Urban chronicler with a poetic sting.

• Author: Bach, Caleb
• Position: Uruguayan writer, Mario Benedetti - Includes poem

Acclaimed Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti captures the daily dramas of city life and pricks his country's conscience

Mario Benedetti, Uruguay's leading man of letters, lives smack-dab in the middle of downtown Montevideo, in a modest apartment overlooking the main street, Avenida 18 de Julio. From here, like a respectable voyeur, he can witness daily rituals: an ancient bus spewing diesel smoke upon commuters it has just disgorged, a briefcase-toting bill collector twisting the arm of a recalcitrant victim, a waiter rushing to deliver coffee to resuscitate a desk clerk drowning in paper. These slices of life, which drift up from the street, also others collected during his daily rounds, are but a few of the little human dramas that fuel his writing. Neither an author of rustic idylls of the countryside nor a reporter of celebrity and spectacle, Benedetti writes about the small tragedies and ironies that define quotidian life in the city. He also spends part of each year in Madrid, where he once lived in exile, but his home base remains Montevideo, a city of some 1.5 million people (about half of his country's population). Benedetti harbors a certain disdain for those who depend upon the capital for their livelihood yet insulate themselves from its disagreeable aspects by retreating each evening to the upscale suburbs of Pocitos and Carrasco. Such escapism, in his opinion, misses the entire point of urban life; the pleasure comes from submerging oneself in a city's many moods, discovering its secret haunts, and knowing its inhabitants from all walks of life.

"Actually, I was born in the country town of Paso de Toros near Tacuarembo," Benedetti explains, "in 1920, but at that time people from many small communities--Melo, Colonia, Flores--were moving to the capital. My pharmacist father, Brenno, took a job as a civil servant in Montevideo, so we moved when I was four years old. My parents were cultured people, of Umbrian origin on my father's side and French and Spanish lineage on my mother's, but there were no writers in the family. My mother, Matilde, was devoted to books, but I was the first to want to write, almost from infancy. I wrote a novel at age twelve. In that sense I'm the founder of the literary dynasty." For a time he attended the German School of Montevideo but transferred to public school when his parents discovered his German teacher was indoctrinating students with Nazi ideas. At age fourteen, Benedetti left school to work full time, but he continued to read voraciously.

In his first job, with a firm that imported car parts, Benedetti worked successively as a cashier, salesman, and office clerk. He mastered the intricacies of brake pads, escape valves, and spark plugs, and the preparation of purchase orders, import permits, and invoices, but mostly he filed away for future reference aspects of human behavior: coworkers maintaining affairs on the side, burned-out employees counting days to retirement, duplicitous sycophants maligning superiors behind their backs.

At age seventeen Benedetti moved to Buenos Aires to serve as personal secretary to Carlos Bernardo Gonzalez Pecotche, the founder of a spiritual movement called Logosofia (a rioplatense offshoot of European theosophy). The elder Benedettis had joined the movement and involved their son as well. Unfortunately, working for Raumsol, as the Logosofia founder called himself, was mostly a misadventure. On the upside, Benedetti met a young woman destined to become his future wife, Luz Lopez Alegre, the daughter of neighbors of his parents also involved in the movement. On the downside, he had to weather nearly three years of loneliness and prolonged separation from his family and girlfriend while at the beck and call of a guru who proved to be a fraud. Nonetheless, during this period Benedetti progressed considerably in his own self-education by reading a broad range of authors and writing some of his first serious poetry. "I came to know the work of Antonio Machado, one of the very best poets in our language. I also read an anthology of work by Baldomero Fernandez Moreno, an Argentine poet. It was a revelation! He wrote in a simple, clear manner. Also he was a poet of the city."

In 1940 Benedetti extricated himself from this oppressive situation and returned to Montevideo, where he landed a job as secretary to the General Accountant of the Nation while moonlighting with an import-export firm and the Basketball Federation of the Interior. Thus he joined the ranks of the "universal office" about which he later wrote, "Uruguay is the only office of the world that has reached the category of republic!" Despite his heavy work load, the tireless Benedetti managed to court his future wife, take tango lessons at a local dance academy, and write poetry. The latter activity led to the publication in 1945 of his first collection of verses, La vispera indeleble [The Ineffaceable Eve]. "That was the year I found more lucrative work in the private sector as office manager at La Industrial Francisco Piria, S...