“The history is a crime file”, according to a quote from the Hungarian sociologist Gyorgy Könrad, and Alvaro Abós knows how to find materials for fiction in that space full of tragedies and conflicts. burning chapelthe writer’s latest novel, reopens an episode from the Argentine past in which the legend and unanswered questions persist: the uprising of a group of gauchos who, under the leadership of a dark character called Tata Dios murdered thirty-six European immigrants in Tandil, between January 1 and 2, 1872.
burning chapel associates the two aspects of Álvaro Abós’ production: criminal narrative and historical investigationto. Author of biographies of Natalio Botana, Macedonio Fernández and Xul Solar and of Eichmann in Argentina (2007), and novels and stories, Abós usually resorts to real events in fiction.: in human remains (1991) addressed the story of Jorge Burgos and Alcira Methyger, a famous crime of the 1950s, and in Five bullets for Augusto Vandor (2005), reworked the murder of the union leader that in 1969 convulsed the political scene.
But if fictions based on real events tend to be restricted to common places that actually describe the present, Abós does not freely invent the characters and the speeches they utter but rather erects them into exhaustively detailed context.
burning chapel configures the Tandil massacre as a crossroads that radiates in multiple directions over the Argentine and European history of the 19th century: the plot integrates the civil struggles in the province of Buenos Aires, the rise and fall of Rosismo, the appropriation of indigenous lands, the events of the Commune of Paris, colonization and the criminal future of the gauchos.
The photographer’s gaze
The facts are narrated through the eyes of Javier López, a photographer from Montevideo who arrives in Tandil after going through the Paraguayan war. “Tandil then had five thousand inhabitants and was built on an old fort,” says Abós, who brought together the leading forces of the time at the Hotel de la Piedra Movediza, including rancher Ramón Santamarina and Colonel Benito Machado.
Abós already knew that area of the province of Buenos Aires –He also investigated the crimes of Mateo Banks, in a ranch in Azul– but part of the previous investigation took place in Tandil. “Today nothing reminds us of the massacre, although a few elements are preserved in the Fuerte Independencia Historical Museum,” he points out. It is logical, what happened in 1872 is not for school events.”
–What does literature do with the materials of History, what does it look for in that “crime archive”?
–Crime is one of the forms of fine arts, said Thomas de Quincey, ironically. But this fusion of art with the human condition was right because it posed the following enigma: how is it possible that a human being is capable of depriving another of the most precious gift, life? This mystery has obsessed so many writers, from Sophocles and Shakespeare to Raymond Chandler and Dostoevsky.
–How did you come to the story of Tata Dios, why were you interested in treating it in fiction?
–I was interested because it is one of the most terrifying crimes in Argentine history and above all because I found, while searching, photographs of some of the murderers who were arrested. That is to say, there was a photographer in Tandil in 1872, as there were war photographers in the Crimean War, in 1856, and in the Paraguayan War. I discovered that in Tandil there was a photographer who was dedicated to photographing families, newborns or dead, because funeral photography was one of the main activities at that time.
–Did you think that historical events can have a current meaning, or is this accessory to the novel?
–The story of what happened in Tandil in 1872 seems implausible. A gaucho rebellion led by a messianic healer, a massacre of immigrants, followed by fierce repression, culminating in the murder of the leader in prison. 1872 is also the year in which José Hernández wrote the Martin Fierro locked in a room at the Hotel Argentino, at 100 25 de Mayo Street, where the AFI (Federal Intelligence Agency) is today. He Martin Fierro It is the poetic chronicle of a persecuted gaucho, it is the story of a gaucho like those who were in Tandil, and José Hernández, himself an outlaw, does not hide it. And on the same date, President Domingo F. Sarmiento invited all the people of the world to populate this country. Tandil was a tragedy, but also a social and human mystery. How did these events happen? Who were those Argentines who killed immigrants and those immigrants who returned blow by blow? Historians such as Hugo Nario and John Lynch addressed the topic. I tried to do it through literature. I researched for many years and then tried to forget everything I knew and construct a fiction.
–In a burning chapel, a notable dead person is honored and worshiped. Here it seems to describe the very form of the novel, due to the voices that cross around Tata Dios. Is that so or did you think about it differently?
–In that title I tried to synthesize the wild atmosphere of that 19th century in Argentina where violence reigned. In 1872, twenty years had passed since Caseros, but the civil war continued after that battle whose triumph had proclaimed that “there are no winners or losers” while the corpses of the prisoners hung from the trees of Palermo. In Tandil there was a massacre and another followed, and the State failed at that moment as on so many other occasions. Yes, the State existed, because Argentina in 1872 had been in civil war for half a century.
–A historical key is photography, a new art at the time that rethinks the questions of truth and documents. The photographer is the character who allows us to observe the characters and their conflicts, apart from the photos he takes.
–In Burning Chapel I look at what happened not with my eyes but with those of someone who encounters the massacre. That of 1872, like others that followed in our history, was unexpected, abrupt. What the main photographer wants is to bear witness to what he sees. By then photography had some magic. But even with precarious means such as collodion-dipped plates, photography was also a way of creation. A photographer tried to capture reality, rescue it from oblivion. A century and a half later, as a writer he tried to re-live what happened. That obsession never stops.
Álvaro Abós basic
- He was born in Buenos Aires, a city in which he has lived and will live until the end, with an interlude, through exile, of unease and happiness in Barcelona.
- He has published novels, short stories, chronicles, essays, biographies. Among his titles, the most celebrated have been the crime novel human remains and his The verbatim. Literary guide to Buenos Aires, where he portrays over a hundred writers who lived, created or were shipwrecked in the city of Plata.
- He has written about three peopleBuenos Aires honors: the editor and journalist Natalio Botana, the painter and magician Xul Solar and the philosopher, poet and professor of happiness Macedonio Fernández, biographies for which he received the Konex Platinum Award in 2014.
- He loves making anthologies, because he can express his passion as a reader: some are The Book of Buenos Airesabout chronicles of the city; Assassinsabout detective stories by authors outside the genre such as Whitman or Proust; The criminal, about police reports by maestro Roberto Arlt, and the latest: Stories to read on Saturdaysabout the stories that Borges edited in a popular newspaper, and The perfect crime. 13 Argentine thrillers.
- He has won the Jaén Novel Prize and, in 2012, the Municipal Literature Prize of the City of Buenos Aires.
burning chapelby Álvaro Abós (Hugo Benjamín Edition).