A Brief Life: Analysis of Major Characters

Author: Juan Carlos Onetti

First published: La vida breve, 1950 (English translation, 1976)

Genre: Novel

Locale: Buenos Aires and Santa María, Argentina

Plot: Psychological

Time: The late 1940's

Juan María Brausen (BROW-sehn), the protagonist, who is suffering an existential crisis at a time when both his vacuous job as a Buenos Aires adman and his marriage are dissolving. Outwardly conventional, cautious, and repressed, he considers his life to be a form of death. Inwardly, though, he lives an artist's fantasy life. To save himself from the outer void, he takes on two new identities: an impersonation that he assumes so as to enter the life of the prostitute who lives in the apartment adjacent to his own, and his fictional surrogate, the protagonist of a film scenario that he is alternately writing and imagining over the course of the novel. All three levels of his identity merge ambiguously at the end of his story. He flees with the young man who has independently carried out the murder of Arce's prostitute and ends up in the imaginary town of Santa María, the setting of the film scenario.

Juan María Arce (AHR-seh), the name under which Brausen moves in with Queca, the prostitute, who is unaware that he lives next door as Brausen. He virtually becomes a kept man. A channel for Brausen's repressed violent instincts, he develops a sadistic relationship with Queca and plans to kill her, essentially as a gratuitous act but also because she taunts him as a perpetual cuckold. When Ernesto murders her for his own reasons on the same night that Arce planned to do the job, Arce adopts a protective, paternal attitude toward the younger man, recognizing that Ernesto is in effect a more active part of himself.

Dr. Díaz Grey (DEE-ahs), Brausen's fictional alter ego, a slim provincial physician with thinning blond hair. Díaz Grey, like Brausen, is middle-aged and repressed. He is a bachelor but is awakened to love by the appearance of Elena Sala in his life. He faithfully accompanies Elena on her quest for a young man whom she wishes to save from desperation. Quite corruptible, Díaz Grey supplies Elena with regular injections of morphine and, after her death, accompanies her husband to Buenos Aires to procure drugs for illicit trade, without questioning the wisdom of such an endeavor. At the end of the novel, he is newly devoted to Annie Glaeson, a young violinist, and on the verge of being apprehended with Lagos by the police. Díaz Grey is last seen in Buenos Aires, having left behind his fictional habitat, Santa María, and effectively changed places with his creator, Brausen.

Gertrudis (hehr-TREW-dees), Brausen's wife, originally from Montevideo, Uruguay, as he is. She has grown corpulent in her maturity and had a mastectomy just prior to the action of the novel. She is saddened by both her mutilation and the loss of love between herself and her husband. Brausen is put off by her new physical state and also by the routine of marriage that Gertrudis represents. She leaves Brausen and goes to live with her mother in a Buenos Aires suburb. He derives his more seductive fictional character, Elena Sala, from Gertrudis.

Raquel, Gertrudis' younger sister, who is twenty years old and still living in Montevideo. Slender, reddish-haired, and green-eyed, she gives rise to a nostalgic fascination for youth in Brausen, who seduces her on a trip he takes to her city, although she has recently married. Later, naïvely wishing to make a clean break with Brausen, she visits him in Buenos Aires, but he treats her harshly and orders her out of his apartment. Raquel is visibly pregnant by the time of her visit, one of several signs that her youth is behind her.

Enriqueta (Queca) Marti (ehn-ree-KEH-tah KEH-kah mahr-TEE), the diminutive prostitute who lives and works in the apartment next door to Brausen's. Queca's vulgar, chatty vitality paradoxically attracts Brausen-Arce, as do the unreality and inauthenticity of their relationship. She is as insincere as he is, constantly telling him lies about herself. Her only moments of truth and intelligence with him are when she is describing her obsession with “them,” invisible spirits who torment her when she is alone. As time goes on, Arce routinely beats Queca, and she verbally abuses him and seems to intuit his desire to kill her.

Ernesto, a tall, bony, dark-haired, impulsive young man, one of Queca's lovers. He finds Brausen-Arce with her in her apartment one night, beats him, and throws him out the door. Eventually, Ernesto kills Queca, and after the murder, Brausen-Arce takes charge of the disoriented young man and attempts to help him escape by going to Santa María.

Elena Sala (eh-LEH-nah SAH-lah), the tall, blonde married woman with a lewd smile who one day shows up in Díaz Grey's office to get morphine. She continues to receive it from the doctor, along with his discreet attentions and his devotion. She controls their curious relationship with her self-possessed manner and quiet determination, right up until the night that she gives herself to him sexually and then dies of a drug overdose. Elena's search for young Oscar may be motivated by love, in addition to altruism.

Horacio Lagos (ohr-RAH-see-oh LAH-gohs), Elena's aging husband, a short, pudgy man, formal and tedious in speech and manner but intelligent and mysterious in his actions. Setting himself up as a cuckold, he indulges Elena's interest in the young Oscar Owen in Buenos Aires, then effectively turns her over to Díaz Grey in Santa María when she embarks on her search for Owen in the Argentine provinces. After her death, Lagos organizes the final drug deal as, in his cryptic words, a revenge and an homage. Díaz Grey initially despises Lagos, but in Buenos Aires he sympathizes with him, even though there is evidence that, because no real escape plan has been made, Lagos' revenge is aimed at his companions and himself.

Oscar Owen, known as the Englishman, a tall, elegant, pipe-smoking young man with a thin face and a cocky look who introduced the Lagoses to drugs and acted as Elena's escort in Buenos Aires. Lagos considers him to be a gigolo and perhaps somewhat effeminate, and he insists to Díaz Grey that Owen did not have a sexual relationship with Elena. Owen participates indifferently as the driver in the drug deal that takes place toward the end of the novel.

Annie Glaeson, a talented teenage violinist whom Díaz Grey meets during the search for Owen and whom Lagos convinces to accompany him, Díaz Grey, and Owen to Buenos Aires for the drug operation. Her motivation for the trip is not specified, but Díaz Grey transfers his affection from the deceased Elena to the young violinist. At the end of the novel, the two of them walk off slowly and happily into the sunrise of the day when they are all likely to be apprehended.

Julio Stein (HEW-lee-oh), Brausen's bantering, alcoholic colleague at the Macleod advertising agency, who prides himself on taking life less seriously than Brausen. Stein suggests that Brausen write a commercially viable film scenario, which Brausen never delivers to him but uses as a projection for his own identity crisis. Stein also warns Brausen that Macleod is about to fire him.

Miriam (MEER-ee-ahm), also called Mami (MAH-mee), a sentimental fifty-year-old French prostitute and madam, still beautiful, with whom Stein has been involved since he was twenty and she was thirty-five. Mami is nostalgic for Paris; she sings chansons and pores over a street map of the French capital. One of her songs gives the novel its title: “La vie est breve.”

Macleod, the ruddy-faced, sixty-year-old North American owner of the advertising agency where Brausen and Stein work. Almost a caricature of the Yankee businessman, Macleod is religiously devoted to his profession, and when he is dismissing Brausen, he recommends that in the future his erstwhile employee forget about himself and give himself completely to business.