In recent years, every time some journalist, communications student, filmmaker, or writer has asked me to talk about the magazine Cerdos & Peces, I have either refused or not responded because, among other reasons, I felt I had nothing to add. I’ll transcribe a few sentences that would float through my head whenever I was called upon: “All I had to give when it comes to Cerdos & Peces, as little or as much as it may have been, I have already given.” Another: “My life is in the present.” My favorite: “I feel too young to sit in an armchair and talk to the new generation about the past.” And, of course: “The golden age is now.” At any rate, I was sure that those interested in talking with me were just looking to confirm a story they had already finished, and one which would inevitably not match my own.
Throughout this time, I thought all those who wrote, opined, or produced any given cultural material related to Cerdos & Peces had the right to do so with absolute freedom. They could reread the magazine and interpret it as they saw fit, and assess or criticize it accordingly, because no one owned any definitive truth about Cerdos & Peces. But, since I did not agree with any version of the truth that was out there—even Enrique Symns’—I reserved the right to not take part, to not contribute.
This text, then, is dedicated to all the people who have tried to talk with me about Cerdos & Peces, to whom I have either not responded or said no. It is dedicated to all those who formed part of the magazine and are no longer with us. This is a long list. And, of course, it almost goes without saying that this is dedicated to readers of different times.
When I close my eyes and think of the editorial office of Cerdos & Peces, I see people working. Illustrators walking in with their portfolios, photographers with their contact prints or negatives, drawing boards with layout sheets, clacking typewriters, intense meetings with no time limit, impassioned conversations, and something that seemed normal to us at the time but that, in hindsight, is astonishing: artists offering up their work with no hopes of compensation. I suppose these images of people in the office sharing and debating ideas, telling stories and analyzing experiences, will be of no great interest to anyone. When it comes to the madcap anecdotes—which journalists tend to seek out and which excite editors—either I don’t have them or, if I can remember them, they strike me as not amusing but rather painful or tragic.
To work on a magazine is to share space with people who think differently from you, without fail. When I joined Cerdos & Peces, its editorial stance was already conceived and set, so I sometimes think many people assign me an overly elevated place there. I’ve said this elsewhere: I felt that my style was too light and my writing was too naive for Cerdos & Peces. I felt that I didn’t fit in with the magazine, but I wanted to be there. The pirate ship, with its mad, drunk captain, had already thrust its way through the city, it had melted the pavement and reached the edge of the sidewalk where I was sitting, bored, chewing gum. I was determined not to miss out on the adventure. I strove to raise my pitch, and it worked. I also managed to push a bit further and add something of my own—and to open space for others—with some freedom. I managed to gain some influence, but I lacked veto power. That is an important point to clarify: I disagreed with much of what was published in Cerdos & Peces, and I meant for some of my writing to act as a counterweight. This was a failed attempt, as what I produced ended up being encompassed in the same entity. At the time, of course, I didn’t realize.
When I recall the Warholian era of Cerdos & Peces, at its most extreme, I see Ignacio Sourrouille approaching my desk with a folder full of photos. That huge, ugly, functional metal desk I had at the office on Lavalle where so many people spread out their materials for me to take a look. But that noontime, Ignacio brought not his own photos but rather a series of copies—impeccable ones—of the extraordinary Robert Mapplethorpe. I remember the impact those photos had on me. I thought, “We’ve got to publish this,” and I went to find Symns.
It is unfair to name names, because that means omitting others who were fundamental. I usually go months or years without thinking of Cerdos & Peces, but when I open my mind to the memories, the images start flooding in, more like a film than my own experiences. It’s strange: in my memories of the most intense period of Cerdos & Peces, I see myself from the outside and the images are all in black and white, and so the bar, my dresses, the office, the smoke, the pale sun, the typewriters, Pueyrredón Avenue, Leonardo Sacco’s smiling face, and everything else comes to mind in black and white.
