Southeaster Read online

  The River Plate is present in many narratives but primarily as a place for the arrival of immigrants in their millions, mainly from southern Europe, or of travellers and visitors. It also offers the embarkation point for journeys to Europe. Memoir accounts of the early twentieth century would be full of descriptions of elite travellers to Europe. The writer and cultural Maecenas, Victoria Ocampo – who later promoted Conti’s Southeaster in the pages of Sur, the magazine she both funded and edited – wrote engagingly of the way her family would visit Europe almost as a biblical exodus. They would load onto the ocean liner all manner of family, staff and provisions, including cows to give milk on the journey and in their subsequent lodgings in the best Parisian hotels.5 Ocampo was a lifelong cultural bridge-builder, and it was fundamental to her concerns to bridge the span of the ocean, bringing together like-minded intellectuals from Europe and the Americas.

  The city of Buenos Aires became the centre of the nation, both in economic terms and in terms of literary imagination. Jorge Luis Borges would explore the orillas (literally banks or shores) of Buenos Aires in his poetry of the 1920s, but his eccentric view is from the outskirts of the city, where it meets the countryside. Certain writers would share Conti’s later interest in marginal figures in a landscape, but these works would also mainly be set in the cities, as in the novels of Roberto Arlt who, in the 1920s and 1930s, would paint the world of the urban poor (see, for instance, his 1929 novel The Seven Madmen). When nationalist writers in the first part of the twentieth century questioned what they considered the elite, ‘European’ liberal values of society, they would look to reverse Sarmiento’s formulations and espouse nationalist symbols such as the gaucho Martin Fierro, the eponymous hero of the late-nineteenth-century poem. Conti’s views would chime with those who sought to question the cultural and economic dominance of the port city: ‘I am from the interior,’ he says. ‘I always saw Buenos Aires through the eyes of an outsider, and this is the only way that it functions for me.’6 Yet his vantage point is different: he chooses the ebbs and flows and sudden storms of the river, not the land, and Buenos Aires is always a landscape in the mist, just around a corner, before the Delta opens into the River Plate. Buenos Aires is only a few miles away, but it is in another time, it is another way of perceiving the world.

  Conti would witness profound changes in Argentine society. He was five when a military government deposed the Radical party that had emerged in the early twentieth century as a counterbalance to an elite Argentine political system that had ruled the country by oligarchy. He left his religious vocation in 1945 when Juan Domingo Perón and Evita Perón were emerging as political figures. At the seminary he had become the friend of a Jesuit priest, Hernán Benítez, who introduced him to literary criticism and would later become the confessor of Eva Perón. Conti lived between Buenos Aires and the Delta during the Peronist decade of 1946–1955, studying at university and later receiving a grant (in 1952 and 1953) from the Cine Club ‘Gente de Cine’ (Cinema People), to work on film projects. It was at Gente de Cine that he would have seen independent cinema that offered an alternative to a Hollywood aesthetic, in particular Italian neorealism and French new wave. (In the light of this interest, readers of Southeaster might wish to observe Conti’s use of description that has the precision of a camera, his attention to images, forms, colours, sounds, and to the ways in which his narrative is ‘cut’ and edited.)

  Conti began publishing in the aftermath of Perón’s overthrow in a military coup, and he lived through the many changes that took place as Argentina struggled to find a political system that would exclude or incorporate Peronism, under the ever-watchful eye of the military. He became more politically active around the time when Perón returned from exile in 1973 in a wave of popular euphoria. And Conti published his last novel, Mascaró, el cazador americano, when Perón’s third wife, Isabel, took over as president following Perón’s death in 1974, and government and paramilitary forces became more oppressive, and the political moment more radicalised.7

  Of course, we should not make easy connections between politics and writing. Conti himself would often warn against such easy links. He would affirm throughout his life that writing to an overt political formula could result in bad literature:

  Quiero decir que por la sumisión a ciertos universales rígidos, cuya imposición y verificación se convierte en un fin en sí mismo, alguna literatura comprometida corre el riesgo de ser pasatista ella también.

