PRIMER CAPÍTULO DE BARILOCHE

© Anagrama, Barcelona, 1999

SYNOPSIS

Demetrio Rota, a dustman in a district of Buenos Aires, sleeps in the afternoon and then works on puzzles every night before heading out to work. His daily life –with the exception of the occasional sexual encounter– is despairingly mediocre and he remains in control of himself through pure exhaustion. However, with the help of the puzzles that he patiently puts together in his small apartment next to the Chacarita cemetery, Demetrio goes over and puts order in his personal memory, which the reader will gradually come to know as he or she fits together the fragments of the novel. A parable of memory and decadence, Bariloche examines the conflict between the amazed memories of youth and the scepticism of the adult mind, between the impossible idealising of nature and the moral and physical suffocation of big-city life, between rootlessness and the return to the source, in a language as beguiled by putrefaction as it is by the lyrical. The contradictory character of Demetrio Rota, who despite his work possesses middle-class attributes, is perhaps an emblem for the immense majority of anonymous citizens who feel that their lives, without deciding it themselves and without doing anything to stop it, form part of a reproductive and excretory machine that is becomes more and more degrading. Likewise, the Buenos Aires which the novel evokes is a real city but at the same time any urban centre in western capitalist countries. The author (who was born in Buenos Aires but has been formed as a writer in Spain) recreates in his fiction the city where he was born from the perspective of the culture and the language of his present. The book can be read as the exploration of a double gaze: the novel of a Spanish writer about Argentine society and culture, or an Argentine novel narrated, among other voices, by a Spaniard. Both ways of approaching the novel will enable the reader to put together the puzzle of Bariloche.

 

Eran las cuatro en punto cuando Demetrio Rota iluminó débilmente la noche con su traje fluorescente. Casi sin pensarlo, dejó caer un escupitajo en una alcantarilla. Se complació en acertar. La húmeda vaharada del Río de la Plata llegaba desde el puerto y atravesaba Paseo Colón hasta llegar a la 9 de Julio; a partir de allí, el aliento invernal de Buenos Aires campaba a sus anchas: espeso, continuado, corrosivo. El frío era lo de menos.

Pero Demetrio Rota iniciaba la recogida al otro lado de la avenida Independencia. Junto al camión, que despedía un hedor cálido a motor y residuos, a cáscaras de naranja, yerba mate usada y gasolina, él y su compañero tiritaban con esquimal indiferencia. Tirame esa bolsa, tirámela, le gritó el Negro. Demetrio no escuchaba. Miraba la alcantarilla y se estaba quieto y con los hombros encogidos como si se hubiera olvidado de bajarlos. Pero dale, vamos, qué hacés ahí. Ahora Demetrio sí lo había escuchado, pero permanecía aún inmóvil, con las bolsas de nylon negro a sus pies igual que un ejército de sucias mascotas. Mirá que son y cinco eh, después nos jodemos los dos Demetrio. Entonces él suspiró y se agachó para darle la primera bolsa al Negro. La alcantarilla insinuaba un lejano discurrir al fondo.