Quiroga and the Lathestterie |Page 12

The story by its author

If life were ideal, I would write a story per week.As life takes care of being who it is, statistics are another.But luckily there is summer/12 and then it is like feeling the call of the species.

"Quiroga and the Dames" allowed me to return to the genre that I enjoy writing the most;I wrote it now, between November and December of the Infame 2021, on tumultuous and hard days, not so strange to the days of its protagonist.But what Quiroga taught us - before our first teacher of the story, who translated the form that Poe or Maupassant drawn so much - is that in the story the truth must find his balance, his harmony, his beauty.What in life can be ignored or treated with carelessness, in the story seeks to find the best tone of him.

Since I published the shelters, my first storybook in 2010, the intertexts and fragmentation attracted me.Ricardo Rojas reproached Mansilla for the second and so many critics first to Puig.But against everything that may seem and sin of "procedural" it is because when that unity of meaning arises in me, that epiphany that threads the story, already arises as a knot of roots (not to say rhizome, so abused).There is as a vortex where Quiroga is born and confused and the moving, the dating and the family situation that the story presents.Finally, writing a story that in turn includes a certain theoretical and ladino analysis of the story was always a temptation that I finally commit (that Fogwill has done it several times, I do not protect me, on the contrary).

About to finish it, by the way, I learned about the affair of “cancellation” of Quiroga for adolescent students.Hypocrisy is great and strong.Do we really want to cover the eyes of our teenagers to the violence of "the slaughtered chicken", but not to the dipy or simply to the inexhaustible variety of stupidities that says any panelist or media?Of course: let's not censor anyone.To nobody.But less to Quiroga.To Quiroga, on the other hand, I propose that the National Library dedicate an updated version of his complete work.

Quiroga and the Lathetterie

For Alinovi.

And for Tania.

1.

To get to Vinon, L. takes the diversion of the road that would actually take him to Bourges, he travels for not much more than five minutes vine The left, the Denthetterie arises as a rare accident, as something artificial, not quite true, an implant of can or cyanide in the bucolic inexpressive landscape of the campaign. The Dative is a mixture of VTV and scrap, a not very large and open -pit verifier that basically has well distributed a series of dump trucks; Aligned along a ramp for cars, trucks and even trucks that download, in those dump trucks you can throw - and find - of everything: metals, wood, helmet, furniture, encombrants (something like, “hinders”: elements: elements Hybrids, a rotten carpet, the stroller already without use of the baby, the Ikea's agglomerate and plastic furniture that has already passed from season). L. is moving an entire house and is also getting rid of that house - and getting rid of the house. He annoyed him to the dechetterie, tires him, dirties him, demoralizes him, exhausts him, but after each visit he feels he is closer to the other shore.

*

What L. did not like "drift" was the end.The way Quiroga had announced it so much to hide it.It is that a hundred years later, that failed story was read because it was a Quiroga story: I had those landscapes, those planes and that brutal rhythm, that writing so direct and at the same time so baroque and fierce.But the revelation of truth did not work.There was no surprise, there wasn't that blow that comes without being seen - or rather, having wanted not to see it."Drift" had that defect.For L. "Drift" was a simple story, a good story - an old story, not so different from "to Build A Fire" in the end -, well written, but badly told.

*

The truth is that as longwhich is recently in a very delicate health situation.One of those situations that arise one day and from nothing, and that soon become little less than irreversible and atrocious.L. does not stop thinking about that situation, a little because he has surprised him, a little because his cousin's husband is the only man in the available family if something of urgency happened to his mother (or when he has alreadypast).A little, to tell the truth, L. also thinks of her's husband, because that kind of thing, at any time, could happen to him.

two.

