went to a pharmacy, others that he went to a hardware store. What everyone agrees with is that Horacio bought potassium cyanide, which was the only remedy to put an end to that long affair. He never submitted to the State, be it Uruguayan or Argentine, to parties – left or right, although he was closer to the former; nor to the Church –

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whatever religion it was – or to the Army. He remained faithful to his secular creed as a lone anarchist. Once, in a letter to Ezequiel, he wrote: “I don’t want anything to do with the military, my great phobia, or priests either.”305 He believed in affection between people, and that is why he needed to hug those he loved. When he returned to the hospital that Wednesday night, he found Batistessa still awake. The next morning, the friend and some of the nurses understood the essential: that the writer Horacio was no longer alive.

305 “No quiero nada de militares, mi grande fobia, y tampoco de curas.” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 600).

19. THE SUN ON THE NEWSSTANDS

When, on the morning of February 19, Elías Castelnuovo stopped by the newsstand to buy the newspaper, he learned of the death of Horacio Quiroga and it was impossible for him not to remember that of Roberto Payró, which had happened ten years before. As on that day from a decade ago, Elías was going to catch the train and, in the same way, he was informed by the newspaper about the death of the writer he admired so much. While waiting at the station, he remembered the lunch offered by Horacio Quiroga to Payró, two years before his death, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the publication of El casamiento de Laucha. They all went together to Lomas de Zamora, Payró’s hometown, for the celebration. He himself had received Horacio’s written invitation. Coincidentally, on the day Payró died, it was Horacio himself whom Castelnuovo met on the train. As he walked towards him to offer his condolences, he pondered that they were already friends. They had exchanged some letters and he had even written, a few months before, to congratulate him on his article “La santa democracia”, featured in La Nación, for what was an unquestionably accurate reading of the political climate. Horacio acted humble, replying that “The truth is that saying that was in the air, by force of dislike for what happens”.306 As soon as Castelnuovo opened his mouth to greet his friend, Horacio immediately warned him: “Do you know what happened? Payró died.” Before he could react, Horacio continued, sharply: “If you say a word about this I will get off the train and leave you here.” Castelnuovo’s bewilderment could not be greater. It was impossible to understand Horacio. Much less now, for he was dead. It was late. There was nothing to do. He took his seat on the train, but perhaps Horacio's ghost sat beside him. In the newspaper he had in his hands, he read: “Horacio Quiroga, the greatest 306 “Lo cierto es que el decir eso estaba en el aire, a fuerza de disgusto por lo que pasa”. (Quiroga, Nuevos papeles íntimos, 58).

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narrator in South America, has died. He loved the forest and extracted its secrets.”307 Elias went straight to page six, where, in six columns, there was a homage to Horacio and a complete reproduction of his short story “El almohadón de plumas”. There was no explicit mention about the cause of death, just about a walk and a conversation with the doctor in charge. He read: In the hospital of Clínicas, after a long and terrible illness, the great writer and admirable short story writer of the missionary jungle, Horacio Quiroga, has died, at seven in the morning today. For a long time he had been afflicted with a terrible illness. Lately he had improved, in such a way as there was hope for a total recovery. In the afternoon of yesterday he had gone out to see some friends. At night, professor Ivanissevich, upon conducting the nightly round to his ward, conversed for a long time with the writer, whom he found in good spirits. That is why, despite the gravity of the illness he was suffering with, his death has not ceased to cause shock. His personal friends were aware of the inevitable severity of the illness and its fatal outcome.308

The article continued with a portrait of Horacio. Elías was disturbed by the image that came from those pages: “Nothing more beautiful in Quiroga´s demeanour than his eyes, where all the sweetness and strength in the world seemed to be concentrated.”309 “It is impossible! They're talking about someone else,” he was surprised to hear his own thoughts. He went over the names of Crítica’sjournalists, trying to find out who would dare to speak like that about that intractable man. It is not possible! Will they want to turn Quiroga into a saint now? A 307

“Ha muerto Horacio Quiroga, el más grande narrador de Sud América. Amó el bosque y le extrajo sus secretos.” (Crítica, “Ha muerto Horacio Quiroga, el más grande narrador de Sud América”). 308 “En el hospital de Clínicas, después de una larga y penosa enfermedad, ha fallecido a las siete de la mañana de hoy, el gran escritor y admirable cuentista de la selva misionera, Horacio Quiroga. Hacía mucho tiempo que estaba afectado por un terrible mal. Últimamente se había mejorado, de tal manera que se llegó a pensar en un total restablecimiento. En la tarde de ayer había salido a visitar a algunos amigos. A la noche, el profesor Ivanissevich, al hacer la visita nocturna a su sala, conversó largamente con el escritor a quien halló en buen estado de ánimo. Por eso, a pesar de la gravedad del mal que lo aquejaba, su muerte no ha dejado de causar sorpresa. Los amigos personales no ignoraban la ineludible gravedad del mal y su fatal desenlace.” (Crítica, “Ha muerto Horacio Quiroga, el más grande narrador de Sud América”). 309 “Nada más hermoso en la figura de Quiroga que sus ojos, en donde toda la dulzura y la fuerza del mundo parecían concentrarse.” (Crítica, “Ha muerto Horacio Quiroga, el más grande narrador de Sud América”).

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list of names ran through Elías' head. He imagined that Eglé Quiroga had something to do with that, she who had already been a translator and who was then doing administrative work in the newspaper's editorial office. He was not sure whether the girl could write. Natalio Botana himself, the newspaper owner… Salvadora Medina Onrubia, Natalio’s wife. Well, the list is growing long. Who knows… He would probably be in charge of writing the obituary of his compatriot for Claridad. It would have to be something less rose-tinted. He would restore the truth about Horacio. One by one, the precise adjectives to describe the deceased were formed: “Horacio Quiroga was a surly, acerbic, retiring man. By his side, one always had the impression of being before a wild, tangly, thorny plant that needed to be looked at without getting too near to avoid getting hurt.”310 Horacio's ghost no longer owned what was said about him. The respect or fear that one has for the living no longer applied to the deceased person. They began to name him, to talk about him in a way that they would never have done if he still walked among the living. His name began to come into dispute; everything that until then was only said of him in small talk got to the printed pages of newspapers, magazines, and, soon, a book. His specter wandered through the city and the voice of the people was shaping, according to their memories, a body entirely made of language and memory. It was weird to be dead.

The flame Castelnuovo read the Crítica that day, but any other newspaper would not have made much difference. The newsstand was dominated by Horacio Quiroga on that February 19. Notícias Gráficas opted for being blunt instead of suble in its headline, “Horacio Quiroga, our Rudyard Kipling, has died”,311 and for a no less emphatic opening paragraph: “Horacio Quiroga, indisputably the best short story writer of South America, has died. He passed away today at the hospital of Clínicas in this city, where he entered

310

“Horacio Quiroga era un hombre adusto, puntiagudo, huraño. A su lado, se tenía la impresión siempre que se estaba frente a una planta salvaje, enzarzada, espinosa, que había que contemplar sin acercarse demasiado para no pincharse.” (Castelnuovo, “La tragedia de Horacio Quiroga”). 311 “Horacio Quiroga, nuestro Rudyard Kipling, ha muerto” (Noticias Gráficas, February 19, 1937).

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a few months ago, to receive medical treatment for an ailment he was suffering of, and which became fatal.”312 The text took two columns and was not signed as well. The reservations that, two years ago, were directed at Más allá, Horacio's last book, now gave way to an outpouring of praise. The author of a coldly received book was then deemed as el indiscutiblemente mejor cuentista de Sud América. El Mundo, for its part, would take a day longer. The record of his death would only be published on Saturday, discreetly, around the fifteenth page, after the news of the war, Argentine politics, the society column, and even some crimes that are still familiar today: “Man kills his wife with one gunshot and then takes his own life.”313 The newspaper exchanged the urgency of the news for the delicacy of the chronicle, which began by highlighting the writer's refusal to social life and fame in recent times. In the text, Horacio was treated as a former writer, as someone who had refused social life and fame for some time: Some time ago the figure of Horacio Quiroga had all but vanished from the world of letters. His long stays in Misiones, his withdrawal from the circles that unite writers when he stayed in Buenos Aires, had managed to make his name acquire a kind of veneer of celebrity, together with his prestige as a writer and his evasive presence, always just stopping by, always quiet, always looking at the ground, as if he didn’t want the surrounding spectacle to invade the abstraction of his thoughts. This is how his colleagues were used to seeing him – the few colleagues that drew near to his reserved, but profound friendship. And that is how he has been, visited by few during his illness, with the sharp, jaundiced face and dimmed eyes. Horacio Quiroga, in his last period, was almost dehumanized.314 312

“Ha muerto Horacio Quiroga, el indiscutiblemente mejor cuentista de Sud América. Ha muerto hoy en el hospital de Clínicas de esta ciudad, en donde se internara hace unos meses, en procura de atención médica para una dolencia que lo aquejaba y que se volvió mortal.” (Noticias Gráficas, “Horacio Quiroga, nuestro Rudyard Kipling, ha muerto”). 313 “Mata a la esposa de un balazo y en seguida se quita la vida.” (El Mundo, “Horacio Quiroga”). 314 “Hace tiempo ya que la figura de Horacio Quiroga se había poco menos que se perdido en el ambiente de las letras. Sus largas estadas en Misiones, su alejamiento de los círculos que congregan a los escritores cuando permanecía en Buenos Aires, habían logrado que su nombre adquiriera una especie de pátina de celebridad, integrada por su prestigio de escritor y por su evasiva presencia, siempre de paso, siempre silencioso, siempre mirando al suelo, como si no quisiera que el espectáculo circundante invadiera la abstracción de su pensamiento. Así se habían acostumbrado a verle sus colegas – los escasos colegas que se acercaron a su amistad reservada, pero profunda. Y así se ha dado, visitado por pocos durante su

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In his final days, the writer had very few friends, but all of them still seemed to have access to the press. Beneath the reverence of the unsigned text, affection for the dead man was overflowing. The article ended by announcing the funeral at 4 pm on that same Saturday, at Cementerio de la Chacarita, where the body would be cremated. The funeral began, however, at Casa del Teatro, then located at 1243 Santa Fe Avenue. The burning chamber received those who came to see Horacio in his final moments. Among those present there, in addition to writers, filmmakers, family friends, and friends of Horacio, a singular figure slinked. A discreet man, one of the first to arrive, stayed a few minutes and spoke to no one but the dead man, with whom he had become so close in those final days. It was Batistessa, the one who had offered Horacio company and care, and who then went beyond his status as a social outcast to go to the funeral. He spent long minutes looking at Horacio dead, thinking about that body that would never write a single word again, that would not say anything, that would never get up from there again. More so, a body that would soon split into flames, smoke, and finally ashes. He looked at him in his entirety. He thought about what his solitude would again be like at Hospital de Clínicas, until he found another patient willing to talk to him, who did not fear his wound, who did not take the eyes off him. He walked over to María, who looked at him sweetly, grateful that he had been able to offer that man some relief when otherlimits were imposed on her. Discreetly, willing to register his presence, he handed the widow an improvised condolence card, on which, under his name, handwritten in pencil, his address of residence could be read: “Hospital de Clínicas, quarto 4”.

The smoke María Elena Bravo, touched by the presence of so many figures who came to celebrate her husband, people from different periods of his life, from different social conditions, with luxurious or improvised cards, collected each one of the condolence cards and placed them, glued, on large sheets of cardboard, in the manner of an album. On these sheets, the cards of Batistessa and Leopoldo Lugones coexist, the Lugones who, at that moment, had ceased to be the model poet who had encouraged Horacio to launch himself into literature, ceased to be the friend who had taken him to enfermedad, con el rostro agudo, cetrino y la mirada apagada. Horacio Quiroga en su última época, era un desumanizado casi.” (El Mundo, “Horacio Quiroga”).

