Every so often there was news of Brando. Someone had seen him in Trastevere, driving around in an Alfa Romeo. Someone else thought they’d heard, though they couldn’t quite remember from whom, that he was summering in Sicily. The elder Brando, who was now too old to accompany Cuello around the islands, but who had a cookout with him every so often, and who’d taken to calling his son Il Dottore, said that Lydia had just had a baby girl and that the post at the embassy left them plenty of time to travel. In 1950, Lydia had another daughter, but, according to the first lieutenant (who was a captain by then), who’d run into Gamarra once on a bus to Buenos Aires, they were getting tired of being away from their family, and Lydia didn’t want their grandparents to die without knowing their granddaughters.
Most Tuesdays at eleven in the morning, Tardi would pass by the Highway Administration, where Benvenuto worked, to meet him for a cup of coffee at the corner bar. Once, Benvenuto was waiting for him with a copy of the previous Sunday’s La Prensa (which had been banned by the government). There was an article by Brando in the rotogravure. He’s worth his weight in gold! Benvenuto had said, brandishing the rolled-up newspaper. While Benvenuto finished organizing some forms, Tardi read it, shaking his head and issuing surprised, scandalized laughter every so often. It was an essay on Dante, written practically at the foot of the Florence Cathedral. According to Brando, contemporary literary language was like Latin in the era of Dante: it was dead. De vulgari eloquentia, and if it couldn’t stand up as a valid program, it had, nevertheless, the value of a universal token inasmuch as it demonstrated with clarity that every great poet should forge his own language. Dante couldn’t express himself with precision in Latin; he needed a new language. Given this, he didn’t go against his time at all, because he’d adopted the language of his time. Without shrill, false rebellions he’d managed to express a complete philosophical system. That had cost him more than one hardship. For instance, his disciples, his friends, his group Dolce Stil Novo, were no doubt unable to stand it that Dante, elevating himself above doctrinal squabbles, and above the limited reach of every little courtesan poet, would have dared to take on, in his great philosophical poem, all knowledge, both human and divine. Yes, but Dante was forced into exile, and he lives off the fat of the dictatorship, Tardi exclaimed, throwing the paper on the table and lowering his voice slightly when offering that aside.
The elder Brando died in late 1950. In the final years he may have glimpsed the reason for his repudiation of his ancestors, the ones who had Taine for dinner and led him through a labyrinth of palazzi: it was a kind of melancholy. He ended up taking with him to his grave the interior chuckle with which, not without some compassion, he regarded the known universe. The following autumn, Brando and his family arrived from Italy. According to Cuello, who knew one of his brothers-in-law, an agronomist who managed some family farms near Malabrigo, Brando, while still in Rome, had demanded that all actions concerning the inheritance be frozen until his arrival, and so no one touched a paper, but when Il Dottore arrived (always according to Cuello, who was sarcastic yet incapable of slander), the first thing he did was burn the manuscripts of his father’s realist novels. Everything else, which he was not indifferent to after all, came second.
