My desire to read all the novels and short stories that take place in Onetti's fictional town of Santa María brought me to this book, in which a woman named Helga Hauser is condemned to die in childbirth after being impregnated by one of the townspeople. The presumed culprit is Augusto Goerdel, born in the Swiss Colony that is something of a sister city to Santa María and brought up under the wing of Father Bergner, who sees big things in Goerdel's future as a member of the clergy. Doctor Díaz Grey, who holds the distinction of having been around since the very beginning in La vida breve when Juan María Brausen dreamt up this place where men and women live and die, reprises his customary role of observer and confessor of Jorge Malabia, who pays the doctor more than a few visits and wants to avenge Helga's death. However, it's not completely clear whether Goerdel is guilty or not. It seems that he is, that he should be, but it's never entirely pieced together. To tell the truth I read this book a few weeks ago and am having trouble reconstructing the plot in my mind. However, I do remember a few things that interested me and made me glad I'd read this book:

--Brausen, the creator, takes a much more fundamental role in this book than in other novels set in Santa María. He's no longer merely alluded to with fleeting references to his God-like role. Now he has a stronger, clearer presence in the lives of his creations. Díaz Grey speaks of the presumed murderer as perhaps spending his nights on his knees praying to "our Father Brausen who art in the nothingness." Jorge Malabia tells Díaz Grey that he's interested in learning about the doctor's past, in knowing "who, what you were, doctor, before getting mixed up with the inhabitants of Santa María. The ghosts invented and imposed on this place by Juan María Brausen." In previous books I'd enjoyed the way the characters struggled to understand their place in a world characterized by the vague presence of a creator whose role was something like that of a puppeteer. They yearned for autonomy, they wanted to be more free than they were, but they didn't seem to fully understand the mechanisms that had brought them to Santa María and kept them there. Here it's as if they've figured things out: now they know who they are and who made them, and although they don't (or can't) leave Santa María, they are much more aware of their plight and openly, sometimes bitterly, reference their creator.

--Time has passed. Jorge Malabia is no longer the young man he was when he "suffered over suicidal sister-in-laws and impossible poems" in Juntacadáveres. He's put on some weight and now the newspaper is his. Díaz Grey has also changed, aged by the years imposed on him by Brausen and now aware that one of the forms of his creator's incomprehensible punishment was "to have brought me into his world with an age invariably stuck between feelings of ambition tempered by time and despair." Reading this book gave me a chance to see the characters I'd come to be familiar with at a different moment in their lives, long after the events of earlier books like Juntacadáveres and Para una tumba sin nombre.

--The Swiss Colony comes into the foreground. It's always alluded to, but usually it's stuck on the outside, spoken of by the inhabitants of Santa María but not visited. Here, through the story of Augusto Goerdel, the history of the colony and the lives of its inhabitants are told. Father Bergner and Doctor Díaz Grey visit the colony. Its connection to Santa María and the relationships between the inhabitants of the two cities begin to come into focus.

I enjoyed this book because it gave a different view of a familiar place and showed me the characters of Santa María in a different time and context. I liked how Brausen's presence was expanded to enter into the everyday conversations of his creations. And I liked reading about Doctor Díaz Grey in a different moment of his life, somewhere between the early novels and his final appearance in Onetti's last novel, Cuando ya no importe. ( )