[In the following essay, Brotherston discusses Onetti as an urban novelist.]

He shrugged and raised his head and moved off in the direction of the unchanging sky-blue of the curtains, in the cloudy and undecided Sunday morning. He knocked on the door with the butt of his pistol and we waited for a while. The youngest girl, the round-faced blonde, slipped back a bolt and looked at us, sleepy and calm, as if she had been expecting us.

‘Good morning,’ she murmured towards the pistol in Marcos's hand.

We went in, blinded by the half-light, and saw in turn the tables, the pictures on the walls, the withered forgotten flowers and the hostile doors of the bedrooms. A second later we saw the man sitting at the large table in the middle, with his hat on, playing patience with greasy cards. He put the cards down on the embroidered table-cloth and greeted us matter-of-factly.

‘Hello.’ Larsen had his fingers intertwined and wobbled his thumbs.

Marquitos went forward step by step, put the bottle on the table and started emptying his pockets.

‘For the ladies,’ he said.

‘How kind.’

Marcos pushed the muzzle of the pistol towards the other man's face. Corpsegatherer looked at him absent-mindedly.

‘I came to clean this lot up,’ Marquitos explained without raising his voice. ‘And personally I've nothing against you, mind. You don't exist. I'm just not keen on having a brothel in Santa Maria.’

The fattish blonde, Nelly, stood beside me, smiling at me with patience and affection.

‘Would you like to sit down?’ she asked me.

‘No thank you. I can see better standing.’

Nelly shrugged her shoulders and went over to the table. Brushing against Marcos she picked a packet of cigarettes.

‘Excuse me. You said they were for us, right?’

Marcos didn't answer her and went on playing with the gun; the woman lit a cigarette and inhaled ravenously. Then she moved away lazily and drew back a curtain. I felt that the morning light didn't suit the scene. The woman passed by me and went noiselessly into one of the bedrooms. The two men went on looking at each other; they were quite still, one standing, the other sitting; Corpsegatherer was just moving his thumbs and Marcos his pistol. After a while, evidently bored, Corpsegatherer pulled a silver watch out of his waistcoat; Marcos held the gun steady.

‘Six o'clock,’ Corpsegatherer said sadly. ‘Just the time I was thinking of turning in. All things considered, it's one person's preference over another's.’

Marcos leant his fist on the table, spat in Corpsegatherer's face and slowly drew himself up.

‘Jewish turd,’ he said.

Stock-still, looking sideways at the embroidered flowers, Corpsegatherer began to smile, to rejuvenate. He seemed separate from us, from the occasion, by a long stretch of years. At last he murmured, slowly and clearly:

‘Not at all one thing and hardly, they say, the other.’

Marcos let out an insulting laugh and sat down opposite Corpsegatherer. He put the pistol on the table and opened the bottle.

‘There are some glasses in the cupboard,’ Larsen remarked.

‘Jorge,’ said Marquitos.

I went up to the cupboard and hesitated for a moment. Then, smiling, I brought three glasses to the table. Marquitos glanced at me, unsure; then he filled his. Almost immediately I poured whisky into the glass I'd brought for myself and into the one I'd brought for Larsen.

‘You know,’ Larsen said, ‘I haven't used guns for some time. Haven't carried them at least.’

The three of us drank and in the pause the voices of the women we couldn't see reached us.

‘A Luger, right?’ Corpsegatherer diagnosed, indicating the pistol.

Marcos filled his glass again. I couldn't see any spit on Larsen's face. One of the invisible women shouted out an order. Corpsegatherer put his empty glass to one side and moved his hand towards the pistol. Marcos watched him, unmoving, smiling contemptuously.

‘Of course, a Luger,’ Corpsegatherer confirmed with a happy expression. ‘The best I know. Inside there's a Parabellum. Later I'll ask the girls to bring it. They're like twin sisters. But if you ask me …’

Polite and tactful, he put the pistol back by Marquitos's elbow. I filled up the glasses and we drank. I suddenly felt pleased and a little drunk: last night's brandy, this same night still not dead, and little sleep. Then, bustling and dressed up, gay, the women came in to welcome us.

Marcos got up and bowed, said his name and mine. He got glasses from the cupboard and handed round cigarettes. After this, smiling, forgiving, he started looking for tangos on the small white radio and danced with Maria Bonita.

