Violent tales of a rural collective
Every so often, the world retrieves a writer from literary obscurity and repackages him or her as a “best-kept secret”. The Argentine Diego Angelino is one such example. His work has hitherto circulated in elusive and curious ways; it has been a marginal presence, sparse but steeped in poetry. Now we have a first complete edition of his short stories, which includes letters to the author from Victoria Ocampo (Silvina’s sister), the editor of Sur magazine – testimony to the recognition he once received from one of Argentina’s most influential literary figures.
Angelino was twenty-nine in 1973 when he submitted the story “Bajo la luna, sobre la tierra, bajo la noche” (Beneath the Moon, Above the Earth, Beneath the Night) to the Fondo Nacional de las Artes. Ocampo, then on the board, wrote back: “I like the straightforward simplicity and the narrative style. Keep writing”. Soon after, Angelino completed his novel Al sur del sur (To the South of the South), which was recommended for publication by a panel including Juan Carlos Onetti, Julio Cortázar and Rodolfo Walsh. But the author decided not to publish it. It remains unpublished.
Angelino has since produced just four novels and twenty short stories. He lives in El Bolsón, Patagonia, where he runs a plant nursery named La Tierra Baldía (The Barren Land), which sounds a little like one of his stories. He has seven children, and for thirty years wrote nothing at all: life had his full attention. His method quietly resists the idea that writing needs to be a constant activity.
The opening stories unfold in a fictional town in Entre Ríos known locally as Campo del Banco. (The land was repossessed by the bank after the original owner became insolvent.) Here, place becomes protagonist: the narrator emerges from collective memory and local speech (echoing the communal voice of William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”) to chronicle a territory overshadowed by death. Stories intersect, characters resurface, and always the geography underpins the narrative. The book’s second half takes us further afield, to Patagonia, Paraná, Chile; it adopts more colloquial registers and makes specific historical allusions. Despite these tonal shifts, Cuentos completos avoids unevenness. Angelino’s voice seems fully formed from the outset, its rigour a facet of its emotional authenticity. With their wide temporal spans and domestic tensions, the Campo del Banco stories certainly show the influence of Faulkner, though in their sheer concision they are perhaps closer to Jorge Luis Borges, whose influence also appears in the mythical geography and narrative circularity.
The stories unfold with the rhythm of rural life. Much happens – terrible things, sometimes – but events often take place while people are waiting (for floods to recede, a letter to arrive, a battle to begin). Time follows its own rules. What calendars fail to record is marked instead by death, that shared destiny and final boundary. The opening of “Bajo la luna, sobre la tierra, bajo la noche” is almost musical:
“First Gringo died, then the hens, the turkeys and the orphaned lambs that the Baroness had been tending since the early days of her widowhood, and then the Frutos’ son.” (My translation)
Characters and local institutions (families, the general store) anchor the action. The cast includes young runaways, men in decline, pious fathers, quarrelsome baquianos, perpetual widows, feuding neighbours and itinerant figures: soldiers, musicians, merchants.
Cuentos completos may seem an ambitious title for a volume comprising just twenty stories. Yet it gives the sense of a finished body of work, in a precise voice, with a style that is always succinct. So often, Diego Angelino’s writing dispenses with drama, drawing its strength from omission. The narratives build instead through a shaped recollection of events. The violence of what takes place in these rural spaces cannot bear much extended narration, and the most profound truths emerge from the realms of the unspoken.
