The city of Buenos Aires became the centre of the nation, both in economic terms and in terms of literary imagination. Jorge Luis Borges would explore the orillas (literally banks or shores) of Buenos Aires in his poetry of the 1920s, but his eccentric view is from the outskirts of the city, where it meets the countryside. Certain writers would share Conti’s later interest in marginal figures in a landscape, but these works would also mainly be set in the cities, as in the novels of Roberto Arlt who, in the 1920s and 1930s, would paint the world of the urban poor (see, for instance, his 1929 novel The Seven Madmen). When nationalist writers in the first part of the twentieth century questioned what they considered the elite, ‘European’ liberal values of society, they would look to reverse Sarmiento’s formulations and espouse nationalist symbols such as the gaucho Martin Fierro, the eponymous hero of the late-nineteenth-century poem. Conti’s views would chime with those who sought to question the cultural and economic dominance of the port city: ‘I am from the interior,’ he says. ‘I always saw Buenos Aires through the eyes of an outsider, and this is the only way that it functions for me.’6 Yet his vantage point is different: he chooses the ebbs and flows and sudden storms of the river, not the land, and Buenos Aires is always a landscape in the mist, just around a corner, before the Delta opens into the River Plate. Buenos Aires is only a few miles away, but it is in another time, it is another way of perceiving the world.
Conti would witness profound changes in Argentine society. He was five when a military government deposed the Radical party that had emerged in the early twentieth century as a counterbalance to an elite Argentine political system that had ruled the country by oligarchy. He left his religious vocation in 1945 when Juan Domingo Perón and Evita Perón were emerging as political figures. At the seminary he had become the friend of a Jesuit priest, Hernán Benítez, who introduced him to literary criticism and would later become the confessor of Eva Perón. Conti lived between Buenos Aires and the Delta during the Peronist decade of 1946–1955, studying at university and later receiving a grant (in 1952 and 1953) from the Cine Club ‘Gente de Cine’ (Cinema People), to work on film projects. It was at Gente de Cine that he would have seen independent cinema that offered an alternative to a Hollywood aesthetic, in particular Italian neorealism and French new wave. (In the light of this interest, readers of Southeaster might wish to observe Conti’s use of description that has the precision of a camera, his attention to images, forms, colours, sounds, and to the ways in which his narrative is ‘cut’ and edited.)
Conti began publishing in the aftermath of Perón’s overthrow in a military coup, and he lived through the many changes that took place as Argentina struggled to find a political system that would exclude or incorporate Peronism, under the ever-watchful eye of the military. He became more politically active around the time when Perón returned from exile in 1973 in a wave of popular euphoria. And Conti published his last novel, Mascaró, el cazador americano, when Perón’s third wife, Isabel, took over as president following Perón’s death in 1974, and government and paramilitary forces became more oppressive, and the political moment more radicalised.7
Of course, we should not make easy connections between politics and writing. Conti himself would often warn against such easy links. He would affirm throughout his life that writing to an overt political formula could result in bad literature:
Quiero decir que por la sumisión a ciertos universales rígidos, cuya imposición y verificación se convierte en un fin en sí mismo, alguna literatura comprometida corre el riesgo de ser pasatista ella también.
[I want to say that, by submitting to certain rigid rules, the obedience to which, and demonstration of one’s conformity to which, becomes an end in itself, a literature of commitment runs the risk of becoming frivolous.]8
For the purposes of this brief overview we can say that, at least at the level of rhetoric, the first Peronist governments gave value to an Argentina beyond the city. Peronist parades would often be lead by gauchos on horseback, and speeches made constant references to cabecitas negras, migrant workers from the interior. Radio programmes would broadcast popular music from the countryside, as well as the urban tango. We know that Conti’s father, Pedro Conti, set up a branch of the Peronist Party in his home town of Chacabuco, though there is little information about his son’s political affiliations at the time. There were aspects of this Peronist cultural project that would chime with Conti’s own affiliation to regional cultures. While most intellectuals were opposed to the first Peronist governments, which they perceived as authoritarian, Perón’s overthrow by the military, and subsequent military involvement in politics, led to a gradual reappraisal of the political order and, by extension, the social function of intellectuals and writers. These were debates that Conti would enter more vigorously from the early seventies.
While writing Southeaster, Conti would have been living at a time of both political confusion and also excitement: how should Argentina become more modern and develop (modernisation and ‘developmentalism’ were the terms used at the time); how might it embrace the new; how might it react to the imaginative proximity of revolution, with the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959? One of Conti’s answers seems to be to step back from the glitter of the new, and shine a torchlight from the brow of his boat on hitherto unexplored spaces of popular culture. In particular he would look to eschew the notion of writer as celebrity, someone — in Tom Wolfe’s phrase — leading the vanguard march through the lands of the philistines. As Conti remarked in a handwritten note:
No sé si tiene sentido pero me digo cada vez: contá las historia de la gente como si cantaras en medio de un camino, despojate de toda pretensión y cantá, simplemente cantá con todo tu corazón. Que nadie recuerde tu nombre sino toda esa vieja y sencilla historia.
[I don’t know if it makes sense, but I tell myself these same words every time: narrate the people’s story as you’d sing while on a journey, relinquish all ambition, simply sing with all your heart. Let no one be concerned to remember your name, but everything there is of this old and simple story.]9
The novel that seemed to both represent and guide this optimistic embrace of the new was published one year after Southeaster: Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch (1963). This novel, in its ‘hopscotch’ between the cities of Paris and Buenos Aires, was a playful but also sophisticated search for freedom, both existential and profoundly literary. It stressed the need to ‘un-write’ the novel, to free it from convention and high seriousness — the solemnity and pomposity of much of national literatures — and to play the game with grace and intelligence. It was the novel’s freshness, its limitless cultural breadth and its eroticism that captivated a new audience, who wanted to be Cortázar’s active readers: engaged, modern, experimental and hip. It was one of the first ‘boom’ novels in Latin America, chiming with the literary, modernist experimentation of the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, the Mexican Carlos Fuentes and the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez. These were the writers who would be promoted by publishing houses, critics and cultural magazines, and would be translated throughout the world.10