Malena saito
08/27/2021 22:01
Clarín.com
Society
Updated 08/27/2021 10:01 PM
This year I entered the drama career at the Metropolitan School of Dramatic Art.
It is an entry that consists of three exams that are spread over time.
For one of those exams, I had to choose a work from a list of four and present an “original” reading in about fifteen minutes or explain why it caught me.
I chose "Doll", a work by Armando Discépolo, which I had not read.
I kept reading
Control temptation so they don't judge you
Society
It was love at first sight.
But many times when a book tells us what captivates us, it is difficult for us to understand what it was.
Disassemble the parts.
"Doll" is a play, in which a man, Anselmo, suffers deeply for his ugliness.
Since he is ugly, no one is going to love him.
Unless I buy that love
He meets Muñeca at some point, a beautiful woman, who
is
actually
with his best friend and suffers so much for her that when he finds out that his friend cheated on him, he kills himself
.
High school graduation.
The film teacher, Malena Saito, a classmate and the Literature teacher.
A human group that did support her unlike the rest.
Now let's rewind. Everyone around Anselmo loves him deeply. They are his friends and they give everything for him. Even Enrique, his best friend, offers the love of his life, Muñeca, a character who by the way has almost no speech in the play. The pretty ones don't need to talk? Machismo aside - it's a text from the twenties ... .-, I was deeply captivated by the work that the work does on male friendship (in fact Discépolo dedicates this work to his best friend) and the deep pain that feeling ugly can entail. What goes into the ugly? Or rather, what is left out? When I got to the exam, I said that I could not believe for days and days, I could not identify with Muñeca, the woman they treat as an object and yes with Anselmo, the man who cannot see himself in the mirror and feels absolutely punished in this world for his appearance.Women since we are girls, we learn to suffer for our body. I remember one of those truth or consequence girl games. What part of your body would you tear off? Which one would you operate on? Which one are you proud of?
Although it seems that the problem is beauty, the problem is always ugliness. The fear, if anything, of never being enough. Some friends ask me why I connect my feeling of being ugly with being fat.
That is why I feel ugly for being fat
. I think it is because perhaps if there was an edge by which to approach beauty, after years of swallowing fictions, only the skinny ones seem to be able to hang on that edge. As if from there, the field will begin to open and the race could be started. When I was young, a friend told me that if I kept eating, I would be left alone, to shut my mouth. Paradox aside. And although the Macbeth witches say that "The beautiful is ugly and the ugly beautiful", for this society in which I was born my body is a punished body. Or not?
I keep thinking and as I think, I highly recommend Dietland, a wonderful series that addresses the question.
That pain that is imposed on my body is like a passport from a country where points are always worth less.
For them to listen to me, for them to speak to me, for them to kiss me, for them to pay attention to me, for them to understand me, I always have to make an extra effort.
On the beach.
Then came the problems for Malena Saito: a pediatrician suggested that they confront her in a mirror.
I can't stand having photos taken of me. This particularity, which could be a detail of color, in my life as an artist became a problem. My psychologist says it's called image anorexia. I want to erase myself. I don't really want to erase myself. When he asks me why I keep agreeing to occupy spaces where my image should appear, I tell him that I am not willing to lose work, that I have to find a way to stop escaping from myself.
Some time ago, I had a bookstore (Artificial Light) with a friend, we had no money to hire a community manager, so
we did everything ourselves with our precarious cell phones and the results were "ugly"
for some of
our acquaintances
. But that ugliness, we were overwhelmed, it seemed comfortable, different, different. The rest of the bookstores had neat Instagram feeds and exactly the same as each other.
When I started reading poetry cycles and cultural events, there was no instagram. At most, someone wanted to register you on YouTube, but as there were few of us and we knew each other a lot, I always approached
designated cameramen
and asked that they not film me. One of them is the great Mili Morsella, a historical photographer from my underworld, with whom I have had a pact for years. In other words, one day I had to take my discomfort in my hands, approach and tell him everything. My friend who I had the bookstore with used to also do that job behind my back. I think the idea of just being the one in the mirror does not satisfy me.
Over time, my tantrum got complicated, now everyone had a camera in their hands and could film me for their “stories”. It was absolutely uncomfortable to clarify to everyone why and for them to understand that it was not a joke. I used to appeal to a phrase from a poet
"remember: what happens between you and me is reality"
, but in the realm of the literal, the wink went unnoticed by everyone.
I have come to reject audiovisual projects for this and to appear in others that I could not bring myself to see them even once. On one occasion, a Mexican documentary filmmaker asked me how I wanted to appear in her documentary, how I wanted to be represented. From the fragment, I said to him and my hands, my glasses, my voice appeared. I always wanted to see it, but I didn't make it to the screening and then we got lost in time. I remember being invited to a television channel to talk about books. Despite myself, I accepted.
When I got to the set, I ran into a colleague; They interviewed him just as he arrived, with a shabby pilot and everything. They took me to make-up, to hairstyle, they ironed my hair, “they made me smaller” as a friend says, they put rouge, lipstick and all the chiches on me. I was terrified. Uncomfortable The production company, before arriving, had asked me to be "neat." Like a baby, who is challenged by the mother.
