The secret of endurance: the work of Sara Gallardo

In the last decade the narrative and journalistic work of Sara Gallardo (Argentina 1931-1988) has been reissued by independent Latin American publishers. Together with the Argentine Silver Bowl, Fjord, Tourist Class, Excursions, Dum-Dum (Bolivia), Laguna (Colombia), the young Spanish publishing house Malas earth has joined the work of reissuing this little recognized author. But what is the secret of its endurance, beyond three decades of his death and four of his last published work? We try to answer it by reviewing his work, consulting his editors, as well as contemporary writers admiring his work.

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Since his first novel, January (1958 and reissued in 2019 by Bad Lands), Gallardo explored the bewilderment of wealthy social classes, small hypocrisies, the loss of innocence, as well as a reconfiguration of the way the field was approached as a literary space, touching controversial themes in his time. Like, for example, the rape and the consequent abortion attempts of Nefer, the protagonist. Read modestly as "a story of love upset," in January , the daughter of a staykeeper in a room is a victim of her employer's sexual abuse and forced to marry him. The writer Alejandro Morellón places this novel “in a diptych next to Yerma (1934) by García Lorca, so it has a rural and stigmatic atmosphere, because of this social and hetero-patriarchal violence regarding the maternal functions of a woman in a village space "

She was followed by two more novels, Blue Pants (1963) and Los greyhounds, the greyhounds (1968) that still remain within the realistic spectrum. According to the writer Federico Falco, this first period of his work was influenced by "certain trends common to his time and with some influence of American literature and post-war Italian writers such as Cesare Pavese, Vasco Pratolini." It should be noted in his following works of narrative Eisejuaz (1971), The country of smoke (1977) and The rose in the wind (1979) the author took an important step: experimentation with folklore, the marvelous, magical realism and even mysticism in convergence with the Latin American oral tradition, without falling into the clichés of costumbrismo.

To this eclectic work is added his non-fiction work, recently gathered in Macaneos (2016) and Los Oficios (2018) thanks to the work of the expert in his work, Lucía de Leone and, also Paula Pico Estrada, editor and eldest daughter of Gallardo. At the same time as fiction, since the fifties, the author collaborated with chronicles, articles and columns for both fashion magazines and for Confirmed and Front-page magazines, reputed media of the time. With the freedom that characterized his narrative, Gallardo gave his opinion on the miniskirt and boasted in a programmatic way of his "outdatedness": "Give up the pernicious custom of asking me to write about current issues. I am not interested in current affairs. Also, I think it doesn't exist. And if it exists, it is vulgar. Read me as I am, and thank fate for that fate. Congratulations".

Despite this apparent frivolity, Gallardo did not hesitate to travel to the most isolated and disadvantaged places in Argentina because of his chronicles. On one of his trips to northern Argentina where he met first-hand the aboriginal communities that would give him the inspiration for what is considered his most ambitious novel, Eisejuaz (also reissued in 2019 by Bad Lands). Starring an Indian mataco who believes he is receiving signs of God, the sharp work with orality and the indirect free style in this novel still amazes his contemporary readers. According to the writer Liliana Colanzi, who will publish the book in Bolivia, through Dum-Dum, her editorial project “ Eisejuaz is more in force than ever: not only is her language full of findings, but she speaks of the countryside as a place crossed by the forces of capitalist extractivism that is cornering and pushing indigenous people and animals from their territories. We are seeing this phenomenon right now with the destruction and burning of the Amazon in Brazil and Bolivia, and with the numerous ecocides in Latin America. What Sara Gallardo does in a formidable way is to take the indigenous from a place of purity - which is also to fix it in the past and make it anachronistic and irrelevant - and show us this indigenous acculturated in his barbaric Catholicism, which is capable of giving God an animal face. In that sense, Gallardo is a furious transculturator. ”

Descendant of the founders of Argentina

An anecdote told by the writer and journalist Mariana Enriquez effectively illuminates the family legacy it came from: in one of those typical teenage adventures, one of her sisters escaped from the family estate and when the police found her and interrogated her, the young woman He said his last name was "Gallardo", who lived on the "Gallardo estate" and attended a school, also called "Gallardo". A triple coincidence made the police think that the girl was lying and exaggerating her family ancestry, but it was not. Like her sister, Sara shared that family lineage. It was a direct descendant of the "founders" of Argentina.

Born Sara Gallardo Drago Miter in Buenos Aires in 1931, she was a great-granddaughter of the statesman and twice president Bartolomé Miter, great-granddaughter of the writer Miguel Cané, granddaughter of the scientist and minister, Ángel Gallardo, and daughter of the historian Guillermo Gallardo. Stimulated early by the family library, and with this oligarch legacy weighing behind him, Gallardo was not pigeonholed by his ancestry and chose the difficult path. Therefore, his work is closer, in his literary ambition, to the work of Silvina Ocampo and Elvira Orphée, as noted by the writer and great connoisseur of his work, Leopoldo Brizuela, were also little recognized in his time. Maybe that sets her apart from authors like Marta Lynch, Beatriz Guido and Silvina Bullrich, contemporary bestsellers who have not passed the test of time. It should be noted that, unlike them, who wrote about the experiences of middle class urban women, Gallardo focused on rewriting Argentina's rural novel.

Because of that, Gallardo was only recognized in more select literary circuits. As one of the letters of the writer Manuel Mujica Laínez recalls where he congratulates her on the innovation achieved with Eisejuaz . Like The country of smoke (1977), this novel was inspired by the influence of her second husband, Héctor Murena. Poet and essayist influenced by mysticism and Latin American thinking, he was the one who induced her to write "beyond her class". Murena died in 1975, of a heart attack, after a deep tendency to depression and alcoholism. This loss affected Gallardo, who began a wandering life, which pushed her to live first in the town of Sierra Chica, in Córdoba (Argentina) in a house that was owned by Manuel Mujica Laínez. And then in several European cities like Geneva, Barcelona and Rome. He died unexpectedly, of an asthma attack in 1988. His last and unfinished project was to write the biography of the Jewish intellectual and Carmelite nun Edith Stein, murdered in Auschwitz.

The legacy

The renewed interest in the work of Sara Gallardo, after disappearing from the canon during the 1980s and 1990s, resurfaced in the mid-2000s, by independent editors and writers of later generations. Its Spanish editors, Nicolás and Guillermo, from the young publishing house Malas tierra say about her: “What interested us about Sara Gallardo was the exercise of periphery that she carried out and that had not yet taken place in Argentine literature of the twentieth century. From the characters — Nefer, the daughter of a stallion who becomes pregnant after a rape and cannot abort, Eisejuaz, the Chaco indigenous to whom civilization has taken away their culture, their language and finally their world — to the orality of his prose, in which Spanish merges with native languages. ”

His work, brief, but accurate, refers, to the past, to a broad eclectic spectrum of writers ranging from Antonio di Benedetto, Guimarães Rosa, Felisberto Hernández, Juan Rulfo or Edgar Lee Masters. And in the present it continues, according to its contemporary editors and writers, projecting itself in the voices of recognized writers such as Selva Almada, and Samantha Schweblin or the most recent Marina Closs, Mariana Travacio or the Mexican Fernanda Melchor. Perhaps the secret of its endurance is in its own, strange and original voice, its great stylistic and thematic freedom, in the courage with which it deviated from easy paths and cultural agendas.