Written in 1964 by Argentinian writer Di Benedetto, The Silentary, or the “maker of silence”, is set in a nameless Latin American city in the early 1950s. The nameless narrator is a young man who aspires to be a novelist, and silence is the one thing he cannot control at all. For no matter where he goes, noise is always there. He shares an apartment with his mother, and has a friend from work (a nameless bureaucratic agency), and a girlfriend, Nina, who soon moves in with him and his mother, so he is not alone. He sits at his desk at home, and wants to write, and tries to write, but nothing.
Meanwhile, at the end of the street, there is a car wash and repair shop that is seemingly always open. From the early morning, the sound of jets of water is constant, and:
At noon, they are still washing cars.
I come home at 8 p.m. Soon it’s ten thirty. They encroach upon every hour of the day: the legal working hours, the reasonable hour for lunch. They seem to have abandoned themselves entirely to their passion for the hygiene of all that has four wheels and an engine.
He and Nina start to search for a house. But the prospects end up being next to an auto body shop, or a park with a merry-go-round that wheezes out tunes all day long, or a house with a nightclub in the basement with a fondness for bongo drums, or a block that is a favorite for drag racers, or . . . You get the drift.
They end up purchasing a home on a quiet street, but almost as soon as they move in, a sign goes up on a nearby building. “Grand Opening Dances!”
My dude, you could actually move out to the country, you know. Just sayin’.