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Misiones for the first time, 30 years ago, to become a foe, even more so after having declared support for fascism in a newspaper article, in which he said it was time for a call to arms. Besides Horacio's body, that old and resentful Leopoldo made a terse comment to their mutual friend César Tiempo: “I still struggle to believe it. A man so robust eliminating himself with cyanide. Like a maid.”315 Leopoldo expected a heroic, grandiose departure from Horacio. Not that death common among poor women, who killed themselves with powdered potassium cyanide, a cheap substance widely available in hardware stores. Leopoldo did not accept this. Leopoldo brooded over this vexing fact, day after day, for a whole year. Until, exhausted from cavilling, disgusted with life and with himself, he ended his own life, mixing a dose of cyanide in a glass of whiskey. It was February 19. Newspapers were relentless with the national fascist. In the chronicle published on page 11 of El Mundo, the anonymous journalist exposes the irony of the fact: “Consuetudinary teetotaler and militant Catholic, he marks his final minutes with the fire of alcohol and the shadows of suicide.”316 Such a deafening noise.

Ashes still embers Eglé never came to terms with it. Elías Castelnuovo could not have done that to her father's memory. It was not ethical, it was not dignified, it was not. Despite everything that was said about him in the press on both sides of Rio de la Plata, Castelnuovo's harsh words hurt her for their lack of sensitivity, of respect. Turning her father into a monster after death, that is what the Uruguayan man had done. Eglé read and reread the unacceptable article. Someone needed to answer that, someone needed to do something. She furiously wrote a letter to Samuel Glusberg. Every line echoed her father's furious style, for she was now the defender of his memory. I also read Castelnuovo's stupid article in Claridad. You can imagine how outraged I was. Why didn't he say that during his father's lifetime? He should 315

“Todavía me cuesta creerlo. Un hombre tan entero venir a eliminarse con cianuro. Como una sirvienta.” (Lugones apud Tiempo, Cartas Inéditas y evocación de Horacio Quiroga, 25). 316 “Abstemio consuetudinario y católico militante, marca sus minutos finales con el fuego del alcohol y las sombras del suicidio.” (El Mundo, “Con la desaparición de Leopoldo Lugones pierde América uno de sus grandes poetas”).

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She is a living grudge. Even Glusberg's clear answer was not enough. His father's intimate life exposed, with the series of suicides, taking him not as a great writer or a great man, but as someone whose fate was marked by a tragic sign, removed from Horacio one of his greatest merits: that of a maker, that of having forged a career in literature for himself in spite of unfavorable conditions, and of having accomplished feats with the narrative from Rio de la Plata, taking it to previously untried levels. Horacio was reduced to the condition of a victim of fate, a resentful bourgeois, and a selfish man. She wanted to wring that idiot's neck. With her father no longer present to impose himself with his authority as an artist against gossip that now became public, little by little the doors were opening wide for the invention of the myth of the intractable man, enveloped by an aura of death and tragedy, a solitary crow, a tropical Poe, a troubled hermit. It seemed that it was only going to increase, like a disease, like an urban legend, like a fuse of gall on a social network. So it was, as Horacio was magnetic. His ghost never forgave or freed Castelnuovo. The question that circled his mind, that tormented him, was: why? Why Horacio and not me? Exactly forty years later, on March 20, 1977, there was still much talk about Horacio Quiroga. The man, the work, was celebrated. Elías, then 83 years old, could not hold back. He had to say one or two well-spoken things 317

“También yo leí el estúpido artículo de Castelnuovo en Claridad. Te imaginarás lo que me indignó. Me parece de lo más cobarde. ¿Por qué no dijo eso en vida de papá? No debió meterse nunca en su vida privada como lo hizo. Se ve perfectamente que es un envenenado. Dice algunas cosas que dan la pauta de su pobre mentalidad. ¿Recuerdas aquello de que ningún campesino asistió al velorio? Al pobre se le ha hecho una ensalada en la cabeza con su viaje a Rusia y quiere que en las calles de Buenos Aires abunden los campesinos con botas y todo… Castelnuovo es íntimo de doña Salvadora Medina Onrubia de Batalla, que tiene un Rolls Royce… Siento que no le hayas contestado como se merece. Si algún día lo llego a ver le diré todo lo que pienso de su valiente actitud. Eglé.” (Eglé Quiroga In: Quiroga, Horacio. Diario y correspondencia, 498).

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to reestablish the truth of the facts. He needed to say one or two well-spoken things to restore the truth of the facts. He wrote a letter to the director of the Uruguayan library, Arturo Sergio Visca, to impose what he considered fair limits to the festivity. How could they have so many commemorative parties, editions, and stamps for Horacio? It was necessary to place clear limits on the celebration of that impenetrable, bourgeois, resentful figure. Elías selects from his dictionary of adjectives those that he will gush over the memory of the dead man: Horacio Quiroga was indeed a strange man. Hermetic, somber, impenetrable, his soul was permanently closed like a tomb. I doubt that anyone could have penetrated there. Not even when he was drunk did he open its doors. Fedor Dostoevsky was an extrovert next to him. Thanks to that, however, he could be what he was. The most tragic of the writers of Río de la Plata.318

Forty years had passed. His words were worth more and more, Elías thought. I am the bearer of memory, of facts. I am the one who writes the truth to future generations. Nobody gets to Quiroga if it is not through me. He took a deep breath and continued the letter. Internally, he responded to Eglé's complaints about his article: Now that Quiroga is dead, there is endless talk and abundant crocodile tears are shed. But, the truth of his last instance on earth, was the following: his wife did not attend the wake, his two children, Eglé and Darío, showed up in the middle of the night, in casual clothes, she carrying a racket, and did not stay in the room more than ten minutes. The only ones who accompanied Quiroga throughout the night were only six. Alvaro Yunque and his wife, Carlos Giambiagi and Liborio Justo, my wife and myself.319 318

“Horacio Quiroga, era en efecto un hombre raro. Hermético, sombrío, impenetrable, su alma estaba cerrada permanentemente como una tumba. Dudo que alguien haya podido penetrar allí. Ni siquiera cuando se emborrachaba abría sus puertas. Fedor Dostoievsky resultaba a su lado un extrovertido. Gracias a eso, sin embargo, pudo ser lo que fue. El más trágico de los escritores del Río de la Plata” (Letter from Elías Castelnuovo to Arturo Sergio Visca, March 20, 1977. Collection of Uruguayan National Library, docs 301-308). 319 “Ahora que Quiroga está muerto se habla y se habla y se derraman abundantes lágrimas de cocodrilo. Pero, la verdad de su última instancia en la tierra, fue la siguiente: su mujer no acudió al velatorio, sus dos hijos, Eglé y Darío, se presentaron al promediar la noche, en traje de sport, ella portando una raqueta, y no se quedaron en el recinto más de diez minutos. Los únicos que acompañaron a Quiroga durante toda la noche fueron solamente seis. Álvaro Yunque y su mujer,

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Arturo pondered the typed letter over some time. He, like few others, had had access to Horacio's letters. He had edited the writer's first volume of correspondence, published in 1959. More than a decade later, in 1970, he had also recovered and edited the 33 letters that Horacio had sent to his last editor, César Tiempo, 29 of them dealing only with the edition of Más allá. Arturo knew, like few, about Horacio's intimate connections, the way he dealt with work, with his anxieties, with his children, with death. He considered once more that new missive, of which Horacio was neither the sender nor the addressee, but the subject. Arturo also thought: this letter is not for me. It does not belong to me. The image of Horacio's daughter with a tennis racket at his funeral was stuck in his mind. Arturo took the letter and placed it in Horacio Quiroga's file folder at the National Library's Research Department. It would remain at the bottom of that folder, buried alive, like forgotten things that from time to time will be remembered, reread, reconsidered, in successive exhumations, over the centuries.

Carlos Giambiagi y Liborio Justo, mi señora y un servidor” (Letter from Elías Castelnuovo to Arturo Sergio Visca, March 20, 1977. Collection of Uruguayan National Library, docs 301-308).

20. LOS CUENTOS DE MIS HIJOS

So from everything a little remains. A little remains of your chin in the chin of your daughter. A little remained of your blunt silence, a little in the angry wall, in the mute rising leaves.320 (Carlos Drummond de Andrade, “Residue”)

The smoke rose and dissipated in the skies over Cementerio de la Chacarita. Days later, Horacio's cooled ashes would begin a journey opposite to the one made by the writer in life: first along the waters of the Rio de la Plata towards Montevideo, with a stop in the city of Colonia. Later, they would go to Salto, the hometown. Each one of the stations that had been left behind, heading for the place of origin. A photo published in the Sunday edition of El Diario, from Buenos Aires – where Horacio had tried, in 1934, for months and without success, to collaborate as a short story writer – showed the procession with a few dozen people, accompanied by another tribute, with the full reproduction of the short story “El potro salvaje”. In the form of ashes, smoke, and dispersion, Horacio wondered: Is María going to get paid for these short stories published without anyone's endorsement? Days later, because there is no hurry after death, the ashes arrived in Montevideo, where the writer

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“Pois de tudo fica um pouco. Fica um pouco de teu queixo no queixo de tua filha. De teu áspero silêncio um pouco ficou, um pouco nos muros zangados, nas folhas, mudas, que sobem” (Andrade, Travelling in the Family: Selected Poems, 58-60).

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was honored in a public ceremony at Parque Rodó. It was March 27. A journalist of the Argentine newspaper La Nación described the act: In the auditorium of the Parque Rodó a secular homage was held tonight, in memory of the writer Horacio Quiroga, whose ashes were brought from Buenos Aires, via Colonia, by a delegation of intellectuals from Rio de la Plata. (...) The urn [of carob tree, carved with the head of Quiroga, by Stefan Erzia], covered with the Argentine and Uruguayan flags, was placed in a tumulus raised in the center of the auditorium, rendering honors, with torches on high, an endowment from the fire department. (...) Finally, the Sodré band played music by Wagner, Schumann and Beethoven. The urn will be taken tomorrow at 7 o'clock in an express train to Salto, where new tributes will be made, being deposited, finally, in the pantheon that the Quiroga family has in the Central cemetery of that city.321

The procession followed, without haste, and arrived in Salto ten days after the writer's death, on the last day of February. The number of people and the public commotion grew at each new station. Tribuna Salteña dedicated the whole first page to the event: in the headline, it announced that “The procession was formed by 5000 people”. And below: “The homage to Horacio Quiroga has no precedent in the history of Salto.”322 The commotion had been built up, days before, on the initiative of the mayor of Salto, J. E. Costa, in partnership with the Minister of Public Instruction, Social Security, and Foreign Affairs. The intention was to create a committee with the active participation of the press, so that the remains of celebrated man of letters Don Horacio Quiroga were not only transferred to Salto, for public celebration, but remained there. Tribuna Salteña responded to the call, joined in the chorus, and convoked its readers: “We are sure that our population will respond with 321

“En el auditorio del Parque Rodó se llevó a cabo esta noche un homenaje laico, en memoria del escritor Horacio Quiroga, cuyas cenizas fueron traídas desde Buenos Aires, vía Colonia, por una delegación de intelectuales rioplatenses (…) La urna [de algarrobo, labrada con la cabeza de Quiroga, por Stefan Erzia], cubierta con las banderas argentina y uruguaya, fue colocada en un túmulo levantado en el centro del auditorio, rindiendo honores, con antorchas en alto, una dotación del cuerpo de bomberos. (...) Finalmente, la banda del Sodré hizo oír música de Wagner, Schumann y Beethoven. La urna será llevada mañana a las 7 en un tren expreso a Salto, en donde se realizarán nuevos homenajes, depositándose, por último, en el panteón que la familia Quiroga posee en el cementerio Central de aquella ciudad.” (La Nación, “Montevideo rindió sentido homenaje a Horacio Quiroga”). 322 “Formaron en el cortejo 5000 personas [...] El homenaje a Horacio Quiroga no tiene precedentes en el historial salteño.” (Tribuna Salteña, March 1, 1937).

