Brando was born in 1920. In 1900, his father, an Italian immigrant, arrived in Buenos Aires with the certainty that every one of his compatriots huddled alongside him in the boat, along with everyone who’d come over in the last thirty or forty years, crowded in other boats, and still crowding in Buenos Aires slums until they got the chance to finally own a farm or a business, that every one of those compatriots, who came from everywhere in Italy, still shared the same weakness, pasta, and that he would be the one to supply them with it. After three or four years of adventures, he finally landed in the city and started to manufacture, in small, artisanal quantities, fresh pastas that he distributed to a fixed clientele in wicker boxes, carefully wrapped in immaculate napkins cut from bags of grain. Two years later, the customers would be coming to buy their pasta at the Brando family delicatessen, in the center of the city, and if by 1918 their dry spaghetti, wrapped in cellophane or in twenty-kilo bags, was sold in numerous shops in the north of the province, by 1925, Pastas Brando was one of the top businesses in the province, and Atilio Brando was the president of the Círculo Italiano. (In 1928, one black ball thrown in the vote would keep him out of the Club del Orden.)
To the annoyance of many local patricians, Atilio Brando’s Spanish was flawless. Five or six years after having come to the country, all that was left of his Italian accent was a slight aspiration. His family was full of lieutenants to Cavour, to Pellico, and to Garibaldi. In the sixties, Taine had eaten with one of his relatives in Rome. And when the manufacture of pastas had achieved a regular pace, when the complex, futuristic harmony of the factory was producing an uninterrupted chain of identical packages of fragile, yellow pastas ready to be circulated by a perfectly oiled and efficient distribution network, the elder Brando handed over the factory to a loyal manager with a share in the profits and started spending long periods in Italy or writing novels and memoirs in his house in Guadalupe.
It was said that, without a doubt, the Brandos had come to this world to demolish stereotypes. The delicate Romans who conversed with Taine in French and supported unification ended up forgotten and scattered, while the visionary who, to reconstruct his patrimony, had only a couple of secret recipes for tagliatelle and rigatoni, could boast a virtuously nonchalant attitude with regard to his children’s education and to the destiny of Pastas Brando after the death of its founder. Memoirs and realist novels were the polestars of his life. In contrast to every gringo imagined by the Argentine theater, Atilio Brando wasn’t a slave trader, work wasn’t his religion, and he didn’t demand a law or a medical degree from his son as the first step toward an advantageous marriage with a patrician young lady.
In contrast, to Mario Brando, social status had true value and wasn’t the tenuous and somewhat degenerate simulacrum that the old pasta maker described in his realist novels. To him, urbanity was an extreme form of historicism, and materialists, if they were consistent, should venerate snobs. But Mario Brando wasn’t a snob, inasmuch as, every time he used the word, he knew what he was referring to. His poetic vocation was authentic, and his historicism was in fact manifested in his romantic life and in the tenets of precisionism, of which he was the primary author. The relationship to his father was original for reasons diametrically opposed to those that literature has accustomed us to think of as typical of generational conflict. Of the two Brandos, the father was the romantic and the son the pragmatist; the father was generous and the son miserly; the father, indifferent to social conventions, and the son, utterly dependent on public opinion. The father walked around shabbily dressed, lost in daydreams, while the son never left the house without a vest or a gold cigarette case. Like a millionaire father who tries to hide from his board members the vagrancies of his heir that might endanger the business, Mario hid his father’s flirtations with realism from landowners and his disciples, considering them a mockery of precisionism’s scientific exactitude. Luckily, Atilio Brando wrote in the language of Dante, as he proudly declared, and apart from a few articles in La Región from the thirties, his books (Against Hermetism, for instance), published in Italy, did not circulate beyond a few members of Unione e Benevolenza. The old man was bothered by worldliness because it distracted him from literature; for the son, literature was the pinnacle of worldliness, in the noble sense of the word, and he told himself that it was the only noble thing he could boast of.
For several reasons: first, because precisionist mechanics were essentially worldly, which is to say historicist (historicizing might be the most appropriate word). The idea of translating a traditional poetic vocabulary into rigorously contemporary scientific and technical language demonstrated a blind faith in the knowledge of the age and in an exact correspondence between its terminology and reality. The heart in “El corazón, viejo, tan mentado,” in “El alma que canta”—Brando would often say at the dinners — isn’t a forced rhyme, it’s a muscle. And he would stare at his interlocutor, his eyes wide, with the hint of a slightly defiant smile, taking in the effect that his words had produced.
Second, Brando and his underlings were convinced that the mass media, like newspapers, radio, and later television, along with traditional cultural institutions, should play a dominant role in the dissemination of precisionist tenets. It wasn’t simply exhibitionism: Brando was convinced that precisionism’s social function was to purge the language of the masses, modernizing it and making it correspond with scientific terminology. It’s very simple, Brando would insist, it’s about speaking with precision. That simplifies things very much. Look at the etymology of the word “precision,” from the Latin “praecisus,” cut off, abbreviated. Every word that the precisionist poet uses should correspond to a verifiable thing. In this way, all misunderstandings in the social exchange of concepts and emotions disappear. The precisionist movement hoped to occupy the totality of the social field, acting on each of its articulations in order to transform it completely. Was this optimism or extremism? the neoclassicists asked themselves, somewhat lost, pretending, with their perplexed tone, that despite every good intention and everything they knew about them, they couldn’t find any conceptual coherence in the movement. And yet, when those echoes of bewilderment reached his ears, Brando said that the answer had already been given in the first sentence of the first manifesto, published on the first page of the first issue of the first volume of Nexos (December, 1945): To preserve the economy of ideas, in the field of verbal commerce we are protectionists.
By 1945, Brando was already finishing law school. He’d done it rigorously and swiftly, on his own initiative, inasmuch as the elder Brando was not subject, as mentioned above, to the fetish of the diploma. Furthermore: by 1940, he’d already turned the factory over to his manager, an honest, hardworking criollo with more luck and more ethics than those described by Gutiérrez (Eduardo), among others; he’d transformed his capital into real estate and property (land, houses, farms) and lived peacefully from the rent, contemplating the implicit worldview in I Malavoglia. Pasta, he supposedly confessed once to Washington Noriega during casual conversation on a corner downtown, sometime around 1937, a dalliance of youth. He’d already married off his three daughters and had determined that his youngest son was not one to be disarmed by life. At twenty-one, he was already dating the daughter of a general. At twenty-six, four months after the appearance of the first issue of Nexos, and with the second soon to be published, a story in the society section of La Región announced the wedding of Señorita Lydia Ponce Navarro to Dr. Mario Brando. The elder Brando shook his head deep down (to put it one way), mystified. Mario’s social success impressed him less than the painstaking and efficacious way in which he passed from one stage to the next, and the almost mathematical exactitude that ruled over the realization of his projects. In short, at twenty-six, Mario Brando was one of the most cultured and elegant men in the city, he worked at an important law firm, he received a portion of his father’s estate, he’d married the daughter of a general, had turned down an assistant professorship in Civil Law, and he was the undisputed head of the precisionist movement, whose magazine, Nexos, had been warmly received in the Sunday supplement of La Nación.