And so we began to live, the six of us. I don't want to know how long we stayed together; I'm determined to forget, and do, the usual trivialities and the stupid situations. I can think we were happy to the end, when the officer and Medina knocked on the door one forgetable hour and spoke with Marcos, pretending not to see me, and handed Larsen a copy of the Governor's order.

—Juntacadáveres (Montevideo 1965). Corpsegatherer. Chapter 27.

Marcos Bergner has come to Larsen's brothel to close it and clean up the town. He has spent most of his time in the novel planning this confrontation, nurturing a bigoted hunger for violence through one drunken night to the next, until finally he grabs his gun and goes out to do the job. He is Larsen's bitterest enemy, the active expression of the outrage felt in the town, Santa Maria, that Larsen's business flourishes and was ever allowed to be set up.

Grossly offended, Larsen clearly comes out on top when at last they meet. Bergner's attack spends itself; after drinking together, he, his young companion Jorge Malabia (here the narrator) and Larsen settle down to a communal life in the brothel, with its three principal whores of unconcerned charm. In this situation they are happy (felices), the rarest of states for Onetti's characters; and exemplarily more successful than the six idealist ‘pioneers’, among them the younger Marcos Bergner, who had tried to found a ‘primitive Christian’ commune earlier in the novel. Larsen's is an artist's victory. As the Corpsegatherer who gives the novel its title, the collector of whores past their prime, he is masterfully cured of life's more absurd illusions. He is a kind of catcher in the sty, who has learnt to contain the most swinish assault. He is finally expelled from Santa Maria, it is true; but leaves his reign of one hundred days as a legend in the town.

For reasons that are not always convincing as narrative, Onetti delays Bergner and Larsen's crucial encounter until near the end of Corpsegatherer, so that the reader is the more compelled by the rush of action when it comes, by the sudden focus of nebulous and over-stretched preoccupations into sharp shapes (‘with his hat on’, ‘greasy cards’, ‘small white radio’). For once independent of their author, Onetti's characters carry the fiction themselves, creating the highly-charged atmosphere and enjoining that grey unbending humour (‘I can see better standing’) which mark his best writing. Understanding and affecting things most is Larsen, here living his finest hour. His gestures and appearance convey matter-of-factness, faint boredom and the slightly soiled patience emblemized in his playing cards. Yet he is unbeatable and never for a moment out of control. He may not be learned in the traditional sense, but he is a connoisseur of all that pertains to his survival, guns for example. Indeed, his kin would be found less readily in consecrated literature than in the novels of Dashiel Hammett or Raymond Chandler, or in a sophisticated Western (say Spencer Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock). No one could accuse Larsen of picking a fight; but his quiet self-possession and his very courtesy amount to a statement that cannot be simply ignored. And this is the source of his quasi-religious power: a spat-upon martyr who bears the initials of Jesus Christ in his sordid nickname (Junta-cadáveres).

Among the characters who recurrently inhabit Onetti's very many novels and short stories (like Gabriel García Márquez and Eduardo Mallea, he is markedly fond of genealogy and saga), Larsen is indeed privileged and long-lived. He first appeared in No Man's Land (Tierra de nadie, 1941), and displayed a resourcefulness and a fictional potential noticeable even in the crowded, fast-moving pages of that novel. As the suspect defender of a psychopathic rapist, and the acquaintance of the immoralist lawyer Aranzuru, he appears only briefly; just long enough to abduct the libidinous teenager Nora, who eventually becomes his companion in the brothel as the whore Maria Bonita. After getting permission to set up his establishment in Corpsegatherer his first act is to go back to Buenos Aires, to find Nora and get her help in the enterprise. As he sits at night waiting for her in the city of his youth he goes over all that had happened to him in between: his exasperated humility in a series of office jobs, his stylish contemptuousness as one of the local hard men, and his growing inner pride at his success as a pimp. This is an ‘authentic’ if abominable existence, which Onetti comes to endow with heavy cultural significance in this later novel. Drawing partly on the plot and the idea in the title of No Man's Land, he suggests that the experience of Larsen and his companions (the like of whom he had known well as a hard-headed employee of Reuters in Buenos Aires in the 1930s)¹ had been a cosa nuestra of some importance, a special way of life destroyed by waves of immigrants, ‘Poles, Gringos, and others’, who were coarser, more numerous, and finally shot their way to control of the underworld. With the murder of the ‘indigenous’ leader Julio, Larsen reports that everything came to an end: ‘It had to be. The country (patria) really was finished, everything was over.’²