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warm unanimity to the suggestion launched, which is animated by a high sense of justice and admiration for the one who has bequeathed to the memory and devotion of generations a work that is a stamp of pride and glory for the country.”323 The body, it was finally decided, would stay in the family pantheon, in the Municipal Cemetery. With the death of Horacio, little by little, he ceased to be the unpalatable, unconsidered, unfriendly figure to become the celebrated man of letters, pride and glory for the country, still governed by the coup leader Gabriel Terra, who had exonerated him and tried to avoid paying his pension. Horacio became a hero and his funeral, a civic act. His ashes inside the carob urn, carved by the Russian Stefan Erzia in the shape of his head, would travel twice more: first, to the Historical Museum of Salto; later, in 2004, to a Casa Museo, founded in his honor. A summer home he barely remembered, as his mother, a widow, had sold it when he was four years old. It is still there. There are those who think that the exiled Horacio was not repatriated yet. In the singular case of this writer of two homelands, there is, however, another house-museum Horacio Quiroga, in another province. It was his home by choice. The most radical gesture would be, regardless of the dubious nationalisms, that one day that carob tree sculpture containing the ashes, would be buried under a tree planted by him in the house of Misiones. The banished Quiroga will be, finally, in his place.324

With the ceremonies and procession over, the ashes deposited in Salto and not in San Ignacio, what is left? Testimonials from friends, enemies, a whole posthumous literature, a contradictory chorus saying the most diverse versions of Horacio. What is left? Writing in proliferation, discourses, contradictions. The bodies of the children, incognito, in some unfindable drawer in Chacarita. Ana María, under the broken, heavy, laconic tombstone, in the municipal cemetery of 323

“Estamos seguros de que nuestra población responderá con unanimidad calurosa a la sugestión lanzada, que está animada por un alto sentido de justicia y de admiración hacia quien ha legado al recuerdo y a la devoción de las generaciones una obra que es timbre de orgullo y de lo gloria para el país.” (Tribuna Salteña, February 23, 1937). 324 “En el caso singular de este escritor de dos patrias, existe sin embargo otra casamuseo Horacio Quiroga, en otra provincia. Fue su casa por elección. El gesto más radical sería, independientemente de los dudosos nacionalismos, que un día esa escultura de algarrobo conteniendo las cenizas, fuese enterrada bajo un árbol por él plantado en la casa de Misiones. El desterrado Quiroga estará, finalmente, en su lugar” (Giucci, Guillermo, “Las cenizas de Horacio Quiroga”, 19).

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San Ignacio. A handful of verses by Alfonsina. The burlap-bound books, María's papers, safeguarding his memory, a few unpublished letters, the canteen molded in clay by himself, a long snakeskin, also kept by the widow. His remains remain: as residue.

The light of urgency Eglé first settled alone in Buenos Aires in 1936. She wanted to free herself from the suffocating proximity of Jorge Lenoble, her brief husband, whom she had divorced after a few frustrating months. Since things were not going any better between her father and María, there really was not any reason to stay. Her father’s presence was strong. He had always been the sun. Before Eglé could even discover herself as a girl or a woman, she could already read herself in her father's literature: the interlocutor of his Cuentos de la selva and Cartas de un cazador. She could see herself in the news about her writer father in San Ignacio. Her intense childhood, on the edge of abysses, in front of almost wild beasts – coatis, deers, jaguar cubs. Everything had been said, everything had been told by her father. Her name belonged to the other, to the writer. Her friend also suddenly became his friend, and then her stepmother. Eglé had always been a character, a muse of so many for so long. Who was she, she wondered discreetly, almost involuntarily. Both she and her brother were born characters, became readers, but another step had to be taken. She was not born to be a housewife, neither in the jungle nor in the city. She went to Buenos Aires to discover herself, in her own lair, for the first time, with her own job, in the editorial office of Crítica. There, she held the most diverse functions: she was a translator, worked in the subscription sector, and did office work, the kind her father Horacio would have refused to do. She knew, however, that it was the price of escaping the asphyxiation of marriage, the new family configuration, the faraway jungle from which she only wanted to keep her distance. There was more, however: through her jobs, Eglé acquired a room of her own, away from the judgmental eyes of the world. She could read whatever she wanted until late. She listened to music, went to the movies with her brother or friends from time to time. And she had a bed of her own, where she could date without worrying about marriage. And there were a lot of interesting people in her work. Single and married friends who looked at her as a woman. She got involved with some of them, brought them to her house. Each one of those transgressive gestures made her heart flutter,

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because she felt alive as never before, in adventures she did not even know were possible. Experiencing all that freedom made her uneasy. She was tortured by some guilt she carried with her and, in the end, she did not know if it was really right to be so free. Despite her internal dead ends, Eglé breathed freedom into wherever she went. She was liked by her editorial colleagues: smart, delicate, intense. Eglé was a bomb, organic, on the verge of exploding with so much life. Wherever she went, she left marks. Emma Barrandéguy, recently arrived from Entre Ríos to become one of her colleagues at the newspaper, wrote in her diary: Do you remember Eglé? For her I felt a clean affection, lacking clinginess. She saw me entering in the morning, at Eglé Quiroga’s. She got up to open the door for me, and she then returned to bed. On that bed there is a wrinkly pair of men’s pajamas. Eglé followed my gaze and began to speak. To cry. My God, why cry? She did it slowly, resigned. And meanwhile, she explained, thinking perhaps about some attitude of mine of rejection. I want to make this clear to you – she said –, before anything else, to see if you want to continue being my friend after what I’m about to tell you. These pajamas are my friend’s; I also have relations with Julio, from the office; don’t act surprised, you know I married very young. She tried to continue her story. What is it to me? Was I asking for explanations? I thought everything was fine and dandy. I felt a certain admiration and a confusing desire to imitate her, that was all. (...) For the first time in my life I had near me a human being who read, knew about painting, who with her daily conduct tried to be beautiful and true.325

Emma, newly arrived from the countryside, was delighted with Eglé. That mismatch between having little to no experience with her own feelings 325

“¿Recuerdas a Eglé? Por ella tuve un afecto limpio, desprovisto de adherencia. Me veía entrando por la mañana, a lo de Eglé Quiroga. Se levantó a abrirme y se volvió luego a la cama. Sobre esa cama hay un arrugado pijama de hombre. Eglé siguió mi mirada y comenzó a hablar. A llorar. Dios mío, ¿por qué llorar? Lo hacía con lentitud resignada. Y mientras, explicaba, pensando tal vez en alguna actitud mía de rechazo. Te quiero aclarar – decía –, antes que nada, para ver si querés seguir siendo mi amiga después de lo que te cuente. Este pijama es de mi amigo; también tengo relaciones con Julio, el de la oficina; no te asombres, vos sabés que me casé muy joven. Intentaba proseguir el relato. ¿Y a mí qué? ¿Acaso yo le pedía cuentas? A mí todo eso me parecía muy bien, pero muy bien. Alzaba cierta admiración y un confuso deseo de imitarla, eso era todo. (...) Por primera vez en mi vida tenía a mi alcance un ser humano que leía, que sabía pintura, que con su diaria conducta trataba de ser hermoso y verídico.” (Barrandéguy, Habitaciones, 110).

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while, on the other hand, also having seen so much, lived so much, and lived with so many people, made her the most unique woman Emma had ever seen. Eglé had been raised by a strong, straightforward man with few subtleties in everyday life, but with so many equally strong and straightforward women who counterpointed him – they were called Alfonsina, Emilia, Cora, Berta. And now, in the prime of her twenty-five years, she finally had the world before her. The encounter between the two women, so lonely in their family lives and now freed in the city, was so special that Emma, in her precocious memoirs, written in the early 1950s, mentioned again and again, at length, her relationship with Eglé – that girl who became her friend and shelter: Nobody knew, however, with what absolute sensation of cleanliness, that by her side clarity and harmony were aligned, many times I had taken Eglé Quiroga under my wing after absurd and stupid family scenes. I could stand any weight on my shoulders if I knew that later I would talk with her about a book by André Gide or drink a cup of tea by her side.326

Horacio had left to his daughter his own intensity, his taste for Gide, his personal magnetism. In the memories narrated by Emma's, Eglé's name is a leitmotif, like a sublimated love, a brief and intense friendship. Eglé wanted to live what she could, to enjoy the freedom she had achieved, with a bed of her own, a job of her own, a whole city for herself. Her urgency grew with each new experience, with each discovery of her young body, and her soul thirsting for experience. It was on a day like any other, after feeling a sharp pain, a lump in her breast, that she heard from the doctor that she was sick. Eglé, like her father, and still so young, had cancer. A breast tumor. The girl thought about Alfonsina’s pains, who also suffered from that illness. She felt fear. Then, she felt courage. Her future would not last long, but nonetheless it belonged to her, it was her own. There was not much to do but enjoy each day and end their number when she could not go on any longer. Emma wrote: Eglé Quiroga had a kind of serenity that came from repeated negative experiences. The same serenity with which she slipped sleeping pills into the

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“Nadie sabía, sin embargo, con que absoluta sensación de limpieza, de que a su lado se alineaban la claridad y la armonía, había acogido muchas veces a Eglé Quiroga después de absurdas y estúpidas escenas familiares. Todo podía pesar sobre mis hombros si sabía que más tarde habría de comentar con ella un libro de André Gide o tomar una taza de té a su lado.” (Barrandéguy, Habitaciones, 76-77).

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orange mug. A large quantity of pills. Like her father a year before. How much firmness in this little blonde head! And what a stubborn decision to avoid complications from others. ‘What will I do, understand me, to tell them that I am ill?’ And me, so she wouldn’t kill herself, I wuold invent a trip to Uruguay, anything. Go on, get better there, and come back. She would smile. ‘You’re not the afflicted one’, she would say. ‘You’re on the other side: that of life (...).’ Eglé couldn’t find respite, she was always seeking pleasure and she knew how to give it, at least she told me so. ‘It is so scarce, one must make the most of it’.327

So Eglé – as her father had done so many times before – decided it was time to leave. The ailing body prevailed. But she did not leave defeated, she made the moments of her young life of twenty-seven years count. She was next to her loved ones, her friend Emma, and her brother in the last few days. Eglé Quiroga left some letters: one for Emma, which later had to be recovered before a judge, another for comedian and friend Mario Warnes. She also tried to call her friend Alejandro Storni, but there was no time for him. Time was too short for Eglé.

The Father’s dazzling sun Darío was a loving, generous, and reckless boy. He felt the death of his sister like few others. He, who had already lost his mother in immemorial times and was, in those days, being forced to say goodbye to Eglé and soon Aunt Alfonsina. The one he never lost was Horacio, a ghost too big for him. A sun that, paradoxically, shaded him. By that time, he already knew full well: the life of affects is a complex one; complicity is not always achieved on the first try; having an adored father was too much of a burden, because he was already at a disadvantage from the outset. Since the beginning, he wants to follow in Horacio's footsteps, but he does not have the old man’s stamina: his accurate blows 327

“Eglé Quiroga tenía una especie de serenidad que le venía de repetidas experiencias negativas. La misma serenidad con que echó pastillas de dormir en la taza color naranja. Mucha cantidad de pastillas. Como su padre un año antes. ¡Cuánta firmeza en esta pequeña cabeza rubia! Y qué afanosa decisión de evitar complicaciones a los demás. ‘¿Cómo voy a hacer, compréndeme, para decirles que estoy enferma?’ Y yo, para que no se matara, inventaba un viaje al Uruguay, cualquier cosa. Andá, curate allá y luego volvés. Sonreía. ‘No sos vos la enferma’ – decía –. Estás en la otra orilla: la de la vida (...).’ Eglé no hallaba reposo, siempre estaba buscando el goce y sabía darlo, o al menos me lo decía. ‘Es tan escaso, hay que aprovechar’” (Barrandéguy, Habitaciones, 110-111).

