The legacy of Haroldo Conti: The author's magical prose, 100 years after his birth

It has just been one hundred years since Haroldo Conti was born , on May 25, 1925. Also in the month of May, on the 5th, he was kidnapped by Army Intelligence forces ; he was never released, is on the list of the disappeared and the whereabouts of his remains are unknown. If every May 5th is commemorated as Buenos Aires Writer's Day , remembering this tragic circumstance, there are powerful intrinsic reasons to consider him as one of the writers most deeply linked to the province from its essential literary landscape .

If anyone else can compare with him in this respect, it would perhaps be Benito Lynch (1885-1936), who depicts an older Buenos Aires pampa, that of the old Creole estancias, while Conti tells us of the similar farms, towns and cities , populated by the immigrants from whom he himself was descended. Or of the vast river landscape of the Paraná Delta , where he sailed and had a home.

He dedicated one of his most beautiful stories to his mother, Petronila Lombardi de Conti (along with his birthplace, Chacabuco), which also gives its title to a book: “The Ballad of Carolina Poplar.” His father, “Pelado Conti,” is presented thus, with his surname and his bald head, as the master and hunting companion of hares and partridges, armed with a Beretta shotgun, in the story “A la diestra” (published separately in 1978).

Something of that hunter will have remained in his novel Mascaró, the American Hunter (1975), or in other fathers who mark his stories , from the fisherman and smuggler of “All the Summers” to the “crazy Seretti” of “My Mother Walked in the Light,” who spent hours on the roof of his ranch to look at the world from another perspective.

In an interview with Heber Cardoso and Guillermo Boido, Conti evokes the figure of his real-life father : He was not only his hunting instructor, but also “a great storyteller” who provided him with a narrative model: “My father was a traveling salesman, a street vendor, and I would go out with him to explore the countryside; he would meet people and before selling them anything, he would start chatting and telling stories. That’s how I acquired the habit of storytelling orally.” This fluid knowledge of the colloquial and the popular is articulated in a limpid, intimate, and magical prose that reveals the everyday in a new light.

Conti published four novels: Sudeste (1962), winner of the Fabril Editores Prize, is the slow-moving saga of the river and its ferryman ; Alrededor de la jaula (1966), winner of the University of Veracruz Prize, focuses on the port area of ​​Buenos Aires , where Silvestre and Milo, an old man and a child, work in an amusement park. Near this job that links them to machines is the Zoological Garden, full of imprisoned animals (like them in the city) with whom Milo establishes a close and obsessive connection.

The suffocation and hopelessness of the megalopolis return, intensified, in his third novel , En vida (1971), a Barral Prize winner , also set on the margins of the city that lives with its back to its river. Its protagonists are adult men condemned to a subsistence alienated from nature and their own selves, who seek gratification or solace in the bars and brothels of Buenos Aires's Bajo district.

Among them is Oreste, a name that would reappear in some stories (albeit with a different story) and in his last novel: Mascaró, el cazador americano (1975), winner of the Casa de las Américas Prize . There, the geography expands in the journey of a traveling circus that reaches the extreme south of Argentina . Its picturesque and nomadic characters embody an unorthodox practice of life in freedom. The circus carries the torch of creative fantasy to the most miserable, distant, and abandoned places; it reconnects its inhabitants with their hidden and ignored potential, showing them the joy of another possible existence.

Regarding Mascaró, it is interesting to note that the report submitted to the SIDE by a censorship body appears on the website of the Haroldo Conti Cultural Memory Center (Mascaró Censored by SIDE - CCM Haroldo Conti). The report demonstrates literary knowledge and captures the work's symbolic complexity and expressive power. However, or because of this, the censor believes the novel contributes to promoting a Marxist ideology contrary to the National Constitution, although the text never explicitly mentions this.

Read today, Mascaró, like Conti's work in general, goes beyond the dichotomy between liberalism (or capitalist neoliberalism) and Marxism (especially the Marxism that led to state capitalism). While a revolutionary impulse runs through the book, it is above all a process of inner transformation before an incitement to armed struggle.

Its philosophical foundation is more closely related to the current thinking of literary ecocriticism , with the utopias of restoring the primordial unity between humans and nature visible in writers (especially Latin American women writers) today, and with the disruptive and emancipatory power of art.

Conti always defended and practiced a literature independent of dogmas and slogans , with its own ethics, faithful to itself and its internal necessity. In the aforementioned interview, granted to Cardoso and Boido, he says: “–Sometimes people talk about commitment only in political terms, as if the writer should be merely the standard-bearer for a political cause. (…) Many people talk about revolution and forget that revolutions are made by specific individuals”; “the revolution begins with the individual; it is not imposed by decree. If in my recent work, I believe, a greater commitment to social issues appears, that happened by default, and I'm glad. But I didn't set out to do so on purpose. (…) I still believe it's foolish to predetermine the type of literature one should write. There can be no other precept than that which arises from honesty with oneself.”

He also published three collections of short stories : Todos los veranos (All Summers) (1964), Con otra gente (With Other People) (1967), La balada del álamo Carolina (The Ballad of the Carolina Poplar ) (1975) and a few other loose stories in magazines . The most disadvantaged margins of the Capital (the slums), the endearing town of Buenos Aires as a recurring space of memory and the eventful life on the river, are his favorite environments as a short story writer.

In these contexts, the familiar female figures (mother, aunt, sister, cousins) act as anchors and bastions , as guardians of the home fire (the peasant mother who “walked in the light,” Aunt Teresa, the mother of the adolescent slum dweller in “Like a Lion”), they are also the enduring icons of a beauty that survives all the distances of travel and even death (cousin Susana, cousin Haydée).

Men, on the other hand, embody dissatisfaction and movement. Sometimes they launch themselves into excessive adventures, which can be fatal. They literally want to fly, like Basilio Argimón (“Ad Astra”), even though the price is a catastrophic death, or they are tireless runners like Uncle Agustín, “the runaway horse of summer” (“Las doce a Bragado”) who never crashes, like Argimón, although he fades sweetly into old age, where he no longer recognizes the nephew who visits him, but can speak with the dead and visit places long since vanished.

Loss characterizes the man, who becomes alienated from his own life in the hostile labyrinth of the big city (Oreste, in “Perdido”, Pedro in “Mi madre andaba en la luz”), takes marginal paths, which separate him from society, or is pushed into them (“Death of a Brother”, “The Last”).

Profound existential loneliness (or anxiety) haunts these disoriented, restless figures, who lose their bearings. A paradigmatic story in this sense is "All Summers." A solitary man, accompanied by his dog Olimpio and sometimes by his only son, who is still a boy, subsists precariously on his boat, letting himself be carried by the rhythms of the elements. He wants to build a boat (a mobile home) as a legacy with his own stamp: "A man like me without a boat like me is not complete."

However, the work remains unfinished, and he doesn't even manage to give it a name : "My father had arrived too late, and his desire was too old." His heart, his center, is not in its place: "it was never where the rest of his body was. Always further ahead, or somewhere else, but not there."

Unlike his character, Haroldo Conti, that distinguished navigator on the river of words, left us his ship with the compass and desire wisely arranged.

He transformed solitude into a choral world traversed by the living and the dead, and the anguished escape into a perpetual back and forth that goes back and forth from urban marginalization and confinement to the Carolina poplar and the hearth fire.

These are, in short, complementary dimensions, which attract as much as they repel each other, and which question each other. Because being gone (he says in "To the Right," his dazzling posthumous story) is also a "form of being."