During the past 50 years, the work of the Argentine writer Antonio Di Benedetto has found its way to readers like water trickling from a blocked stream. Beloved by an almost clandestine coterie of admirers that included Roberto Bolaño, Di Benedetto, who died in 1986, is still largely unknown in the United States.
With the publication in English of THE SUICIDES (New York Review Books, 165 pp., paperback, $16.95), the third novel of what can loosely be called a trilogy, this may be about to change. All three books have now been masterfully translated by Esther Allen, who has managed to capture the humor, the sobriety and the oscillations between realism and mental fragmentation that constitute the essence of Di Benedetto’s fiction.
No writer has laid bare so thoroughly the ongoing predicament of the Argentine, for whom the resolution of even minor problems, such as a noise complaint or the collection of one’s modest salary, seems beyond normal human effort. Di Benedetto understands this bitter ingredient of Argentine life, where the middle class is as evanescent as melting ice, subject to impoverishing currency devaluations, corrupt populists, vicious military coups, cynical guerrilla movements and useless reforms.
There is some Kafka and Gogol in his comic tragedies, and some Dostoyevsky in his characters’ furious nihilism, but the atmosphere of his fiction is unlike anyone else’s. His protagonists are aggrieved, frustrated and emotionally trapped. They comb through their psyches with claws, always in the first person. They are repellent and charismatic, often at the same time. And they tell their stories with brio: Curious and well-read, they are ingenious weavers of philosophical riffs designed to shield themselves from the curse of futility.
“To the victims of expectation,” reads the dedication page of his best-known novel, “Zama,” the first book of the trilogy. It could apply equally to its successors, for the psychological danger of harboring hope where there is none is Di Benedetto’s binding subject.
In “Zama,” the eponymous narrator is a midlevel functionary for the Spanish Empire in South America. He is stuck in an outpost far from the social attractions of Buenos Aires, where he longs to be transferred. The story takes place in the 1790s, when criollos like Zama — of Spanish descent but born in the Americas — are looked upon with suspicion, as the 260-year-old bureaucracy that has governed the Americas from Madrid is beginning to crumble. Zama’s official duties are meaningless, and his relentless maneuvers to land a more glamorous posting seem doomed.
The only conquests available to him are sexual, and even these are distorted by his sometimes criminal behavior and his risible illusions about the purity of white women. He clings to the comportment of the “civilized” but can’t maintain the facade, because inwardly he is more barbaric than his social inferiors. As the years pass, the Spanish cease even to pay his wages and Zama descends into a life of subsistence, too poor to afford the humblest lodging. In a last-ditch attempt to earn a transfer, he joins a posse hunting a notorious outlaw and enters the wildness of an ungovernable land.
“The Silentiary,” first published in Spanish in 1964, eight years after “Zama,” takes place in the early 1950s in what the author calls “a city in Latin America” that he declines to name. Its subject is the deadly irritations of modern quotidian life. “I open the gate and meet the noise,” goes the first paragraph. The noise — chattering radios, bad music, roaring machinery and motorcycles — is corroding the unnamed narrator’s sanity and sabotaging his plan to start writing a book. You may sympathize with his torment, but you will also recognize the perils of an insoluble fixation. Like Zama, he is an office worker with unspecified duties, a sub-manager, a second-in-command.
His affliction grows so intense that it expands to include normal human sounds. During late-night intervals of quiet, he is “alone the way a person is alone in the shower.” Only one person understands him: his best friend, a half-mad visionary “who charges into any fray,” sees through the diabolical system and dresses in rags. At times he seems to be a product of the narrator’s spiraling ideation. Like his friend, the narrator believes himself to be a “martyr for having aspired to live my own life, and not someone else’s, not the life that is imposed.” In Di Benedetto’s hands he is both ridiculous and tragic.
“The Suicides” (1969) also takes place in an unnamed provincial city. A reporter who has just turned 33, the age his father was when he ended his life, is told by his editor to write a series of articles about three recent suicides. His only lead is a photograph of each of the victims after they died. “There’s terror in their eyes,” observes the reporter. “But their mouths are grimacing in somber pleasure.”
His assignment is to unlock the meaning of these contradictory states. But details are scarce; the police don’t release information about suicides. Can dying by your own hand be a relief for some? Is it hereditary? Might it be a rational response to a forced condition of stagnation? Questions multiply, as the novel turns into an investigation of the reasons for living.
Interspersed with the story are the results of statistical studies about suicide — by gender, race, nationality and age — dry asides that presage Bolaño’s factual accounts of brutality in his 2004 novel “2666.” These give a disturbing clinical ballast to the story. Among other things, Di Benedetto can be seen as a bridge from the magic of García Márquez to the realism of Bolaño and the generation of Latin American writers that succeeded him.
Di Benedetto’s work provides its own study of violence. In common with the trilogy’s other protagonists, the reporter in “The Suicides” is prone to outbursts that seem fueled by an incurable frustration. He entertains himself by engaging in drunken brawls and attending boxing matches where he can “clamor for violence and destruction.” He assures us that “this is normal,” that his “belligerence is collective, and my atrocities mingle in the air with everyone else’s.” He adds: “Oppression makes you weak.”
Di Benedetto was born in 1922 and lived most of his adult life in the north-central province of Mendoza, the reliable supplier of good olive oil and wine to Buenos Aires. He was a reporter at the provincial newspaper, Los Andes. In 1976, he was arrested by the military government, tortured and put in front of a firing squad four times. After 18 months he was released.
He had no history of political activism and to discern the subversions in his fiction would have required an insight the generals didn’t possess. But in those years of state terror, anyone who wasn’t an active supporter of the government was seen as an enemy.
When I was in Mendoza in the early 1970s, I don’t remember many people speaking of him. The joke then was that for an Argentine to be read in his country he had to write in a foreign language and be published in translation. Respect for homegrown artists was scant.
Di Benedetto’s decision to stay in Mendoza may have been bad for his career, but not for his fiction. It connected him to the deepest psychology of his countrymen, giving him the vantage point to write about the secret workings of their souls and the torment of their far-flung hopes.
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