Alberto Laiseca, the Argentine writer who offered to fight in Vietnam

Alberto Laiseca was a writer of colossal dimensions, a demiurge who created his own universe. Owner of an imaginary obsessed with the grotesque, the excessive and the sinister, engendered a being in his image and likeness: a five -header of five heads called Chanchín, a hybrid and motley creature, endowed with intelligence and a single mouth. The five heads are five of his disciples (Selva Almada, Sebastián Pandolfelli, Natalia Rodríguez Simón, Guillermo Naveira and Rusi Millán Pastori), authors of the book Laiseca, the teacherwhich is not just a biography, but an invocation.

More than a guardian, Chanchín is a creator: he rebuilds In order From different angles, it fragments it to make it reappear, it follows it in its childhood and rebel youth, in its excess bohemia, in its role as teacher and in its old age. He tells him as if he were still present, as if at any time he opened the door of his apartment in Flores and invited him to enter, to take a warm whiskey while talking about Poe, Tolstói, of the mathematics of horror, of sex as a structure narrative.

From the pages of this book the profile of a consecrated writer does not emerge, but A living, wandering portraita laise that beats, that exhales the smoke of its impartial, that murmurs between teeth and, from time to time, emits a hoarse laugh.

The editor Ana Laura Pérez, director of the Penguin Random House literary division, evokes a decisive moment in the wake of Alberto Laiseca: the number of disciples who came and the deep connections that united them caught: “There was a book and had to take the same form as his workshops”. The project that brought together the five authors emerged.

Selva Almada, a writer consecrated with works such as The wind that sweeps y Ladrilleroshe comments that the process of searching for a collective voice was a challenge. To solve it, they adopted the term with which Laiseca was addressed to their workshop in affectionate and without gender distinction: “Chanchín, did you write today?” Thus the common narrator arose that intertwine all perspectives.

The book begins with the portrait of Lai’s early years in the Cordoba town of Camilo Aldao (He was born in Rosario in 1941). He grew up in a home marked by discipline and premature maternal death, and found refuge in literature.

“I cut comics and saw monsters,” Almada did. He learned very early that writing could be a shield or a way of invoking fears to face them.”

Decades later, that same spirit was perceived in his department of Flores: “Books wrapped in white paper, brick annotations and the chop cat sleeping between ashes,” Almada evokes.

The second part of the book investigates the youth of Laiseca: the clash with a father who intended to study engineering, clandestine devotion by Poe, Wilde and Ayn Rand in Santa Fe pensions, and The hard experience of working in Mendoza Campos.

“Literature is not just an art; It is survival, ”says Sebastián Pandolfelli, who was in the care of the editions of Hybris (2023) y Complete stories (2024), Laiseca works that were published after his death in 2016.

In the third part of the biography, the Buenos Aires bohemia of the sixties comes alive with the modern bar as an epicenter of a effervescent counterculturewhere cursed poets, experimental magazines and extreme figures such as Marcelo Fox and his delusional “esoteric”.

In that context of ideological fervor and radical explorations, Laiseca faces their fears and the need to overcome them.

While the Vietnam War occupied headlines and divided opinions, he found in that remote contest a kind of definitive test field: The possibility of surrendering to a destination marked by violence as a personal exorcism.

With that purpose, he wrote a letter to Lyndon Johnson, the president of the United States, To offer yourself as a volunteerconvinced that only in the heat of the battle I could annihilate the paralysis that grip it. The answer never came.

That paradox – finding freedom in absolute delivery – is exposed in a dialogue with his friend Sergio, who recriminates: “You always have to be on the side of the weak.” In order She disputes them: “Then you will have to be in favor of the US.”

The dubborn argument, but synthesizes his thought: behind military power, He perceives the fragility of a country caught in a war that, for his excessive gaze, was already lost.

The fourth part shows it in the nineties, becoming a teacher, dictating classes at the Rojas Cultural Center and in its own department. According to Sebastián Pandolfelli, author of Diamante y Social Choripán“It is difficult to separate his life from his work; He talked about magic, handles, death and ghosts, and everything became narrative material. ”

Laiseca used to tell stories that his students continued with devotion. In one of his classes, he narrated the adventures of his friend Víctor Stepanovich, a Russian soldier who had fought in Siberia with a knife who had ended in his possession.

The class listened to the story in a state of fascination while the weapon passed from hand to hand. Until a student read the inscription on the sheet and exclaimed: “But here says section!” Without flinching, Lai kept the knife in a drawer: “For me it is Russian.”