What Quiroga should have done - even, says L., what Quiroga thought of doing - if he really wanted to believe that Paulino was saved, it was to show that the bite of the viper did not evolve badly.That Paulino continued to live as if nothing, and take the story for the other side, for another area, another conflict.And only every so often remind us, that it was not that the pain had completely disappeared, that the pain had never really left.Every so often to make the bite reappear, in deafine, as a passing nuisance of reality, that kind of stupidities that one kicks to the side, like a petty pet, without preventing Paulino from doing the rest of his things and had other concerns.In short, incorporate the bite and its evolution to the lowest or lowest layers of the reader's consciousness.

*

When L. He made the last trip, the incredible last trip to the Lames, a journey that, L. realizes, he himself is - the trip and L., of course - could be said, a waste; Because that trip no longer enters the account, he no longer has an account, the travel account was lost a while ago, then, he said, when L. He returned from the last trip to the Denthetterie thought that the final moment of the move is a figure of the disruption. That moment where one imagines the troops running anywhere and doing anything to save the leather: hide, sell, betray, beg, betray. A moment that is exactly the opposite of that other moment, that first moment, continuing with the metaphor, so "strategic", where the steps to take, and are measured with a serious gesture such or that imponderable; The image of the hierarchs displaying a large map on the table. When it is believed that the situation is controlled, because the experience still did not even begin. It's just theory. Now instead L. is molten and the last trip does not count, he has nothing in particular, what did he throw, what did he just throw on that trip, for example? He is already forgotten. He does the same. L. He also felt a hierarchy at the beginning, and now Galopa and hugs him whining his horse.

*

L. He had learned about his cousin's husbandry for a conjugal crisis. Jealousy, versions of some confusing deception that L. had heard from her mother's story without giving her great importance. Things that happen in all couples, what L. called the sentimental novel, the misunderstandings, one truly never knows what happens inside a couple, that kind of vagueness or generalities had told their mother with apparent sufficiency and a great indifference , in reality. She also told her mother to try not to get. But then one day she tells him that there was an urgency, that her cousin's husband passed out, that they called the ambulance, that they took him to the hospital, who discovered that he had an important renal problem and that it was that renal problem that, that, Incredibly for anyone who does not know of medicine, it was affecting the brain, and it was that affected brain, which had resulted in a celotypal delirium. Already without indifference, now afflicted by the events, L. However, he thought that everything would go well, why not, the blessed and indefatigable common sense: a young man (50 years was not being a young man? L. he said himself always said No), strong, as far as I knew healthy. From afar and reasonably, everything suggested that now that he was admitted, with an adequate diagnosis, his premium's husband would begin to recover.

*

L. takes up the construction and justification of history.“The man did not wantWe do not want to die? We are going to die, there is no return. Therefore, Paulino's recklessness leaves him exposed, naked and fragile.

Quiroga's triumphs in this story are writing details: "The entire leg, to half thigh, was already a very deformed and very hard block that burst clothes."That kind of violence, that maroon writing that Quiroga did not write better than anyone, he invented with Sarmiento.

*

Having lived between two houses, two regions, two cities in the last four years, to L. What distressed him the most and even scared him from the move, was that one could get so fast from, literally, half of a life . He did the same if what was going to the tenant had been well thought out and determined as in the first trips or ended there as when in a boat that sinks you try to download weight. L. will never be able to forget the ten -sized rooms, the toys on the floor, the mixed and wrinkled clothes, the hangers here and there, the products of the defeated cupboard, the unused remedies, in short, if even What I was going to the dating, in his sentence, seemed to have a less ambiguous destination than those things that saved in bags or boxes, already without criteria, and that would travel two hundred kilometers to wait and moisten in the caves of a couple of friends for time indefinite, not to say forever. L. was stunned to see how life could be divided and maintained by half and then put an ax - and there L. knows that the spirit of Quiroga was leaked - in one of those halves, with or without remorse, what mattered; Life imposed survival until when it didn't seem that what was at stake was survival.

