What we don’t want to know, but we sense. The irremediable. What is hidden. What overflows. What surprises. There are eight stories of Marcelo Arias in The inertia of bodiesand there are eight topics addressed in each of them.
Edited by January Editorial, its one hundred and twenty-two pages play with tedium, with popular beliefs, with the open wounds of history, with family Sundays, with what is alive and with what has already been. They are a mix between the collective and the intimate. And in each story the apocalypse, the spark that ignites the truth dormant within the characters’ guts.
Everything happens in minimal spaces: in a studio apartment, in the cabin of a sailboat, in the barking of a dog, in a neighborhood store or on the edge of a knife. And that truth that was waiting for its moment of fame, springs forth by the work and grace of the author’s pen. He is the one who commands. And he manages to take us from terror to tenderness in a single point and apart. They are crackling stories, which open spaces that previously remained closed. Short and not so short stories which, with a notable thematic and temporal diversity, make for a pleasant read.
Dog life it is the first one. “The dog on the terrace must be silenced. Better if the owners take care of it,” was the warning that the protagonist of the story slipped under the door of the owners of the animal in question“Every night the hoarse, hoarse barking continued until dawn. It was a disinterested barking, which did not seem to express any need and in which he sensed the explicit purpose of ruining his life, of condemning him, almost every day, to the insurmountable fear of going to work without sleeping.”
The note didn’t work and the dog continued doing his thing until one day when “The sky was cloudy, the night was cool and the neighborhood was sleeping.”, the insomniac made a decision.
It follows Finitude, 1877 or how some issues were resolved in the last century.” I am a man who reveals extraordinary sorrow. (…) I sense that my wait is about to end“, says the character in the first person who is not Borgeseven if it seems. “The facón offers some resistance when I pull to retrieve it, as if by penetrating it, it had become attached to the belly of its victim.”. And well, if something goes wrong, it ends badly, said my grandmother and Marcelo Arias It also tells us about that and many other things. It challenges us. We are afraid of ourselves when revenge triggers the unexpected and fate is inevitable, without exception.
The inertia of bodies It is the third story in the anthology and has the same title as the work. It tells a specific event that happens during a sailing trip. Things happen and what happens is very similar to an analogy of the adventure of living. The narrator is completely unaware of what can happen (just like in life?). And then: what happens when it is uncertainty that rules? His friend Gabriel, the owner of the sailboat, has experience on board, and so does the rest of the crew.
However, he cannot help the terror that little by little (as Cortazar wrote): “Neither the horrible sky, nor the waves, nor the violent shaking of the sailboat made me suspect that we were in trouble, until I looked at my friend’s face. Only then did I measure gravity. (…) When I stood up, leaning on my arms, my hands and knees were wet, because there was a lot of water on the floor of the boat.”. And in open river navigation, the protagonist learns (and so do we) -that in a storm “two captains sink a ship“, something that leaves you thinking and that is ultimately nothing more than another of the lessons that this beautiful story of Arias. “For several minutes I will do nothing but think about that phrase: about the conflictive bond established by urgency and deliberation. (…) When what happened to us happened, one of us proclaimed himself captain, without consulting anyone. “It shakes my convictions a little to recognize that it was an authoritarian gesture to which I can find no arguments to oppose and which I warmly celebrate that it took place.”
In Delivery, the room of the stories, the author takes us to 1816 Yet the “scoundrel defection consummated by one of the 29 deputies who, the day before, signed the act of Independence declared by the Constituent Congress of the United Provinces of South America”. Any resemblance to reality is your idea. Anyway. Leave it there.
The next is The space she occupies, that investigates with nobility the finitude of life. It is the synthesis of human tragedy, embodied in an old lady, “alone, fragile, petite, not much less than ninety years old, not much more than one and a half meters tall, smiling and very cordial, the finest voice I have ever heard in my life” and it contains a moral: although we insist on aspiring to eternity, we are destined to die. And that is and will be the only certainty we have in our short, medium or long existence. That’s why be careful! with what we do while it lasts.
Anyway, to close – and I promise that I won’t spoil any more details of the beautiful florilegium edited by January Editorial-, I want to say that the story that I liked the most, the one that tells you that there is hopethat there is light in the darkness and all that, it is Carelessnessthe penultimate story in the book of Marcelo Arias. ““Open the box and give me eight thousand pesos,” he told me and showed me the gun hidden under his jacket.”. The narrator is the owner of a neighborhood ice cream shop. And you will wonder and What hope or light is there in an armed robbery? Well, there is that and much more. Read it, and then tell me.
♦ Marcelo Arias is a writer and university professor, with a degree in Literature (UBA) and a Master’s degree in Social Sciences and Humanities (UNQ).
♦ He is the author of: “The Sound Barrier” (Modesto Rimba, 2016) and “A Narrow World: Travel Novel” (Modesto Rimba, 2018).
♦ As a researcher and discourse analyst, he is the author of the essay “The television news: glare of a disturbing discourse” (Biblos, 2014).
