Aurora Venturini photographed by Nora Lezano.
After having published five novels, as many storybooks and more than a dozen collections of poems, Aurora Venturini experienced success as a writer by winning in 2007, at the age of 85, the Premio de Nueva Novela Página / 12 with 'Las prima' .
Tusquets
reissues this novel in September, of which 'Babelia' offers the first pages, as part of a series of previews of the most anticipated books of the 'rentrée'.
First part
Disabled childhood
My mother was a pointer teacher, in a white coat and very severe, but she taught well in a suburban school where middle-class and not very gifted boys attended. The best was Rubén Fiorlandi, son of the grocer. My mother exercised the pointer on the heads of those who pretended to be funny and sent them to the corner with donkey ears made of red cardboard. Rarely did a bad man repeat offenders. My mother thought that the letter with blood enters. In third grade they called her the young lady but she was married to my father who abandoned her and never returned home to fulfill pater familiae obligations. She assumed teaching duties in the morning shift and returned at two in the afternoon. The food was already made because Rufina, the morochita who was a very consistent housewife, knew how to cook.I was sick of pouting every day. In the background cackled a henhouse that fed us and in the fifth, miraculously golden squashes sprouted suns racked and submerged from heavenly heights to the earth, they grew next to violets and rickety rose bushes that nobody cared for, they insisted on putting the perfumed note on that wretched sewer.
I never confessed that I learned to read the time on watch faces at the age of twenty.
This confession embarrasses and surprises me.
I am ashamed and surprised by what you will find out about me later and many questions come to my mind.
The question especially comes to mind: what time is it?
Truth of truth, I did not know the time and the clocks scared me like the rolling of my sister's orthopedic chair.
She, more of a cretin than me, did know how to read the dial of watches even though she ignored reading in books.
We were not ordinary, not to say that we were not normal.
Rum ... rum ... rum ... whispered Betina, my sister walking her misfortune through the garden and the flagstone patios.
The rum used to be soaked in the drool of the drooling fool.
Poor Betina.
Nature's mistake.
Poor me, also a mistake and even more so my mother who carried oblivion and monsters.
But everything happens in this filthy world.
That is why it is not logical to be too distressed by anything or anyone.
Sometimes I think that we are a dream or nightmare fulfilled day by day that at any moment will no longer be, will no longer appear on the screen of the soul to torment us.
The cousins
Betina suffers from a bad mood.
It was the diagnosis of a psychologist.
I don't know if I reproduce it correctly.
My sister suffered from a crooked spine, on her back and sitting she looked like a hunchbacked bug with short legs and incredible arms.
The old woman who came to mend stockings thought that Mom was hurt during her pregnancies, more horrific during Betina's.
I asked the psychologist, a mustachioed and browed young lady, what was psychic.
She replied that it was something that had to do with the soul, but that I couldn't understand it until I was older.
But I guessed that the soul would be similar to a white sheet that was inside the body and that when it was stained people became idiots, a lot like Betina and a little like me.
As Betina went around the table ruminating, I began to observe that she was dragging a tail that came out through the opening of the back and the seat of the orthopedic chair and I said to myself it must be the soul that is slipping away.
I questioned the psychologist again this time if the soul was related to life and she said yes, and even added that when it was missing, people died and the soul went to heaven if it had been good or to hell if it had been bad .
Rum ... rum ... rum ... kept dragging the soul that every day felt longer and with gray lamps and I deduced that it would soon fall out and Betina would die.
But I didn't care because it made me sick.
When it was time for meals, I had to give the food to my sister and I purposely missed the hole and put the spoon in one eye, in one ear, in the nose before reaching the big mouth.
Ah ... ah ... ah ... the dirty wretch moaned.
I would grab her by the hair and put her face in the plate and then she would shut up.
What fault was I for the mistakes of my parents.
I tried to step on his soul tail.
The tale of hell held me back.
I read the communion catechism and "you shall not kill" had been burned into me.
But a tap today, another tomorrow grew the tail that the others did not see.
Only I saw it and rejoiced.
Institutes for different learners
I rolled Betina to hers. Then I walked to the one that corresponded to me. At Betina's institute they treated very serious cases. The pig-boy, trumpeted, hawkish and with pig ears, ate from a gold plate and drank the broth from a gold cup. He took hold of the cup with fat and ungulate legs and sipped, making the noise of a watery torrent spilling into a well and when he ate solid it moved his jaws, his ears, and did not get to bite with his fangs that were very protruding like those of a wild pig. He looked at me once. The little eyes, two expressionless little balls lost in the fat, yet they kept looking at me and I stuck my tongue out at him then he growled and threw the tray away. The caretakers came and had to calm him by tying him like an animal, which he was not.