*

Then L. News from what was the new situation, an argument that common sense had not planned.Because his premium's husband did not improve or worsen at all.He remained and maintained stationary, within a serious picture, with an uncertain prognosis, now with dialysis, always sedated, and with the plus that the world is going through a pandemic and then family members cannot visit the sick;That is, neither my cousin can visit her husband nor her daughter can visit her father.

3.

Those who rent, L. thinks, know it well. The others are not that they know it, but they are fooled with the idea of ​​property. A house is a castle of sand. L. You will never forget the final moment, too pathetic and comic at the same time; Pathetic, because when he could return from the dating, of the last trip where he didn't even know what he threw, when he returned from that trip as if he had finally woken up on the sand of some coast, but unconscious and spitting salt water, and finished disarming and Loading the elastic bed of the boys, as well as the boxes that had been under the stairs, a snowstorm broke out, and then it seemed that the spirit of the glow reached that town in the center of France. And comedian, because before, while he finished closing and lowering the last boxes, and the new tenant, Monsieur Milan, was entering the things of him. "They don't let the dead cool," he recalled in Creole. There was nothing illegal, it was the last day of the contract, and the new tenant wanted to have his armed house or almost, to inhabit it from day one (the French are very school in the application of the law). Monsieur Milan had asked him if he bothered him to bring some things and L. told him no, that there was no problem. What L. did not imagine is that Monsieur Milan would occupy every space that L. left empty in an automatically and absolute way. As if it were a play and literally there, a change of decoration. Thus, the last things of L., his own backpack, were on a last blanket in the center of the living room and were already surrounded by glass tables, a giant plasma, and many large pots with interior plants. Monsieur Milan, apparently, liked plants. Pathetic and comic, between indoor plants and snowstorms, putting how the parantes of the elastic bed could in a common car, so were the last moments of the house where, as they say, such important moments had lived.

*

Quiroga was wrong, L. continued, how strong the metaphors they use are. Because in addition to the drama that Paulino does not find Alves, the compadre who could help him, to assist him, the only one who lives nearby, which worsens everything, immediately Quiroga writes, when he returns to the story, "the Paraná runs there at the bottom of a Immense Hoya, whose walls, high of one hundred meters, funerally fit the river. " Funerally is the second, or, if you want, the third announcement, nothing subtle. And then. "The landscape is aggressive, and a silence of death reigns in it." L. Think with irony that the story is written, well written, in reality, so that the character is saved. If the character at the end was saved if it would be surprising. And then the object of the story would be the dangerous loneliness of those places, but above all the experience of what we call a big scare. Go through great danger and get rid. Sometimes it happens, and we always remember it. "Drift," the title would be an ideal title in that case. In the last quarter of the story, Quiroga puts the word "chill", which is already a scandalous redundancy, if it weren't because he writes later, closing: "Suddenly he felt that he was frozen to the chest." It is true, perhaps the story no longer aspires to any surprise and today is read as a Joycean story. But in that case, the last part, the passage of the apparent improvement would be a little underlined. No, Quiroga didn't think so. Quiroga did not think that way to the story. Quiroga trusted the story as a real revelation mechanism. And in that sense it is and was key concealment. What fails in this text. Why does L. wonders because Quiroga is anguish, and even a death like that of his protagonist. That is why in the fiction of the story he kills him to his character, in the revealed truth. And there is the fault. He doesn't want to kill him.

*

His cousin's husband is still the same.That could be read, considering that more than a month has passed, as a favorable indication.But that would be to ignore the cruel, bold, imaginative laws of life.So who knows.For his part, L. sometimes imagines going to visit him when he goes to Argentina, or imagines that he is already recovered, he knows that any of those thoughts is to anesthetize the unbearable of what is out of all calculation, forecast, control.And then L. remembers what I had really remained silent, that serious problem, that other problem that is neither the dating, nor the health of his premium's husband, nor the ill -fated Quiroga story.Because the problems are distinguished from those who are thought, even very thought, and those that prefer to avoid thinking, those who shut up.