ABSTRACT
In 1928 the Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga published his famous short story collection Los desterrados (“the exiles”) set in Misiones, a remote area in the Argentine-Brazilian interior where Quiroga homesteaded for a number of years. The stories are populated by a motley set of eccentrics, mainly stranded Europeans who have washed up there at the margins of the margins, one by one, over the years. There is the Frenchman Rivet, an industrial chemist who after twenty years in Argentina and a successful industrial career appears without explanation and eventually dies drinking lamp alcohol with his friend Juan Brown. Brown had gone to Misiones “un par de horas, asunto de ver las ruinas” (“for a few hours, just to see the ruins”) and was still there fifteen years later.1 There is a Flemish explosives expert named Van Houten nicknamed “Lo-que-queda-de-Van Houten” (“What’s left of Van Houten”) because he had lost “un ojo, una oreja, y tres dedos de la mano derecha” (“an eye, an ear, and three fingers of his right hand”) in accidents.2 There is the Swedish biologist Dr. Else, once a member of a team of European experts contracted by the Paraguayan government to organize hospitals, schools and laboratories who, fifteen years later, shows up inexplicably in Misiones wearing “bombachas de soldado paraguayo, zapatillas sin medias y una mugrienta boina blanca terciada sobre el ojo” (“baggy Paraguayan military pants, loafers with no socks, and a grimy white beret cocked over one eye”)3 In an alcoholic delirium Else shoots his only daughter, thinking she is a giant rat. This excess is the result of his collaboration in a failed distilling experiment with the one-armed engineer Luisser, whose prize possession is two volumes of Diderot’s Encyclopédie. Misiones is a parody of cosmopolitanism at the periphery, which is also the heart of the neocolonial order.
