Thursdays at La Giralda

An excerpt from the novel La Grande

Before the central market was torn down, the alley behind it was full of cheap restaurants and boarding houses. In one of these, La Giralda, on August 6, 1945, precisionism was born.

There was no broadside, no Battle of Hernani, no exquisite corpse. Mario Brando, its creator, had his sights elsewhere: precisionism should take its place not among the avant-garde, in opposition to the times, but rather as its most faithful representation. According to Brando, newspapers, radio stations, universities, and large-circulation magazines should be the natural media for the expression and expansion of the movement. Scientific magazines not only weren’t excluded but in fact were, in a certain sense, the immediate precursors of the precisionist aesthetic. A proto-precisionism could be found precisely in the latest scientific treatises and the reviews of these in popular magazines.

At the time, for the writers of the city, it was a sign of good taste to be seen, every so often, at one of the precisionists’ Thursday dinners. Only the post-modernista old guard refused to yield, but it’s important to note that, from Belisario Roldán onward, they’d labeled every new literary movement as wayward, prosaic, and incomprehensible. Anyone still left over in 1960 was still making the same joke about modern art, namely that everything represented by abstract painting was a fried egg.

The rest of the opposition, which is to say the neoclassicists and the regionalists, was much more elastic, if not opportunistic. The regionalists, who met on Fridays at the San Lorenzo grill house, would individually attend the dinners every so often, and would invite this or that precisionist to their cookouts. But they didn’t suffer from any illusions: they knew that Nexos, the official organ of Mario Brando’s movement, would never welcome a regionalist text. The neoclassicists, whose magazine, Espiga, had been published triannually since 1943, had some official exchanges with the precisionists, inasmuch as Brando and his clique thought that certain neoclassical subjects, like Christian mysticism, for instance, could yield to the precisionist aesthetic. And the neoclassicists, meanwhile, appreciated the precisionist inclination for traditional forms. In private, the regionalists referred to the neoclassicists as sanctimonious Bible thumpers and to the precisionists as outdated futurists and fascists; the neoclassicists said that the regionalists, with every one of their criollo cookouts, were slowly devouring the subjects of their literature, and that the precisionists, with their absurd scientism, were the medical school pages; and the precisionists, who weren’t satisfied with the occasional slander and in fact launched fully clandestine smear campaigns, referred to several members of Espiga’s editorial committee as Curia spies, to their writing as an intentional amalgamation of mysticism and faggotry, and said that the interest of the regionalist group’s leader for the countryside could be explained by the fact that he was actually a horse.

Brando was born in 1920. In 1900, his father, an Italian immigrant, arrived in Buenos Aires with the certainty that every one of his compatriots huddled alongside him in the boat, along with everyone who’d come over in the last thirty or forty years, crowded in other boats, and still crowding in Buenos Aires slums until they got the chance to finally own a farm or a business, that every one of those compatriots, who came from everywhere in Italy, still shared the same weakness, pasta, and that he would be the one to supply them with it. After three or four years of adventures, he finally landed in the city and started to manufacture, in small, artisanal quantities, fresh pastas that he distributed to a fixed clientele in wicker boxes, carefully wrapped in immaculate napkins cut from bags of grain. Two years later, the customers would be coming to buy their pasta at the Brando family delicatessen, in the center of the city, and if by 1918 their dry spaghetti, wrapped in cellophane or in twenty-kilo bags, was sold in numerous shops in the north of the province, by 1925, Pastas Brando was one...