She was not a person going to talk about her trade, she was just another woman
. As Virginie Despentes says, in a book that I did not like, but I did leave this idea to me, women whatever we do, whatever success we have, we always have to keep reaffirming that we are docile and beautiful. Or that at least we are willing to be.
Recently a man I had an affair with told me what bothered him the most was not that I was fat, but that he didn't want to do anything to change it. As if it were an act of carelessness. When the mandatory quarantine began, messages circulated on all social networks talking about the panic of getting fat.
Before bullying was not said, but I do not remember how it was named. Capable was not named. I remember not naming it.
They always bullied me for being fat
. Being fat is being a citizen of another category? Is it always being at fault? In movies and series, there comes a time, where the fat woman always loses weight and then, people love her and ask her forgiveness because in the end, she was pretty after all. In high school, I got knocked over a bank, for being fat. Guys at parties, when I told them not to kiss them, they called me fat whore, who is going to love you?
I was never anorexic and always felt like I should. That it was a nonsense to continue eating next to my friends who did not taste more than one olive for days. But I was surrounded by women who did not eat until they passed out, who cut themselves, who vomited until they went crazy. Men concerned about my health, who lived without exercising and eating potato chips all day, men who made fun of women who ate celery to please them.
At first, walking, while I thought I was going to say here, I assumed that I had only suffered it in a part of my life. That bullying had been applied to me in a certain school where a sector of the Buenos Aires upper class went. But no. It always was. In all the later areas that I went through: in the militancy, in school, in the faculty, in the theater. Steeped in the family. My uncle telling my aunt that he was about to be on the cover of a field magazine, when he was ten years old.
My grandmother vomiting after any heavy meal.
My pediatrician recommending that they put a mirror on me while I was eating so that I would think well if I wanted to repeat. Could it be that seeing myself in the photos reminds me that I am one, that girl, and not the one I think I am, thousands?
María Moreno says in a note that women lose weight, to advance without being seen, to disappear. The first cigarette I smoked, a friend gave me to stop eating. Where is hatred armed? All the women I know suffer from their weight as a student says in one of her stories, a green thread of casancrem light unites me with all the women in my family.
When I was a teenager, all I wanted was to be allowed to live. Because unlike the teenagers around me, I was interested in the world and wanted to express my opinion about it. Military, act, study, debate. A few months after entering that school, a friend, of the few that I managed to do, told me “you don't always have to be the scapegoat”. I asked her what it meant and she told me that she is the one who puts her head, so cut her off. She wanted to help me. But I didn't want my head to be cut off. I did not want to disappear, I wanted to occupy the space and at that moment for me to occupy the space, was to speak. I came from a school, where the normal thing was to give my opinion and I entered an unknown universe, where being interested in something was the summum of "heaviness".
The cool thing was that you didn't care about anything. Be light, be subtle.
I remember that I and four crazy women plus a gender commission set up to talk about abortion, trafficking networks, machismo. People treated us as "taken out". A preceptor grabbed my arm at an assembly and told me to stop breaking my balls and shut up the fucking fuck. Nobody believed me. I admired the guy, he was a poet. Nobody wanted to defend anyone, very few people wanted to get close to me, for fear of "catching it" and being mistreated as well.
The only space that I remember as comfortable at that time in high school was a film workshop. A workshop that worked on a counter-shift, run by Mónica Acosta, where it did not matter what place each one occupied in the high school social ladder. Once he showed us a short film, where we saw for the first time that stories could be told from many points of view. Art as a portal, as a space outside of time, art as power. To be able to do things. Over time, I was able to enter the specialization in "letters" and get away a little from the abuse.
Some time later it was the “Not a Less” and millions of teenagers were summoned to take to the streets. Feminism became "fashionable" and that made me happy. Knowing that other adolescents were going to be more accompanied, that “the competition” between us and with it, the pain was fading.
I dream of the day when we stop responding to a label. On demand
. To a preset image.
A few days ago, I gave my colleagues from EMAD, people I knew only through the screen, dresses and jackets that I had not had for years. Which I kept as punishment to remind me that I still did not lose weight. We were talking to one of them about how these things that they told us about so young continue to act in us and fill us with fears, insecurities, phantom sensations that obstruct our enjoyment. I try all the time, every day, to continue existing and reconcile with the other who is behind the mirror. As I am a writer, I suppose that I have, like witches, to make a spell (or an invention, as my teacher, Margarita Roncarolo, taught me). So we are
going to make an invention / that will cover us from the wind / from helplessness
.
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Malena Saito is
a cultural producer, bookseller, and poet. She is one of the founders of the Luz Artificial bookstore. He published “Amiga” (2017, Santos Locos), “Sorry, I told you I loved you” (2018, Golden Branch) and “I found something and I don't know where to keep it” (2020, Ascasubi). His poems are part of several anthologies and were translated into Portuguese. He is currently studying Dramaturgy at EMAD. Provides the writing workshops "The house on fire" and "The tías: 8 poets". He conducts the cycle of interviews “La avivada” in La Libre and the radio program “La guerra suave”. Try to write and not be swept away by savage capitalism while drinking sparkling water every day.