  [I want to say that, by submitting to certain rigid rules, the obedience to which, and demonstration of one’s conformity to which, becomes an end in itself, a literature of commitment runs the risk of becoming frivolous.]8

  For the purposes of this brief overview we can say that, at least at the level of rhetoric, the first Peronist governments gave value to an Argentina beyond the city. Peronist parades would often be lead by gauchos on horseback, and speeches made constant references to cabecitas negras, migrant workers from the interior. Radio programmes would broadcast popular music from the countryside, as well as the urban tango. We know that Conti’s father, Pedro Conti, set up a branch of the Peronist Party in his home town of Chacabuco, though there is little information about his son’s political affiliations at the time. There were aspects of this Peronist cultural project that would chime with Conti’s own affiliation to regional cultures. While most intellectuals were opposed to the first Peronist governments, which they perceived as authoritarian, Perón’s overthrow by the military, and subsequent military involvement in politics, led to a gradual reappraisal of the political order and, by extension, the social function of intellectuals and writers. These were debates that Conti would enter more vigorously from the early seventies.

  While writing Southeaster, Conti would have been living at a time of both political confusion and also excitement: how should Argentina become more modern and develop (modernisation and ‘developmentalism’ were the terms used at the time); how might it embrace the new; how might it react to the imaginative proximity of revolution, with the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959? One of Conti’s answers seems to be to step back from the glitter of the new, and shine a torchlight from the brow of his boat on hitherto unexplored spaces of popular culture. In particular he would look to eschew the notion of writer as celebrity, someone – in Tom Wolfe’s phrase – leading the vanguard march through the lands of the philistines. As Conti remarked in a handwritten note:

  No sé si tiene sentido pero me digo cada vez: contá las historia de la gente como si cantaras en medio de un camino, despojate de toda pretensión y cantá, simplemente cantá con todo tu corazón. Que nadie recuerde tu nombre sino toda esa vieja y sencilla historia.

  [I don’t know if it makes sense, but I tell myself these same words every time: narrate the people’s story as you’d sing while on a journey, relinquish all ambition, simply sing with all your heart. Let no one be concerned to remember your name, but everything there is of this old and simple story.]9

  The novel that seemed to both represent and guide this optimistic embrace of the new was published one year after Southeaster: Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch (1963). This novel, in its ‘hopscotch’ between the cities of Paris and Buenos Aires, was a playful but also sophisticated search for freedom, both existential and profoundly literary. It stressed the need to ‘un-write’ the novel, to free it from convention and high seriousness – the solemnity and pomposity of much of national literatures – and to play the game with grace and intelligence. It was the novel’s freshness, its limitless cultural breadth and its eroticism that captivated a new audience, who wanted to be Cortázar’s active readers: engaged, modern, experimental and hip. It was one of the first ‘boom’ novels in Latin America, chiming with the literary, modernist experimentation of the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, the Mexican Carlos Fuentes and the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez. These were the writers who would be promoted by publishing houses, critics and cultural magazines, and would be translated throughout the world.10


  It would be wrong to argue that the attention given to particular writers distorted the market, because the readership for Latin American literature as a whole grew throughout the sixties, both at home and abroad. But it would be fair to say that, in their excitement to promote the boom, publishers and critics in the sixties paid less attention to the quieter, seemingly less ambitious narratives like those of Conti. Readers in Latin America and beyond are today far more likely to bring to mind the trips down the Magdalena River described by García Márquez in Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) and The General in His Labyrinth (1989), or the Amazon as described by Vargas Llosa in The Green House (1966).

  If there is one travel image that might be said to represent this sixties boom – and despite the writers’ own attested fear of flying – it would be the fast-paced mobility of jet flights that looked to shrink the spaces between Buenos Aires and Paris, Mexico City and New York, Havana and London. By contrast, as Eduardo Galeano puts it: Para entender a Haroldo Conti hay que estar en el Tigre y ver el río correr despacito. Ese es su ritmo [To understand Haroldo Conti, one has to be in Tigre and to see the river running slowly on. This is his rhythm.]11

  Let us hope that, fifty years after the first publication of Southeaster, this first translation into English can offer a similar place in our imagination to the Paraná River and its Delta.

