What is left over is neurosis

"How can one understand or appreciate the trauma of a neurotic if one has never experienced anything like it firsthand?", rhetorically asks psychiatrist George Matthews – protagonist and narrator of this story – during the first visit of Jacob Blunt, an atypical patient who will involve him, outside of any therapeutic framework, in events and experiences darker than the pedestrian, universal, vulgar neurosis.

Matthews's odyssey after that interview takes place not in the doctor's office but in a prototypical 1940s New York, with its proverbial alleys and shadows in an atmosphere that could well have inspired Scorsese's After Hours . In keeping with that climate, the questions that arise during the psychiatrist's journey are as worthy of a madman as of a sane man, and the protagonist experiences them firsthand: What is reality? What we want it to be? What someone wants us to believe?

The subject matter, which cuts across centuries of art, philosophy, and spirituality (Platonic cave; the illusory veil of Buddhism; the life or dream of Calderón), grows in an unexpected lysergia and ends up detaching itself, through color, from the crime novel, a genre in which the novel nevertheless falls, insofar as it meets the conditions of the category, even if it exceeds them. Like jazz entering bebop, the story corresponds to its time but escapes it: it ruffles the scene, adding leaps and apparent dissonances.

A dwarf goblin who hands out coins, a lethal amusement park, the Percheron horse that provides the title and appears alongside each murder. Dead and more dead: women, men, prominent people, inconsequential people. Subway stations, psychiatric hospitals, bars, police stations complete the ghost train that runs through Matthews, doubting his sanity.

By 1946, when this title was first published, it's logical that John Franklin Bardin —a contemporary of Hammett and Chandler—wasn't playing in the major leagues of the genre: his writing, closer to noir than to the robust American noir, was uncomfortable, fatalistic, and morally ambiguous. Perhaps for this very reason, Bardin leaves an aftertaste of John Fante, the rough diamond of the 1930s whom Bukowski paid homage to to the point of imitation. "One knows that time will never end, and one begins to make plans against that fact. To plan beautiful ways of escape and return to a life that probably never existed," says the psychiatrist, a victim of the worst social terror: being considered insane and locked up, having your reality, necessarily, cease to be that of the world. And consequently, the unsettling questions about what is real and what isn't return. Bardin, unconventional in substance and form, belonged without belonging. Although he worked and made a living from his profession as a writer, which is already quite a lot, he was not given much credit until the 1960s.

In 1986, it was rediscovered posthumously when The End of Philip Banter, one of his paradigmatic novels, was adapted into a film. This novel, where, as here, conspiracy and madness compete for a possible outcome, was adapted into a film. Three years later, César Aira made the first translation of these pages. The Argentine, a connoisseur of surreal atmospheres, proved to be a great appropriator of his translation.

The Deadly Percheron is part of the "Bardin Trilogy," which, without being a saga, weaves together the same psychic and identity tension as Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly (translated into Spanish as Al salir del infierno ) and the aforementioned film adaptation. Because it came late, because it fit and didn't fit, because it snuck something dreamlike and cursed into the subgenre (a black swan, a kind of Black Mirror of its time), Bardin establishes a certainty: there is more to the past in the future than we supposed.

The Deadly Percheron , by John Franklin Bardin. Trans. César Aira. Impedimenta, 224 pages.