Pedro Mairal: tales of this century

The Argentine winter brought two reissues of books Pedro Mairal: Evasion maneuversin July, and Brief eternal loves in August, published by Emecé, Planeta. The first brings together a series of texts selected and edited by Leila Guerrierowhich first appeared in the pages of magazines such as Brando, Soho, Orsai, Other sky, Dossier or on the author’s personal blog, and some of them remained unpublished at the time of the book’s original release, in 2017. In the second they are brought together the stories from the previous publication of the title, in 2019and the stories of early todaybrought together by Aguilar in 2001.

The Entre Ríos town of Curugazú, on the web, refers to the –fictitious– town of origin of Daniel Montero, who at 17 years old undertakes a trip to Buenos Aires to meet Sabrina Love, the most popular porn star of the moment, thanks to a sweepstakes you win on the television show hosted by the female star. Who also won in this story was Pedro Mairal, author of One night with Sabrina Love (Emecé), the initiation novel starring Montero. The book received the first Clarín Novel Award 1998 awarded by a jury that included three Cervantes awards: Adolfo Bioy Casares, Agusto Roa Bastos and Guillermo Cabrera Infante.

“The room fills up and I am left standing in the middle of that great cocktail party full of unknown faces. The ceremony begins. Everything is live on the eight o’clock news. My friends and family watch from their homes. From the podium, the presenters, Canela and the actor Leonardo Sbaraglia, name the mentions, talk about the award, the culture, the juries, the pre-selection jury. (…) The title of the winning novel is One night with Sabrina Love. My God. Then they say my name. Nobody knows me. And it’s the big bang”. This is what Mairal wrote in his text “Bioy’s nephew”, one of those that make up the selection included in Evasion maneuvers.

And continue with the story of that ceremony with which he entered through the front door and through the red carpet directly to the firmament in which the main Argentine writers shine: “I am twenty-eight years old but I have the face of eighteen and I am atomizing myself, multiplied on television screens throughout the country with my blue suit and my school hair and the few phrases that I say nervously; Among them, I thank my friends, who helped me correct the book (…) Roa Bastos gives me his chair, I am between him and Bioy, who tells me ‘I started reading your novel and I couldn’t put it down until I finished it.’ It’s the world upside down”.

The text, full of details and reflections about the disbelief and stupor caused by living that dreamed and at the same time unexpected situation, ends with the explanation of the reason for the title: in those days he was telling two writer friends – Fabián Casas and Whashignton Cucurto – in a car that took them to the radio where Casas would talk about his book of poems, some unhappy circumstances that he had to go through after winning the literary contest. One of them happened when her sister went to buy the novel and asked the person running the store how this Mairal wrote. The bookseller without hesitation assured: “He is the one who won the Clarín award because he is the nephew of Bioy Casares.”

The writer’s activity is approached from different aspects in other texts included in the book: one of them is the now classic “Behind Natalia”: “Natalia, the beautiful Natalia, saved very well and was discerning. I knew when to say yes, that I was going, that I would be there, because I guessed my intention of showing up at that cocktail party to get drunk with friends, and I knew when to agree to go to that distant school because there was something that I liked about those children asking me unexpected questions, and when to take a job because the money was necessary to pay to fix the humidity in the wall of my house, and when to commit to that article on the subject that had just been running through my head for the last few months. “She knew me better than anyone,” she says in those lines, in which the narrator also confesses that Natalia does not exist and that she never existed: It was his invention so that someone could fulfill the task of stopping “all those penalties” and thus be able to dedicate themselves to writing with peace of mind.

In “Goodbye, Lady Ana”, the narrator traces in the first person a profile of his mother and also refers to his writing activity: “He started getting sick after he turned sixty. So she had many years of health and good life. But it’s a matter of perspective. I am left with her illness in the foreground, covering the rest of her luminous time. And that is unfair. That’s why she now jumps into that past, above her last years. Only writing lets me do that. Skip to Mom’s Summer.”

The different ways in which a person who writes manages to focus on his task even when having to attend the events to which he is invited, or in compatibility with his role as father, son, husband, friend or frequent traveler – “My homeland is my laptop” – are present throughout the texts.

some of them were originally published on Mairal’s personal blog, The Lord Belowone of the essentials in those happy times of chained readings, when the scrolleo The column located to the right of those virtual notebooks of professional or amateur writers led to the pages of other authors, and thus the seasoned Internet user could spend hours reading some of the great texts that the era produced, linked together with a simple click. .

It seems impossible to find a more suitable title for the stories that the book brings together: stories of loves that are brief, yes, but at the same time eternal as, perhaps, all loves are. It may be that some distinguishable features of its author can also be attributed to others: he includes in his stories of sexual encounters detailed in detail, characters who suddenly find themselves trapped in ridiculous situations of which he does not return, or a boy who meets a girl in a literary workshop, where she writes stories that take place in Paris, Amsterdam or New York, with characters who, like her, are always invited to parties.

It is not so common, however, that when thinking about what she would like to have if she could ask for anything in the world, the girl in the workshop dreams of a “personal hypnotist”, that is capable of putting her to sleep in dead moments and waking her up for moments of action: someone who could edit your life. Or that the woman with whom a married man plans a furtive and paid encounter is advertised in one of the newspaper’s old classified ads as “Zoraida your beautiful giantess.” This is how Mairal invents: as well as he narrates.

Characters such as a man who, based on a bad joke he makes to his wife at the beginning of the trip, spend an overwhelming family vacation in Punta del Este, from which he begins to flee daily to live unforgettable clandestine moments, also parade through his stories. .

Or Emilio, a young man who leaves his house and his married life dressed as footballl, to arrive at a friend’s apartment where fruit daiquiris and a guest, “half Brazilian”, are waiting for him, with whom he experiences fiery situations that lead to a hilarious circumstance linked to his wedding ring that ends badly. A young woman, mother and wife, who returns to work after years completely dedicated to the family and becomes involved with an office colleague, about whom she tells her psychoanalyst. The story is called “Zero Guilt”, like the classic Buenos Aires cliché created to describe situations like that.

Or a teenager from Barrio Norte who stays during the summer in Buenos Aires to prepare school subjects while his family spends the summer in Buzios, but spends his time spent mirroring porn videos with a friendin a VCR stolen from a neighbor they dislike. Male characters, in general, seem more conflicted and coiled in their own plots than the female ones.

early todayan anthology of stories included in the new edition of Breverse eternal loves, opens with the excellent story that gives the book its title, in which the narrator tells his life from car trips that he has done over the years.

Throughout the following pages Characters parade who work in magazine editorial offices, check emails in call centers, and even one who substitutes in an advertising office, where a partner plays driving a Formula 1 car on a large computer that emits sounds amplified by two speakers.

“Until then I had only heard about the Internet, and that morning I saw how the photos of naked women were slowly opening up, from top to bottom, in a kind of electronic striptease,” says the character who performs “La suplencia.” of the title of the story.

The beginnings of the web era are also present in the hilarious “The Virginity of Karina Durán”, where the beginning of a girl’s sexual relations is offered on an internet auction site and the original proposal goes around the world. In another of the stories, “Love in Colonia”, a clandestine couple manages to coincide on a fun tourist trip in the nearby eastern republic, a land dear to Mairal, where his successful novel also takes place. The Uruguayan (Emecé), published in 2016. But that is another story.

Evasion maneuvers y Brief eternal lovesby Pedro Mairal (Emecé).