It has been more than a week since Rene G. Favaloro, Argentina's most esteemed surgeon and a pioneer in the heart bypass operation, committed suicide. But the outpouring of grief seems to be compounding day by day, opening a channel of despair so profound that Argentines are raising the deepest of questions about themselves and their country.
As wreaths of flowers pile up in front of Dr. Favaloro's research foundation, newspapers are publishing extra columns of letters to the editor in a deluge of long, sorrowful and often bitter diatribes blaming the entire society for the suicide. Dr. Favaloro's photograph is on covers of magazines filled with details of the suicide and theorizing by Argentine writers about what Dr. Favaloro's death means. There has been blanket television coverage showing pictures of his life along with recordings of the most doleful tangos.
Argentines -- and especially Portenos, as residents of this capital are known -- are among the most psychoanalyzed people in the world. Depression is a topic of everyday conversation of people of all classes, and Argentines are not shy about airing complaints, from the weather to the pressures of their jobs. Funerals and cemeteries are elaborate, and suicide is not uncommon.
But there is something so distinctive about Dr. Favaloro's suicide that it goes beyond the national fixation with neurosis and death. Some analysts say that the national mourning could be just the epiphany Argentines need to kick themselves out of their lethargy and the long decline the nation has suffered since its economic and cultural heyday in the 1920's.
Ernesto Sabato, the Argentine novelist, noted that it was profoundly tragic that one of Argentina's most creative sons would feel so ''desperate and impotent'' that he would end his own life. But he added, ''I ask myself if this sadness that is draining all of us might just jolt us out of our inertia. Perhaps that was his final wish.''
Such thinking may well be wishful in the extreme, an example of what one newspaper article today characterized as an Argentine propensity to swing from despair to euphoria.
The talk of Buenos Aires's smoke-filled cafes these days is about how Dr. Favaloro's death is just one more symptom of a country in which a deep two-year recession has ravaged the middle class, forcing the best and brightest to line up at the American, Spanish and Brazilian embassies seeking visas letting them find work elsewhere. It has also spurred a debate about health care in Argentina, and how the country does not put enough resources into scientific research.
In an essay entitled ''The Sad Land of Psychoanalysis and Tango,'' published today in La Nacion, the country's most prestigious newspaper, Dr. Favaloro's death was linked to a deep national melancholy. ''Millions of Argentines, trapped by unemployment and recession, are confronting an insecure future with anguish,'' Claudio Ivan Remeseira wrote in the essay. ''The death of Rene Favaloro marked a transcendent moment in this climate of frustrated expectations.''
Meanwhile President Fernando de la Rua was put on the defensive by reports that the surgeon had sent him a letter crying out for help just days before he shot himself in the chest. It was more than awkward, and some said it was heartless, when the presidential palace put out a statement early last week denying that the government was to blame.
The 77-year-old heart surgeon had a rags-to-riches life story. The son of a seamstress and a carpenter who grew up in the provincial city of La Plata, Dr. Favaloro became one of the world's best known doctors. He developed a technique for heart bypass surgery while working in a clinic in Cleveland in the 1960's. He returned to Argentina and started a foundation dedicated to heart transplants and research that is among the most important medical centers in South America. Beloved and respected, he was repeatedly mentioned over the years as a possible presidential candidate. But along with the Argentine economy, the Favaloro Foundation has fallen on hard times in recent years.
Dr. Favaloro's body was found by his brother and secretary in a bathroom of his apartment in the upscale neighborhood of Palermo on July 29 with a .38-caliber pistol beside him. No foul play has been suggested, but his suicide immediately stirred controversy.
For the past week, the news media have reported that the Favaloro Foundation was being sued by the government because it was behind in paying social security contributions to its employees at a time when the government reportedly owed the foundation a more substantial amount of money for unpaid services to a public retirement institute.
The government suit was disclosed by a federal judge, Julio Cruciani,, who bitterly complained that ''this is a country that comes down hard on people who are doers.''
The political magazine 3 Puntos commented on its cover, ''The suicide of Rene Favaloro has hammered Argentine society like some special crime committed by an inefficient and corrupt state.''
President de la Rua's handling of the suicide has been criticized as clumsy and is at least in part fueling the hand-wringing.
The president responded to the news of the suicide by decreeing that the nation was in mourning. But over the following days, the Argentine press reported that before his death Dr. Favaloro made a desperate appeal to the president to help him solicit financial support for his foundation from the business community. Mr. de la Rua said he received the letter only a day before the suicide.
''The government has no guilt to wash off its hands nor does it want to enter the debate over whether or not someone is to blame,'' Jorge de la Rua, the president's brother and chief of staff, was quoted by local newspapers as saying.
And the author Tomas Eloy Martinez wrote: ''It would be unjust to attribute to the government of Fernando de la Rua the responsibility for these tragedies -- the emigration of so many young people, the worsening poverty, the suicide of an exceptional scientist. But all these things are alarming symptoms that we cannot pretend not to see.''