Of course Onetti is not Larsen. On the other hand the reasons for his enduring association with this character are far from casual. In the context of Corpsegatherer, Larsen acquires palpable historical significance, and, when expressing himself like that, responds to a question which has haunted Onetti's work more or less elusively: whether having the River Plate cities as your environment could of itself mean anything. If only because Onetti's standard answer is a bored denial that it could, and because (as Vargas Llosa has noted) he is grossly underestimated as a Latin American writer, Larsen's explicit words about his patria are worth attention. Above all, Onetti is an urban writer,³ and not given to any attempts at Romantic escape from the fact. If Larsen's commune succeeds where young Bergner's does not, it is also because the Corpsegatherer is more civilized, in his author's terms. He is a city product, ‘dirty, calm and hardened’, quite unlike the pure pioneers who bore each other in their isolation, victims of the simplicity they profess and of their own unknown nature. His habitat is the man-made artificial interior, preferably nocturnal, in which the morning light looks ‘wrong’, blue is the colour of curtains, not sky, and flowers wither and are forgotten: the very antithesis of Carpentier's marvellous America.

The epithets ‘dirty, calm and hardened’ are applied to the River Plate itself at the close of No Man's Land, as it flows past Buenos Aires in the night, observed by Aranzuru:

There was no longer any island for sleep on all the old earth. No friends or women for company.

He heard the music of an accordion coming from the black ships by the jetty or from the bars on shore. End of the day. Unseen, at his back, was the city with its dirty air and the tall buildings, with the coming and going of people, hellos, death, hands and faces, games. It was night already and the city hummed under the lights, with its men, its hats, children, handkerchieves, shop-windows, steps, steps like blood, like hail, steps like an aimless current.

Here, he was sitting on a stone, with the last stain of a seagull in the air and the oil stain on the dirty, calm, hardened river.

The city is registered here, as a precondition of any imaginable life, in a way which from the start precludes enthusiasm for the New World and naive faith in its ‘magic’. The river flowing by is irreversibly remote from any natural source, from the ‘blooming wilds’ and ‘worlds of solitude’ upstream. Natural America is not just overlooked but positively transmuted into the social, sordid, deprived and anonymous: a secondary, unvirgin state.

When the characters in No Man's Land are themselves led to ask where it is that they live, they can find only oblique answers. To this extent the title is literal. And inset into the narrative are factual reminders of its meaning: quoted advertisements, for example, like: BRISTOL—IMPORTED CIGARETTES (tobacco is after all an American plant). Coming from a part of Latin America that knew industrialization early, and has strong connections with the commercial West, Onetti is indicating where not to look for identity. Hence his impatience with those who can only extol the beauty of natural landscapes like the pampa and hold up an ‘indigenous’ American figure like the gaucho as one relevant to modern times. This kind of response is no less a ‘farce’, he says, than dealing in straight pre-Columbiana (the Indians of the pampas suffered a fate as catastrophic as those of the Great Plains, at the same period and for similar reasons). Onetti suspects that his part of the New World at least is without roots and prematurely senile. No claim it might have to being ‘different’ can ignore this fact. And Larsen does not. As one who has seen the ‘real’ Buenos Aires fall from its fortune in history he holds in himself the special truth of his patria; the glittering nostalgia of Gardel⁴ and the tango; an aggressive contempt for naiveté in any form; and the xenophobia of one who bears his own rootlessness in his name (as does Onetti, once O'Nety). But this is a fragile almost secret truth, to be guarded closely and shared, laconically, only with those also able to understand.

By making Larsen revisit Buenos Aires and fetch Nora in Corpsegatherer, Onetti integrates a latent historical questioning of his, or the residue of it, with what had in the meantime become his principal occupation as a writer: the creation and peopling of Santa Maria, the coastal ‘somewhere’ in Entre-Rios or Corrientes where the brothel is finally established. In one of his best novels, Brief Life (La vida breve, 1950),⁵ the reader witnesses the extraordinary birth of this town, a kind of River Plate Yoknapatawpha (Faulkner being important in many ways for Onetti).⁶ Juan Maria Brausen, a character in the novel who is bored with his trivial job and as incapable of further feeling for his wife as he is of forgetting her, escapes his condition by dreaming up fellow characters: a certain doctor Díaz Grey, a ‘fictional’ Brausen, and Onetti himself. These characters then struggle between themselves for psychic supremacy in the novel. Gradually Díaz Grey predominates and becomes the guide to yet further characters who find a point of reference in his consciousness and then in the houses and streets of Santa Maria itself.

