Its unclear if Puig fully understood the danger he was courting when he

published The Buenos Aires Affair. His first novel, Betrayed by Rita
Hayworth, wasas noted by Suzanne Jill Levine in her biography of the
authora mixture of quietly subversive politics and avant-garde art that
terrified his publishers when they realized that the book used the
word coger (to fuck) over thirty times. Nonetheless, it went on to find
such impressive supporters as Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and Puig
suffered no worse repercussions than a typo-ridden first edition and some
light insults from prudish national newspapers. For his second
novel, Heartbreak Tango, Puig toned down both the language and the
political critique, resulting in a book that quickly became a bestseller and
catapulted him to fame.
As well as making his name with the public, these first two novels
established Puig as a talented innovator; especially noteworthy was their
skillful use of narrative fragmentation and stream-of-consciousness
narration. Puigs readers were asked to play a far more active role than
that to which they were accustomed, frequently wading through swamps
of disorderly and untrustworthy monologue, collaborating with the author
in establishing the facts of his novel while all the time working to order its
story into a coherent chronology. Yet Puig was not writing esoteric texts
meant solely for litterateurs. These novels widespread use of popular
cultureincluding American movies and Argentine tangosas well as
their meticulous and engrossing storylines marked Puig as an author who
embraced the middle class as both a subject of and an audience for his
writing.
Puig was free to write more or less what he wanted in his first two novels
without fear of government intervention, yet by the time he published The
Buenos Aires Affair in 1973, Argentina had very much lost its political
way. Earlier in that year it had permitted the restoration of demagogue
Juan Pern, the wildly popular general who had raised fears of Argentina

drifting into fascism, and who dominated Argentine politics throughout the
1940s and 50s, finally being tossed out in a coup in 1955. From the
moment Pern set foot in his home country, his presence aggravated an
already tense situation: as a crowd of three and a half million greeted him
at the airport, snipers associated with a right-wing terrorist group opened
fire. And yet, even as he was being targeted by the rightists, Perns
relations with the far left worsened, and in late 1973 he went on the
offensive against them as well. In the midst of these open battles against
guerrilla groups on both the right and the left, Pern was confronted with
rampant inflation, and he finally succumbed to a heart attack on July 1,
1974, leaving his ill-prepared wife, Isabel, to govern the nation. Argentina
languished in chaos for nearly two years under her rule, and then the
situation reached its final nadir: In 1976, the military deposed Isabel and
proceeded to institute one of the most disastrous, terror-ridden military
dictatorships of the twentieth century: a regime that would make torture
and kidnapping into instruments of policy, and that would reportedly kill
30,000 of its own citizens in just seven years, a period now known in
Argentina as the Dirty War. This was the highly charged climate of fear
and suspicion in which Puig published The Buenos Aires Affaira
book that openly condemned the Pern government (both past and
present) and that made perverse sex a central element. Little wonder
that it was to be a disaster. Puig would see his book stripped from store
shelves, his hard-won place in Argentine literature effaced, his very life
put at risk. Puigs audacity during a time of systematic repression ensured
that one of his great worksthe novel that saw him begin to embrace his
own sexuality in his writing and transition away from the relatively safe
experiments of his early novelswould be denied the audience it
deserved.
Despite its ideological undertones, however, which admittedly got its
author into serious trouble, The Buenos Aires Affair is anything but a
lugubrious political documentit is, in fact, a highly suspenseful novel

that begins as a thriller would, with a mother discovering that her middleaged daughter is missing from an idyllic beachside apartment. Puig then
carefully draws the reader into this mystery, dropping clues as to where
the daughter is, as well as hints at the motives and circumstances behind
her disappearance.
With so many clues littered across its pages, its very appropriate
that The Buenos Aires Affairis subtitled A Detective Noveleven
though it contains no detective, and its murder (which occurs quietly in
the middle of the book, and with little doubt left as to perpetrator or
motive) is hardly typical of the genre. In giving The Buenos Aires
Affair this label, Puig wasas he would do throughout his careertoying
with form and genre, while casually sassing his reader. From the books
very first pages, Puig reimagines the detective thriller as a smorgasbord
of false documents, first creating expectations and then gamefully
undercutting them while embarking on a thorough investigation of his
characters and their trajectories through his sordid plot: continually
undermining our assumptionsboth for this novel in particular and then
its supposed genre as a wholegiving us vital evidence and red herrings
in equal measure and forcing the reader to wage a protracted battle to
establish the facts of the case. To present this information, Puig employs
devices as varied as phone-call transcripts, news items, a mock
magazine interview, a psychiatric case study, dream languages, and
internal monologue, and as the novel takes shapea series of related
texts without an ostensible consciousness to connect them all into a story
we come to the gradual realization that we ourselves are the detective
meant to tie all the evidence together. And yet, there is no such thing as
objective truth in a novel, and certainly not here, hiding behind Puigs
network of cluesthere is only what the reader is able to glimpse, and
what really happened exists only insofar as the reader can guess at the
big picture.

