A surprise was waiting for them: Captain Ponce himself was preparing the cookout. He’d arrived the day before from Córdoba, where his regiment was stationed, due to one of those unexpected troop movements, since his headquarters were in the south. The continuous punishment of the Patagonian wind had removed his frail look and had given him the consistency of leather. He greeted them cheerfully, with a glass in his hand, but worried about the progress of the coals. He himself had brought the demijohns of Caroya wine that were one the table, and he filled their glasses with generosity and insistence, under Brando’s slightly reproving gaze.
Also present was a stranger to the historical precisionists, a Doctor Calcagno. He was a serious, almost sad, and well-educated man, and although he was several years older than Brando, he seemed intimidated by him and acquiesced to everything he said, even to things he didn’t seem to agree with. He taught Roman Law at the university and enjoyed a considerable reputation in his specialty, and two or three years after Brando left his old firm in order to start his own they became partners and were never separated again. Calcagno was like Brando’s silent and obedient shadow. He accepted everything, and even Tardi, who had been almost literally Brando’s servant during the first period of the precisionist movement, was scandalized by so much submission, possibly feeling irritated that as of that day Brando would prefer Calcagno’s servitude to his own. The firm made a lot of money, but while Brando kept a few cases for himself, which he managed personally, at the margin of the firm, Calcagno was the one who took on all of the work, something which would have been more or less understandable if the reason had been to leave Brando free time for his literary activities, but Calcagno also took on all of the practical work for the movement, editing, distribution, public events, proofreading, correspondence. Even years later, when he married a much younger woman, Calcagno still maintained that religious obedience to Mario Brando. What’s curious is that Calcagno wasn’t even a writer, and, moreover, that he was an honest man, but even when Brando, who’d become a provincial minister after the revolution, had to resign his post due to obscure accusations of corruption that were never completely clarified, and which, despite his opportunism, prevented him from ever aspiring to a public post again, Calcagno, whose honesty was unquestionable, continued to support him till his death.
With that cookout, precisionism’s second institutional era, after the announcement in La Región and Brando’s article, was inaugurated. Brando, upon his return from Europe, must have badly needed the restoration of the group, because otherwise he wouldn’t have invited his disciples and their families and everything else to the house in Guadalupe. It was a gesture of reconciliation that would not be repeated. Once he was assured of the collaboration of the three or four poets from the old guard, he went back to meeting them at peripheral and depressing bars and restaurants. His social life, meanwhile, took place at his house and in the houses of his rich and ignorant friends, at the Jockey Club, or in political circles, although, as the regime lost popularity, and though he’d had a diplomatic post in Rome, he started to move imperceptibly toward the side of those who, three or four years later, after a couple of aborted coups, would end up overthrowing it. The only person who shared both worlds with him was his faithful shadow, Doctor Calcagno.
Even Brando’s most intransigent enemies admired his political opportunism. Over five or six years he’d managed to be named cultural attaché in Rome by one government, to spend several years in Europe with his family, on a diplomatic salary, without any sort of declaration or public stance, and even without seeming to carry out any political activity, and then, just after the provincial inspector formed the first cabinet after the coup, he was asked to take the post of Secretary of Public Works. Had it not been for that obscure embezzlement incident, which was never clarified, and which had no other consequence for him than his retirement from politics, it was almost certain that a national trajectory awaited him.
What interested him was poetry and science, and astronomy in particular. At the house in Guadalupe, in a kind of tower at the back of the garden, which served as his office, he’d built an observatory where he’d shut himself up every night. Apart from Calcagno, who often went to visit him, very few people had enjoyed the privilege of an invitation. But from some poet or journalist from Buenos Aires, which is to say, anyone who could spread, beyond the city, his image as poet and scholar of art and science, a visit was particularly appreciated. After the coup, when he was Secretary of Public Works, in the photo that accompanied an interview with him, he was seen bent over, looking at the sky through the telescope. What’s surprising is that the story, which occupied a whole page, came out in La Prensa, after its legitimate owners recovered the paper, and despite the fact that he’d published his “Meditation at the Foot of the Florence Cathedral” while the newspaper, seized by the government, had been transformed into an official organ. Someone once said that Brando didn’t own an umbrella because when it rained he was able to walk through the drops without getting wet. What one had to admit, according to this same person, and to several others, including some of his enemies, was his fidelity to poetry, though it was rumored that when he wasn’t writing precisionist texts he wrote more traditional poems that very few people, if anyone, had seen, and through which he hoped to save his reputation if precisionism ever fell out of fashion.