In the many books of Onetti's Santa Maria saga, Grey often acts as an authorial confessor. It is he who records the spoilt lives, the petty betrayals and inadmissible neuroses of the principal family in the town: Jorge Malabia's sick love for his sister-in-law Julita, the prurient hypocrisy of her brother-in-law Marcos Bergner, and so on. For a Nameless Tomb (Para una tumba sin nombre, 1959), for example, is the story of Rita, a maid seduced and abandoned by Marcos and then exploited as a prostitute by Jorge. Díaz Grey's judgment is implicit, but never simple and always evanescent; Onetti's hypersensitivity to the idea of misrepresentation and to confession as an irrevocable lapse means that reported acts themselves can abruptly be suggested to have been illusory. In Brief Life and For a Nameless Tomb, Onetti deals through Dr Grey with obsessions in terms less disheartening than those of the Freudian analysis they would seem to invite and which he expressly abhors; obsessions announced already in his first work The Well (El pozo, 1939), an aggressively ‘anti-literary’ narrative spoken by a first person who is both adolescent and acutely critical of the value of his incessant fantasies.⁷ Elsewhere, Díaz Grey acts as little more than a fixture in the given setting of Santa Maria. This is especially true of the stories which deal with people further from the structural centre of the town; visitors living on the outskirts, like the incestuous athlete in The Goodbyes (Los adioses, 1954), or the reporter in ‘Hell So Feared’ (‘El infierno tan temido’, 1962), who is driven to suicide by his ex-wife's practice of sending him obscene photographs of herself.

Onetti first brought Larsen to Santa Maria when he began writing Corpsegatherer. However, before finishing and publishing this novel he produced another, also about Larsen in Santa Maria, which in many respects is better. Onetti reports that he could not rid himself of a sudden vision of Larsen's final demise, which is the subject of The Shipyard (El astillero, 1961). Characteristically aware of the absurdity of the act, Larsen returns to Santa Maria after his expulsion as a brothel-owner (which however had not yet been fully related since Corpsegatherer remained to be finished), to become the employee of Petrus, an erstwhile shipping magnate. The business is in irremediable decline: machinery stands idle and rusts, the two remaining clerks ritually handle correspondence from years back. Larsen goes into all this as a new manager, playing the game harder than they, and ostensibly works to get things going again. He even courts Petrus's stupid daughter, furthering an ambition appropriate to his position in the firm. His unpardonable mistake, according to his own ingrained code, is to believe fleetingly that his adopted system has meaning and purpose, to fancy in an unguarded moment that his existence might have acquired hope and hence honour. This offence precipitates his definitive end. The passages in which Larsen realizes this is so are among Onetti's best. Details of season, place and character cohere in a remarkably single-minded existential statement. Haunted by the ‘impure hatred’ from the past of men and women whom he has deceived, he bears himself through grey wet winter, consulting Dr Grey, diagnoser of palpable ill-health, and serving the respected Petrus, who turns out to be a cheat, and an inept one at that. He strays through junk-strewn yards, oppressed by the decaying machinery, recognizing the obsolete bureaucracy of the firm as a mode of comfortably evading a grotesquely hopeless state of affairs. One of his very last acts is to make love to the maid backstairs in the gentleman Petrus's villa; a sad echo of his old underworld self, too muted now to be in any way subversive.

Devoting this whole book to a character who was congenial to him, Onetti plumbs the lower depths of a misanthropy which verges on pessimism. Always avoiding the temptation to shrill directness (the chapters are carefully disposed and titled like scenes from a play) no less than social or psychological ‘explanation’, Onetti performs an exorcism, notably as Larsen catches the southern spring with his dying breath, in a paragraph at the end of The Shipyard, its lyricism enclosed within parentheses:

(… As the launch shook with its engines, Larsen, covered by the dry sacks they had thrown over him, could imagine in detail the destruction of the shipyard buildings, could hear the wheezing of ruin and decay. But the hardest bit to take must have been the unmistakable, capricious breeze of September, the first thin smell of spring slipping through the chinks of decrepit winter. He breathed it as the launch beat its way upstream. He died of pneumonia in Rosario before the week was out, and in the hospital's papers there is a full record of his real name.)