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with the machete, his precise gun shots, the cutting phrases, the seductive look. Darío always finds himself at a cruel disadvantage. He inherited, all the same, his father's unbreakable stubbornness. He tries throughout his whole life to follow in his footsteps, to compete with his gaze. Sometimes he arrives late, as when he stole the extremely rare edition of Leopoldo Lugones’ Las montañas del oro at the Anaconda bookshop, putting it in his father's coat pocket, only to be publicly humiliated by him later. Sometimes, he tries to arrive earlier, to see if, with a few more days, he can be prepared, he can make the right decisions. Thus, he anticipated his trip to Misiones by six months in the early 1930s, to learn to work in the fields. His father, always complacent, told Isidoro Escalera in a letter to give the boy some support. Darío continues to pursue a destiny of his own, but he never comes across a model that is not him, the Father. Thus, Darío ends up prospering as a home builder in the Misiones region, in a company with Giambiagi, but then soon gives up, because none of that made much sense to him. A short time later and already back in Buenos Aires, in sync with his sister Eglé, and even though he tries to deal better with his own life, his father is still too strong a sun in the center of the scene. Darío tries to be a writer. Short story writer. He asks Mundo Argentino magazine for space to collaborate as a short story writer. Son of Horacio, the favor is granted quite generously. For his debut, Darío has the privilege of an interview, with a photo, about his literary production. When deciding on his author name, he seeks to honor his mother, with whom he only lived for two years. So he signs: Darío Quiroga Cires. His debut takes place on June 24, 1936, in issue 1327 of the magazine. The story is preceded by a complimentary report and a photo of himself, in which he does not face the camera, but discreetly looks down, showing some shyness, discomfort, in a pose that, inauspiciously, resembled his father's attitude in many photos. The magazine said: An Intellectual Vocation A son of Horacio Quiroga, the famous author of ‘Cuentos de la selva’, is initiated through MUNDO ARGENTINO in narrative literature with the interesting story that appears on this page. A few years ago we met young Darío Quiroga Cires, when he was still a boy, who now came to us, to share with us, as a literary debut, his vocation for the same genre that gave his father shine and fame. The vocation of Quiroga, junior, re-edits the infrequent case of hereditary literary dynasties that has in the descendant line few analogies.

Los cuentos de mis hijos The cheerful and communicative spirit of Quiroga Cires, who is now in this capital willing to try his hand at journalism and literature, has piqued our curiosity: ‘Is your vocation firm?’ we asked him. ‘Tremendously,’ he replies. ‘My greatest satisfaction would be to become a good novelist or short story writer.’ ‘And how did this literary inclination begin in you?’ ‘I don’t know whether it was from an inherited aptitude, the stimulation from my father’s successful dedication, or the influence of my favorite books. I am a passionate reader of short stories. I read avidly all good authors that I come across.’ ‘Do you feel any predilection for any of them?’ ‘In general I like those who leave in my spirit glimmers of life and real atmosphere. On the other hand, I am not interested in fantasy or adventure stories, that did not entertain me as a child, for being false and artificial.’ ‘Have the works of your father had any influence on your vocation?’ ‘Surely.’ ‘As have his advice and direction?’ ‘My father neither encourages me nor has he given advice on any discipline. But neither is he opposed to my interest. When I consult him and show him some unpublished work, he points out defects or simply tells me if he finds it bad or good.’ ‘What opinion do you have of your father’s work?’ ‘I read him with admiration; particularly in his short stories with a missionary atmosphere.’ ‘So,’ we said to him, ‘if you mainly like stories where one can feel the pulse of emotions and life reflected, knowing the missionary atmosphere as well as you do for having spent time and lived there, surely we will have in you a new painter of landscapes and dramas of the jungle.’ ‘No,’ he replied decisively. ‘I do and will do what I can to distance myself from the genre of my father. Not because I am not tempted or do not like it; but because I would never do it as well as he does, and it would not be dignified for my aspiration to imitate him.’ The short story we publish today, by Darío Quiroga Cires, is the first with which he is initiated in the literary publicity of this intellectual lineage, which is a promise for Argentinian letters. It is, as we shall see, a piece that is not exempt from grace and interest; and although a little naive as should be the first steps in the difficult art of the short story, it gives a surefire idea already of the constructive aptitude of an incipient short story writer and, especially, the realist sense he intends to imbue his stories in and his restraint and discretion for avoiding exotic fantasies and facing an easy and familiar atmosphere for his youth.328

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Un hijo de Horacio Quiroga, el famoso autor de ‘Cuentos de la selva’, se inicia por medio de MUNDO ARGENTINO en la literatura narrativa con el interesante relato que aparece en esta página. “Pocos años hace que hemos conocido, niño todavía, al joven Darío Quiroga Cires, que ahora llegó a nosotros para hacernos, con una primicia literaria, partícipes de su vocación por ese mismo género que dio lustre y fama a su progenitor. La vocación de Quiroga, hijo, reedita el caso poco frecuente de las dinastías intelectuales hereditarias que tiene en la línea descendente escasas analogías. El espíritu animoso y comunicativo de Quiroga Cires, quien ahora se encuentra en esta capital dispuesto a iniciar sus armas en el periodismo y en la literatura, ha incitado nuestra curiosidad: – ¿Es firme su vocación? – le preguntamos. – Muy grande – nos responde. – Mi mayor satisfacción sería llegar a ser un buen novelista o cuentista. – Y cómo sobrevino en usted esa afición literaria? – No sé si por aptitud heredada, por el estímulo de exitosa dedicación de mi padre, o por la influencia de mis lecturas favoritas. Soy un apasionado lector de cuentos. Leo con afán todos los buenos autores que llegan a mis manos. – ¿Siente usted predilección por algunos? – Me agradan en general aquellos que dejan en mi ánimo reflejos de vida y de ambiente real. En cambio no me interesan los cuentos de fantasía ni los de aventuras, que no me entretenían ni de niño, por falsos y artificiosos. –¿Las obras de su padre han alguna influencia en su vocación? – Seguramente. – ¿Su consejo y dirección también? – Mi padre ni me estimula ni me ha aconsejado disciplina alguna. Pero tampoco se opone a mi afición. Cuando le consulto y le muestro algún trabajo inédito, me indica defectos o me dice sencillamente si le parece mal o bien. – ¿Qué opinión tiene usted de la obra de su padre? – Lo leo con admiración; particularmente en sus cuentos de ambiente misionero. – Entonces – le dijimos, – si a usted le agradan principalmente las narraciones en que palpitan emociones de vida refleja, conociendo como conoce tan bien el ambiente misionero por haberlo frecuentado y vivido, seguramente que tendremos en usted un nuevo pintor de panoramas y dramas de la selva. – No – respondió decididamente. – Hago y haré lo posible por distanciarme del género de mi padre. No porque no me agrade y me tiente; sino porque no lo haría nunca tan bien como él lo hace, y no sería decoroso para mi aspiración imitarlo. El cuento que publicamos hoy, de Darío Quiroga Cires, es el primero con que se inicia en la publicidad literaria este abolengo intelectual que es una promesa para las letras argentinas. Se trata, como se verá, de una pieza no exenta de gracia y de interés; y aunque un poco ingenua como deben serlo los primeros pasos en el difícil arte del cuento, da idea segura ya de la aptitud constructiva del incipiente cuentista, y, sobre todo, del sentido realista que pretende exprimir a sus relatos y de

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The interview was like fencing against himself, his father, his future: the difficult position of wanting to follow in his father's footsteps without following him, in the same magazine he had published, twenty years before, Los cuentos de mis hijos. It is true that, in that year of 1936, Horacio had not published a single text in any magazine or newspaper. In the past four years there had been not much more than a dozen. It did not matter. Even retired, Horacio would always remain the Writer of short stories. “A piece that is not exempt from grace and interest;[…] although a little naïve”. Horacio, at the time, was not indifferent either to the debut or to the editor-in-chief’s provocation, and wrote to Martínez Estrada: Darío: I’m sending his story. As you will see, there is potential in the boy, such a beginner! He already has the gift of storytelling; we shall see in time if he has anything further. I put him on guard against the warning of the direction, that his story is naturally naive, given the age of the author. Some idiot!329

The debut short story was “Cuento para cesantes”, a first-person, humorous account of a young man who, in 1930, lost his public office and had to deal with poverty, facing adverse and comical situations, such as running away from his landlady because of his debt. The situation of his father's financial hardship was transfigured in those first published lines. Two months later, Darío returned, in the edition 1341 of Mundo Argentino. The father, sick, was about to arrive in Buenos Aires when, on September 30, 1936, the magazine published “Mi viaje a Suiza”. Another humorous account, one that tells the experience of the protagonist's trip to a deliberately stereotyped Switzerland, where breakfast can only be eaten at nine, not ten; where the lunch menu has dishes determined months in advance; where the siesta lasts exactly three hours; and where alpinists know and respect each other according to how many meters they had already climbed. The land of his father's former companion, Alfonsina Storni, appears deformed in a playful exploitation. The illustrations that accompany the tale give a measure of the lightness that is intended to be printed on those pages, aimed, it is suggested, at a young audience. su mesura y discreción para rehuir fantasías exóticas y encarar un ambiente fácil y familiar a su juventud.” (Mundo Argentino, “La vocación intelectual”). 329 “Darío: le envío relato del tal. Como usted comprobará, hay pasta en el muchacho, ¡tan principiante! Tiene ya el don de contar; veremos si tiene algo más con el tiempo. Lo puse en guardia contra la advertencia de la dirección, de que su cuento es naturalmente ingenuo, dada la edad del autor. ¡Habrá brutos!” (Quiroga, Quiroga Íntimo, 620).

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He had said he would not imitate his father. How not to imitate him, if he had written more than two hundred short stories in the most diverse styles, and Darío had read absolutely all of them? In any case, there are questions that would only disturb and make writing difficult for him. He set out to write his boldest short story, his most personal experience. It was going to be called “La Mujer Blanca”330 and, contradicting everything he had promised before, the tale was set in the Northern jungle. What could he do? The jungle also belonged to him, now that he remembered it in Buenos Aires. How many times, he thought, had the same thing happened to him and to his father? To recover the past in writing, already so distant, even geographically, from the events. It does not matter. It was going to be his literary fantasy, they are not his memories. They are not. He will not be the one to tell the story, but someone else. The narrator, a dentist, Mendes, is married to Alina, the daughter of a farmer from Rio de Janeiro. Mendes needs to go to work on a farm, among the indigenous people, on the border with Mato Grosso. And he had been warned by the locals about the danger of leaving the girl alone among the natives, and also of avoiding close relations with them whenever possible. The indigenous people are sinister. First, the girl is spotted by an old man while fishing – the glances are not complemented by any phrase exchanged between them. At night, however, several natives sneak into the girl's room through the window. Meanwhile, another native addresses the owner of the house, saying he is hungry and asking for something to eat. Mendes soon realizes that it was a ruse for something else. The house is taken by the natives. However, the invaders do not attack anyone, do not steal anything. They all gaze passively at Alina, enraptured. ‘Didn’t you tell me you were hungry?’ The old Indian looked at him wearily. He probably no longer remembered what he had said. ‘No; Indian no hungry; all want see white woman today, tomorrow, all moons, always, all Indians come’.331

330

Mundo Argentino, November 18, 1936. “– No me dijiste que tenías hambre? El viejo indio lo miró con fastidio. Seguramente ya no recordaba lo que había dicho. – No; indio no hambre; todos quieren ver mujer blanca hoy, mañana, todas las lunas, siempre, todos los indios venir.” (Cires, “La Mujer Blanca”, 12-13).

