Pros and cons of catching Osvaldo Lamborghini's rage

In July 1974, at the Cedrón Brothers' Workshop, Osvaldo Lamborghini understood—or thought he understood—what Oscar Masotta had just told a crowd: that his book The Fjord is "the best text in world literature." In January 1981, at Pringles, Lamborghini dragged Arturo Carrera around his Pompeian home, carrying an imposing desk that had belonged to his grandfather. He took him from room to room, carrying a typewriter.

Between 1978 and 1980, he signed letters on the letterhead of the self-proclaimed Freudian School of Mar del Plata. In January 1979, he spoke on the pine tree of the exquisite Finnegan's Bookstore—located at 2733 Santa Fe Street—before the select audience of Juana Karasic, José Luis Mangieri, Roberto Raschella, and Hugo Savino. He stayed until the early hours of the morning, only to reopen the store himself the next day. Throughout the pages of Ricardo Strafacce 's biography, Lamborghini sways his uncompromising Osvaldic ancestry. In every place in time on which one rests, unrepeatable and unique, there are Lamborghinies. Accused of being a "cheap sadist," Paula Wajsman's cat, Vespasiana, is thrown into the void from the 8th floor.

“It's better not to know them. I would have liked not to have met Osvaldo and to have encountered the work. It's better for working with him. It would give me an advantage. That's interesting, it has another interest. You can distance yourself more. You can be more unpunished, more naive. And in others the opposite, because those who knew him are more naive than those who didn't, right?” Tamara Kamenszain spoke like this, in a 2009 interview. And who, regarding the biography, already added back then: “There are many Osvaldo corpses. It's better than thinking of it as a fight over the corpse, which Osvaldo provided for that… That's why what Strafacce did, how fantastic that he was able to do that with such a character. And in the end, he doesn't canonize him…”

Read in 2008, the biography quickly revealed itself as the archaeology of a scene—an intrigue—that, narrated frame by frame, in slow motion, replenished the details of a crucial internal conflict that took place in the heart of the 1970s and had shaken the hardliners of Argentine literature. Read in 2025, a sort of Pierre Menard effect—through the mere passage of time—modifies Strafacce's biography . Some characters not so recognizable then are now revealed as key protagonists, with the aura of mythical characters: Hanna Muck, Diana Bilmezzi, Vilma Marzoa, Tina Serrano, and Marcelo Uzal. And there, interspersed among all those names, is that of Admiral Massera, in a footnote to this new edition that will surely—Pierre Menard-style effects—generate even more commentary.

Trapped within the traps of the imaginary he himself wove for himself; or between collages of "B-grade" photos and iconoclastic pop drawings; sunk in a tunnel of dystopian sexuality, Lamborghini is also a subject trapped in the web of his labyrinth. A paradoxical prisoner and accomplice of a preciousness of the abject and illusory language games. Thus, he believes or propagates promises of nonexistent trips to Mexico, of jobs in multinational advertising companies (and not so multinational ones as well), or of sumptuous publications with dollar contracts that, ironically, are actually fulfilled in the US.

In the biography, one can read a sort of family structure, made up of friendships and affections. A sort of hierarchical structure. Thus, a gradation can be made between those who gradually become disillusioned (cured of the Lamborghini-like). At the lowest end of the chain are those who never become un-Lamborghini-like. The most curious thing is that the lowest link can also be—from a certain Madame Bovaryism of the cursed—the highest hierarchy in the chain. Although there was an extreme at which he refused to remain, Osvaldo Lamborghini plotted and knew every step of the chain.

There's a story that's rarely cited and that works in dialogue with the biography. It features a black dog and was, naturally, written by César Aira . It's about a dog that transmits its rage. There's an instinctive fear of being caught by that spreading rage. The most literary aspect is that rage isn't transmitted by contact, but rather from a distance. It's not difficult to see who Lamborghini's rage infected or touched. This is legible in a certain way of becoming intransigent and radical: in the face of all the protocols in the world. It's not difficult to detect the false revelers of that intransigence. Everyone bears the mark of Lamborghini as best they can.

Is Lamborghini really our Saint Genet: playwright and martyr? Why did Lamborghini go into "exile" in the 1980s? Elsewhere, Germán García—his former colleague from the Literal years—broke into a sharp argument with him after a peaceful conversation about the passage of time in literature. One of them was left with a cast on his hand. The other was adrift, and without the last friendship he supposed he had left. It was November 30, 1981, and he was in Barcelona. It wouldn't be the last time they would see each other. About four years later, after another trip to Argentina—a hospitalization in between, on July 14, 1982, at Argerich Hospital— Lamborghini would die in Barcelona. Sitting on his own bed, late at night on November 17, 1985: imagining-writing-remembering-cutting-drawing, in one of the most radical transatlantic scenes in Argentine literature.

There's a photo from 1967, in Don Torcuato, in the courtyard of Lamborghini's married home with Pierangela Taborelli. Piera is sitting on Osvaldo with a mate in her hand. Beside her is her daughter Elvira, about four years old. Sparse spikes of grass surround a family portrait. The three of them smile happily. If it's true that any moment can be more intense and profound than the sea, the moment in Strafacce's two biographies could be that one. There is a moment when a man does not choose, forever, happiness.

Lamborghini has the Borg of Borges. I don't know of a higher praise.

Osvaldo Lamborghini, a biography . Ricardo Strafacce. Blatt and Ríos, 880 pages.