Capitalism and Culpability
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By Federico Perelmuter
As Toni Morrison once said, guilt is “a substitute emotion . . . of no use to anyone.” It is an index of failure fed by not facing up to some odious fact that has turned violent—melancholic in the recursive, Freudian sense. Guilt’s unproductivity should set it against capitalism, which longs to extract as much labor as efficiently as possible. Starting in the 1980s, feminist Marxist theorists such as Arlie Russell Hochschild (author of the landmark text The Managed Heart) have framed emotions as crucial to a deindustrializing, service-centered society. Emotions, Hochschild showed, are integral to the public-facing service occupations that took center stage in the early years of the neoliberal era, from flight attendant to fast food server.
Garbage collectors, the protagonists of Andrés Neuman’s Bariloche, are on the other end of the spectrum. Theirs is an ancient, nearly anachronistic profession, transformed by urbanization and automation but never part of the service economy, or at least not its public-facing side. Neuman’s lyrical exegesis of life in late twentieth century Buenos Aires—originally released to great acclaim in 1999 and published in March 2023 by Open Letter in Robin Myers’ exacting translation—is awash in tumultuous, errant feeling: guilt, mainly, combined with nostalgic escapism. The novel’s protagonist, Demetrio Rota, was born and raised in Bariloche, a town known for its glorious natural ambience. (Bariloche is located near the Andes in Southern Argentina on the shores of lake Nahuel Huapi.) Neuman’s prose glows, especially when capturing Demetrio’s remembrances of Bariloche:
The earth thickens until it opens out onto the rocky shore, the water knocking there with silver glints. Against the curtain of the sky, coins spinning on their axis. The ochre of the trunks conceals itself behind the shadows. The thickets twist and curl around oblivion, as a figure in a nightgown, spectral, haunting, quickly cuts through the myrtles like the only happenstance of time stopped still.
Alas, Demetrio left school—and Bariloche—for Buenos Aires as a teenager, following his parents. The family, broken by the firing of Demetrio’s father, and his brother, Martín, who left for mandatory military service and a career far from his parents. Jobless in the big city, Demetrio’s father would “get up around two in the morning, my old man. He’d get home at noon, eat something, read the paper, spend a little time with us, and go to bed early because he had to start making bread at three a.m. sharp.” Demetrio’s father develops a cough soon thereafter and dies months later—the cold and the early mornings, his mother says.
Neuman’s prose gives urgency to Demetrio’s voice, which pulsates with rage—guilt’s masculine façade—at his father’s death:
What I don’t get is how the hell I stayed home like an idiot, painting a door green or peeling vegetables with Mom. What the hell was I waiting for, instead of going out and telling him no, just one second sir, you stay here, I’m the one who’s going to work, I’m stronger, you rest. Or at least take over half his morning shift, I don’t know, something. Instead, I filled my room with furtive cigarettes and puzzles.
Demetrio, the guilty man, had already left behind an adolescent lover in Bariloche with whom, during the summer, he would sneak onto a small island for romance until they were caught and forbidden from seeing each other. As his abandonments and betrayals accrue, Demetrio’s guilty conscience blossoms.
Demetrio lives in Chacarita, a now-gentrifying neighborhood which, at the time of the novel’s composition, was known for its cemetery—the largest in Buenos Aires—and quiet, almost suburban middle-class houses. Neon yellow uniforms glowing in the dark, Demetrio and his partner, El Negro, trudge through downtown Buenos Aires every morning, enduring freezing cold, nothing in their stomach but the fantasy of the café con leche they share daily, halfway through their shift. Demetrio, brought up mostly middle class, could have procured an easier job but chooses not to do so. He emulates his father’s absurd waking hours and self-imposed labors in almost Hebraic self-punishment, condemned by his sinful unhelpfulness to wander the city’s alleyways at dawn in the cold (even though Demetrio knows his father had a cough for years).
Unlike Demetrio, El Negro is undoubtedly working-class: he has another job, to which he rushes immediately after dropping off their truck at the warehouse. El Negro is married, too, which we know because Demetrio is sleeping with his wife. On game days, when El Negro and his friends go see Boca Juniors play, Demetrio crosses almost half the city to meet Verónica. Verónica loves Demetrio madly and sees him as more “cultivated” than El Negro—or she’s just desperate to flee her husband and two children. If Bariloche has something resembling a plot, it revolves around these affective misadventures. Demetrio cannot stand the guilt he feels lying to El Negro every day while El Negro remains totally ignorant of the extent of Verónica’s unfaithfulness: “Demetrio, who felt the droplets soiling his cheeks and softening his skull, very still, his hair a black pulp, with a weight on his shoulders and his vision diluted, confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt that El Negro knew nothing, or that he’d never be able to retaliate with hatred. His awkward paw of a hand came to rest fondly on Demetrio’s shoulder: he received the stab of this caress as the rain picked up.”
Overwhelmed by guilt yet again, Demetrio walks away from Verónica’s longing arms and into the rote, anodyne isolation that has ruled his life since leaving the maternal abode. Occasionally broken—his brother visits briefly; Verónica pleads with him in multiple ways before surrendering and ending things—Demetrio’s alienation and shattered sense of belonging latch onto an unhoused man. El Negro and Demetiro pick him up on Calle Tacuarí—a “no man’s land” for those who mostly huddle in central squares and plazas—upon first noticing his presence there. They get breakfast together at the café then return him to his spot. This becomes part of their routine until Demetrio offers to let the old man crash in the uninhabited truck warehouse over a weekend. Come Sunday morning, the neon suits have vanished, as has the old man. Guilt, Demetrio’s oldest companion, returns him to his irreparable isolation and strange fixations. He spends his spare time assembling puzzles that depict Bariloche and its surroundings: an emblem of the intractable loneliness of a failed sociality.
Facile critical approaches oft simplify Bariloche into a portrayal of neoliberal atomization and post-national identification, much as they have the work of Roberto Bolaño, who prefaces this edition. Neuman, too, is a migrant Latin American, and has lived in Spain for decades. But, more compellingly and originally, Bariloche acutely witnesses guilt’s place in a capitalist society, showing it as the product of unmoored subjects who cannot but take responsibility for a world collapsing around them and thus turn toward self-loathing and escapism. Demetrio finds in Verónica the short-lived, precarious relief of sex and otherwise spends his days longing for a lost home. His life goes on in self-imposed penance: guilt run amok, even though he is arguably not responsible for the things that provoke his pain. Guilt, then: capitalist apocalypse unrecognized, made personal.
Federico Perelmuter is a writer from Buenos Aires.
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