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The girl is then subjected to a daily ritual of enraptured contemplation by more and more indigenous people who, every night, invade the house to spend hours in awe, admiring her body: Alina, reclining, could see in the half darkness the gleam of six eyes on her. She tried to get up, but felt very lazy, very lax. She had the confused impression of being pinned within the visual radius of those eyes, destroying her will. She renounced the effort and remained in the same position; but without sleeping, all night, until the Indians, with the first lights of dawn, went back out through the window, as silently as they had entered.332

The short story was unsettling. The editors understood that they were facing a literary work that deserved more graphic refinement. Distributed over two pages of the magazine, the story was illustrated in pen and ink by Montero Lacasa. Unlike before, this time Darío's story was right at the beginning of the magazine, not relegated to the end. The story was also unsettling because of the magazine in which it was published. Mundo Argentino, in those years of 1936 and 1937, explored the advances in photography and printing, and took pleasure in showing the female body in its pages. The second and third covers always featured an American actress, sometimes Argentinian, in provocative poses, showing off her legs, arms, and chest for the visual delight – or scandal – of whoever browsed through the magazine. Eroticism, previously limited to dark movie theaters, gained the pages of Mundo Argentino. Eglé, proud of her brother, leafed through the magazine and read: “Toda atleta debe casarse, opina una gran campeona” [“Every athlete must get married, says a great female champion”]. The opinion was given by swimmer Holm Jarret, North American Olympic champion. The girl remembered Lenoble and clicked her tongue. Later, by chance, she found an article by Sofia Castelli, “La mujer – dicen los fisiólogos – debe usar menos ropa que el hombre” [“Women – phisyologists say – must wear less clothes than men”]. Eglé read it in one breath, and burst out laughing at the final paragraph:

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“Alina, acostada, veía brillar en la semioscuridad los seis ojos fijos en ella. Trató de levantarse, pero sentía una gran pereza, una gran laxitud. Tenía la impresión confusa de estar sujeta dentro del radio visual de aquellos ojos, anulando su voluntad. Renunció al esfuerzo y se quedó en la misma posición; pero sin dormir, durante toda la noche, hasta que los indios, con las primeras luces de la madrugada, salieron nuevamente por la ventana, tan silenciosamente como habían entrado.” (Cires, “La Mujer Blanca”, 12-13).

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The ad for Palmolive soap, some pages ahead – Triunfa el romance... con un cútis lindo [“Romance triumphs… with a beautiful skin”] – led Eglé, almost automatically, to look for the image of the indigenous man looking at the girl in the drawing. She closed the magazine. She was going to visit her father at the hospital. Darío, on the other hand, was divided between his new work as a short story writer, caring for his father at the hospital, and his new job at the Dirección de Tierras of the Ministry of Agriculture, which drained his strength. His father's death, a few weeks later, knocked down his plans as a writer. After all, if he was writing to and for Horacio, what was the point of continuing to try without Horacio's eyes? This question was answered in silence. With the support of his friend Ulyses Petit de Murat, years later, he published a short story in the newspaper La Nación “Cuarenta grados de fiebre”. The newspaper that helped his father become famous; a delirious story. Everywhere Darío ventured, there was the image of Horacio, patting him on the back, acknowledging his efforts. There was also the frustration of going through a path already trodden, mapped, illuminated by the other. That sun.

Prisioneros de la tierra Eglé would have liked to watch, but she was no longer alive on August 16, 1939, the opening day of Prisioneros de la tierra: the film that had her brother as author of the script in partnership with the writer Ulyses Petit de Murat, based on three short stories by his father – “Los mensú”, “Una 333

“Por eso se explica como una frágil hija de Eva puede pasearse sin molestias los días crudos de invierno con sus piernas apenas cubiertas por una finísima media de seda. El hombre, en cambio, tirita de frío a pesar de llevar ropa interior, adecuada a la estación, un traje de lana, sobretodo, bufanda y abrigos de toda especie. Esto se debe a que el sexo fuerte es el más débil para las bajas temperaturas por carecer de las defensas subcutáneas de la mujer.” (Castelli, “La mujer – dicen los fisiólogos – deben usar menos ropa que el hombre”).

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bofetada” and “Los destiladores de naranja”. It was Darío's heyday, but Horacio and Eglé were unable to witness it. Darío succeeded where his father had failed: in cinema. Horacio's screenplay attempts were never taken forward. There were no technical means, there were no investors, there was nothing. In 1939, however, things had changed. There were investors, the Pampa Film; there was a great director, the experienced Italian Mario Soffici; there was the daring project of making an epic film, full of outdoor scenes and with non-actors. Also, there was a story to be told: the story of the peones in the Misiones jungle. They only needed to choose the protagonist, who would play the peón Podeley, a character in the short story “Una bofetada”. Ulyses Petit de Murat bet on the experienced José Gola, who had already participated in seventeen films up to that point, including literary adaptations. Ulyses sent José the script, to see if he was interested in playing the lead role. The effect of the reading, said the screenwriter, was fulminating: “Three hours later, my phone rang and, when I picked it up, I heard José Gola's cracked voice: 'I have finished reading, it is the book of my life.' Gola was a very emotional man, and the tragedy of the mensú Podeley brought him to the verge of tears.”334 Having decided on the protagonist, the caravan left for Oberá, in Misiones, very close to where Horacio had lived. A place that, for many reasons, Darío knew like few others. José Gola was stunned by the possibility of starring in the film. He had felt some discomfort lately, but he did not worry about it. Cinema heals everything, he said. Another heartthrob went along. Ángel Magaña, who was off duty and was going to accompany the troupe to Rosario to watch a River Plate match. Magaña watched the match and, on his way back, the staff arrested him, as a joke, in the cabin of the boat, forcing him to go with them to Misiones. Satisfied with the detour, the actor took the opportunity to visit, with Darío, the house of Horacio Quiroga, someone he already knew through some of his books. On the way back from the excursion, already in Oberá, José Gola felt sick. He was suffering from an untreated appendicitis, which led to a hasty, improvised surgery in the jungle, in the open air and illuminated by the car headlights. The team was dismayed by the unpromising beginning. Recently operated, convalescing, José was taken back to Buenos Aires. Fragile, he 334

“Tres horas después, sonó mi teléfono y, al atender, escuché la voz entrecortada de José Gola: ‘He terminado de leer, es el libro de mi vida’. Gola era un hombre muy emotivo, y la tragedia del mensú Podeley lo puso al borde las lágrimas.” (Petit de Murat apud Huberman, Hasta el alba con Ulyses Petit de Murat, 97).

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only endured the long journey to die in the capital. He would no longer be the peón Podeley. Benefiting from the succession of accidents, Ángel Magaña got the role. What enabled him to do so was having visited Horacio's house. With all the improvisation that marked the production, almost entirely shot outside a studio, the first problems soon appeared. Magaña did not even have a costume: The shooting began the next day. I saw a Paraguayan mensú passing by. He was on horseback and the woman was walking; they arrived at the shop on the corner. At the shop, I approached him, talked to him and told the boss to ask him for a shirt, some panties, some canvas leggings that they wore, the espadrilles, a hat and the machete. I would buy it for him. This mensú was a little surprised by all this. He was told that it was a tourist's whim and he gave me all the clothes he was wearing. I took them to the hotel, boiled them in soda, put them to dry and, the next day, with the same clothes I got dressed. I went out into the field where they were filming and they didn't recognize me. Podeley!335

Something magic was happening. That place literarily created by Horacio gained another dimension, in an alliance between its readers – Darío, Magaña, Ulyses – and those who had never and would never read it, the people of Misiones. Inevitably, something was lost in that partial magic. Ángel Magaña wanted in the film all the harshness of Horacio's literature, present in the short story “Una bofetada”; however, he soon realized that it was going to be somewhat downplayed to meet the standards of bourgeois cinema. They also transplated to the middle of the jungle a – carefully condensed – love story, in order to give the story more appeal with the audience: “To be frank, there he wanted to soften somewhat the fact that Podeley was throwing the foreigner out more for love of the girl than for that kind of liberation he wanted with that 'Andá a tu tierra, gringo añamembuí', which is a kind of curse in Guaraní. And it was premonitory. 335

“Se empezaba al otro día la filmación. Vi pasar a un mensú paraguayo. Iba a caballo y la mujer caminando; llegaron al boliche de la esquina. En el boliche, yo me le acerqué, le hablé y le dije al patrón que le pidiera una camisa, unas bombachas, unas polainas de lona que ellos llevaban, las alpargatas, un sombrero y el machete. Yo se lo compraba. Este mensú se sintió un poco extrañado de todo esto. Se le dijo que era un capricho de turista y me dio toda la ropa que llevaba. Yo la llevé al hotel, la hice hervir en soda, la puse a secar y, al otro día, con la misma ropa me vestí. Salí a campo donde estos estaban filmando y no me conocieron. ¡Podeley!” (Magaña apud Calistro, Reportaje al cine argentino los pioneros del sonoro, 103-104).

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That whip was centuries of beating; it was not a little fight of a lost-cause lover. At the end, the man is imprisoned in his land. The film has very important things”336 The shooting, however, was a unique event in Argentine cinematography. Since May 3, 1939, the weekly Mundo Argentino has duly informed its public, in the section “Mundo Cinematográfico”, about the adventures in the North. The first published note reported the death of José Gola, which occurred in Buenos Aires on the 27th, and his being replaced by Ángel Magaña. On June 14, after eight weeks of outdoors shooting, King, the critic of Mundo Argentino, informed that the team returned exhausted to shoot the last scenes in Buenos Aires. Two weeks later, the same magazine, to excite the public's curiosity, featured, on a double page, a photographic article with seven photographs taken from the set in Misiones. The text highlighted the “vibration of national cinema”, the use of extras from the region to play the role of prostitutes, and also that the origin of the story was the work of writer Horacio Quiroga. The magazine treated the event as the apotheosis of national cinema, with a prominence that it had not given to any other production so far. On August 16, the day of the premiere, expectations are raised to the maximum degree: Today 'Prisioneros de la tierra', a Pampa Film production, will be premiered, which judging by the projections that its studio attributed to it may turn out to be one of the great films of the season. Its plot is the result of the compilation of several stories by Horacio Quiroga about the life of the mensú in Misiones. It was directed by Mario Soffici and starred Francisco Petrone, Angel Magaña, Roberto Fugazoy and Elisa Gálvez in the leading roles.337

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“Para ser francos, ahí se quiso suavizar un tanto el hecho de que Podeley echaba al extranjero más por amor a la chica que por ese tipo de liberación que él quería con ese ‘Andá a tu tierra, gringo añamembuí’, que es una especie de maldición en guaraní. Y fue premonitorio. Ese látigo eran siglos que pegaban; no era una peleíta de amante dehauciado. Al final, está ese hombre aprisonado en su tierra. La película tiene cosas importantísimas.” (Magaña apud Calistro, Reportaje al cine argentino los pioneros del sonoro, 104). 337 “Hoy se estrenará ‘Prisioneros de la tierra’, producción de la Pampa Film, que a juzgar por las proyecciones que su estudio le atribuyó puede resultar una de las grandes películas de la temporada. Su argumento es el resultante de la recopilación de varios cuentos de Horacio Quiroga sobre la vida del mensú en Misiones. Fue dirigida por Mario Soffici e interpretada en sus papeles principales por Francisco

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Days before, following in the footsteps of Mundo Argentino, El Hogar, a magazine in which Horacio collaborated throughout his life, also printed a double-page photo report, talking about the author of the short stories that gave rise to the film: “National cinematography pays tribute to Horacio Quiroga.”338 The writer reappeared, honored by the cinema screen, finally freed from the pathos of personal stories. He was the creative artist, only that. More than that, some critics looked for what remained of Horacio's work in the face of the challenge of transposing the narratives to the universe of commercial cinema. Celu-Loide, a week after the premiere, commented on the film, again in El Hogar: The viewer of 'Prisoners of the Earth' certainly enters from the first scenes in contact with the foreshadowing of the drama. What comes later is its natural confirmation. And in this circumstance resides the outstanding merit of the film, which being the intelligent but arbitrary version of some stories by Horacio Quiroga, it sticks with such commendable austerity to the technique of the great storyteller, that almost happily there are no errors or concessions to the taste of others to censure.339

In the magazine Sur, critics took a little longer and the task was left to Jorge Luis Borges. It was in the September edition, and Borges pointed out that the film was one of the best in national cinema and even better than many that were arriving from Hollywood and Paris. He said that one of its merits was not giving in to the romantic affectation of foreign cinema. He concluded his brief article by confessing his taste for violent films, but it seemed to him that Prisioneros de la tierra went beyond brutality: (...) I do not remember, in so many bloodthirsty films, a stronger scene than the penultimate one in Prisioneros de la Tierra, in which a man is whipped to a final river. That man is courageous, that man is proud, that man is taller

Petrone, Angel Magaña, Roberto Fugazoy y Elisa Gálvez.” (Mundo Argentino, August 16, 1939). 338 “Rinde homenaje la cinematografía nacional a Horacio Quiroga.” (El Hogar, August 4, 1939). 339 “El espectador de ‘Prisioneros de la tierra’ entra por cierto desde las primeras escenas en contacto con el presagio del drama. Lo que viene después es su natural confirmación. Y en esta circunstancia reside el mérito sobresaliente del film, que siendo la versión inteligente pero arbitraria de unos relatos de Horacio Quiroga, se ciñe aquél con tal encomiable austeridad a la técnica del gran cuentista, que casi felizmente no hay errores ni concesiones al gusto ajeno que censurarle.” (CeluLoide, “Prisioneros de la tierra”).