For all its formal innovation, The Buenos Aires Affair is nonetheless a
gripping thriller sensitive to the pleasures of genre. Puig draws on pulp
clichs in inventing his two protagonists, making them the two halves of a
sadomasochistic relationship. He seems to delight in the potential for
irony, perversity, and psychoanalytical satire posed by the opportunity to
concoct backstories for Gladysalmost the ideal of the woman familiar
from pulp, who has a deep desire to be dominatedand Leothe man
whose only pleasure lies in domination. As the novel progresses, it
becomes clear that we will eventually witness their perverse union; what
remains in doubt is how and why . . . and what happens then.
Its worthwhile too to note that it was in The Buenos Aires Affair that
Puig, homosexual and promiscuous in a culture with little patience for
either inclination, began to deal in print with some of the questions
surrounding his sexual orientation. Despite its subversive political content,
its Puigs treatment of sex in The Buenos Aires Affair that was
arguably most provocative for its original audience. The book contains,
among other things, an explicit description of female masturbation, and
likewise one of violent male-on-male rape: transgressive enough
elements by themselves in the mainstream fiction of the time, but all the
more so here because of the way Puig makes the reader of these scenes
feel like an intruder. What comes across most in the masturbation scene
is the shameful thrill of the Peeping Tom, the reader being coerced into
watching a woman investigate a sexuality that still frightens her; while the
latter scene is pervaded by disgust: we feel like witnesses to something
we would have turned away from, if only we could have managed. Both
moments are extremes for the range of sexuality on display
throughout The Buenos Aires Affair: the masturbation scene gives us
sex as a dirty but fundamentally safe thrill, whereas the rape scenes
excessive brutality portrays sex as a dark urge that society needs to keep
a lid on. What unites both perspectives, and what remains most
interesting about Puigs depiction of sexuality throughout The Buenos

Aires Affair, is that this is sex thats far removed from the idealized world
of pornography, despite the readers occupying the same voyeuristic
vantage pointthis is sex that is not titillating or prurient but rather just as
prosaic, messy, and inconsistent as it is in the real world.
The readers entrapment in the role of voyeur is hardly confined to the
sex scenes: Puigs use of supposedly found documents, casually
breaking away from any semblance of objectivity, constantly reminds the
reader of her presence as a watcher, as someone who is meant to feel
she is looking in upon a supposedly unedited reality. Time and again the
sense of being an interloper in these strangers lives is impressed upon
the reader, and, oddly, this lends the book an air of reality that more
conspicuously realistic books lack. The anti-artificial artifice of
conventionally realist novels often makes us aware that what we are
reading is in fact an artifact carefully designed to create a certain
recognizable feeling of reality. By contrast, in The Buenos Aires Affair,
any hint of reality is obscured beneath what appears to be a nave
reproduction of real-life documents. The Buenos Aires Affair is
obviously just as carefully engineered as any novel, if not more so, yet
Puig has taken pains to make the seams show. This gives the book an
atmosphere that can at times seem similar to so-called reality television:
the producers of reality TV are so careful to create a purposefully
unedited presentation of life that viewers can at times be persuaded to
forget just how carefully manipulated their images are, despite (or
because of) the absence of a fourth wall. In a similar way, The Buenos
Aires Affair hides its artifice in open sight.
Puigs methodology here is now so familiar to us, so typically Puigian,
that we might forget how substantial a development it was for him as an
author: although elements of this real world approach to fiction can be
found in his two earlier novels, those books greater reliance on streamof-consciousness narration made them feel far more artificial. By contrast,
Puigs novels after The Buenos Aires Affairespecially Kiss of the

Spider Woman and Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages

discard almost everything aside from this presentation of unedited, real
life: books composed more or less entirely of unattributed, overheard
dialogue, and quite clearly designed to subvert expectations of what is
novelistic.
But we shouldnt make the mistake of thinking that sex and voyeurism are
the only great themes at work in The Buenos Aires Affair: here too we
find Puigs straightforward, highly caustic condemnation of Argentine
politics, with the Pern government of the 1950s referred to quite openly
as Fascist regime (going so far as to place Pern in the company of
Hitler and Mussolini)a statement that was still quite inflammatory in
1973. Even more boldly, or foolishly, Puig takes the remarkable step of
openly describing the mode of torture then favored by the policeat the
instigation of the government then in poweras a means of stifling
opposition and discontent in a society that was slowly but surely reaching
a crisis point. Puigs inclusion of such details is even more pointed given
that The Buenos Aires Affair rarely touches upon other aspects of
Argentine society in such a specific manner. Moreover, while the shocking
nature of the graphic sexuality presented in The Buenos Aires Affair is
blunted somewhat by the fact that these scenes are folded into nuanced
studies of character, the political aspects receive no such softening. To
put it simply, they stick out. They feel willfulas though Puig has made a
conscious decision not to be delicate in their presentationand yet, they
are far from gratuitous: in pairing sexual angst and political mayhem, Puig
infuses his work with an intriguing set of implications, though he leaves it
to the reader to work out the precise relationship between these forms of
discontent.
The response to the double dose of female/homosexual sexuality and
anti-government sentiment was swift: Upon release, The Buenos Aires
Affair was attacked by the largely Peronist press, television interviews
were cancelled, and it faced soft-peddled censorship almost from its date

of publication, culminating in the books formal branding as pornography

in early 1974, and in Puigs virtual erasure (to quote Levine) from
Argentine literary culture. (Even though the novel had sold 15,000 copies
during its first three weeks in bookstores.) Puig was far from chastened,
however. His next novel, 1976s Kiss of the Spider Woman, was if
anything more provocative on both the political and sexual fronts, and so
it too was duly banned. Fearing for his life, Puig left his homeland
permanently that same year.
Now, we can hope, despite its having fallen between the cracks of
Puigs oeuvre, despite its long years out of the spotlight, The Buenos
Aires Affair can finally be recognized as a turning point in the career of
one of Argentinas boldest and most innovative writers. For all the grave
implications it raises about power, sexuality, and politics, it is foremost a
beautiful and captivating work of art. At this stage in our literary history,
when once again there seem to be louder and louder cries that only a
straightforward plot can entertain, or that only a conventionally realist
novel can convey the full flavor of life, it is important to be reminded
thatThe Buenos Aires Affair is neither . . . and yet it does both.