Who has read The Uruguayan can not forget it. Who has the fortune to ignore it, what luck: you will discover a pearl that flashes for its humor, for the good / bad luck of an antihero, a sad and tender experience that causes an accomplice smile with the reader. The sympathetic tribulations of the characters of Pedro Mairal now return in the form of stories with Brief Eternal Loves (Destiny), which includes two books, the first (also titled Brief ... ) written 10 or 12 years ago and early today , with what more recent. The difference: sensuality / sexuality is more present in new stories.
The texts are of all colors: from the husband who leaves home dressed as a footballer to attend a party ( The ring ) to the surreal recreation of a 16th-century Spanish conqueror who wanders through the jungle between delirium and helplessness ( Amazonia ). Pedro Mairal (Buenos Aires, 49 years old) is recreated in this story: some soldiers who were looking for El Dorado for "the edge of the world" are beaten by the sword with angels, a man who was wounded by a tiger sprouts black rays and roars in the silence of the night, others turn into trees and from their armpits lianas arise, and a friar named Cándido escapes with some cannibals while a heavy rain falls and without forgiveness.
«I was interested in going to that era of Humanity, between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and how the Spaniards found an unbridled continent, how they came with a magical thought that ate all the logic, sanity, as in The Heart of the Darkness of Conrad », he comments slowly, calmly, weighing every idea this man who went to the doctor but he insisted on writing despite family opposition. «My grandfather was a diplomat and my father is a lawyer, so there was no artist model at home. The arts were considered to be for the weekend. Until he convinced his parents to watch the movie The Dead Poets Club , in which a young man commits suicide because he cannot be an actor. They doubled their pulse.
Pedro Mairal seeks essentiality in stories. «Some might stretch but if I can count them on seven pages why do it on 100. It depends on what the story asks me. The story is a situation, several things happen in the novel; the difference is in the use of time ».
Humor is usually in sight or crouched. «In Spain he smiles while the character suffers, which is something very quixotic; They look giant when they are mills. It is the difference between the desired and the real, and that causes me some tenderness, ”he says.
What do you want to achieve, if you want something, when you write? "More than telling life, which is how a creative writing seminar I give, would be how to tell the fact of being alive, writing from the body." What do you ask your students. «To be honest, sincerity causes identification. If with social networks we create a reality, literature is its back, its hidden side. With literature you have to show what shame you.
Pedro Mairal spent a few years of drought, he could not think of (or did not come out) something literary , so he took refuge in journalism, in poetry, in writing blogs , on travel ... «And when nobody expected it I went back to the novel. After passing through journalism, he jarrized his language, stylized it. «It took me time to take off that beguiled part that high literature is supposed to have. And I looked for something intermediate between that tradition and the drive to write as the speaker ». His sentences are short, direct, effective. "I write by necessity, not by an external imposition . "
Sometimes, the reader finds himself dumbfounded at what Mairal writes, as in the story The Substitution. A boy faces his first job in the middle of an office with a strange environment for him, somewhat hostile. Someone invites him to eat, they end up in a brothel at noon and he is forced to lie with a woman while he suspects someone is spying on them. «It is a sordid situation. Sometimes you are forced to interact with people you would never choose and that fascinates me. The text ends like this: 'I lie to not have to tell this whole story' ».
In The Journey of Professor Bellini , a mature woman also lies , if by lying it is also not telling everything that happened with what this entails (while taking advantage to lash out against mass tourism). Borges appears and does not appear in Pictures , or how an old, wise and blind writer travels through Britain giving lectures assisted by a woman who insists they get married. And the bubble of the social networks reach a degree of unemployment in The virginity of Karina Durán : a girl of 17/18 years auction (or not) her virgo through a web page. «It was my first look at a parallel world, to the bubble in which the protagonist lives. I learned after writing that some people resort to that to pay for their studies.
Pedro Mairal's preferences include Cortázar, Borges, García Márquez and Salinger's stories . Raymond Carver, Richard Yates, Virginia Woolf and Argentina's Sara Gallardo ( Eisejuaz ), the Human Poems of César Vallejo and "rare books" such as Bartleby and company of Vila-Matas or The autonauts of the cosmopist of Cortázar. "What I want the reader to feel is living my story, to feel the sensuality of the text with the five senses."
The Uruguayan Can it be seen in the cinema? «Some Brazilians have bought the rights, I have participated in the first draft of the script and Jorge Drexler is in music ... Cinema is good for the obvious and literature for what is not said, for what you did not count. For the shy ones ».
More difficult would be to take Marcelino López to the big screen, the text where he realizes the raving of a man who digs and digs an Olympic pool alone , day and night, and who years ago rescued from drowning. Someone on horseback galloped to the well of a river; that man resurfaced from the waters, grabbing the mane of his horse and dragging unhappy Marcelino Lopez when he was no longer breathing.
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