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than the other... In analogous scenes in other films, the exercise of brutality is left to the brutal characters; in Prisioneros de la Tierra it is left to the hero and is almost intolerably effective. (If I am not mistaken, that magnificent attribution is the work of Ulyses Petit de Murat; the actors execute it very well).340

Georgie was accurate: the protagonist was brutal. His bitter parentheses were less accurate. What he praises is the literal scene at the end of “Una bofetada”, penned by his foe Horacio Quiroga, only transported to the script by Ulyses and Darío. The critic silenced what he did not know how to say, giving himself the benefit of the doubt. But it was said.

Errant postmen, bombs, and a postponed party In Argentina, from the weeks of filming until the premiere of Prisioneros de la tierra, there was a more or less widespread notion, among audiences and critics, that this was a unique event in recent Argentine cinematography. The days after the premiere confirmed the impression. Meanwhile, across the sea, in a Europe entranced by the rise of Nazifascism, the French announced, in June, an upcoming film festival that could face what the Venice International Film Festival, created in 1932, had become. Under Mussolini, the event caused international embarrassment in general, especially to the French, who wanted to celebrate the values of democracy. That was how the idea of a democratic and anti-fascist Film Festival was conceived. The organization was frantic and improvised, as they wanted the festival to be international and take place in that same season, taking advantage of the last days of summer. There was resistance: local movie theaters already had their rooms filled with their own programming. Another location had to be found, and the choice was Côte D’Azur, in the Municipal Casino building, in Cannes. They would really take advantage of the very end of summer, between September 1 and 20. Tourists would stay a few more days, hotels would be full; 340“(...)

no recuerdo, en tanta sanguinaria película, una escena más fuerte que la penúltima de Prisioneros de la Tierra, en que un hombre es arreado a latigazos hasta un río final. Ese hombre es valeroso, ese hombre es soberbio, ese hombre es más alto que el otro… En escenas análogas en otros films, el ejercicio de la brutalidad queda a cargo de los personajes brutales; en Prisioneros de la Tierra está a cargo del héroe y es casi intolerable de eficaz. (Si no me engaño, esa atribución magnífica es obra de Ulyses Petit de Murat; los actores la ejecutan muy bien).” (Borges, “Prisioneros de la Tierra”, 92).

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furthermore, it would start right after the end of the Venice festival, facilitating the displacement of foreign moviegoers. Reinforcing the idea of a democratic and anti-fascist festival, the organizers ended up opening registrations so that all countries that produce cinema could sovereignly submit their films. At the same time, the Cannes Film Festival was intended to be a showcase for the market and, therefore, favored large producers. Countries that produced more than three hundred films a year could apply with up to 12 films – as was the case with the United States. Argentina, on the other hand, which released less than a hundred works a year, had the right to submit two feature films or three shorts. Mundo Argentino magazine gave repercussion to the invitation coming from Cannes and stated that one of the local works to represent the country at the festival would be Prisioneros de la tierra: “At the request of the Argentine Film Institute, Pampa Film has sent two copies of 'Prisioneros de la tierra' and 'Nativa' by air to Cannes to take part in that great international competition”.341 However, published on September 13, the magazine's news was already old. By those days, the festival should already be happening. It was not just Argentina that had difficulties with all the improvisation involved in the first edition of the anti-fascist festival. In other magazines released on the eve of the festival, thirty-two selected films from nine countries were mentioned: the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. The special French publication, La Sélection 1939, reported that other films were still expected, especially from centers outside Europe: “The Netherlands, Sweden, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Luxembourg and the U.S.S.R. have already announced the films they will send to Cannes. In addition, we are counting on last-minute participations that could be those of Mexico, Argentina, Egypt, etc.”342 Just nine days before the beginning of the Festival, the general secretary of the event, Tony Ricou, was still waiting for some film cans and registrations to arrive:

341

“Por indicación del Instituto Cinematográfico Argentino, la Pampa Film ha enviado por vía aérea a Cannes dos copias de ‘Prisioneros de la tierra’ y ‘Nativa’ para tomar parte en aquel gran concurso internacional” “King, “Mundo Cinematográfico”). 342 “Les Pays-Bas, la Suède, la Pologne, la Tchécoslovaquie, la Luxembourg et l’U.R.S.S, onte déjà fait connaître les films qu’ils enverront à Cannes. En autre, on compte sur des participations de la dernière heure que pourraient être celles du Mexique, de l’Argentine, de l’Égypte, etc.” (Loubes, Cannes 1939 : le festival qui n'a pas eu lieu, 248-249).

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I am still waiting for the registration of Ireland, Egypt, Portugal and Argentina. Japan, which had agreed to take part in the festival, informed me that they could send me their films only on September 17; it was much too late. As for Germany and Italy, they declined our invitations, just as we declined theirs to go to Venice.343

The political gesture of the split was given. The same went for the geopolitical division. The world of cinema was split between Cannes and Venice. The French believed themselves victorious, as they had done their best to face adversity: the scarce time, the delays of international mail. They had not anticipated, however, another event, which was being insidiously gestated and had its starting date on the same day as the Cannes Festival. On September 1, 1939, World War II began. Still unable to imagine the magnitude of the conflict, the organization postponed the opening by ten days, with the expectation that conditions would improve. The extent of their optimism was soon revealed. There would be no festival. The Nazi-fascist wave across Europe would not be confronted by the celebration of the seventh art, Mario Soffici's film with Horacio's short stories would not be seen across the sea. The only spectacle, for years to come, would be the war. The news of the Cannes Film Festival, which did not take place, is lost among the horrors of the War, and the recognition of Prisioneros de la tierra will be limited to a second place in the Buenos Aires municipal film award, in addition to being chosen as the best film of the year 1939 by the magazine Sintonía. Just as Horacio traveled to the City of Light in 1900 and was eclipsed, so did Soffici's film: once again prevented from shining in the French spotlight. At least until very recent times, when the copy that had Cannes as its final destination was located in Paris. Given the disappearance of all existing 35mm copies, some 16mm copies circulated, with serious image problems and precarious technical quality. With help from The Film Foundation, founded by the American filmmaker Martin Scorsese, and the Italian laboratory L'Immagine Ritrovata, from Bologna, after three years of

343

“J’attends encore l'inscription de l’Irlande, de l’Égypte, du Portugal et de l’Argentine. Le Japon, qui avait accepté de participer au festival, m’a fait savoir qu’il ne pourrait m’envoyer ses films que le 17 septembre; c’était beaucoup trop tard. Quant à l'Allemagne et à l’Italie, elles ont décliné nos invitations, tout comme nous avons les leurs pour aller à Venise” (Loubes, Cannes 1939 : le festival qui n'a pas eu lieu, 166-167).

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work, the film was restored and digitized in 4K format, for its exhibition in the 2nd edition of the festival Il Cinema Ritrovato, on June 25, 2018. There was an expectation that the copy would be shown at the 34th edition of the Festival Internacional de Cine de Mar del Plata, on November 13, eighty years and two months after its premiere in Buenos Aires. However, once again, it did not happen. Horacio's exiles continue to wander around the world, with their spectral image, facing the hazards and misfortunes to which the artistic production of our peripheral countries is subject, with the odd stroke of luck.

My father Unaware of the European wanderings of the cans of the film he helped to make, on January 13, 1949, Darío Quiroga, now almost forty years old, gave a commencement speech about Quiroga to a graduating class at Universidad de la República, in Montevideo. About cinema, about his relationship with his father and with cinema. About the adaptation of his father's works for the cinema. About how much he went to the movies with his father. Memory, work, art, everything was mixed for Darío, and everything had to do with his father. He, who had devoted himself to literature and given it up twice, who had done technical work with Ulyses in cinema and had also given it up, in the end, felt comfortable talking about his family history and his relationship with cinema, on both sides of the screen: In large families, there are collective vocations and tastes. Ours has several. At a table where rice dishes have been served, one will immediately know, for example, which are the Forteza's. It doesn't matter on which shore of Río de la Plata the scene takes place. It does not matter on which shore of the Río de la Plata the scene takes place (...) And this is not the only collective preference of the family. The cinematographer counts among them, to the highest degree. My grandmother, Pastora Forteza, almost seventy years old, went to the movies every day and it was precisely in a projection room where she had her fatal attack.344

344

“Existen en las grandes familias vocaciones y gustos colectivos. La nuestra tiene varios. Ante una mesa donde se hayan servido platos de arroz se sabrá en seguida, por ejemplo, cuáles son los Forteza. No importa en cual orilla del Plata ocurre la escena. (…) Y no es esta la única preferencia colectiva de la familia. El cinematógrafo cuenta entre ellas, en grado principalísimo. Mi abuela, Pastora Forteza, con casi setenta años, iba todos los días al cine y fue, precisamente en una sala de proyección en donde le sobrevino el ataque mortal.” (Cires, Darío Quiroga,

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He, the organizer of his father's works, the co-writer, the technical assistant, humbly found a prominent place in the family pantheon. Darío's other reckoning with Horacio and with the public was to justify his impenetrable public silence about his father, whom he reverently calls by first and last name: This is the first time I speak about Horacio Quiroga. For ten years I kept a hermetic silence about him because I believed, perhaps unjustifiably, that being mentioned by a member of his family meant both a tribute and a usufruct. I can now, perfectly well, break this slogan. Two lustrums after Horacio Quiroga's death, everything that is said about him, even by his son, cannot be considered even by the most suspicious of people as anything other than a just and deserved homage.345

After revealing the movie theaters in Buenos Aires that his father used to attend, how he collaborated as a film chronicler, and how cinema appeared in his literature, Darío talks about his father's desire to be a screenwriter. The writer entrepreneur that Horacio was, who took a risk on all possible fronts of the Rio de la Plata cultural industry – literature, theater, criticism, chronicles –, and who also wanted to make a film. Darío tells about the script for “La jangada”, which he had delivered, the day before, to the National Library of Uruguay. Knowing the tremendous similarity between that script and the one that was posthumously screened, he explains the coincidence by saying that it comes from that complicity between father and son in movie theaters. He adds that the script only reached his hands in 1940, when the film was already done: For the plot of 'Prisioneros de la Tierra' I chose, at first, four stories by Horacio Quiroga: 'Una bofetada', 'Los destiladores de naranjas', 'Un peón' and 'Los desterrados'. The first two would provide most of the facts; the second two, the characters. It was necessary to incorporate into the film

“Aspectos poco conocidos de la vida de Horacio Quiroga”, conference at Universidad de la República, Montevideo, January 13, 1939, personal collection). 345 “Es esta la primera vez que hablo de Horacio Quiroga. Durante diez años guardé a su respecto un hermético silencio porque creí, quizá injustificadamente, que ser mencionado por un miembro de su familia significaba tanto un homenaje como un usufructo. Puedo ahora, perfectamente, romper esta consigna. Pasados dos lustros desde la muerte de Horacio Quiroga, todo cuanto sea dicho de él, aún por su hijo, no podrá ser considerado ni por la más suspicaz de las personas por otra cosa que por un justo y merecido homenaje.” (Cires, Darío Quiroga, “Aspectos poco conocidos de la vida de Horacio Quiroga”, conference at Universidad de la República, Montevideo, January 13, 1939, personal collection).

