La Grande (46 page)

To the annoyance of many local patricians, Atilio Brando's Spanish was flawless. Five or six years after having come to the country, all that was left of his Italian accent was a slight aspiration. His family was full of lieutenants to Cavour, to Pellico, and to Garibaldi. In the sixties, Taine had eaten with one of his relatives in Rome. And when the manufacture of pastas had achieved a regular pace, when the complex, futuristic harmony of the factory was producing an uninterrupted chain of identical packages of fragile, yellow pastas ready to be circulated by a perfectly oiled and efficient distribution network, the elder Brando
handed over the factory to a loyal manager with a share in the profits and started spending long periods in Italy or writing novels and memoirs in his house in Guadalupe.

It was said that, without a doubt, the Brandos had come to this world to demolish stereotypes. The delicate Romans who conversed with Taine in French and supported unification ended up forgotten and scattered, while the visionary who, to reconstruct his patrimony, had only a couple of secret recipes for tagliatelle and rigatoni, could boast a virtuously nonchalant attitude with regard to his children's education and to the destiny of Pastas Brando after the death of its founder. Memoirs and realist novels were the polestars of his life. In contrast to every gringo imagined by the Argentine theater, Atilio Brando wasn't a slave trader, work wasn't his religion, and he didn't demand a law or a medical degree from his son as the first step toward an advantageous marriage with a patrician young lady.

In contrast, to Mario Brando, social status had true value and wasn't the tenuous and somewhat degenerate simulacrum that the old pasta maker described in his realist novels. To him, urbanity was an extreme form of historicism, and materialists, if they were consistent, should venerate snobs. But Mario Brando wasn't a snob, inasmuch as, every time he used the word, he knew what he was referring to. His poetic vocation was authentic, and his historicism was in fact manifested in his romantic life and in the tenets of precisionism, of which he was the primary author. The relationship to his father was original for reasons diametrically opposed to those that literature has accustomed us to think of as typical of generational conflict. Of the two Brandos, the father was the romantic and the son the pragmatist; the father was generous and the son miserly; the father, indifferent to social conventions, and the son, utterly dependent on public opinion. The father walked around shabbily dressed, lost in
daydreams, while the son never left the house without a vest or a gold cigarette case. Like a millionaire father who tries to hide from his board members the vagrancies of his heir that might endanger the business, Mario hid his father's flirtations with realism from landowners and his disciples, considering them a mockery of precisionism's scientific exactitude. Luckily, Atilio Brando wrote in the
language of Dante
, as he proudly declared, and apart from a few articles in
La Región
from the thirties, his books (
Against Hermetism
, for instance), published in Italy, did not circulate beyond a few members of
Unione e Benevolenza
. The old man was bothered by worldliness because it distracted him from literature; for the son, literature was the pinnacle of worldliness, in the noble sense of the word, and he told himself that it was the only noble thing he could boast of.

For several reasons: first, because precisionist mechanics were essentially worldly, which is to say historicist (
historicizing
might be the most appropriate word). The idea of translating a traditional poetic vocabulary into rigorously contemporary scientific and technical language demonstrated a blind faith in the knowledge of the age and in an exact correspondence between its terminology and reality.
The heart in “El corazón, viejo, tan mentado,” in “El alma que canta”
—Brando would often say at the dinners—
isn't a forced rhyme, it's a muscle
. And he would stare at his interlocutor, his eyes wide, with the hint of a slightly defiant smile, taking in the effect that his words had produced.

Second, Brando and his underlings were convinced that the mass media, like newspapers, radio, and later television, along with traditional cultural institutions, should play a dominant role in the dissemination of precisionist tenets. It wasn't simply exhibitionism: Brando was convinced that precisionism's social function was to purge the language of the masses, modernizing it and making it correspond with scientific terminology.
It's very
simple
, Brando would insist,
it's about speaking with precision. That simplifies things very much. Look at the etymology of the word “precision,” from the Latin “praecisus,” cut off, abbreviated. Every word that the precisionist poet uses should correspond to a verifiable thing. In this way, all misunderstandings in the social exchange of concepts and emotions disappear
. The precisionist movement hoped to occupy the totality of the social field, acting on each of its articulations in order to transform it completely.
Was this optimism or extremism?
the neoclassicists asked themselves, somewhat lost, pretending, with their perplexed tone, that despite every good intention and everything they knew about them, they couldn't find any conceptual coherence in the movement. And yet, when those echoes of bewilderment reached his ears, Brando said that the answer had already been given in the first sentence of the first manifesto, published on the first page of the first issue of the first volume of
Nexos
(December, 1945):
To preserve the economy of ideas, in the field of verbal commerce we are protectionists
.

By 1945, Brando was already finishing law school. He'd done it rigorously and swiftly, on his own initiative, inasmuch as the elder Brando was not subject, as mentioned above, to the fetish of the diploma. Furthermore: by 1940, he'd already turned the factory over to his manager, an honest, hardworking
criollo
with more luck and more ethics than those described by Gutiérrez (Eduardo), among others; he'd transformed his capital into real estate and property (land, houses, farms) and lived peacefully from the rent, contemplating the implicit worldview in
I Malavoglia
.
Pasta
, he supposedly confessed once to Washington Noriega during casual conversation on a corner downtown, sometime around 1937,
a dalliance of youth
. He'd already married off his three daughters and had determined that his youngest son was not one to be disarmed by life. At twenty-one, he was already
dating the daughter of a general. At twenty-six, four months after the appearance of the first issue of
Nexos
, and with the second soon to be published, a story in the society section of
La Región
announced the wedding of Señorita Lydia Ponce Navarro to Dr. Mario Brando. The elder Brando shook his head deep down (to put it one way), mystified. Mario's social success impressed him less than the painstaking and efficacious way in which he passed from one stage to the next, and the almost mathematical exactitude that ruled over the realization of his projects. In short, at twenty-six, Mario Brando was one of the most cultured and elegant men in the city, he worked at an important law firm, he received a portion of his father's estate, he'd married the daughter of a general, had turned down an assistant professorship in Civil Law, and he was the undisputed head of the precisionist movement, whose magazine,
Nexos
, had been warmly received in the Sunday supplement of
La Nación
.

