Leopoldo Marechal – Megafón, O la Guerra

Megafón, o la guerra es su novela política por excelencia y, a la vez, una suerte de magnífico testamento narrativo. Su protagonista, un muchacho de Villa Crespo que alguna vez arbitró peleas en el Boxing Club del barrio, es un autodidacta empedernido que llega a la conclusión de que no hay ‘monstruos anacrónicos’, que toda lucha es un combate subterráneo que nunca sale a la luz, y que es necesario dar batalla a esos males en su propio campo.
En un país con olor a bronca, una bronca que nadie deja de olfatear en el aire, misteriosa y temible, y que emborracha como la pólvora, la gesta de Megafón es tan desproporcionada como conmovedora. No importa que fracase en su intento por rescatar a Lucía Febrero de las garras del tenebroso rufián que la tiene prisionera en un burdel del Tigre; no importa siquiera que sea apresado y descuartizado, ni que sus restos se dispersen por distintos lugares de la ciudad: su rapsódica derrota abre el curso de las conquistas morales que su epopeya ansiaba como coronación final.

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Megafón, o la guerra is his political novel par excellence and, at the same time, a sort of magnificent narrative testament. Its protagonist, a boy from Villa Crespo who once refereed fights at the neighborhood Boxing Club, is an inveterate autodidact who comes to the conclusion that there are no ‘anachronistic monsters’, that every struggle is a subway fight that never comes to light, and that it is necessary to fight those evils in their own field.
In a country that smells of anger, an anger that no one fails to smell in the air, mysterious and fearsome, and that makes you drunk like gunpowder, Megafón’s feat is as disproportionate as it is moving. It does not matter that he fails in his attempt to rescue Lucía Febrero from the clutches of the tenebrous ruffian who holds her prisoner in a brothel in Tigre; it does not even matter that he is captured and dismembered, nor that his remains are scattered in different parts of the city: his rhapsodic defeat opens the course of the moral conquests that his epic longed for as its final coronation.