An article with a photo in the next day’s edition of La Región had described the first precisionist dinner. Behind the apparent objectivity, the post-modernista resentment was clearly visible. Brando learned his lesson. After that day, he wrote the newspaper and radio stories for them himself. What would strictly speaking be called the group’s creative labor was soon supplemented with conferences, newspaper articles, and radio interviews. The appearance of the magazine was of fundamental strategic importance: in the articles, the seminars, the interviews, and the conferences, they had to make terminological and theoretical concessions, which generated numerous misunderstandings; but the pages of Nexos, meanwhile, maintained, from start to finish, a consistent exactitude. It’s precisionist manifestos, texts, and engravings formed a coherent and persuasive compendium. The first issue, for the city and for the time, was luxurious, so much so that the neoclassicists, who’d been producing the modest Espiga at great personal cost for almost three years, started to spread venomous rumors about the source of their funding. Brando’s legendary cheapness immediately ruled out the possibility that the issue was paid for out of his own pocket. There was, in fact, no mystery: the new owner of Pastas Brando, who’d known Marito all his life, the lawyers at his firm, who through Brando had contacts in the industrial and military sectors, and the bookstore-press that Brando convinced of the possibility of an exclusive series of single-author editions from precisionist poets as soon as the movement was funded, were more than enough to finance the first four issues of Nexos, which comprised the first volume.
The Thursday menu was invariable: alphabet soup (that was Brando’s idea), Spanish-style stew, cheese and dessert, and red or white house wine. Cuello, the most famous regionalist, after attending one of these dinners, said to a friend, Instead of trying to reform literature, they should start by reforming their wine list. Brando had made a deal with Obregón, the owner: after fourteen guests, the price of the menu was reduced. The first group of precisionists consisted of seven people, to which four or five girlfriends were added, and because there were always a few other guests who varied from week to week, the number that Brando and the owner had agreed upon was always easily met. It was said that, with fourteen people, Brando not only got a price reduction, but he himself ate for free. In any case, whenever the dinner finished, he always took charge of gathering the contribution of each guest, and was always the one to settle at the counter with the owner. One night, the number of guests reached twenty-one, not counting a table of regionalists and neoclassicists who, apparently by chance, as though they didn’t know that the precisionists got together at that restaurant every Thursday, had decided to eat there that night. When he walked in and saw them sitting at a table near the one that the owner usually prepared for them, Brando told one of his lieutenants, with great discretion, to avoid provoking them at all cost. But the others were celebrating a municipal prize, and when they started drinking champagne with dessert, two or three of the precisionists started to fraternize with them at the next table.
Someone who never missed a dinner was First Lieutenant Ponce, which is to say, Brando’s brother-in-law and Lydia’s younger brother. Though he’d studied at the military college in Buenos Aires, his father had obtained a post for him in one of the regiments in the city. He was shy and tanned and all of those intellectuals made him somewhat uncomfortable. He admired his brother-in-law very much, and wouldn’t say a word during the whole meal. But because he would arrive before anyone, and would drink three or four Hesperidinas at the bar before the meal, sometimes, afterward, he would start to recite Joaquín Castellanos’s “El temulento,” which, along with “Si hay un hueco en tu vida, llénalo de amor” was the only poetry he knew. Brando’s underlings, sensing that the founder of precisionism grew impatient with the first lieutenant’s poetic inclinations, started to say, behind Brando’s back, when describing the episodes, that the post-modernista fifth column was trying to undermine the movement from within.
For several years, precisionism dominated the literary world in the city, with a strong advantage over the other schools. It was the only original literary movement to have appeared there, inasmuch as the neoclassicists weren’t in fact anything more than a branch of a movement that had circulated throughout the country, and the regionalists weren’t a group strictly speaking because the only thing they had in common was their taste for cookouts and their systematic employment of barbarisms. Among the regionalists, only Cuello was known outside the province. His books were regularly reviewed in La Prensa and La Nación, and yet the invariable praise they received repeatedly affirmed that the books constituted an invaluable testimony of his native region and that their author was a profound student of the ways of the countryside. Precisionism, meanwhile, had been recognized from the beginning as something more than a simple literary movement, as a true Weltanschauung. More than as a poet, despite the many merits in that regard that even his detractors recognized, Brando was seen as a philosopher, as a man of science, and even as a reformer. Despite the jealousy that his increasing fame provoked, more than a few regionalists, and more than a few neoclassicists in particular, admitted privately that, had he abandoned his avant-garde pretensions, he might have transformed himself into a more than respectable representative of their respective schools. Higinio Gómez and Jorge Washington Noriega, who kept themselves on the margin of the literary world, referred to him, sarcastically, as “Il Duce stil novo of scientistic debris,” and refused to be impressed by the fact that Buenos Aires was looking favorably on the work of a local agitator. Brando, meanwhile, took that acceptance as objective proof, and the rival groups validated his position. A sonnet of Brando’s, “Chemistry of the passions,” appeared in mid-1946 in the supplement to La Nación, and it should be said that, if the existence of God had been announced in that Sunday rotogravure, the regionalists and the neoclassicists, as of that moment, would have done without the miracles or the ontological proof.