My favorite era of Cerdos & Peces, when I felt most satisfied there, started with José Llovet in 1996. Why did I find so much pleasure in that comeback? Maybe because it felt to me like we were returning after a thousand years. It was a second chance, that’s for sure. We had changed. In my case, I had experience, I knew how to make a magazine. I wasn’t overwhelmed. Plus, since it was not a successful experience in sales terms, I didn’t feel hounded by others.
At first we weren’t throwing around the idea of publishing a magazine, we were just getting together at Guillermo Monserrat’s house to drink tea with lemon and come up with some project we could get behind. Four people were willing to invest an interesting amount of money in setting up a cultural center with a bar. We loved the idea of its being not just a bar but also a place where we could put on other activities. Llovet, Guillermo’s friend, was the driving force and the one who was in touch with potential investors.
Leaning back in Guille’s armchairs, we read the classifieds in Clarín, looking for storefronts or houses that might work as spots in which to put the plan into action. I remember the three of us taking a bus to the northside to check out an incredible old house, a big dump of a place that was perfect for our idea. Everything was going splendidly until three of the potential investors pulled out before the project could come together, and the meetings at Guille’s house came to an end.
The following days were tough for me. I couldn’t resign myself to it. It was always the same, then and now: working on a project with friends. When that is diluted, life’s intensity drops. One of those afternoons I was at home, lying on the bed, the gray wireless phone resting on my belly, with the curtains around the window waving in the warm breeze. My boyfriend was out of town; we had talked on the phone for a long time, then broken up. I was thirty years old. Before, I was living a quiet, pleasant life. I was in love. I had put the chaos of youth behind me. I spent my time taking care of myself, reading, watching films, clothes shopping, and going out with my boyfriend. Our relationship was stable and passionate at the same time. We didn’t live together, but we were faithful and loyal to each other. I felt I had found the format of my ideal partner. I was having a good time while I awaited the next adventure. That afternoon, I said goodbye to my boyfriend, pushed the button to hang up, and lay there staring at the walls, the Kandinsky painting and the window, the curtains, the slow blades of the ceiling fan. And suddenly I found myself doing simple math: how much the printing might cost, how much for paper, how much you could charge per issue. I jumped up from the bed, grabbed a random magazine, looked under the staff—where they always put the press’s address and phone number—and called to ask about the costs. It took me a few days to get the prices because they didn’t want to tell me their budget over the phone. I had to go to the printing house and meet personally with the owners. When I went back to Guille’s house, I said the magic words:
“With that money, we could make a magazine.”
We spent the rest of the summer talking about The Magazine.
Enrique and I agreed on one thing: we needed to lock down a distributor. That was step two. We weren’t going to write a single line until we had a distributor. Enrique suggested the Vaccaro-Sánchez company and Llovet contacted them and set up a meeting. That was when we decided the magazine would be Cerdos & Peces, so the distributor would accept us and we’d have an in with the newsagents. Up to that point, we had just been talking about The Magazine, not giving it a name.
Llovet asked me to go with him to the meeting with the possible distributor. Vaccaro was no longer working with Sánchez. Sánchez welcomed us into an office in downtown Buenos Aires. He was very nice. We talked about distribution in the capital city and in Argentina’s interior, and about how many copies we’d have to put out to cover the whole area. It was very important to me that we could be guaranteed to reach the provinces.
“Ten thousand copies,” he told us.
At the end of the meeting, as he was shaking Sánchez’s hand, Llovet made a comment on the collection of model rhinoceroses displayed on a cabinet to one side of Sánchez’s desk and, although all three of us were already on our feet, a new conversation began.
There were rhinos made of stone, wood, and metal, rhinos that were opaque, shiny, big, little, painted vibrant colors, covered in velvet, with thick legs and wrinkly skin—in short, there were a lot. On pedestals or platforms or sitting right there on the mantel. Sánchez showed us his first rhino, with which he started this hobby, and told us the story of how he acquired it. Thanks to some mystery of the mind, I have erased that story from my memory. What I do recall vividly is that, when he was finished, Sánchez laughed, content and resigned to the inevitable: his collection could only keep growing because, when they saw it, people wanted to add a new rhino of their own.
