Tattoo Women In Private Area

S. Roncagliolo

met the work of Juan Carlos Onetti in the early nineties, attracted by tales circulating about the author. My colleagues in the faculty of literature Onetti was told that a hermit, who refused to give lectures, and lived lying on a bed with a bottle of whiskey.

The character profile was exotic in any case, but was especially Unexpected boom in Latin American writer. Most of his colleagues lived in the odor of many, sometimes acting more like politicians than as artists. Mario Vargas Llosa had run for president of Peru. Gabriel García Márquez had met with Fidel Castro and Bill Clinton. Cortázar had defended the Nicaraguan revolution. Carlos Fuentes was Mexico. And instead Onetti, the largest of all living put on a bed clutching a bottle of whiskey. Onetti
After I found out that another had suffered political persecution, but gray, absurd and almost comical: he had been arrested for being part of the jury in a short story competition.
The winning story will be reveled in sexual scenes that ended up being a thinly veiled reference to homosexuality by a member of the military junta government. In punishment, the author of the story and jurors were arrested for offenses against the dignity of the armed forces. During interrogation, an officer asked Onetti Inquisitor:
- What do you have political bias?
"No," replied the narrator.
- But who they voted?
"For anyone.
- "But who would have voted?
"I've never voted.
- Ah! An anarchist!
more bored than scared, Onetti said
-Y ... Ponele anarchist if want. "I can smoke?
Weeks later, again according to legend, "the writer had to be evacuated to a psychiatric hospital due to withdrawal that were the lack of alcohol and tranquilizers. That ended his most heroic feat.
Recently, I reviewed the work of Onetti for a meeting about his work organized by the Casa de America, American General Secretariat and the Foundation for San Benito de Alcántara. While reading, I realized that the episode of their detention would have happened to any of the characters: maybe Juntacadáveres, whose dream was to run a brothel middling. Or the actors Shipyard, pretending to keep your business alive while the machinery sold for scrap. Even the No Man's Land, who fantasize about fleeing to an island that does not exist. None of them faces great epic adventures, like the characters in The War of the End of the world. None is important to American history as The General in His Labyrinth. Only contemptible people faced with the mediocrity of life, like most of us. Onetti novels would be laughable if they breathe the depressing mood of mediocrity.
Which is why Onetti is the least known of the writers of the boom. The last Mohican of existentialism not only disdained politics, also disgusted success, fame and the glamor and felt a genuine distaste for all that stink of public figuration. Therefore, not faced with evil dictators or fearless guerrillas. Perhaps because he lived in Uruguay, one of the most prosperous, peaceful and egalitarian of the region knew that in an exemplary democracy can also be unhappy.
But for that, and inadvertently, Onetti author has become the latest boom. Until the eighties, during the height of the Cuban Revolution, the real-marvelous utopia led by Gabriel García Márquez went like a bulldozer on Latin American novels, full of women with pig tails flying out the windows. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the often violent urban realism of Latin American literature was pervaded by Mario Vargas Llosa, whose characters fighting for freedom against the tyrants.
But twenty years later, not one extreme or another of the ideological spectrum produced great passions. The Cuban Revolution has improved the lives of people, and after two decades without dictators in the rest of the region, the number of poor is the same as before. The American democratically voted Chavez authoritarian rulers, Uribe, the PRI. And the phenomenon is not unique to Latin America. Throughout the last decade, on behalf of democracy invade countries like Iraq and tolerated dictatorships such as Libya, Egypt and Kazakhstan.
That atmosphere of disillusionment is reflected in European and Latin American literature. Two of its most notable writers in recent years, Bolan and Houellebecq, belong to the generation that saw the largest fall of Allende dreams and May 68, and his bitterness reminds Onetti. Poets Chilean murderers of masturbatory French officials, exiles suicide first and second sex tourists, can appear in any novel by a novelist from Uruguay who died without knowing. Onetti
not seem to have influenced these authors. It is he who got his work will endure through time. On the contrary, it is time that it became his novels narrated. Throughout the twentieth century, the planet was divided into two great truths. In the XXI century we know, as Onetti knew before, that both were lies.
No doubt it is admirable to be both the most senior member and most modern in the most exclusive club in the Latin American novel. But mostly, it is remarkable to have done from a bed, with the only weapon of a bottle of whiskey.