Onetti confesses that it was hard, tantamount to an exhumation, to return to the script of Corpsegatherer after this exhaustive exercise. The novel lacks the drive of The Shipyard. Larsen seems out of place ‘after’ his journey to death, after facing walls infinitely more blank than those of Santa Maria's self-righteous inhabitants. Apart, possibly, from Bergner, his opponents appear provincial, even folkloric, and at moments the action degenerates into a farce no amount of heavy irony can redeem. Correspondingly, Díaz Grey relapses into a role less pertinent, more obtrusively omniscient, than in The Shipyard. And certain chapters have prompted charges of self-plagiarism, or of simply bundling together previously untold episodes of the Santa Maria saga.⁸ But Onetti's most genial invention, the character Larsen, cured of life's illusions, even of life itself, reveals yet further strengths, risen now from his very grave.

After such professionally Latin American novelists as Asturias and Carpentier, Onetti comes over to us in a different way. He shares none of their enthusiasms for the idea of America as a strange or magic extant reality. Moreover, as an urban novelist who is beyond all that, he reminds us continuously that the settings and characters in his novels (after No Man's Land) are quite imaginary, barely-disguised figments of a mind primarily concerned with universal problems of an existential and even a theological nature. In this he no doubt resembles many other major River Plate writers, among them Macedonio Fernández, Ernesto Sábato and of course Borges. What distinguishes him however, and explains the keen interest of fellow novelists in his work, is his ability to ‘precipitate’ a minimal but substantial reality in his novels, which is unapologized for and unenhanced by inherited literary and other myths. For all Onetti's corrosive scepticism and the apparent reluctance with which he establishes a setting or grants autonomy to his characters, the atmosphere and style of moments like Bergner's encounter with Larsen have a quite dazzling immediacy of their own. The merest turn of speech, the smallest material object, are given and arranged by one wholly intimate with them, so that barely noticed they generate their own atmosphere. By the time Bergner looks for tangos on Larsen's small white radio we are tuned in to a quite particular time and place. And this is an antipodal redoubt where, we are reminded with urbane and stoic resentment, it is September that announces spring, the season of Larsen's death.

Notes

1. Onetti has worked as a professional journalist for most of his life. After the job with Reuters he ran a number of magazines and became an editor of the famous Montevideo newspaper Marcha.

2. ‘Tenía que ser. Y entonces sí que se acabó la patria, se acabó todo’.

3. While deeply read in the contemporary western novel (Proust, Céline, Huxley, Faulkner, Hemingway, Hamsun) he paid attention to only one Latin American predecessor, Roberto Arlt, the novelist of modern Buenos Aires: see Jean Franco, Introduction to Spanish-American Literature, p. 304. As the ‘first modern novel of Latin America’ (Emir Rodríguez Monegal), No Man's Land owes much to Arlt's ‘anti-literary’ style, laconic dialogues and cinematic sequences. Onetti is a fervent admirer of Cortázar's work: see Alvaro Castillo's note on his literary preferences generally in Homenaje a Onetti, ed. H. Giacoman, New York 1974.

4. A singer who left his native Toulouse at an early age for the River Plate. His music has been appreciated with such fervour in that part of Latin America that whole books have been devoted to proving that he was born there.

5. Well discussed by Fernando Aínsa, a younger Uruguayan novelist, in Las trampas de Onetti, Montevideo 1970; see also Mario Benedetti, ‘Juan Carlos Onetti y la aventura del hombre’, Literatura uruguaya del siglo XX, Montevideo 1963, pp. 76-95.

6. Cf. J. Irby, La influencia de William Faulkner en cuatro narradores hispanoamericanos, Mexico 1956.

7. Angel Rama's preface to the 2nd edition of this work is a superb introduction to Onetti's work as a whole: ‘Origen de un novelista y de una generación literaria’, El pozo, Montevideo 1967, pp. 49-100.

8. See Luis Harss, Into the Mainstream, p. 200.