When we left the building, the late-afternoon summer sun hit us right in the face. We walked down to Corrientes, very pleased and satisfied. Llovet had already decided he was going to bring a rhino to the next meeting. It was just a matter of finding one that was special. He also told me that, from that moment on, he would take care of everything with the distributor, and he thanked me for going with him to the meeting. We had a distributor. Now we had to get down to making the magazine.
I set about planning the tentative table of contents. I had the word “classic” in mind. Cerdos & Peces Clásica. And I was trying to convince Enrique that we had to return to the typical themes of Cerdos & Peces, the ones that still seemed valid to us, and focus on them: to keep defending excluded minorities, calling out the state’s crimes and abuses at a time when Argentina’s law enforcement entities were standing against the people in general and the youth in particular, making a significant space for rock, literature, film, and comics, and covering the city’s nightlife and artistic effervescence. Of course, Enrique listened closely. He was always very susceptible to my words. And, of course, he went on to do everything his own way. But some portion of that idea of our becoming a “classic” was expressed in that phase. The ingredient I was missing in those previous talks with Enrique, and which later came through naturally, was the emergence of cultural resistance with a focus on political opposition: a defining mark of the whole cultural scene of the nineties, and one the magazine captured with its own style.
In that first issue of the comeback, I wrote a review of Pulp, the last novel by Charles Bukowski. I titled it “El Legado,” or “the legacy.” In Pulp, Bukowski’s writing had changed, it had moved somewhere else, though it held on to his trademark breath. After writing Pulp, Bukowski had died. He left us—those of us who were his readers at the time, who had grown up reading his books—the first steps down a new path that only he had been able to walk in a short genre novel. I felt this legacy was, at the same time, liberating. It was not a heavy load to carry.
Enrique wrote the issue’s cover story: an article that questioned the role of journalists and the media in the transformation of anonymous tragedies into notorious public affairs. Enrique had always been interested in this subject, and the magazine had addressed it before. But this time, we focused on how the media meddles in the lives of victims and on the varied forms of morbid interest and manipulation of pain. Enrique himself decided to take the lead in the corresponding photo shoot, with a suit and a microphone, pushing open the door to an apartment alongside a cameraman. The image represented the story’s stance, and the fact that he was playing the journalist harassing victims was an obvious act of self-incrimination, a way of questioning a media landscape he felt he was a part of, albeit from the margins.
I could write fifty pages on the months we had our editorial office in what was once Llovet’s bachelor pad in San Cristóbal. I remember two things in particular, and both have to do with painting. One happened in the first week. They were painting the building’s front entrance, and there was a ladder propped up in the narrow hallway. I’m not superstitious, so I walked under the ladder dozens of times that first week. But I was surprised to see so many intellectuals doing pirouettes and acrobatics so as to get to the office without going under the ladder. The other thing I remember is that, the second week, I got sick of going downstairs to open the door for our contributors, so I went to a locksmith and got twenty copies made of the front door key. I painted each of them with nail polish and handed them out to our most frequent visitors.
Our previous sales figures were eight thousand copies at worst and eighteen thousand at best. When we got our first report back from the distributor, we were dumbstruck. The first issue of the comeback hadn’t even sold three thousand. And, in the following months, it got worse: sales dropped instead of climbing. We didn’t lose faith. We kept going as if these sales numbers were an error that would soon be corrected.
As that phase was flying by, long before we could get bored or get used to it, something unexpected happened—something that lay outside or contradicted the well-known but dubious strictures of Murphy’s Law: we were about to return to the time before our meetings in Guille’s living room when Lido Iacomini turned up with a book under his arm. I was putting away photos in boxes and picking up what I had in that office in San Cristóbal. Lido came in and, without sitting down, told me he could bankroll the design and printing and take care of distribution. But he couldn’t pay a cent for anything more. After saying this, he showed me the book in his hand, asking me if I knew the author and if I had read this novel.