The fifth part already speaks of the 2000s, when Laiseca broke into television with its program Tales of TerroR (the famous I-Sat cycle led by the dup-duprat duo) and became a cult icon, and even exercised as a sentimental advisor in Cupiddel canal Much Music.

“It was unexpected,” says Guillermo Naveira, co -author of Give it to pear-. The same Lai that one saw in his department ended up appearing on the screen. “

But it also appears in this section of the book loneliness and emptiness after the death of his partner, Graciela Scheines.

The sixth part shows the stay of Laiseca in the geriatric Osiris. Rusi Millán Pastori, author of The light stateremember the visits, readings, attempts to help him in everyday life: “We were again with In orderwe remember, we laugh and sometimes suffer with their things. ” There, the teacher wrote Camilo Aldaoposthumous book that closes the circle with its homeland.

Natalia Rodríguez Simón, author of the novels I saw her mutar y Barrohighlights the thorough research they did with documents, letters and interviews: “We discovered facets that we did not even imagine, as their passage through the magazine Alfonsina of María Moreno ”.

The final assembly of the book demanded multiple meetings and an arduous editing work to forge that collective narrator that runs through the life of Laiseca without isolating it in cold chronologies.

Naveira describes the impact of Lai’s death as “a mazozo”but also the need to keep it in mind: “We inherit your worldview and encourage ourselves to write our version of the show.”

The last section shows the author of The Sorias (Summit work that was reissued in Spain in 2024) in its town, receiving the leather medal. This distinction, which as a child he had invented as a joke to make fun of his classmates, becomes a real recognition. Without losing his composure, the writer receives it seriously, as if it were a prestigious literary award.

The book is a trip to the interior of the life of the writer who turned his existence into a great narrative. Through a series of unforgettable anecdotes, the authors reconstruct their world, marked by literary obsession, extravagant humor and a vision of the universe as unique as their narrative style.

For years, Laiseca discussed with friends the possibility that pyramid builders were not slaves. His theory was that the Egyptians worked motivated because Kheops gave them beer. His friends laughed, but a few years later, archaeologists discovered in Giza a gigantic beer factory. “Did you see? I told them, ”he exclaimed.

In another passage in the book it is said that convinced that someone would try to steal the water pump from their house in Escobar, Laiseca spent a night in candle, lying in the dark, body to ground and with a revolver in hand. I was willing to do everything. Finally, no one appeared, and the next day, with his usual mixture of humor and fatalism, he reflected: “Luckily they did not come. Look at the degree of despair: my life ends there, or because they kill me or because I am imprisoned. But go reason with a desperate and crazy guy. ”

In each of these anecdotes, Laiseca is revealed as an absurd teacher and ironya narrator who turned his life into literature. From his refusal to remember a childcide, to the attempted theft of The Soriasthe ritual of cigarettes and pterodactiles, and their particular reading of Juan Carlos Mesa.

There are also the episodes of paranoia and everyday epic, such as when he wanted to catch a real turkey with his own hands. There is no lack of disconcerting impassibility, such as when he refused to open the door to a wounded, or demonstrations of his particular logic. And in the field of pure absurd, they are their altar with a Soviet passport or the day Fogwill “stole” the presentation of his own book. An unbeatable portrait of a writer who never stopped inhabiting his own literary cosmos.

The book is, more than a biography, a portrait that resurrects Laisec. “We were with Lai again, we remember, we laugh and suffer,” recalls Millán Pastori.

Rodríguez Simón compares his teacher with “a fire totem” And he explains that those who attended their workshop orbiting around them in different ways: sometimes as assistants, sometimes looking for heat, sometimes dancing. For her, this book meant bringing the stage center back to Laiseca, but also represented the opportunity to deepen her figure, to meet him beyond her role as a teacher. “Literature is magic and excess,” he used to say.

The edition of Laiseca, the teacher It includes photographs of the writer when he was young, especially given by his daughter, Julieta, where the author is seen in histrionic or family attitudes. These images enrich the biographical story and allow to contemplate the same In order Cone Raso Soldier, Factory Operator and Dandy Bohemio. That is, before becoming the “count laisek”, the one to which the public recognized on television.

The strength of these photos lies in strengthening the central hypothesis of the book: the personality of Laiseca contained a scenic potential, even before looking at the audiovisual medium.

Already in his youth he played to be several: the magician, the office worker, the hidden writer. These photographs, in which it appears with expressions halfway between seriousness and carelessness, They confirm that histrionism was not an artifice of his last stage, but an identity feature that always accompanied him.