An article with a photo in the next day's edition of
La Región
had described the first precisionist dinner. Behind the apparent objectivity, the post-
modernista
resentment was clearly visible. Brando learned his lesson. After that day, he wrote the newspaper and radio stories for them himself. What would strictly speaking be called the group's creative labor was soon supplemented with conferences, newspaper articles, and radio interviews. The appearance of the magazine was of fundamental strategic importance: in the articles, the seminars, the interviews, and the conferences, they had to make terminological and theoretical concessions, which generated numerous misunderstandings; but the pages of
Nexos
, meanwhile, maintained, from start to finish, a consistent exactitude. It's precisionist manifestos, texts, and engravings formed a coherent and persuasive compendium. The first issue, for the city and for the time, was luxurious, so much so that the neoclassicists, who'd been producing the modest
Espiga
at great personal cost for almost three years, started to spread venomous rumors about the source of their funding. Brando's legendary cheapness immediately ruled out the possibility that the issue was paid for out of his own pocket. There was, in fact, no mystery: the new owner of Pastas Brando, who'd known Marito all his life, the lawyers at his firm, who through Brando had contacts in the industrial and military sectors, and the bookstore-press that Brando convinced of the possibility of an exclusive series of single-author editions from precisionist poets as soon as the movement was funded, were more than enough to finance the first four issues of
Nexos
, which comprised the first volume.

The Thursday menu was invariable: alphabet soup (that was Brando's idea), Spanish-style stew, cheese and dessert, and red or white house wine. Cuello, the most famous regionalist, after attending one of these dinners, said to a friend,
Instead of trying to reform literature, they should start by reforming their wine list
. Brando had made a deal with Obregón, the owner: after fourteen guests, the price of the menu was reduced. The first group of precisionists consisted of seven people, to which four or five girlfriends were added, and because there were always a few other guests who varied from week to week, the number that Brando and the owner had agreed upon was always easily met. It was said that, with fourteen people, Brando not only got a price reduction, but he himself ate for free. In any case, whenever the dinner finished, he always took charge of gathering the contribution of each guest, and was always the one to settle at the counter with the owner. One night, the number of guests reached twenty-one, not counting a table of regionalists and neoclassicists who, apparently by chance, as though they didn't know that the precisionists got together at that restaurant every Thursday, had decided to eat there that night. When he walked in and saw them
sitting at a table near the one that the owner usually prepared for them, Brando told one of his lieutenants, with great discretion, to avoid provoking them at all cost. But the others were celebrating a municipal prize, and when they started drinking champagne with dessert, two or three of the precisionists started to fraternize with them at the next table.

Someone who never missed a dinner was First Lieutenant Ponce, which is to say, Brando's brother-in-law and Lydia's younger brother. Though he'd studied at the military college in Buenos Aires, his father had obtained a post for him in one of the regiments in the city. He was shy and tanned and all of those intellectuals made him somewhat uncomfortable. He admired his brother-in-law very much, and wouldn't say a word during the whole meal. But because he would arrive before anyone, and would drink three or four Hesperidinas at the bar before the meal, sometimes, afterward, he would start to recite Joaquín Castellanos's “El temulento,” which, along with “
Si hay un hueco en tu vida, llénalo de amor
” was the only poetry he knew. Brando's underlings, sensing that the founder of precisionism grew impatient with the first lieutenant's poetic inclinations, started to say, behind Brando's back, when describing the episodes, that the post-
modernista
fifth column was trying to undermine the movement from within.

For several years, precisionism dominated the literary world in the city, with a strong advantage over the other schools. It was the only original literary movement to have appeared there, inasmuch as the neoclassicists weren't in fact anything more than a branch of a movement that had circulated throughout the country, and the regionalists weren't a group strictly speaking because the only thing they had in common was their taste for cookouts and their systematic employment of barbarisms. Among the regionalists, only Cuello was known outside the
province. His books were regularly reviewed in
La Prensa
and
La Nación
, and yet the invariable praise they received repeatedly affirmed that the books constituted an invaluable testimony of his native region and that their author was a profound student of the ways of the countryside. Precisionism, meanwhile, had been recognized from the beginning as something more than a simple literary movement, as a true
Weltanschauung
. More than as a poet, despite the many merits in that regard that even his detractors recognized, Brando was seen as a philosopher, as a man of science, and even as a reformer. Despite the jealousy that his increasing fame provoked, more than a few regionalists, and more than a few neoclassicists in particular, admitted privately that, had he abandoned his avant-garde pretensions, he might have transformed himself into a more than respectable representative of their respective schools. Higinio Gómez and Jorge Washington Noriega, who kept themselves on the margin of the literary world, referred to him, sarcastically, as “
Il Duce stil novo
of scientistic debris,” and refused to be impressed by the fact that Buenos Aires was looking favorably on the work of a local agitator. Brando, meanwhile, took that acceptance as objective proof, and the rival groups validated his position. A sonnet of Brando's, “Chemistry of the passions,” appeared in mid-1946 in the supplement to
La Nación
, and it should be said that, if the existence of God had been announced in that Sunday rotogravure, the regionalists and the neoclassicists, as of that moment, would have done without the miracles or the ontological proof.