2024-06-27 23:02:53
By Mario Flores
Three reconfigurations of one of the great topics of northern Argentine literature: school childhood.
1. Far from reproducing, as a disruption within the current apparent campaign of nostalgia that the various literary, political and cultural sectors have undertaken, Ana Torres – the protagonist of Silvina Rufino’s first novel – describes the years of the supposed innocence like a tornado in the tropics. From the beginning and until the fourth chapter of the novel, every exercise of remembrance will be closely related to a collapse of the great traditional approaches that literature offers to the foundational and primordial elements of the common denominator in the narratives of childhood: schools, peers. , adventures in diapers, grandmothers and flavors. However, Silvina Rufino (a writer from Oran, born in 1958, also author of the book of stories “Heart Inside”) decides – bravely – not to start her story by reproducing the establishment of a principle of identification, but instead generates a rupture: Ana remembers the era of the monsters as just another monster, along with a few allies who are also monsters: cross-eyed and fat, whore and cuckold. “Kindergarten was not what you might call the stage of innocence and happiness,” Ana narrates in her own voice the first chapter that, although it operates according to a biographical sequence, from her childhood to her adult life, is It is well known that their intimate rhythm and observations in a more literary than average language appear as two basic dynamics when it comes to dismantling the costumbrista story: even the teachers call them “El Bizco” and “La Gorda”, until the last recesses of the system – which was prophesied would foster a minimum of care – belligerently oppose any specimen of the different and the non-hegemonic in a task naturalized and promoted by the laughter that one imagines in the sunny and uncomfortable settings in which Ana walks, They work like in a sitcom. Medieval torture is considered an innocent joke and students in a classroom are compared to inmates in a dungeon.
2. Ana’s myth originates from her own body: giant, too big for her age, overfed, obese. Everything bad, inconvenient and that probes the idea of monstrosity in a platform world where ideas of the positive and enjoyable are represented through the hegemonic and commercial constructions of the female body suitable for male consumption. Ana’s grandmother: “she was like that, hard and tender. They say that she raised her five children with a whip in hand,” and the granddaughter, who narrates the story, tries to emulate that balance between the crude and the secret, to escape from an environment that constantly encourages self-destruction: added to the eating disorder of the protagonist, small alternate stories are added that open and close instantly, like brief snapshots of other lives that intersect just because, but that also turn out to be evasions of the normative made into skin. Even the family, a classic structure of the conservative and the traditional, identifies sensitivity with the symptom of being a faggot; a dead son is preferred to a homosexual one and, almost like a witness role or an alternate character who goes to these other lives (paradox of context, which never presents signs of empathy or any systematic accompaniment) as a passive and analytical spectator, poetic but useless. It does not try to move but rather to record certain pristine truths so that, as maxims of presentation, they interact with the great postcards of the idea of representativeness of what is Salteño: “Northern society is one of exacerbated machismo,” “Would you think that Did I have the slightest possibility of being intimate with someone?”, “Don’t lean on the railing, it’s prepared for normal people.” So it is in this exercise of literary retrospection that Ana imposes a narrative about a life organized from the school stages: primary, secondary and university. But the one who narrates is not a girl about her childhood, nor a teenager talking about what she experiences every day, nor a young woman whose next ones are already dying: Ana is an external voice, which despite operating through a monologue Retrospective and introspective, it reveals analysis and allegories typical of the voice of an already accomplished author – confused, in many cases – who, in addition to remembering, testifies; In addition to counting, she recites; In addition to narrating (putting time in motion), she remains to reflect. If it were an emergence of the author/narrator type, it would be a clear example of an intrusion, but that is why, from chapter five and until the end of the novel, Ana, who comments on her own story with notes in the margin , founding stories that reinforce the myth of origin with more than just subsidiary anecdotes of regional folklore, evolve alongside those who save it. Every common thread of the story is located in survival thanks to the other: like lifeguards in an ocean where it is impossible to distinguish anything that is not pure water and despair, they get confused among crowds to also appear wounded but noble to the spirit of the story.
3. Happy endings are not, and even less so in the literature of Salta in recent years, something that can be trusted: they reveal a principle of ethical reconversion – the same one that Anthony Burgess loved in his A Clockwork Orange and that he railed against Kubrick as a moralistic old man for having decided to remove him from the film script because he was considered weak, too Christian, too English – whose imprint will be approximately at the end of a possible anagnorisis. So, more than the end of “Portrait of a Body” and its motivational message, the most important turning point of this first novel by Silvina Rufino is when an announced death bursts into the well-known scenery that, despite being announced (“ The best response is silence,” says another of those lateral faces that are later revealed as conjunctural points in this work of biographical reconstruction of Ana T.), revealing the maximum level of horror and uncertainty. Suicide also appears and is added to the list of topics discussed in this novel, such as bulimia and depression.
A reading on the structural montage of three voices in two stories.
There are twenty-four times that the word “soul” appears in Silvina Rufino’s first novel. It can be read as a logical association to the genre in which it is inscribed: an initiation story about the disorder. But to this general picture is added – a convergence of time is generated, because it is a story older than Ana’s – a second story, also told in the first person through the epistolary genre. So, this dynamic between various narrative formats that involve diverse voices creates a polyphony of fiction and memory. They are the letters of the participants in a romance from another era, written in the neutral Spanish of library books, they are also the poems that Ana writes, her verses and the verses that she finds in other books. Polyphony and the art of quoting within what is told: this is the most interesting feature of “Portrait of a Body”, because of how its mechanism manages to gradually insert itself – with the slowness of the romantic genre of the Spanish tradition – into the history of the Ana’s body, which is the history of a system that positions the body as the target of the dialectical and symbolic operations of a greater discursive power. Raquel Guzmán, in the prologue of this book, points out: “As a backdrop, the novel draws a provincial bourgeoisie with its hypocrisies, its lies, deceptions, and a double standard that deepens suffering.” This opens new questions, new questions about what are those territories of the unsaid that function as nuclei of action in the fictions and narratives of northern Argentina and, if there are any, what possibilities of reflection do they provide to their community (what are their punitive euphemisms). Once again, the pleasant insertion of an invisible element into a youthful but also poetic novel makes it more believable and closer to, precisely, the bodies to which the title alludes: hosts that battle day after day observing the meticulous treatment with which become no longer part of the rest. In “Portrait of a Body”, the bodies are different and incomprehensible, they jump from balconies or faint, binge or murderously fast, they sink into dark corners, they hug and dance even though they feel ridiculous doing so. More than an absolute and hopeful ending, it is the journey that makes legitimate the intense search for one’s own place: narrating being one in one’s own skin.