  It is not the intention of this afterword to offer a context for the entire scope of Conti’s writings up to 1976, but rather to situate the moment of Southeaster’s publication and its immediate aftermath. (It might however be of interest to note that the boom writers themselves certainly read and admired Conti’s work: in 1971 he was awarded the Barral Prize for his novel En vida, and two of the jury members were García Márquez and Vargas Llosa.)

  We have looked to place Southeaster where it belongs in the history of Argentine and Latin American literature, as one of the most original contributions to what Conti himself would term, in an interview in 1974, ‘a stylistically and imaginatively Argentine literature.’12

  Conti on Conti: A Ship’s Log

  When the writer Juan Carlos Martini was compiling the interview with Conti from which we have just quoted, he spoke of how difficult it was to get Conti to talk about himself and his own work, and of his phobia about being interviewed.13 Yet, when coaxed into speaking in interviews, he would give very measured and insightful comments on his work. One such interview, made at the time of the publication of Southeaster, is published in the first book-length study of his work, Rodolfo Benasso’s El mundo de Haroldo Conti (Buenos Aires, 1969). The following pages present Conti’s illuminating reading of the novel and its different contexts.

  When asked if he felt himself to be a figure in the literary world we have outlined above, he replied:

  No sé si, después de todo, he llegado a ser un escritor, pero lo que indiscutiblemente no soy es un literato. Cuando escribía Sudeste, vivía prácticamente en las islas y, aparte del hecho de empuñar una lapicera y sentarme frente a una hoja de papel, la historia salió de la gente y las cosas, casi a mi pesar. Por ese entonces no conocía a ningún escritor.

  [I can’t say if, at the end of the day, I’ve come to be a writer, but one thing I am unarguably not is a man of letters. At the time I was writing Sudeste, I practically lived on the islands and, aside from the act of my picking up a pencil and sitting in front of a piece of paper, the story itself came from other people and things, and almost in spite of myself. In those days I didn’t know a single writer.]14

  This isolation would change, of course, and might be slightly exaggerated, for he won a prize for Southeaster, and the novel appeared on the bestseller lists in the newly founded Primera Plana.15 But his sense of being marginal to dominant literary currents is further emphasised by his comments on the state of much Argentine literature. He is opposed to:

  la pretensión de una novela que abarque y agote de una vez y para siempre una supuesta realidad nacional. Lo que podría llamarse la novela monumento o la literature de bronce. Todo lo que se ha logrado con esto es acentuar todavía más el divorcio entre la literature y el país. La Argentina es una suma de realidades, a menudo incomunicados entre sí, en perpetuo cambio todos ellos…

  [the pretension of a novel that embraces and exhausts once and for all some supposed national reality. What one might call the monumental, or iconic novel. All that’s been achieved through this is to accentuate still further the divorce between the literature and the land. Argentina is the sum of its realities, which often don’t speak to each other, and are all in constant movement… ]‌16

  This awareness of the diversity of Argentine cultures, and the lack of communication between these cultures, is fundamental to Conti’s writing.

  He goes on to speak of the writers with whom he finds affinities:

  Entre la literatura y la vida, elijo la vida… Pocos libros valen una hoja de ese loco vagabundo, de Jack Kerouac, que con su mochila al hombro corre de una punta a otra de esa gigantesca tierra que gime, canta o resopla a través de su sangre… Pocos libros valen una página de Hemingway, ni media de Sillitoe, ni una línea de Morosoli.

  [Between literature and life, I choose life… Few books are worth one printed spread from that crazy vagabond, from Jack Kerouac, who with his pack on his back runs from end to end of that giant land, that howls and sings and snorts through his blood… Few books are worth a single page from Hemingway, nor a half-page from Sillitoe, nor a line from Morosoli].

