Urgent Matters by Paula Rodriguez

First published in Spain in 2021; published in translation by Pushkin Vertigo on July 25, 2023

Urgent Matters is Argentinian noir spiced with dark humor. Its focus is on the reaction of characters to urgent events that always seem to surprise them.

Hugo Lamadrid is a passenger on a train that crashes. He survives, although he wakes up surrounded by corpses. He’s holding a prayer card for the patron saint of urgent matters when rescuers arrive to cut open his carriage and hoist him to freedom.

The rescuers take Hugo to a hospital. He lost his phone and wallet in the crash so he’s relieved when he isn’t quickly identified. Hugo seizes an opportunity to escape from the hospital. He’s worried that his friend Beto might have talked to the police. Beto is worried that the police are coming for him.

Hugo committed a small, unintended crime. Small in Hugo’s eyes, but the police might have a different view, even in Argentina. Beto helped him clean up the mess. Hugo wants to protect Beto but Hugo is not a deep thinker. “He’s pure intuition and argumentative noise.”

At the crash scene, Detective Osvaldo Domínguez finds Hugo’s phone and reads a text from Marta Lacase asking if Hugo is okay. After Domínguez visits Marta, she and her daughter Evelyn pack their bags with cash and leave Buenos Aires. They make an unexpected visit to Marta’s sister Mónica and their mother Olga in Colon, where Mónica works as the slot manager at a casino. Each family member seems to view crime as a useful sideline, although they often keep the details of their criminal enterprises hidden from each other.

Different characters have different opinions about whether Hugo is alive or dead. Only a couple of characters have opinions that are based on facts. El Rifle is a television journalist who knows Hugo. He makes a national news story out of the authorities’ inability to say whether Hugo died in the train accident. Evelyn would also like to know whether her father is alive or dead. Olga is unhappy when she learns that Hugo didn’t die in the crash, but she doesn’t share that knowledge with Evelyn or with reporters who are camped on her doorstep, covering the prayer vigil for Hugo.

Third-person point of view jumps from character to character to tell the unfolding story. The plot loosely follows Domínguez as he tries to learn the truth about Hugo’s fate (a truth that doesn’t concern his superiors, who believe the publicity will be more favorable to them if they simply report that Hugo is dead). To the extent that the story resolves, it does so shortly after a roller coaster ride that Hugo and Beto share.

Roller coasters are a popular metaphor for life, one that Hugo cannot help but notice. “The momentum comes from the first fall. It’s the only one that matters. Everything that comes after it is downhill, even if you’re going up. If you go up a little, it’s so you fall with more force. You’re falling from the start.” Such is life, or at least Hugo’s life.

Olga’s bitterness adds comic relief, as do arguments about which prayers for Hugo will play well with the television audience. The prayer-givers are fickle; when neither Hugo nor his corpse turn up after a couple of days, they lose interest. If prayers go unanswered, maybe it’s time to pray for something else. The media’s fixation on a story about which they know nothing is another source of humor.

My favorite comic moments involve Mónica’s impressive collection of vibrators. Evelyn panics when she steals a cellphone that she hides in a vibrator box. Getting caught with the vibrator is somewhat preferable to getting caught with the stolen phone, despite the lectures she must endure about the damage a vibrator can cause to a virgin.

Urgent Matters is not the kind of crime story that builds tension with each plot twist. The plot is simple and linear; nearly all violence occurs offstage. Like prayer, crime and corruption are simply part of Argentinian life. Characters write their own fates and (like Donnie Brasco in the movie of the same name) they understand and accept without argument that their actions have inevitable consequences. The novel uses a crime plot to deliver grins and soft laughter rather than thrills. Because it does so effectively with sympathetic characters, Urgent Matters is a refreshing change from heavier fare.

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