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The father, however, could not film his idea, due to problems with the budget. Horacio said that there should be at least thirty thousand pesos in investment but Valle, the producer, refused to invest more than twenty thousand. Darío says that in Argentina in 1949, thirty thousand pesos only cover the lighting budget: Unfortunately, Horacio Quiroga died when the hierarchization of cinema in this part of America was just beginning. When a difference of ten thousand pesos began to be unimportant; when some producers dared to make 'experiments', so to speak, of a quality above the common understanding. Only two years passed from the death of the writer to the release of 'Prisoners of the Earth'. And this film cost just over two hundred thousand pesos. It's unbelievable to think how often the case of Moses and the Promised Land is repeated.347

346

“Para el argumento de ‘Prisioneros de la Tierra’ escogí, en un principio, cuatro cuentos de Horacio Quiroga: ‘Una bofetada’, ‘Los destiladores de naranjas’, ‘Un peón’ y “Los desterrados’. Los dos primeros darían la mayor parte de los hechos; los dos segundos, los personajes. Era menester incorporar al film precisamente a los prisioneros de la tierra roja, a aquellos que, como dijo su creador ‘a semejanza de las bolas de billar, han nacido con efecto. Tocan banda y emprenden los rumbos más inesperados.’ Se juntaba así el drama de estos ex-hombres con el de los nativos. La tragedia común de opresores y oprimidos. Del injerto y del pie. (…) pero todo ese rico material humano resultó excesivo para un solo argumento y prácticamente se redujo a una hábil fusión de ‘Una bofetada’ y ‘Los destiladores de naranja’.” (Cires, Darío Quiroga, “Aspectos poco conocidos de la vida de Horacio Quiroga”, conference at Universidad de la República, Montevideo, January 13, 1939, personal collection). 347 “Desdichadamente, Horacio Quiroga murió cuando recién se iniciaba la jerarquización del cine en esta parte de América. Cuando una diferencia de diez mil pesos comenzaba a no tener importancia; cuando algunos productores se animaban a hacer ‘experimentos’, por así llamar a las cosas de una calidad por encima del entendimiento común. Sólo pasaron dos años desde la muerte del escritor hasta el estreno de ‘Prisioneros de la tierra’. Y esta película costó algo más de doscientos mil pesos. Descuensa pensar con cuanta frecuencia se repite el caso de Moises y la tierra prometida.” (Cires, Darío Quiroga, “Aspectos poco conocidos de la vida de

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Darío had traced, with that film, paths somewhat divergent from his father's. The father spoke of men who were exiled, the son of men tied to the land. In the encounter between Horacio and Darío on screen in Mario Soffici's film, characters of pure movement gain the dimension of the son. He, who was born in San Ignacio and never got rid of that land.

El perseguidor Darío, the pursuer, wanted his father to be proud of him: he stole the books he thought his father would love to have; he wrote the short stories hoping his father would read and approve of them; he helped make the film he imagined his father would have wanted, but could not do. His reduced body of work – short stories, the film, and film criticism – was a work around Horacio. Darío devoted himself to the delicate gesture of completing his father's trajectory: his work made Borges praise Horacio, even without naming him; his figure even made Bioy Casares wish him well and keep him among his memories until his final years: I was a friend - a friend of the tennis club, only, but with pleasure and affection - of Darío, Quiroga's son. We never talked about his father, nor about literature. For me, he was the most intelligent person in the club and with an admirable sense of humor (with a hint of pessimism, which did not upset me). One day - I learned that he had committed suicide.348

That man, orphaned as a child, committed suicide shortly after the conference in Montevideo. Emma Barrandéguy described Darío at the time of his attempt to save Eglé, who had taken poison, like “his bearded and tuberculous brother”.349 From the times of shared joy, Emma remembered Darío enchanted with words, in complicated games shared by the trio: “Let's play with words'. Dario would say a letter and a theme and you had to follow certain complicated rules, which excluded easy and meaningless

Horacio Quiroga”, conference at Universidad de la República, Montevideo, January 13, 1939, personal collection). 348 “fui amigo – amigo del club de tenis, nomás, pero con agrado y afecto – de Darío, el hijo de Quiroga. Nunca hablamos de su padre, ni de literatura. Para mí, era la persona más inteligente del club y con un admirable sentido del humor (con un dejo de pesimismo, que no me contrariaba). Un día – supe que se había suicidado.” (Bioy Casares, Descanso de caminantes, 456-457). 349 “su hermano barbudo y tuberculoso” (Barrandéguy, Habitaciones, 103).

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words. And proper nouns. You had to give the maximum number of words in a minimum amount of time. We laughed tirelessly.”350 Darío also played with words with his friend Ulyses, to whom – according to his own words – Eglé had entrusted her younger brother when she had to commit suicide. Ulyses tells he always feared that Darío would end up taking his own life: I had a feeling that Darío was going to suffer the same fate [as with the father and sister] and my constant concern was to avoid it. I could not. My advice, my long conversations with Darío Quiroga did not succeed in persuading him. One day a woman's voice told me over the phone that something strange was happening in Darío's house. We rushed to Carlos Selva Andrade and Poroto Botana and found that the tragic fate of the Quiroga family had claimed another victim. He had committed suicide with barbiturates he stole from a hospital.351

Without anyone, without fulfilling his high aspirations, Darío's life was concluded. Let the fools talk about tragic conditioning, something as arbitrary as talking about a taste for rice or cinema. It is all a distraction from death. Horacio had faced all difficulties willing to always move forward, irrationally. He faced all challenges, even those created by himself. The sister, in love with life, enjoyed every moment until she drank her last tea from that orange mug. What would people say about Darío? Darío was too tired. Not everything needs an explanation. São Carlos, October 28, 2020.

350

“Juguemos a las palabras’. Darío decía una letra y un tema y había que seguir ciertas reglas complicadas, que excluían vocablos fáciles y sin sentido. Y los nombres propios. Había que dar el máximo de palabras en un mínimo de tiempo. Nos reíamos incansablemente.” (Barrandéguy, Habitaciones, 103). 351 “Yo presentía que Darío iba a correr la misma suerte [que con el padre y la hermana] y mi preocupación constante fue evitarlo. No pude. Mis consejos, mis largas conversaciones con Darío Quiroga no lograron persuadirlo. Un día la voz de una mujer me avisó por teléfono que algo raro ocurría en la casa de Darío. Corrimos con Carlos Selva Andrade y con Poroto Botana y comprobamos que el sino trágico de los Quiroga había cobrado otra víctima. Se había suicidado con barbitúricos que robó en un hospital.” (Petit de Murat apud Huberman, Hasta el alba con Ulyses Petit de Murat, 78).

AFTERWORD

What moves these lines When does a life begin and when does it end? This is not a minor question for a book whose proposal is to tell about someone’s existence. What is the starting point of the life story to be told? Does the biography start on the day the future parents meet? Or maybe the life in question begins with the day when a “life project” is set in motion? In the story of a life, is there only room for public loves, or also for the hidden, intimate ones? Only for what was experienced or for what was imagined as well? Do the things that survive the body fit in the story of a lifetime: the objects left in a trunk, a canteen, some newspaper clippings, a snakeskin? What about what is left to the children, should it be talked about in a biography: traits, gestures, ways of being? Of course, the project about the life story that one wants to tell depends on the answers to these questions. Above all, these were the questions that moved me throughout the writing of this biography of UruguayanArgentine short-story writer Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937), the first to be written about him in Brazil. In his two countries, Uruguay, where he was born and became a poet, and Argentina, where he became a famous prose writer and where he had and raised his children, those questions would probably be different. Maybe not. I write about Horacio Quiroga with my interest in the writer who was forged, and that is why the text does not begin with the story of his family origins, but at the moment when, on the part of Horacio, gestures that indicated the desire for a writing of his own became apparent. On the other hand, while I suppress the family romance of origins, it does not mean that this book does not deal with the writer’s more human dimension. That is to say, with how the trajectory of his vital invention comes to be: his houses, cities, displacements, animals, texts, loves, children, and plants. I take his life both as course and as construction. I also deviate from the myths, from the stereotype – always so present with regard to Quiroga – of the damned, unlucky, tragic writer, and I focus on the one who forged his own life and writing despite the missteps of life – the deaths of those who were closest to him, the political storms, some adverse movements in the literary market. His life is an indignant struggle

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against obstacles and a prodigy of invention with the materials that were available to him. I believe I am taking an important step: letting go, as far as possible, of constraints brought by his initial and important biographers, Delgado e Brignole – who were also friends with the writer in his early days –, and who wrote in 1939, only two years after his death, an edifying, exemplary life story, in which there was no place for the women he had not married. Delgado and Brignole's text suffers from some misogyny that we should not just attribute to the two men, as it is a smell that can be felt running through the pages of several popular publications from the first decades of the twentieth century, in which we see women as little more than domestic and somewhat useless beings. Thus, it is not at all surprising that a central figure such as the poet Alfonsina Storni (1892-1938), a single mother with whom Horacio Quiroga, a widower, had a story of affection, sex, and intellectual sharing, is not even mentioned by them. This is not the place to judge these initial biographers, to ask of them what they were unable to do, that is, to understand that Horacio's work was built on the margins of bourgeois institutions; that his marriages say important things about him, but do not say enough. More is needed to achieve this: to put him in perspective and crisis. Horacio Quiroga's work was built on his ability to speak of the horrendous, the truculent, or the obscene without, however, giving in to horror, truculence, or obscenity. But it would be easy – and many have fallen in this trap – to mirror the story of his life in that of this master of horror. Horacio Quiroga's life is definitely not horrible. The narrow path between the acceptable and the sayable was where he built his work, and was also where he walked his life. At the time of writing such a life, however, he lacked biographers to follow in his aesthetic tracks: the short, agile, unprejudiced narrative, open to surprise and disenchantment. A few years after Horacio's death, with malice as precise as it was terse, the former acquaintance Luis Franco declared in a personal letter to the editor Samuel Glusberg: “From M. Estrada to Barletta, those who call themselves admirers of Quiroga are almost the negation of his spirit.”352 Therefore, much of what has historically been silenced in the many biographies dedicated to the writer – the suicide of his first wife, the love for Alfonsina Storni, the passion for the jungle, the relationship with the second wife – needs to come to light more and more so that more and more 352

“Desde M. Estrada a Barletta, los que se dicen admiradores de Quiroga son casi la negación de su espíritu.” (Tarcus, Cartas de una hermandad, 314).

