Een pooier brengt drie meisjes uit de grote stad naar de kustplaats Santa Maria om daar zijn droom van een volmaakt bordeel te realiseren. Het scandaleuze succes van het bordeel leidt tot verdeeldheid onder de inwoners van de std ( )

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En un estilo denso, de un vigor y una viveza pocas veces logradas en nuestra lengua, el gran escritor uruguayo va desplegando ante los ojos del lector la lucha entre dos fuerzas ferozmente enfrentadas, a pesar de la ambigüedad que les prestan la hipocresía y las apariencias. ( )

It'd been a while since I last visited Santa María, and I figured it was high time to read Juntacadáveres, which narrates the rise and fall of Larsen's brothel in Onetti's fictional town. The brothel is alluded to in El astillero, when Larsen returns to Santa María to take a job at the shipyard. Here, we learn the back story, beginning with the initial arrangements between the pharmacist/politician Barthé, who has long dreamed of passing an ordinance that will allow the installation of a prostibule in his town, and the conservative members of the Santa María government, who provide him with the votes he needs in exchange for his later approval of another, unrelated ordinance. We follow Barthé's emmissary, Doctor Díaz Gray, who travels to meet with Larsen and convince him that his longtime dream of establishing and maintaning a brothel in Santa María is now attainable. And we read of the arrival of Larsen and three prostitutes, their lives in a blue house down by the river, the townspeople's indignance and their attempts to shame all members of the community who dare enter that house of ill repute, and the barroom arguments between citizens for and against the brothel.

This episode in the history of Santa María is of such significance to so many different members of the community that Onetti is also able to include other corrolary stories involving the town's citizens. Jorge Malabia, the teenage son of the local newspaper magnate, slips out of his bedroom at eleven each night to visit Julia, the widow of his recently-deceased brother Francisco, enacting a troubling nightly routine in which he pretends to be Francisco. Marcos Bergner, the nephew of the town priest, is back in town on a weeks-long bender after the failure of a utopic community he founded with some other young couples, which crumbled as his young wife ran away amidst rumors of wife-swapping out in the countryside. Strangely, he's highly offended by the brothel. Lanza, the elderly newspaper reporter and drinking buddy of Jorge, is writing a chronicle of the brothel episode as it's occurring. Father Bergner is strategically and tactfully working to remove the brothel from Santa María, using the power of the pulpit and Catholic rhetoric to influence his followers. And Larsen, as he runs the brothel and drinks at the bar, thinks back on his younger days and the events that brought him to where he is now, running a brothel in a town too small for anonymity.

These characters' stories are not confined to this book: they relate to Onetti's other books and short stories set in this fictional town on the banks of the Uruguay River, beginning with his 1950 novel La vida breve, in which a bored, dissatisfied man named Juan María Brausen sits in his apartment in Buenos Aires and dreams up an imaginary place up the river. Doctor Díaz Grey plays a large role in that book, and a much smaller one here. I recall that, while reading La vida breve, I enjoyed how Díaz Grey seemed to represent Brausen's fantasies about his own life, about the person he might like to be. I also wondered how much Onetti there was in Brausen, and consequently in Díaz Grey. This potential for alter egos inside alter egos was intriguing, and I thought about it again as I read this book. Maybe there's some Onetti (and Brausen) in Larsen, alias Juntacadáveres, as well. Onetti read and admired Roberto Arlt when he was young, and maybe he imagined himself in a somewhat Arltian light, with those fantasies shaping the future proprietor of the short-lived Santa María brothel. And how about Jorge Malabia, the young man who yearns to control his own destiny, brashly rebelling against his family and his teenage place in life? He could represent the child Brausen (or Onetti) wished they were. Marcos as well: his callous, contradictory character and his out-of-control actions throughout the book reminded me of yet another alter ego from La vida breve, Arce, the man whom Brausen pretends to be as he pursues a violent relationship with his neighbor. Looking at it this way, it might be possible to see Santa María as a town inhabited by men all made in their own creator's image, accompanied by women made in his image of the ideal woman, the woman of his fantasies (the woman Larsen believes himself capable of creating at least once in his life).

And here's where it gets even more interesting: they know it, or at least they have a hunch that they're nothing more than fiction, fantasies of a creator who's placed them in a town where they don't necessarily want to be, and they all want so badly to rebel against it. There's a statue of Brausen in Santa María, and on rare occasion, someone makes reference to the creator. None of them seem entirely comfortable in their roles, and whether they're sleeping with their ex-stepsister and enacting a sick nightly ritual in which the dead husband is reincarnated in the living brother, inviting groups of ex-schoolgirls into their homes to write incendiary anonymous messages to the families of those citizens who visited the brothel, or drowning reality in copious amounts of alcohol at the bar each night, they all seem to be fighting against whatever they interpret their assigned destiny to be. The teenage rebellion of Jorge Malabia is obviously quite distinct from the middle aged rebellion of Larsen, with the youngster brashly writing poetry, drinking with the adults at the bar, and trying his best to get the hell out of Santa María. Larsen already lived those youthful days of rebellion, and his older, more mature rebellion is more a combination of indifference and obstinate pursuit of goals that most other people consider abhorent. They all rebel, but instead of rebelling against God, as humans might in other books written in the Christian tradition, they rebel against Brausen. In Santa María, Onetti has created a fictional world; in Brausen, he's created a god.

I've always enjoyed fictional representations of specific, yet nonexistent places in our world, like Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Juan Rulfo's Comala, or even The Simpsons' Springfield. I've been thinking about why I find Onetti's Santa María so compelling. I like how its creation is documented in La vida breve. I like how the creator's presence extends into the lives of the characters, and the characters believe in Brausen's presence in the same way that a lot of people believe in God's presence. And I like the doom and gloom, the bitterness, the nights at the bar, and everyone's desire to be someone else. Because it's not all bad. There's also some hope, the hope that keeps bringing Larsen back to Santa María and keeps everyone going through life, until, in rare cases, as occurs with one of the key characters in this particular episode in the Santa María saga, they can't take it any more and look for a definitive way out.

I'm convinced that if all of the novels, novellas and short stories that take place in Santa María were compiled in a single volume, in Spanish or in English translation, they'd sell reasonably well. I would love to have them all together, because it's really hard to find some of his works in Spanish at a reasonable price here in the United States. It is fun, though, to slowly come across his books, and learn a little more about this fictional world as I read each one. ( )

Review to come :) ( )