Becerra x 2: shoulders and chasms

The titles of this diptych and its covers—visually related or similar—scream for inquiry: the man is driving, facing forward. The women are walking; their smiles are faint, out of focus, along the sidewalk. He—unique, complete, motorized—is at the wheel. They are not: they are scattered in their plurality. Such a semiotic reading, however, is not fulfilled in the interiors.

The man in A Man seems, at first, understandable: he's the proverbial Argentine nutcase, owner of a construction company; silent, bored with his family, classically dissatisfied, a sensual captive of "the dense perfumes of gasoline, oils, metals, rubber, and that sweat seeping through the gaskets," emanating from his small collection of cars. Until something changes when he decides to build—on the land adjacent to his house—a luxury workshop for his four-wheeled offspring.

The decision produces unexpected effects within the framework of a neighborhood and family big bang; a whirlwind of new people distracts him and begins to fascinate him. Surreptitiously, the man (who has no name) thus sends himself to an unknown collector of fate. Instead of calling himself to order, of behaving reasonably, the future ex-nut, who is about to turn 60, allows himself to be impregnated by that foreign wind of unexpected events.

He's shedding one skin and revealing another, leaving behind the candid, reassuring fixation that is the essence of all collecting. He's letting go of the wheel, allowing chance to invade him, to toss him around. He abandons the trappings of a wealthy neighbor, ventures into emerging backwaters, discovers the joy of solving small, shared problems. He's fueled by a new, fresh chaos. He breathes. He's different.

The mutation unfolds at two speeds: it begins in a convoluted way, encompassing engines, bodies, cylinders... all that overwhelming specificity of the fanatics even weighs heavily on the text's description, bogging down the story and its protagonist in vehicular details. But from this tangle emerges an epiphany, and triumphantly, the car-story is left behind: a novel takes flight.

The man takes on a voice because, even if he doesn't speak, his creator speaks: "He felt alone in the middle of the workshop that Giovannesse was leaving. It's a strange phenomenon, living, because in the events of reality, the ones that generally don't count, he was in his mansion, accompanied by his family." A poetic way of saying that nothing is what it is, but a symbol. At that point, the man no longer matters: what matters is the sequence he goes through, which transforms him into almost all possible men.

While the first volume slowly builds pace, Two Women begins at full speed, shouting, in Plaza de Mayo. One meets the other in the middle of the action and chooses to speak to her, to follow her. They walk almost at a trot, through the city that, at a certain point, we begin to miss: streets, diagonals, apocryphal bridges appear, a southern waterfront of another south, compressed, dreamlike, with a blended Buenos Aires feel. The girls' novel would be, if it were a film, a very long urban tracking shot. From the open sky, they move on to a book presentation in the downtown area, in search of food.

A setting that Becerra exploits to capture recognizable atmospheres where his irony meets something melancholic, existential: “The guests flattered each other in a pathological way. They spoke only of themselves… Most of them men, drifting into the nocturnal sea of ​​old age,” he says, making us think about something unexpected: that misty announcement of the approaching abyss. The gender issue (without the pompousness that the cliché sounds like) emerges in winks, with more humor than judgment: “They had an aperitif and chatted for a while with the depth of men, that is, with grandiloquent frivolity.”

In the sum of both novels, there are three women who take control and one man who lets himself be carried away. What would it have been like if he had started with Two Women? Thinking about it makes one imagine other readings, confirming that these titles by Juan José Becerra, like most of his work, have something of a palimpsest, a play, a good experiment.

A Man and Two Women , by Juan José Becerra. Seix Barral, 104 pages and 88 pages.