A critic with the time and inclination could make his name proposing an epidemiological model of world literature, with disease vectors representing the way themes and stylistic tics migrate across continents, then mutate and adapt to their host culture. A distinguished case study would be the Uruguayan Juan Carlos Onetti, whose chronicles of larceny, murder, and betrayal drew on the conventions of English and American detective fiction to create a desolate world that subordinates experience to philosophical dilemmas his protagonists struggle in vain to elucidate. For Onetti, crime is a pretext for exposing the emptiness of human life, the unbridgeable distance between people. His works are structured around a chain of clues, but the deductive method the detective uses to expose the criminal and motive attempts to penetrate the characters’ inner torments, which collapse endlessly, one into the other, like a series of trap doors.
Onetti claimed he began writing in the 1920s while living in Argentina and working as a mechanic. In those days, the sale of tobacco was prohibited on weekends, and he composed an early draft of his first novel, The Pit, in desperation at the prospect of two days without cigarettes. In 1933, he published his first story, “Avenida de Mayo — Diagonal — Avenida de Mayo,” which opens A Dream Come True. A bewildering pastiche of John Dos Passos, it offers little beyond a wholesale importation of foreign stylistic innovations. And yet, it merits reading as a yardstick by which to measure Onetti’s evolution. His early stories feel indulgent; some, like “A Perfect Crime,” barely transcend genre fiction. But by 1940, with “A Dream Come True,” he had written a masterpiece: the tale of a woman who pays a down-at-heel director to reenact one of her dreams on the empty stage of a provincial theater as a prelude to her death.
Onetti is often called an existentialist, but philosophically, his figures are the antithesis of Jean-Paul Sartre’s ideal of the self-fashioning subject, responsible for himself and all mankind. A comparison between two variants of the same story, 1944’s “A Long Story” and 1960’s “The Face of Disgrace,” illustrates the development of Onetti’s temperament. In both, a man staying in a hotel mourns the death of his brother, an embezzler who killed himself after a failed currency conversion scam; in both, he catches sight of a girl whose dead body will later be found rotting in a shed. The first version feels fragmentary and disjointed, as if the essential information had been purposely left out, and the effect is curious but hardly satisfying. What gives the latter one its density is the abandonment of aimless, self-conscious virtuosity in favor of a fully formed vision of the individual as powerless against, even complicit in, the calamities that envelope him. The protagonist asks around about the girl and finally meets her on the beach. They make love, and in seeming penitence for this modicum of undeserved bliss, he allows himself to be arrested for her murder, telling his captors, “The funny thing is, you’re wrong. But it doesn’t matter. Nothing, not even this, really matters at all.”
Onetti claimed to begin writing without any sense of where it would lead, and at times, he comes to a dead end. “The Album” makes no further mention of Cairo, Venice, 12 boys, or a Mr. Pool, and the reader reasonably wonders what the point is of the following:
Yet two pages later comes this exquisite summation of the lyricism and despair that define the Onettian hero:
In the wonderfully titled “Most Dreaded Hell,” the centerpiece of the collection, Risso, a journalist covering horse races, receives an envelope with a stamp from Bahía, Brazil. Inside is “a photograph, postcard size, poorly lit, where hatred and squalor gathered around the dark edges forming thick, wavering swaths, like embossing, like bands of sweat around an anguished face.” Its subject is his second wife, Gracia César, an actress who punishes Risso for leaving her by sending him photographs of her having sex with other men in exotic locales. Disgusted, but not enraged, Risso feels pity “for the simple absurdity of love, and for the complex absurdity of the love that is created by men.” His resignation recollects the occasionalism of Bishop George Berkeley, who ascribed causality not to things but to the mind:
The story closes with the words of Old Man Lanza, one of dozens of characters who reappear throughout Onetti’s fiction. He reports — whether to himself, in an official declaration, or in a conversation isn’t clear — that Risso has committed suicide by overdose. Lanza remembers that Risso never spoke ill of Gracia, never questioned her sanity, and claimed he had erred not in marrying her but at “a different moment,” in that atemporal, inaccessible domain where his doom was decreed.
In February 1974, less than a year into the dictatorship that would rule Uruguay for the next decade, Onetti was arrested and spent a month in jail and two more in a mental hospital for the crime of awarding a prize to a story deemed pornographic.
After his release, he went into exile in Spain. The experience, which must have been devastating for a writer so closely wedded to the Plata River landscape — which he had reimagined as Santa María, an homage to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County — left little trace in his writing apart from the poignant “Presencia,” the account of an expatriate newspaperman in Madrid who hires a detective to follow his beloved María José. At first, the detective notes nothing out of the ordinary, but he soon tracks her to a love hotel where she checks in with another man. In his room, with the lights dimmed and the doors and windows closed, the narrator drinks whiskey and imagines the two engaged in “impossible unions, nonsensical copulations.” But the detective, instead of revealing the truth, has conspired with the narrator to elaborate a fantasy of redemption. In fact, María José never made it to Madrid. The narrator paid her bail after she was arrested in Santa María, but she was rearrested and then disappeared by the tyranny of the fictional General Clot.
Onetti spent his last years lying in bed, not ill, but unconvinced by life on two feet. He drank whiskey, smoked, and read, writing little apart from what the writer José Manuel Caballero, who visited him at home, described as “insomniac verbosities.” Several such fragments, some of them undated, round out A Dream Come True. In them, we find an Onetti no longer concerned with plot or formal unity, “dedicated,” like one of his avatars, “with familiar pleasure to the march of the sentence.” Yet these pieces, too, have their attractions, and when he imagines himself in his coffin, kissed on the forehead by “a cheeky whore,” one of many in his fiction, it is a touching coda to the work of the man Mario Vargas Llosa called “the first modern novelist in the Spanish language.”
Adrian Nathan West is a literary translator, critic, and the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation.