He never left again. According to him, family complications kept him home, but coincidentally, a few months later, soon after an aborted coup, the general retired, and the embassy was never spoken of again. Brando did not seem too upset. The polish of his gold accessories was now supplemented by the splendor of his time in Europe, giving him, that winter, a particular luster. That veneer remained forever, and even for those who knew him later, the new generations of poets who didn’t care much either for precisionism or its inventor, it worked. Brando was one of those people who exemplified better than most, from a sort of personal density, the old idea that all men are unique. He was recognizable from a distance; his arrival was always remarked; his presence was never ignored. And, once he had been seen, it was immediately understood why six or seven poets, some even older than him, had given themselves to his aesthetic doctrines, and for several years had put themselves almost exclusively at his service. The poets who publicized his tenets or typed up his poems must have found, in his compact soul, a possible model for counteracting the uncertainty of their own beings and the interminable afternoons. It had nothing to do either with ethics or with literary talent, nor with any particular capacity for seduction, because, in that regard, Brando was in no way industrious or demanding. In fact the opposite could be said: he was someone who rarely, if ever, demonstrated his affection, and his relations with people consisted rather of an icy and seemingly distracted courtesy. The contradictory nature of his principles was immediately obvious, given that it would never have occurred to him to conceal his irreconcilable inclination for scientistic poetry and social position within the heart of the philistine bourgeoisie. If he read his disciples’ poems it was, invariably, in order to tear them to pieces in the name of the precisionist aesthetic; if he published them in the magazine it was, unequivocally, because they clearly demonstrated that the hand of the chef de file had given them their final touch. To the company of poets he preferred that of rich and illiterate frivolous attorneys from the Club del Orden, that of Rotarian doctors, and that of neat, brutal, and shaven-headed horsemen of the Círculo Militar. If he went for coffee with some local writer who survived on a meager pension from some public office, he, who had considerable assets and who upon returning from Europe had left his old law firm in order to start his own, always managed to make himself invisible when the check came. It was difficult to imagine him in those tasks or positions that are the burden or delight of most other humans: defecating, fornicating, cutting his toenails, relating in some way or another to contingency. Every so often, an extremely faint scatological echo, which one had to be very alert to perceive, vibrated in his conversation. Whenever he made an observation that he considered keen, and which often were, he would sit for several seconds, as I’ve said before, staring at his interlocutor, waiting for his reaction. But, otherwise, it was impossible to meet his gaze. He was always looking at something over your shoulder, if he was taller than you, and at the knot of your necktie, if he was shorter. To be more precise, it should be said that what he actually had were listeners and not interlocutors. When he stopped speaking and the conversation passed to the other party, to what might be called the external field, his eyes, which were large and brilliant while he talked, narrowing, clouded over or shut down. And, all the same, three or four months after his arrival, in June or July of 1951, the precisionist machine began to function once again.
An article in La Región, in mid July, outlined the theoretical precepts of the second volume. Its theme was the decadence of the west, manifested in the irrationality of thought and the increasing relevance of the masses in historical events. If he goes on like this, he’ll end up publishing for Reader’s Digest, someone had told Benvenuto, who, however, received the sarcasm with constraint. In some ways, Brando’s article coincided with two of his favorite theories, namely that a first, enlightened romanticism had been distorted after the fact by one that was irrational and vulgar, and, meanwhile, that the decadence of the west, which was an incontrovertible fact, confirmed the supremacy of eastern thought. Furthermore, Benvenuto perceived, in Brando’s article, certain veiled critiques of the government. For several days, Benvenuto asked himself whether or not he should call Brando to suggest a meeting at a symbolic and neutral location, the restaurant behind the market, for instance, but in the end coincidence took care of that, when, one afternoon, coming out of his office, he ran into Brando as he was walking through the door. The two men embraced on the sidewalk, under the lukewarm July sun, and walked together two or three blocks, talking about the past, about their friends, about Leonardo da Vinci, and about Chinese jurists. After remarking on the suicide of R, Benvenuto learned that Brando had been aware of his problems, and that on two or three occasions R had come to see him, deeply depressed, and that Brando had tried to calm him down. (Less sympathetic versions asserted that Brando, after hearing R’s more or less veiled confessions, had demanded that he remove himself from the movement.) According to Benvenuto, in his final days, R lived on uppers and barely slept. He’d spend whole nights walking through the city and in the morning would go straight to work, without going to bed. Brando asked Benvenuto about Tardi, and suggested that they get together for a cookout at the house in Guadalupe, where he’d moved after he got back from Rome (and where, meanwhile, he continued to live until his death). Noticing Benvenuto’s hesitation, Brando asked for the numbers of Tardi and other former members and said that he would call them himself, which would discharge Benvenuto from a difficult task, making things much easier, because if Brando himself was in charge of making contact with the other precisionists a reconciliation would be much more likely. And so, two Sundays later, at around eleven, the precisionists from 1945 that were left in the city, along with their families, began to arrive for the cookout at the villa in Guadalupe.