The ends of the thread

I'm sure we've already talked here, in previous installments of our newsletter, about the coincidences or the communicating vessels that, suddenly, one can find when reading. I mean, I mean, those like threads whose ends or ends would seem to unite, in more or less obvious or more or less unexpected ways, certain books or certain authors to each other.

These coincidences, in addition to happening between writers and between books, can obviously also happen between literature and, for example, cinema. I say this because a few days ago, while I was reading the novel Mambo, by the Chilean writer Alejandra Moffat, I saw the film El Conde, by Pablo Larraín, that black and brilliant fable, with ruthless and corrosive humor, in which Augusto Pinochet is a vampire who undresses himself through his own voice and whose family also undresses itself through the chorus of their voices. That is, through what they think and, above all, what they seem to feel, which emerges from their mouths like irrepressible impulses, while blenders prepare beaties of hearts and nuns fall in love with money and guns.

The Other Flight of the Vampire

But I was saying that Larraín's The Count – the tip of one of its many threads, which, however, is its main thread, since it carries the entire film – reaches or coincides with or touches Moffat's novel – by the way, if we talk about Chilean novels in which there are capes and men in love with bats, we should never forget the equally brilliant, equally hilarious and no less risky and experimental Batman in Chile, that is, the first novel by Enrique Lihn, recognized above all for being an incredible poet, in which the famous superhero, instigated by the CIA, travels to Chile to overthrow a left-wing government that could well have been that of Salvador Allende—when the protagonist and narrator of Mambo He says, "Pinocchio was superior to bats and vampires. He knew how to fly, go through tunnels, climb mountains, and he could devour you in one bite."

In Moffat's novel, however, in which the narrator protagonist is a girl who lives in hiding with her sister and her parents, although the real protagonist of the book, the one who makes Mambo a difficult book to let go, is the voice of that girl, who brings us into the story as much as she puts us inside herself. making us live, feel and discover what that girl, Anaconda —that's how she refers to herself, to escape the conflict generated by having a familiar name and one that she must use in front of strangers— is living, feeling and discovering, the vampire is such just for a brief instant, because then he is an eagle or a puma or an uncertain danger, but almost always with features taken from a game animal, that is, from a ruthless hunter: "The salamander was on fire and I could recognize that in addition to firewood, some notebooks and books were being burned. When I spoke, I was silenced at the same time and Julia ran to hug me. He whispered in my ear that the eagle was near. I cried because I was so scared. My dad asked me to take a deep breath and explained that they hadn't woken me up because they knew I wasn't doing well."

Another voice, at the other end of time

Coincidences, sometimes—I think we have already said this—come in pairs: after reading Mambo, a novel in which, I insist, the narrator's voice seems to speak in the reader's ear, honoring what the narrative was from the very day it began to be, that is, sitting down to listen to what someone else has to tell us, whether it was around the fire, around a table where dinner has been served or around a playground, I read If Things Were as They Are, by the Uruguayan writer Gabriela Escobar Dobrzalovski, in which the great protagonist is, once again, the voice of a narrator who knows how to appropriate the reader, using the tongue: "I run away from my mother like an infection. When he's close, my body squeezes and I walk with my fingers retracted, as if the floor is frozen or sticky. I would like to unbutton his shirt, peel off his skin, open his tendons until I find, curled between his organs, a soft chord, a crumb of beauty and happiness."

The coincidence is, in this case, in the fact that both novels, Mambo and Si las cosas eran como are, are sustained and are, in reality, for the reader, like sitting down to listen to the power, the liveliness and the subtlety of voices that subdue time and dilute everything that is not the story they tell. The distinction, of course, is also obvious: while Mambo tells us a voice that is discovering her world, If Things Were the Way They Are, in which the protagonist is forced to return to live in the family home, after a separation, it is told to us by a voice that is already coming back, a voice disenchanted with almost everything, wounded and hurt, crazed at times, beautiful and brilliant at others. It is, then, the points or ends of that other thread which is life. That other thread that is, in reality, the experience that life leaves us.

A voice that begins to put the world in its mouth – Mambo's – and another that begins to take it out – if things were as they are: "The deaf have their mouths in their hands. They draw the words in the air; Each word has its own gesture. My aunt and uncle were allowed to use sign language inside their home. Outside, his parents had forbidden them to him. On the street, they were held incommunicado. Shame. Already the Germans had scarred and decimated us. The war is supposed to be over, but, in this family, invisibility remained an obsolete strategy of salvation," writes Escobar Dobrzalovski.

Coordinates

Mambo was published by Montacerdos, while Si las cosas eran como son is published by Creature Editora, Overol and H&O Editores. The latest edition of Batman in Chile is Bordura.

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