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of Horacio's faded hues can be revealed. Removing the writer from the frame of a damned, intractable character and showing him inventing his writing in response to adversity – personal, political, historical, and financial –is the least to be done. Doing this at a temporal and geographical distance, from 21st century Brazil, and with the documents that we have available today, is to show that Horacio's work and life continue to boil: his newly discovered letters to Monteiro Lobato; the repercussion in Brazilian newspapers of the writer's trip to Brazil throughout September 1922; his participation in the celebrations of the centenary of Brazilian independence; the first reviews and translations of short stories that appeared in São Paulo and Rio constitute, by themselves, fundamental material, since they were never taken into account. However, there is more: all this material allows us to understand the incidences of the Brazilian experience in the writer's later work, with the vigorous emergence of Portuñol in two important stories of his: “Los desterrados” (1925) and “Los precursores” (1927). Among the documents that were recently discovered are letters sent to Santa Fe painter and poet Emilia Bertolé (1896-1946) and to his second wife Maria Elena Bravo (1910 - ?). We owe this discovery to Argentine critic Nora Avaro. Such letters reveal an intimate and passionate record of Horacio unknown until recently, giving a dimension of his inner universe that goes beyond the feuilletons he wrote. Beyond those letters are still the ones addressed to María Elena Bravo – which I found in an antique shop in Mar del Plata –, and through this sum we can arrive at a new private image of Horacio, in which he is definitely not the patriarch, the macho in control, but a man weakened and full of contradictions, fears, and hesitations. We come across his humanity at last. The rescue of the story of his children Eglé (1911-1939) and Darío (1912-1951), in this same sense, allows for the revelation of a certain personal legacy of the man, as to how those he raised came to be in the inhospitable jungle of Misiones, in northern Argentina, exposed to natural hazards. What became of those children who received the stories of Cuentos de la selva (1918) and Cartas de un cazador – texts that founded Argentine children's literature and that came from the heart of Horacio's wild experience. There were those who approached the upbringing of his two eldest children to criticize Horacio's attitude for exposing his children to the dangers of the jungle and indirectly blame him for the suicide of his first wife, Ana María Cirés. Looking into the children's future lives, revealed by research in the pages of Mundo Argentino and Crítica, in which both left their marks, makes the aforementioned simplistic version more complex. From Darío, his passion

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for his father and cinema is revealed in the Mundo Argentino magazine, with his own short stories and the script for the film Prisioneros de la tierra, its reception, and his little-discussed application to participate in the first edition of the Cannes Film Festival, in 1939. Finally, I bring the lecture given by Darío at the Universidad de la República, in Montevideo, in the first days of 1949, in which he breaks a long silence about his relationship with his father through an account of their trips together to the movie theaters. Through the voice of the writer Emma Barrandéguy (1914-2006) we learn about Eglé’s years in Buenos Aires, working at the mythical newspaper Crítica. Emma's passionate account allows us not only to recover something of Horacio's daughter's personality but also of the intimate life of a young divorced woman in the late 1930s Buenos Aires. This is a biography of voices, of the intimate voices that circulated around Horacio Quiroga, of those that give a more human and everyday sense to his circulation around the world. That is why, even with somewhat scarce documentation, it was necessary to recover the timbre and marks of the poet Alfonsina Storni in his life, to discern the traces of her intimate relationship with Horacio, without focusing on the record of the tragic or the feuilleton, recovering something from the importance of the relationship that included sex, love, and mutual intellectual respect, outside all institutions. And it is from a Brazil on fire under Jair Bolsonaro and Michel Temer, increasingly exclusionary, violent, anti-cultural, and misogynistic, that I propose to tell the life of Horacio Quiroga, from a plural, polyphonic, and literary standpoint. A text that is attentive to the intricacies of the man’s human and literary choices, of the construction of a work that would last, and, at the same time, of the need for a more or less natural life in the Argentine jungle.

What moves this biographer The premise of this biography is based on a poem by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, featured in his book A rosa do povo (1945), “Resíduo”: de tudo fica um pouco, says a verse that returns throughout the poem and beyond. It was June 2012 and I was in Buenos Aires, casually finishing up the corrections of my translation of Quiroga's 1917 book, Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte. Once the work was finished that early Sunday evening, instead of going down to visit the bookstores on Corrientes Street, where I was staying, I decided to snoop around a virtual bookstore in search of some first edition of one of the writer’s works. That is when I came across an offer that was hard to believe: Colección de y sobre Horacio Quiroga, with a

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breathtaking number of books and objects. I had been dedicating myself to the writer since 1999, as an undergraduate student in Language and Hispanic-American Literature at the University of São Paulo, and that offer struck a chord. Thus, I had access to documents, objects, and books that belonged to the writer and that were under the custody of his widow, the Argentine María Elena Bravo. From the point of view of a researcher, it was a rich material that could yield studies which – if everything went well – would contribute to criticism on the writer. From the point of view of the writer that I was, it sounded in my head like a gong being struck: in everything I had written about Horacio Quiroga so far, such as the book Reverberações da fronteira em Horacio Quiroga (2008), I had always deviated from his biographical aspects, believing that his literature should be in the foreground, for understanding that there was a lot of fantasy and mythology surrounding his life, for his literary kinship with Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), and for some of his personal hardships – accidental deaths and suicides of loved ones for different reasons. Those first choices then returned, like the reverberation of a gong, I repeat, inside my skull. The lot purchased at an antique shop called El Zahir, in Mar del Plata, was not a hit. It was in two boxes of Ecuadorian bananas, with which I crossed Argentina, until arriving in Brazil, not without difficulty: a bribe for the bus driver in Mar del Plata; a dribble in the taxi driver at the Retiro bus station, who started the car without a key, joining the wires to make contact, while he inquired about the content of the boxes (old papers, I said); excess baggage and secular prayers for the Internal Revenue Service of Brazil not to make an issue out of the two-meter skin of an anaconda tucked into the bottom of the suitcase. That was not an archive, but a pile of leftovers from a dead man: books bound in burlap and covered in centenary dust, clippings from newspapers in which he published his stories and clippings from news articles about his death, faded photos of nature and his family life, handwritten letters to his second wife, cards of condolence from his funeral at La Chacarita Cemetery, a roll of 8mm film recorded by Enrique Amorim, a canteen… Everything affectionately kept over the years by María Elena, the wife who had suffered the judgment of Horacio's biographers in the first decades after his death, treated as the futile and selfish girl who had abandoned her sick husband. I was seized by the need to tell the story I had run away from for years. When the dead man's belongings fell on my head, it was no longer possible for me to postpone it. If literary criticism, as George Steiner once said, should arise out of a debt of love, it gained the status of a particular truth in

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that case: a literary passion engendered the need for a biography. In search of a working method, while delaying the beginning – as it was necessary to meet the minimum conditions of time, conservation of the collection, and field research – I was seized by the illusion that it would be possible to bring Horacio Quiroga back by the force of that moribund set of papers; to bring him back to life before my eyes, just like the character from his short story “La cámara oscura” (1920); to go beyond what other biographies had already written, and there were many; to touch the truth, to restore to the writer's literature a body of his own. I was stricken with fever: The Modern Prometheus, The Golem, “The Vampyre”, “Shadow”. Desires for immortality took over me because I was going to, definitely, resurrect the real Horacio Quiroga – a character from my youthful nightmares. As if after having read a writer over the years, the gift or curse of having some of his belongings in my hands was the guarantee of privileged access. But no. The eyes burn, the nose sneezes, tears come up. Each part of the collection escapes, produces a drift of associations, questions, or simply leads to some dead end. As Horacio's body resists, mine also resisted the game and, between them, the collection remained untouchable, warning that death is irreversible outside literature as well. It must be said, in the end, that his marks, his residues, are what exist. Horacio’s archives, such as the ones at the National Library of Uruguay, at the Salto House Museum, at the San Ignacio House, and the collection at Alexandre Eulálio Documentation Center, in Campinas, are indications of his passage through the world, his tracks. As are the invaluable newspapers and magazines in the archive at the National Library of Argentina, also kept in the basement of an imposing building. Ordered with the thoughtful hands of generations of archivists and librarians, that were moved or not by his work, and who, with some parsimony and a sense of order, offered an organization, any organization, to the corpus. Giving up the idealized path was necessary. Only then was it possible to have access to a composite of Horacio Quiroga's writing – private and public – and other speeches and discourses about him – by his contemporaries, his biographers, the critics –, confirmed or not by the documents I was having access to. So I have written just another biography, neither definitive nor revolutionary. It has particularities, as I said, such as not conforming to or being seduced by the idea of a tragic fate – which, in a way, shaped many of the preceding texts. Here I trace a path that, as I said above, begins from the shaping of Horacio as a writer, advances through key moments – the first articles and poems in his hometown, Salto, the trip to Paris, his friend Federico Ferrando’s death before the duel, the project of going to live in the jungle –

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, goes through successive attempts to publish a literature for which he can be recognized, and builds an account in which public and literary writing show how what life offers him is elaborated. More than eighty years after his death, biographies, oral tradition, uncertain mythologies, legends, and accounts have adhered to his name and time, so that it is impossible to talk about Horacio Quiroga as if all post mortem reports did not exist. Thus, furiously embarking on the university discourse and discussing the century before me in detail would prevent the biographical writing from advancing. In a now dark anteroom, such work was done – the biographical genre and Horacio Quiroga's previous biographies were discussed and, like a monument, the biography that could be idealized by the author of the one at hand was erected. Writing this biography, to put it lightly, was not easy. An early version, which oscillated between academic and narrative, without deciding on either register, was completed in 2019, as the conclusion of two years of postdoctoral research in Linguistics, at Universidade de Campinas. In this process, I counted on the patience and listening of Claudia Thereza Guimarães de Lemos, my supervisor, who saw my words flowing, sometimes clear and Olympic, sometimes stumbling and stammering, and often giving in to Portunhol. From this previous trajectory, only the marks that have produced their effects – as it is hoped – should be registered here. When it was essential, I referred to previous contributions and to what I understand as points where it was not possible to go beyond previous works by other researchers, but I did not dive deep into those minutiae. There will be future academic publications to explore such complications in detail. It was necessary here to leave space for what a biography should be: narrative. So I respected the chronology, cross-referenced it with published books, drew hypotheses on the choice of trajectories, and did not keep anyone who reads it from reaching the more impressive moments of a life full of adventure, desire, and boldness. From what I was able to write, I want to emphasize that I present here an image of the writer to Brazilian readers, who know him mainly through Cuentos de amor de loucura y de muerte, which has had more than four translations in the country over the last decades353, through some short stories set in San Ignacio, Misiones, as well as children's stories whose fame has grown over the last decade. I say this because here in Brazil no mythology was built around the character. All the better. Reconstructing the

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There is the translation by Eric Nepomuceno (Ed. Record, 2001, rereleased by Editora Abril in 2010), mine (Iluminuras, 2013), by John O´Kuinghttons (Hedra, 2013), and by Janaína Oliveira (Martin Claret, 2015).

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trajectory of a life, which took place in the first four decades of the twentieth century, provides some relevant data about the period: Paris as the intellectual meridian of writers at the turn of the century, the flowering of big press in Buenos Aires, while the wild North maintained power relations through capital with close to no interference from the State. For foreign readers – especially Rioplatenses –, the Horacio Quiroga I present to you is not so much the tragic author, responsible for a frightening work, or the writer who haunted the childhood of many of you. The Horacio in these pages is a man who no longer needs to defend himself against the young avant-garde of Martín Fierro, who does not care much for the opinion of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) and who, at a certain point in his life, finds it more interesting to go planting pineapples in the jungle than continuing to deal with the affected writers who took over the Buenos Aires press. Talking about Horacio will always mean talking about struggle: against the natural environment, against the conventions of bourgeois society, against the difficulties of having opted for the craft of professional writing with its resulting scarcity, against disease, against indifference. It means talking about someone who does not resign himself to the given conditions and decides to build the unthinkable, say the unheard of, go where no one has ever gone, in a way that no one has ever done, and tell everything about it later. There is such a desire for novelty and invention in his work that dealing with failure is inherent to its furor. The writer was one of those responsible for establishing the short story as a popular genre in Rio de la Plata, he was a precursor of the cinema chronicle, he was responsible for writing children's literature ambiguous enough not to end with some uplifting moral, he was a feuilleton editor, a journalist, and even a biographer. In parallel, he was an orange distiller, confectioner, craftsman, bookbinder, farmer, hunter, navigator, but also diplomat, civil servant, and Spanish teacher. In his personal life, he supported the utopia of living in the Argentinean jungle and providing for his own subsistence – planting, hunting, and writing – always alongside those he loved: he retried his hand at it with different women and different friends and was successful or unsuccessful for certain periods and with varying intensity. But, I repeat, he always wrote about it all. He survived all this until he was 58 years old, leaving more than two hundred short stories, two novels, dozens of articles on literature and cinema, cinematographic scripts that were never filmed, and his abundant correspondence. With his two wives, he raised three children who, in different ways, were related to art, cinema, literature, and had intense lives. In Horacio's universe, daring is imperative, and even

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failure is a gift, as it allows memorable journeys. I leave here my version of Horacio's trajectory.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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