Roberto Mariani, Cuentos de la oficina

‘Arlt's anger burns with a white heat; Mariani's is a cold, blue despair.’ This observation by Christopher Leland (1986: 71) goes to the heart of the matter: the energetic, combative, flamboyant Arlt was never contained by social or literary convention, and until the end of his short life always pressed on, transgressing and inventing. Arlt carved out his personal autonomy, earning a living through creative writing. By contrast, Mariani, sympathetically portrayed by Leland, emerges as a literary figure of some erudition and (as a key member of the Boedo group) social commitment, who however never achieved the recognition he merited. Possibly Leland's assessment is overgenerous, since although Cuentos de la oficina is important, little else has endured.

Mariani, born in 1893 in the Boca port area of Buenos Aires, to immigrant parents, abandoned studies in engineering in order to devote himself to literature. However, his literary endeavours – writing, translating and editing – were a leisure-time activity: he was a functionary virtually all his life, notably in the Banco de la Nación and the Dirección Nacional de Arquitectura. Little is known about Mariani's private life, although Leland speculates that ‘he suffered from severe sexual problems during the whole of his adult life’ (1986: 72). Be that as it may, his life seems to have been austere: he lived in lodging houses, and is not known to have formed any close relationships. There seems to be some correlation between Mariani's stark personal life and his literary development. In Cuentos de la oficina the young author-functionary's detailed knowledge informs a dramatic denunciation of a system, and exposure of the miserable lot of those caught within it. It is a work with immediate implications, and the writer who analyses the system so cogently probably has three realistic courses of action before him: to challenge the system; to effect individual transcendence or escape – in reality or in the imagination; to remain, unhappily, inside. This latter course was Mariani’s, and his 1943 novel Regreso a Dios (which is discussed below in Chapter 5) is the result: an embittered, melodramatic work, of psychological interest in documenting the result of a further two decades of bureaucratic and lodging-house existence, but useless in addressing existential dilemmas or the social and political issues of 1940s Argentina.

Leónidas Barletta, introducing Cuentos de la oficina, identifies Mariani as a founding figure of Argentine literature.