In Onetti, who died on May 30, 1994, everything is striking: his personality, the ruinous beauty that the environments of his books convey, his characters and, of course, his writing.
Let’s start at the end: Madrid, 1994. A dimly lit room, a bed, books — surely crime novels — lots of cigarettes and a glass of whiskey. In bed, a man, and within that man, a world. This image must be seen, not read; as it corresponds to the portrait of someone who has always known that life was a resounding failure. For Onetti, living was failing. Once, during an interview, he confessed: “In me, I think it is a natural pessimism; natural and radical. Deep down, I think I am one of the few people who believes in mortality. That influences a lot. I know that everything is going to end in failure. Myself. You too ”, he replied when asked what was the reason for that feeling of defeat in the face of life that, characteristic of his personality, also persists in his stories and novels.
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In Onetti everything is striking: his personality, the ruinous beauty that the environments of his books transmit to us, his characters and, of course, his writing — and the particular way of conceiving it. “I write for myself, for my pleasure, for my vice, for my own condemnation,” he once told María Esther Gilio.
What motivated in Onetti this feeling of defeat before life? Why this persistence towards failure that is in his works? Giving a definitive answer is arbitrary. We can, in some cases, intuit that the arrest and subsequent confinement in a psychiatric hospital that he suffered, due to the dictatorship of Juan María Bordaberry, greatly influenced his vital position, taking into account that he was forced to go into exile in Madrid and that I would never return to Montevideo.
Critics have always declared that looking for biographical features of an author in a work constitutes a gross error: when writing, he tends to distance himself and falsify situations. How not to affirm that this ‘speaker’ of The Seven Year Old Poets is not Rimbaud himself raising a plea against the oppression of his mother and religious morality? Or is it not possible to identify Céline in Bardamú? There are authors in whom life and work are intertwined, the Uruguayan is one of them. Onetti is his characters — Larsen, Aránzuru, Eladio Licanero, etc. — and they are him.
Reading it is not easy. His writing, in which many see an excess of adjectives and an egotistical delight in language, demands patience, setbacks, pauses. The lyricism with which he narrates can cloud the reader and be distracting to understand his plots, but it is key to feeling the tone of the text and the shape of his characters: “Aránzuru got off the train and began to walk through the underground passage. The air was cooler there. The head was almost touching the globes of light embedded in the ceiling. He climbed the two short stairs and a little fatigue made him stop, looking curiously at the dirt road. He thought that man’s friendship with the earth was lost. What did it have in common with the colors of the sky, the stunted trees of the city, its dark crowds and some light from the window, alone at night. What did she have in common with anything that makes up life, with the thousand things that are doing it and are herself, as the words make the phrase ”.
Follow the news of El Espectador on Google NewsAnother aspect that appears in Onetti, which perhaps contributes to increasing his fame as a tiresome author, is that in his stories and novels an initial situation is presented to us that after a few paragraphs is cut off, to then break through from a point and a narrator totally different. Most of his stories are a kind of puzzle to be completed through clues, but we can’t always do it; for there is a foggy area in their narratives that leaves a wide margin for speculation. This kind of fragmentation of the story, plus the lyricism mentioned, produces a feeling of confusion in the reader, but even so, his work is worth the effort, especially if he leaves us with masterpieces such as El infierno so feared, Welcome, Bob, A dream come true, The face of misfortune or Jacob and the other, among other stories.
Santa Maria or the x-ray of failure
From his first novel – El Pozo (1939) – the Uruguayan will introduce us to the archetypes in which his characters and fictional settings will be sustained: individuals who are usually always on the sidelines, circumscribed to events and places that provide no consolation: “A while ago I was walking around the room and it suddenly occurred to me that I was seeing him for the first time. There are two cots, chairs spread out and no seats, sunburnt newspapers, months old, nailed to the window instead of the glass. Then I started looking out the window […] the people in the courtyard were more disgusting than ever. They were, as always, the fat woman washing in the sink, complaining about life and the grocer, while the man crouched down, drank mate, with the white and yellow handkerchief hanging in front of his chest. The boy was walking on all fours, with muddy hands and muzzle. He had nothing but a rolled-up shirt and, looking at his rear, it struck me how there were people, all of them, capable of feeling tenderness for that. These first sketches will come to constitute what later will be a particular and complex territory: Santa María.
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Like Macondo, Comala or Cedrón, Santa María – imaginary city located halfway between Argentina and Uruguay, according to the author himself, created by Juan María Brausen, central character in La vida breve (1950), and the full setting of Juntacadáveres ( 1964) and El astillero (1961) – stands as one of the great fictions born of a Latin American writer. However, this is abysmally different from those peer territories: in it its inhabitants do not miraculously ascend to the heavens, rather they crawl towards hell. Here the dead do not speak and neither does the heat suffocate; on the contrary: they are all alive, suffering, paying their daily penance in a dropper in a city with a gray aura because of the rain, in which “the river disappears, it recedes without waves in the shadow like a carpet wrapped around … ”And whose streets are always full of weeds and puddles.
Inside Santa María everything is ruin: bare bars where old record players hardly work; hotels with grimy windows; brothels with beds about to fall apart, with threadbare sheets and mattresses; shipyards abandoned at the mercy of rust. The territory created by Onetti more than a place is an existential state. The people who live there are, generally, pessimists, individuals who resign themselves to doom and overwhelmed by failure. Love is impossible, dreams disappear. Everything is a misunderstanding there.
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We know that throughout literary history there are authors from whom it is difficult for the reader to detach himself. Once you enter their world – “Many years later, in front of the firing squad …” -, we know their characters – “I came to Comala because they told me that my father lived here, a certain Pedro Páramo” – and we savored his writing , it is impossible to get out of them. For this reason, if you open a book by Onetti and read: “Five years ago, when the governor decided to expel Larsen (or Juntacadáveres) from the province, someone prophesied, jokingly and improvising, his return, the prolongation of the reign of one hundred days, a controversial and exciting page —although already almost forgotten— of our civic history… ”, know that you have entered Santa María and it has welcomed you to a world of no return and where everything will end in failure, because, as TS Eliot once wrote in a verse: “Mankind cannot bear so much reality.”