“No, I haven’t read it, I don’t know him.”
“Take it, read it, you’ll love it,” he said, and he left.
The book was Leviathan by Paul Auster. Of course I read it, and I spent the rest of the nineties getting familiar with everything Paul Auster had published up to that point; I even read his poems. After the new millennium, as I finished reading each new book, I sat there waiting for Paul Auster to finish writing the next one. My passion for Paul Auster’s novels was as dizzying as his prose and the pace at which he published, to such an extent that I still haven’t had the chance to take pause and rereconsider or reread him. If I ever do, someday, I hope I’m not disappointed. You never know.
A Cerdos & Peces office in the basement of a bar in San Telmo? Where could be more fitting? When we got out of what had once been Llovet’s bachelor pad, because the numbers weren’t adding up, because we couldn’t pay anyone with what we were selling, when everything seemed to be going to shit, besides Lido with Leviathan, Nicolás also showed up and offered to let us set up our office in the basement of his bar, El Mirador. We knew we were living through one of life’s best moments. We had no cash. The magazine was hardly selling. But everything was fantastic. Nicolás was an extraordinary individual. In the eight or ten months we spent at El Mirador, we settled into a new pattern, a new system. We relaunched the magazine under the protection and the silent influence of Nicolás, who, if I remember correctly, came from an anarchist background. The basement was the epicenter of our writing. We had two desks—maybe one of them was just a wooden plank on sawhorses—two eighties-style Macintosh computers, a typewriter, and our boxes of photos and papers. We held our meetings upstairs, in the bar, which was a typical pub with a wooden bartop and tables under the windows that opened up onto the park. You got in through a door in the corner. I usually arrived at three or four in the afternoon and stayed until nighttime. Sometimes our meetings stretched on and we kept talking after the bar closed. Álvaro, the barman, was in charge of the place. He didn’t live at the bar, but in the loft, where we had to set up Nicolás’s office, he had a sort of makeshift bunker to spend the night a couple of times a week.
If I had to sum up the phase when the magazine operated out of El Mirador in two words, I would say: freedom and harmony. What’s more, it coincided with a revitalization of San Telmo—one of many, but this one was not incentivized by real-estate projects. Rather, it was a time of lighthouses. El Mirador was one, and other lighthouses started shining in the neighborhood. Houses and stores that opened up with contracultural, utopian, romantic intentions. Now that I’m writing it down, I realize that part of what we planned in Guille’s armchairs came true at El Mirador: Tom Lupo’s Cabaret Poético, journalism workshops, the magazine Vestite y andate, the bands, the shows, the parties. Enrique would write the editor’s note in the basement, tear the page out of the Olivetti, and come up to read it to the public at the bar. Just like that, with nothing in between.
There was one party that lasted till dawn. When it was over, we stuck around for a while on the corner by the bar. I guess Álvaro was trying to close the shutters while everyone was still talking, feeling good. I was talking to someone too, maybe Juan Mendoza or Jorge Sarmiento, and suddenly I saw Enrique in front of a car that was about to pull away. I went up to him. Standing there with his chest puffed out, Enrique was mouthing off at the guys in the car, challenging them to a fight. I asked him what was going on and he told me the guys were cops and they were taking away two girls they had arrested. The car was cream-colored with plates from Buenos Aires province. We decided to get the girls out of the car. Everything happened fast. Each of us went up to one side of the car, opened the doors, and got them out. The supposed cops did nothing to stop us. I remember, while I was tugging at one of the girls, it seemed strange that it was so hard for me to get her moving. When the two of them were on the sidewalk, I understood why; we were all tipsy, but they were absolutely plastered. The back doors of the car were still open. The supposed cops shut the doors and left.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
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