While she waited for Betina's class to finish, she strolled through the corridors of the coven.
I saw a priest enter with the acolyte.
Someone had delivered the sheet, the soul.
The priest sprinkled and said if you have a soul, may God receive you in his bosom.
To what or to whom was he saying it?
I approached and saw an important family from Adrogué.
I saw a cannelloni on a table on a silk cloth.
That it was not a cannelloni but something expelled by human womb, otherwise the priest would not baptize.
I found out and a nurse told me that every year the distinguished couple brought a cannelloni to baptize.
That the doctor advised her not to give birth anymore because that was hopeless.
And that they said that because they were very Catholic they should not stop procreating.
Despite my handicap, I described the issue as disgusting, but I couldn't say it.
That night I could not eat disgusted.
And my sister grew in soul all the time.
I was glad that Dad was gone.
The development
Betina was eleven and I was twelve.
Rufina said they are in the age of development and I thought that something from the inside would emerge outwards and I begged Saint Teresita that they were not cannelloni.
I asked the psychologist what development was and she turned red advising me to ask my mother.
My mother also blushed and told me that at a certain age girls stopped being so to become young ladies.
Then he fell silent and I was left on edge.
I said that I attended an institute for the handicapped, less handicapped than Betina's.
One girl said it was developed.
I did not notice anything different.
She told me that when that happens the crotch bleeds for several days and that you don't have to bathe and use a cloth to avoid staining your clothes and be careful with men because you can get pregnant.
That night I couldn't sleep feeling the right place.
But it wasn't wet and she could still talk to the males.
When I developed I would never approach any boy unless I got pregnant and had a cannelloni or something similar.
Betina talked a lot, or spluttered and made herself understood.
Thus it happened that one night of family reunion in which they did not allow us to be for lack of manners especially during the meals, my sister shouted with trombone voice: mother, my parrot is bleeding.
We were in the room next to the agape room.
A grandmother and two cousins came.
I told the cousins not to go near the bleeding woman because they could get her pregnant.
They all left offended and Mom hit us both with the pointer.
I went to my institute and told that Betina was developed despite being younger than me.
The teacher challenged me.
It is not necessary to speak immoralities in the classroom and I postponed in the matter civic and moral instruction.
The class became a group of concerned students, especially the girls who occasionally felt themselves to check for humidity.
Just in case I didn't hang out with the men more.
One afternoon Margarita came in beaming and said she came to me and we understood what she was about.
My sister dropped out of school in the third grade.
It did not give for more.
We weren't really giving up either one and I dropped out of sixth grade.
Yes, I learned to read and write, the latter with spelling mistakes, all without H, because if it is not pronounced, what use would it be?
He read dyslalicly, said the psychologist.
But he suggested that by exercising I would improve and he forced me to unblock the tongues like María Chucena roofed her hut and a woodcutter who was passing by said María Chucena you roof your hut or roof the other's I do not roof my hut or roof the other's only roof the hut of Maria Chucena.
Mom watched and when I didn't unlock she would hit me on the head.
The psychologist prevented the presence of mother during María Chucena and I unlocked better, because when mother was, because María Chucena finished very soon, I was wrong, fearing the toe shot.
Betina rolled her rum around, opened her mouth and pointed inside her mouth because she was hungry.
I didn't want to eat at Betina's table.
It disgusted me.
He took the soup from the plate, without using a spoon and swallowed the solids, grasping them with his hands.
She would cry if I insisted on feeding her because of putting the spoon in any hole in her face.
They bought Betina a lunch chair that had an attached table and a hole in the seat for her to defecate and pee.
In the middle of meals he wanted to.
The smell made me vomit.
Mom told me not to be delicate or I would go to Cotolengo.
I knew what Cotolengo was and since then I had lunch, I will say, perfumed with the stench of my sister's poop and the rain of pee.
When he threw balls, he pinched her.
After eating I would go to the campito.
Rufina sanitized Betina and sat her on the orthopedic chair.
The silly woman napped with her head hanging over her chest or over her breasts because her clothes were already denouncing two rather round and provocative lumps because she was developed before me and although horrible she was a young lady before me, which forced Rufina to change her cloths every month and to wash his crotch.
I managed by myself and observed that my tits did not grow since I was skinny as a broomstick or like Mom's pointer.
And so we were celebrating our birthday, but I attended a drawing and painting class and the professor of Fine Arts thought that it would be an important visual arts because, being half crazy, I would draw and paint like the extravagant plastics of recent times.
The cousins
Aurora Venturini.
Tusquets, 2021.
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