Who was Osvaldo Soriano, the most popular and charismatic Argentine author of the second half of the 20th century

“Argentinian literature lacks epic and sense of humorsaid the writer and journalist Osvaldo Soriano. This was perhaps his formula for becoming the most popular author and the most charismatic chronicler of Argentine literature of the second half of the 20th century.

The only son of a Sanitary Works official and a housewife, Soriano was a serene worker in a metallurgical company in Tandil when, at the age of 20, his passion for cinema, literature and journalism led him to venture into the local media. But his talent quickly led him to become the featured editor of the newspaper La Opinion.

A 25 years after his deaththe Sudamericana publishing house has published Soriano, the biography of the famous journalist written by the Argentinian Angel Berlanga. Nourished by countless interviews, the investigation of his work and access to private archives, the author manages to amalgamate the voice of Soriano with that of his friends, detractors, relatives, colleagues and editors to build a story on his life which is also, the story of a whole era.

From his first steps in journalism – with notes on which his editor removed his signature after stenciling them and others that led him to leave your town– even his passion for cats and Saint Laurentthis monumental biography plunges into the intimacy of one of Argentina’s fundamental writers of the 20th century.

I

It’s three o’clock in the morning on a summer evening and Osvaldo Soriano he is lying, alone, depressed, in the apartment he rents, rue Mario Bravo. Buenos Aires, 1972: he has lived in the city for almost three years and several months as a writer for La Opinión. He can’t get around the novel about Laurel and Hardy he’s working on: he wants to tell his parables of anonymity, of Hollywood stars and popular idols, and finally of decay and indifference to industry. . In his childhood and adolescence, the films of fat and skinny he loved them. Over time, he began to find out all he could about them. Shortly before leaving Tandil, he published a profile in the notebooks of Grupo Cine, the independent cultural group he coordinates.

In “The mistake of making people laugh”, the note he wrote a few days ago in La Opinión Cultural, it is clear that he knows much more about them. And that matters much more. But now he wants to take the leap, let go of his imagination. Stan & Ollie are shocked to have fun destroying property and mocking authority in the United States. Big deal it’s their favorite, a masterpiece: the duo want to sell a tree to a guy who has a park full of pines and a phenomenal destructive crescendo ensues.

Soriano even recounted the ephemeral passage of one and the other in Buenos Aires in 1914, 1915, each on his own, and in the article in La Opinión he recounted, with some recreational license, several scenes ” biographies”: the arrival of the ship that in 1912 he took from London to the United States for Charlie Chaplin Already Stan Laurier, star and understudy in a touring troupe; or Hardy’s attempt, already in decline, to get a job at the production company John Wayne. But there’s no case: he doesn’t get a plot that convinces him.

Since being in La Opinión, he has written about Skin and Chazarreta, Mohamed Aliof a film, of books, especially by North American authors: he is dazzled by the stories of Dashiel Hammett there Raymond Chandler. One evening, we were walking in Florida with a group of friends, all drunk, and one of them began to recite a prose text so beautiful that it impressed me. Right there he asked Norbert Soares, the reciter, whose it was. He replied, “Don’t you know Chandler?” And the next day he sent me for a cadet the long goodbye. This is how I discovered Philip Marlowe. “Pain and Dignity”, the first article he published in the cultural supplement of La Opinión, was about this crime novel anti-hero and his author.

While the bitterness ruminates hears a crash of pans in the kitchen. More perplexed than frightened, he gets up and goes slowly to see what is happening. Among the pots, there is a big black cat that has entered through the window. at dusk the cat looks at him. Soriano speaks to him, comes a little closer, and the animal jumps out the window. And he stood there for a moment, like he was telling me what you’re doing, you idiot, you don’t realize that the thing is obvious… What is obvious, what is Soriano reads there, what does he imagine? Which could very well be Chandler’s black cat. And that he appeared to tell her that the only one capable of investigating Laurel and Hardy’s story is a professional detective like Marlowe. When this idea takes shape in his head, the cat leaves.

