Born in the town of Chacabuco in western Buenos Aires province, Haroldo Conti was a keen reader as a youngster and wrote scripts for the school puppet theatre. A second stimulus to writing was his father’s love of telling stories, many recounting the events and personalities of his journeys as a travelling salesman. But small-town life in Conti’s beloved Chacabuco ended when his parents separated, and his mother took him to the capital city to attend secondary school.
His later schooling included two seminaries, an environment Conti said didn’t suit him but where he discovered what he termed missionary novels, tales of preaching the gospel amongst the ‘unbelievers’ in far-off places. He could never remember if he finished it, but the young author wrote a first novel set in Africa and inspired by this reading. He eventually experienced a crisis of faith and left his studies to return to Chacabuco.
Conti became a secondary-school teacher of Latin and, whether or not he relished the work, he was regarded by his fellows as a conscientious colleague, until the political difficulties in Argentina began to interfere with his attendance. But his passion was writing, particularly for the cinema, in favour of which he considered putting aside fiction at one point. Indeed, Southeaster was first conceived as a film script, and directors have brought other of his literary work to the screen, taking advantage of its preference for strongly visual narrative.
Among his many and varied activities, Conti trained as a civil pilot of light aircraft; it was flying that led him to discover from the air the landscape of the Paraná Delta. He rented a small wooden house, which he later bought, sited on a stream in the islands of the Delta, just across from Tigre, and known to most as the Gambado — but names are slippery in these parts, as Conti has related.
Conti’s interest in the lives of others wasn’t merely intellectuaclass="underline" he became a keen fisherman and decided to build a boat; he spent a lot of time with an otter-hunter at one point — and all of this investigation went into his writing, of which Southeaster was the first important published expression.
I met Haroldo in the public lending library in my home town of Úbeda, when I came upon a 1985 edition of Sudeste published in Spain by Alfaguara. I blew off the dust of Andalusia and read the first paragraphs on my feet, between the shelves. Deciding to publish a translation was simply the way to ensure the novel would not have to wait another fifty years to be read in English, and that I could do the work.
It was important to visit the world of the novel, to clarify aspects of local and boating vocabulary for the translation but also just to see the place. I experienced two sudestadas (south-easterly storms) during a month on the islands. The second sudestada was uncommonly severe. The geography of the Delta means that these south-east winds literally pile up the water from the River Plate — the Southern Atlantic, in effect — and send it across the islands of the Delta, where the water level on this occasion was almost three metres above its level on the River Plate. I spent three nights with the water slapping about under the house — just as Boga does in the lean-to.
The first act of every morning on the Delta is to draw back the curtains and look outside, for the activity of each day — quite often of each hour — is determined by the state of the river.
Each of Conti’s four novels was awarded a literary prize, culminating in the prestigious Casa de las Americas prize for his last novel, Mascaró, el cazador americano (‘Mascaró, the American Hunter’, 1975).
The protagonists in Conti’s first three novels are solitaries, a characteristic that is paired in each case with a desire for the wandering life. In Southeaster, Boga’s life around the islands of the Delta is forced on him by circumstances: the death of the old man for whom he works cutting reeds and the fact that he doesn’t know anything else. Despite the austerity of his life and the discomforts of the solitude it implies, Conti’s protagonist finds comfort and takes a pride in his knowledge of boats and engines, in being able to navigate his way around the rivers and in his handling of the simple tools that are the means to survival in his environment. He observes and learns to read the changes in the natural world — in the river above all. These readings give a meaning to his world, but it is a world that cannot be dominated, and here Conti’s protagonist is distinct from Defoe’s Crusoe: despite the dignity of his daily life, Boga lives with a fatalism that comes from understanding that he lives in a world that has no design behind it.
If the indifference of this world to man is what gives the first part of the novel its tension, the appearance of the simpleton Cabecita and the dog heralds change. Conti’s protagonist is irritated at once by this interruption to his solitude, yet he tolerates the odd pair and finds himself, at the last, unable to abandon them. The entry, hard on their heels, of a murderous smuggler confirms a turn in the story towards a more conventional dramatic trajectory.
It is the playing-out of Boga’s dreams and ambitions, and his small achievements in the face of his greater errors and the disasters that befall him, that keep Conti’s story from solemnity. Its enchantment emerges from the understated prose, which provides the space required for readers to do their own imaginative work, and in the rhythmic nature of Conti’s voice.
The matter of how man might best face life was something that conditioned Conti’s reading; Juan Carlos Onetti’s fictions and the early work of Alan Sillitoe were constants in his preference for writers who expressed a defined attitude before life. As to the nourishing of his writing, Conti held to Guimarães Rosa as the principal stimulus, considering the great Brazilian the figure responsible for renewing the language of Latin American literature; he speaks of reading Guimarães Rosa’s work throughout the writing of Mascaró.
Politics forces its way into the story of Conti’s life but, despite the political turmoil in Argentina during the period of his writing, Conti avoids overtly political subjects until Mascaró. Repression in Argentina intensified following the military coup of March 1976, and Conti was warned by someone with links to the military that his life was in danger. But he decided against exile and offered his home in the capital as a place of refuge for others under threat of kidnap and murder. Until he was taken from the streets in the early hours of 5th May.2
JON LINDSAY MILES
Úbeda (Jaén),
May 2015
Notes
1 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past Vol. 3, Translated by CK Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin; and by Andreas Mayor, London: Penguin 1989, pp. 939–40.
2 The known details of Conti’s disappearance were recorded in the CONADEP Report Nunca Más (‘Never Again’, 1984) and can be found at www.desaparecidos.org/nuncamas/web/english/library/nevagain/nevagain_248.htm.
Afterword