  All these references will be familiar to an English reader, except perhaps that to the little-known Uruguayan writer Juan José Morosoli, who had a similar interest in portraying liminal characters in a landscape of rivers and ports. Conti would speak of another Uruguayan writer, Juan Carlos Onetti, whose novels and stories were often set in the invented town of Santa María and its environs, on the banks of the River Plate; Onetti’s famous novel The Shipyard was published in 1961. Conti would often refer to the Argentine poet of the Paraná River, Juan L Ortiz. Added to this list of admired writers was the Brazilian João Guimarães Rosa, whose complex novels and short stories would, in the main, map the backlands of Brazil, but which moved beyond mere regionalism in their philosophical content and radical linguistic experimentation.

  Conti would pay an extended homage to Ernest Hemingway in an article written after a trip to Cuba in 1974. He describes his visit to different sites in Hemingway’s Cuban landscape: the room in the Hotel Ambos Mundos in Havana where Hemingway wrote, and the fishing village and the fishermen immortalised in The Old Man and the Sea. There he swapped stories about navegaciones y peces y amigos, todos esos blandos temas que alivian el tiempo, lo tornan a uno vaguedad, espuma, pájaro forastero [sailing trips, fishes and friends, all those gentle subjects that lighten the time, that turn one to vagueness, to froth, into a strange bird]. The fishermen stories trigger memories, evoke other rivers and seas:

  De un vistazo veo yo allí, superpuestos tiempos y lugares… al Nene Bruzzone del Tigre, al siempre capitán Marcelo Gianelli, al Vasco Arregui que en este momento debe estar pescando la centolla a bordo del Cruz del Sur en el Beagle…

  [In a glance I can see myself there again, the times and the places all superimposed… Kid Bruzzone from Tigre, Marcelo Gianelli, always the captain, the Basque Arregui who, right at this moment, must be fishing for crab on the Cruz del Sur, on the Beagle… ]‌17

  In this account, Hemingway offered Conti a model for the discipline of writing as well as a repository of shared themes. On his final visit, to Hemingway’s former house, now a museum, Conti finds Hemingway’s boat, the Pilar, marooned on the ‘sandbank’ of the grassy lawn. He describes in great detail the dimensions of the boat and its engine capacity, before remarking:

  Este es el barco que el Viejo amó como a un hijo, condenado in memoriam a vivir lejos del mar, a navegar nostálgicamente entre arecas y palmeras sobre el césped bien cortado… Saludo al barco en voz baja, porque los barcos son como personas, entienden a su manera.

  [Th
is is the boat the Old Man loved like a son, condemned in memoriam to live far from the sea, to nostalgically sail between palms and arecas, over the nicely cut lawn… I greet the boat in an undertone, because boats are like people, they understand in their way.]18

  When Conti spoke specifically about Southeaster in the early sixties, he would explain a writing technique which was also, by extension, a philosophy of life. He would begin by stressing the autobiographical and almost ethnographic nature of his work:

  El viaje de Boga en cierto modo es mi viaje. Sólo que el viaje del Boga viene mucho después cuando aquello adquirió pasado y se hizo historia para mí… Por fin, otro día, todo aquello (su vida en el Delta) me golpeó como ausencia. Y entonces a punto de perderlo, de alguna manera, ya lejano y extraviado, traté de inventarlo de nuevo…

  [Boga’s journey is my own, in a way. Except Boga’s comes very much later, when all that it comprised acquired a past and became a story for me… And then in the end, on another day, all of this (his life on the Delta) invaded me as an absence. And then, when I felt I would lose it in some way, already far off and gone astray, I tried to invent it anew… ]‌19

  Writing is not, for Conti, a description of ‘great events’:

  Me reconozco en las pequeñas cosas y las pequeñas vidas sin residuo de historia… los pequeños sucesos de un tipo que ni siquiera tiene nombre se juntan y se pierden sobre ese río-tiempo con otras historias tan insignificantes como la suya.