This may sound like a joke to those who don’t understand the language of catsfor those who do not know that they are mediums – telephones, as it is said cortazar– but I know very well that if sad, lonely and final He exists thanks to this cat.

So Soriano goes back to his typewriter and types the meeting of Philip Marlowe with an Argentinian journalist named Osvaldo Soriano at Stan Laurel’s grave in Forest Lawn Cemetery.

II

Osiris of the Trojans spend a few days on vacation in Tandil, at the avocado ranch Juan Claudio Tuculet. It’s January 1969. Soriano, a columnist for the local newspaper Actividades, had met him about a year earlier, when he was in town to give a talk. Long after, Soriano will say that he shook hands”paralyzed with emotionwithout even waiting for him to speak to him: Troiani was then the editorial secretary of Primera Plana.

When he can, in texts for himself, or that he publishes in the notebooks of Grupo Cine, Soriano imitates the style, the tone of the magazine. One evening, Tuculet invites him to a dinner where Troiani is also present. “As soon as I told him I would give anything to write an article in the magazine, he smiled sarcastically and said, ‘Come on, do a rural electricity survey for the whole Tandil district, visit power plants, interview those responsible, the beneficiaries, the aggrieved, and pay attention to the world they live in; add color and drop me sixty lines on the first bus that passes. Soriano carries out the order. Shortly after the note appears, but there are forty lines, they are rephrased and they don’t have his signature.

The days of a boring summer follow one another: Cabral Faculty, Jorge Di Paola there Victor Laplace They have already emigrated from Tandil and the other friends of the group are eager to follow them. One afternoon, before the end of the summer, his mother showed him a telegram: “Please contact Mr. Julio Alganaraz to Primera Plana phones”. Soriano calls with the same emotion with which he shook hands with Troiani. On the other side of the line they ask you “the most informed, virulent and comical note ever written on the Holy Week procession in Tandil”. He immediately understands that if he does what they ask, he will have to leave town.

Interview, inquire, spend two days correcting. The note presents the procession as a decadent spectacle that uses faith to attract tourism and business. It also creates a pull between the episcopal conservatism and the criticism of some young priests, aligned with Third World ideas. The one who has played Christ for eight years denies: “I no longer feel the interpretation of Jesus, he is painted as too good, almost a fool, not as he really was, a real leader of the masses.” The procession, writes Soriano, is a caricature of Catholicism.

The day before the publication of the magazine, he says goodbye to his girlfriend, Ana María, and runs away with a suitcase: what he wrote will make noise. When the bus arrives at Constitución, he hears the newsboys shouting that Primera Plana is out. He buys it, leafs through it: his name is at the bottom of the ticket. In this number they sign, too, Hector Tizon, Daniel Moyano, Francisco Juarez.

I think I started dancing in the middle of the square, he will say in an interview.

I think I was about to start crying, he will say in another.

It was rare for Primera Plana to affix the authors’ signatures. “Sometimes a few modest initials and occasionally the names of Ramiro de Casasbellas, Thomas Eloy Martinez, Ernesto School oh Mariano Grondona”. He takes it for granted that they will make room for him in “the Argentine cathedral of modern journalism”. Leave the suitcase at the Tandil, a small hotel on Avenida de Mayo that Cabral and Laplace had already passed through. When he comes to the editorial office, Troiani does not give him the ball: “And what are you doing here? He warms up an armchair at the reception, enjoys some food vouchers given to him by the journalists’ idols, reads the newspapers and waits for the opportunity to be sent to cover something. Immediately the letter from the Bishop of Tandil arrives, Bishop Luis J. Actislike a madman because of the profanities that Primera Plana publishes on the procession.

Born in Mar del Plata, Argentina, in 1943. Died in Buenos Aires in 1997.

He was a writer and journalist.

Wrote books like sad, lonely and final, the shadowless hour there tales of happy years.

He scripted movies like A woman, There will be no more sorrow or forgetting there winter quarters.

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