A gentle wave

The crónica is a peculiarly Latin American blend of journalism and storytelling. Famous practitioners include Gabriel García Márquez and Clarice Lispector, but the less well-known (especially outside Argentina) Hebe Uhart also proves a worthy cronista in this collection translated by Anna Vilner. Uhart, who died aged 81 in 2018, was the author of two novels and many volumes of short stories that tended to feature ordinary Argentinians living in remote towns. The vignettes and travelogues collected here contain observations about fellow Latin Americans that are often acute, sometimes slapdash and always original. Uhart’s home in Buenos Aires is the starting point for journeys all the way to Mexico or Colombia, or just to a café around the corner. She seems to jump on a bus with no clear idea of what awaits her at the other end, and treats all destinations, near and far, with equal pragmatism and whimsy. “I went to Asunción because I had a feeling I would like it” is a typical opener.

The earliest crónica describes Uhart’s first trip abroad, when she was just twenty and travelled by train from Buenos Aires to La Paz. This journey, undertaken with a haughty friend who somewhat resembles Jeanne Moreau, lasts three days, during which time Uhart walks up and down the carriages, seeking out interesting people. She meets a priest who escaped Nazi Germany by disguising himself as a cyclist and joining a long-distance race. A Peruvian who has been studying medicine in Buenos Aires persuades her that he is descended from an Inca prince and invites her to sit on his knee. A sad-looking teacher, accompanied by her son, produces from her bag first a chicken breast, which she cuts up for the child’s lunch, then a flag, which she instructs him to wave while declaring “Viva Bolivia” as they cross the border.

These fruitful encounters take place in backwaters and far-flung communities, the kind that are still chewing over nineteenth-century conflicts. In this book’s introductionUhart’s compatriot Mariana Enriquez describes the author as “a writer of the outskirts”, sending home dispatches like “a gentle wave from the pampa.” After seeing an advertisement to “visit Irazusta”, a small town in northeastern Argentina, Uhart obediently hops on a bus, asking the first woman she meets on arrival where she can stay. “Here, in my home”, the woman suggests. It transpires that nineteen other visitors have responded to the advert, and this influx sends the town “into a frenzy”. All twenty tourists are invited to have dinner with a local geography teacher and take it in turns to play with her baby.

Uhart visits indigenous communities in remote parts of Argentina, including the Charrúa people in Maciá, whose atavistic fear of persecution makes them reluctant to appear on any census. In Formosa a university lecturer tells her about efforts to include Toba students. “For example, we wanted everyone in a group to speak up, not just one person. But for them, it was just the opposite: they are used to having a spokesperson.” A teacher herself, when she arrives somewhere new Uhart often heads straight for the local school, with a copy of Horacio Quiroga’s short stories ready to hand over as a gift.

There are some pleasing and funny aperçus among the crónicas, including “When Spring arrives in the north and swallows gravitate northward, North American professors migrate down here”. The inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro are like “citizens of the future”: “They walk around the city … half-naked, with only a towel under their arm that they carry like a minuscule package.” A piece on the many curious idioms coined in the town of Tapalqué must have been difficult to translate, but Vilner rises admirably to the challenge. Rather than tell someone they’re wrong, the people of Tapalqué apparently prefer to say: “It seems to me that not all of these cows are yours”.

Uhart doesn’t shy away from the odd sweeping statement. While it’s true that the inhabitants of Buenos Aires often seem too quick to let you know whether they are pro- or anti-Peronist, her pigeonholing of both sides is more mischievous than accurate. Progressives, she says, “have portraits of horses galloping in the office, but it’s always a discreet gallop, nothing out of control”. In Peronist families, meanwhile,

whims and desires are more permissible. If a member of the family has a craving for hot chocolate at four in the morning, or spends all of their savings on meeting Mickey Mouse in Disneyland, or shoots down loquats with a gun, the other family members will not openly disapprove, because they are not inclined to make value judgments – they are not constrained by the Platonic Form of the Good.

More than fifty years after that train trip to La Paz, she is still to be found sending dispatches from her bed in intensive care, watching as the world passes by and resenting the indignity of her gown, open at the back. “We all have asses”, a friend reminds her gravely, and even at this low ebb Hebe Uhart can still appreciate a fine Socratic truth.

Miranda France is a consultant editor at the TLS

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