Buenos Aires of the 1940, Racecourse, the Jockey Club and Montevideo come together in legal burnout, by Carlos Kreimer.
a prestigious lawyer, an old offense, a "legal" revenge, carefully planned; two women –“big-hearted girls”–, a sidekick who turned out to be a "gabion" and a veteran police officer make up the basic picture of an impeccable detective story, unexpected ending.
legal burnoutIt is the "prima" ofCarlos Kreimer, a lawyer of eighty long years, of extensive militancy in the Socialist Club and the Political Club, art collector and patron, tango expert, insatiable reader and great conversationalist. But above all porteño, essentially porteño.
The plus of this detective story is in the setting: takes place in Buenos Aires in 1940. It is the year of the heyday of the old oligarchic Argentina –the protagonist is a “Lavalle Paz”– and also the year of the German invasion of France, lived in our country as the arrival of the barbarians in Rome.
That swan song tone is the backdrop of this story, to which the secondary characters give consistency and verisimilitude. some are real, like Federico Pinedo or José Peco, and others are characteristic social types of the various worlds that intersect in the novel, just as they crossed paths in Buenos Aires at that time.
The protagonist –an old patrician– moves between his house in Recoleta, the old Faculty of Law -the pseudo-Gothic building on Las Heras avenue-, his studio in the brand new Diagonal Norte and the Jockey Club. The other sides of this world are the neighborhood of Once –not the ghetto of Corrientes and Pasteur but the very Buenos Aires one of the Plaza, La Perla and Rubí coffee–, and the Hippodrome and Bajo Belgrano, where the famous lawyer meets the fauna of the turf: jockeys, keepers and donkeys. In sum, high and low mix, as in the song "Fiesta" by Joan Manuel Serrat.
The difference, more specifically porteña, resides in the prosperous and educated children of immigrants, that begin to emerge between both extremes. His parents became, maybe, established warehouses or artisans, homeowners. Your children are already successful entrepreneurs or professionals, proud of their modest origins, who do not go to the Hippodrome but besiege the sanctum sanctorum of the old oligarchy: the jockey club. "They will not pass" is the slogan of Lavalle Paz, old and influential partner.
Borges needed the sidewalk across the street to make his block in old Palermo a synthesis of Buenos Aires. For Carlos Kreimer, there is no Buenos Aires without Montevideo, "the other side", a kind of parallel and bizarre Buenos Aires, with its old center and the port, its modest neighborhoods and the Maroñas racetrack, where part of the plot takes place.
The war in Europe breaks the pax porteña, interrupts the usual order of days, disrupt business, break into politics, generates controversy and brings refugees. Among them, the young protagonist, a French girl from Toulouse – coincidentally the city of Gardel – whose first job stopover is the famous Chantecler cabaret. There a promising young man begins to become famous with his bandoneon. It's Hannibal Troilo, Pichuco, whose somewhat anachronistic presence in the famous cabaret is justifiable poetic license.
The Chantecler is the place where a good part of the plot is tied, where are the top ones, those below and those in the middle, summoned by the lawyer patricio, in love and vengeful. Their meetings are held there or in other cafes, famous restaurants or cabarets, that the author, and others a bit younger, we got to know.
The center of the scene is Corrientes street, newly widened, which intersects at the Obelisk with the very modern Diagonal Norte. There are all: those of Recoleta, those of the neighborhoods, who attend theaters by sections, those of the urban suburbs, those “tango neighborhoods” where they come from, heading downtown, the boys for “a night of garufa”, o las estercitas, turned into “milonguitas”.
It is the crossroads of the different cultures of Buenos Aires -the Creole, the immigrant, that of the workers, that of the marginals– that, as José Luis Romero showed, mix and shape something new, porteño and in the long run national, whose singular epic is usually narrated by the tangos of the forties.
The world that Kreimer recreates in his novel is, in the background, a world of tango. Many fragments of his letters could have nourished the footnotes. It is what gives flavor and testimonial value to a novel that, besides, has a dense historical foundation, meticulously worked and exposed in an almost didactic way, in the style of the novels of Arturo Pérez Reverte.
At the end of the story, some of the protagonists are doing very well, and to others well. But to the protagonist, the lawyer Lavalle Paz, beyond his “legal scam”, he is doing very badly. The farcical ending, worthy of Goldoni or Molière, barely hides a look tinged with discouragement at a world that is ending, like that of Wagner's gods.
There are a few years left for Peronism, but you can imagine, in the melancholic end of the novel, twilight of the gods.
legal burnout, Carlos Kreimer. Editorial Lea, 288 P.
Luis Alberto Romero. The historian is the author, among others, Brief contemporary history of Argentina, Argentina at school, The Argentine crisis and popular sectors, culture and politics: Buenos Aires in the interwar.
Source: Luis Alberto Romero – Revista Ñ – Clarion – 4 March 2020
