As March ends, I read two spectacular books. Coraby Jorge Fernández Díaz e Father Mugicaby Ceferino Reato.
Fernández Díaz has been alternating journalism, non-fiction and fiction for decades. I am particularly fond of his novels. He still retains the resistance of the authors with whom I trained: the clarity, strength and singularity of the prose, at the service of a story told with the audacity of a first timewith the unapologetic goal that the reader doesn’t let go of the book until the end.
Crime, ever since Operation Traviata-where for the first time he journalistically documented the open secret of Rucci’s murder: executed by the Montoneros-, it recapitulated the bloody and bizarre armed struggle of the 1970s in Argentina.
Both books became intertwined in my imagination, not only because I read them in one sitting, practically at the same time. But also because they support common universes.
In Command, his farewell book, Kissinger suggests: “To know a man’s worldview, ask yourself what the world was like when that boy was 20.” Both Fernández Díaz and Reato remind me not of the world of my twenties, but of the worldview I had forged when I was that age.
Of course, most of the certainties I defended in that inhospitable age for the mind and soul – “I was twenty”, said Paul Nizan, “I will not allow anyone to say that it was the best age of life” – not Today, for me, they surpass the category of nonsense, syllogisms, entelechies… But The doubts from then still accompany me. I keep asking myself the same questions.
Both books took me, as Fernández Diaz says in his novel, into a devastating metaphor, as the sea returns the corpses, those questions that constitute our unique treasure: those that no one can answer.
I believe that both authors have written fascinating and magnetic books because they don’t know exactly what the enigma they are unraveling is. I suspect what customers are asking of Cora: high school romance detective, Netflix fodder, inaugural character femme NO fatale noir Buenos Aires -, it’s not so much that I receive the photos, the evidence, the data. What they want to know is why they didn’t separate, whether they are loved or not, whether they love or not. Not so much what others do: but why they, each of Cora’s clients, have acted this or that way throughout their adulthood.
I’m quite sure that if Fernández Díaz had made explicit this silent affirmation of the clients of his novel, it would not have been as effective as this thriller ends up being, which absorbs to the point of insomnia. Cora it reminds us of it love is a force that goes beyond 21st century monographs, that its spell has not been decoded by artificial intelligence, neither by genes nor by surveys. Much less for the statements of its protagonists. Cora’s task is to allow each client to find their own answer in silence, almost without saying it to themselves.
Díaz’s heroines are literally everyday. They are not traumatized by an atrocious past, nor do they reveal themselves due to gender issues, nor do they feel displaced based on their place in the world. They work hard, they often fall in love with those they would rather not love (like Adam and Eve, for example); They fail and succeed randomly. They are Argentine by nature and universal thanks to the author. They live stories within the novel, and remain alive, looking for a new story, as soon as it ends.
Reato goes in search of Mugica’s killers. And in this transit there is also a typical police dynamic: the victim, the murder weapon, the motives, the suspects. Reato himself plays the role of the detective.
Unlike Traviatawhere the researcher only had to find evidence of an irrefutable hypothesis, in Father Mugica Only the red herrings laid out in more than half a century of manipulation and deception can be categorically discarded; and sow legitimate suspicions on possible perpetrators, on the basis of the fragile traces that justice follows (in its transcendent or judicial version): motivations, declarations, concomitant and antecedent acts.
But what I found to be the center of gravity of the book was the historical and experiential reconstruction of Mugica and its surroundings. Especially their relationship celibate or not, in any case romanticwith the young Aphrodite Lucia Cullen.
That melodramatic aspect, unusual in the other volumes of Reato: the sentimental suspense. Mugica shares a room in Paris with the young philanthropist: both members of a Buenos Aires aristocracy who he found a dangerous form of entertainment in the slums from his own city. Some of those interviewed confirm a consummated love story, others deny it. But later Mugica, as a priest, officiates at Cullen’s marriage to Montonero Nell.
Nell participates in the armed brawl in Ezeiza upon Perón’s return. They left him paraplegic with a bullet. Months later, overwhelmed, He asks his wife for help in committing suicide, who offers it, with his undaunted philanthropy; without too much guilt, according to his correspondence.
But does this tragedy stem from a previous love affair with the charismatic and charming priest who married them? Is it Payró’s Pago Chico or Shakespeare’s? Mugica remained in an uncertain celibacy to ensure his transcendence, driven by vanity; unlike Bishop Podestà, who preferred marriage to history?
I’m sending it to Cora to find out on streaming. I make the first case of him happen in the 1970s. It doesn’t seem impossible to me. Then it reappears in the 90s of the last century: without cell phones or sociological bullshit.
In her early twenties (the age at which we shape our view of the world), Cora must reveal the intimacy of that room Cullen and Mugica shared in Paris; as in a darkroom, not electoral but photographic.
This information can determine a political move that brings Mugica closer or further away from Perón, from the Church, from his multiple motivations, whatever they are exactly, if human he can ever be. The entrepreneur may belong to one of the competing segments: a deputy from López Rega’s social welfare, a lateral from Montoneros, a commoner from Perón’s polymorphic court. It is Cora’s vocational awakening.
Finally, Cora returns with the truth.
Mugica is killed. Nell, from the Tacuara Nazi group, commits suicide next to the train tracks, assisted by his wife, a few months after the priest’s murder. Cullen is pregnant. Will Cora’s revelation impact that sequence of events? Was the political debacle shot through with Shakespearean revenge?
The information arrives late for the entrepreneur, but valid for writing history. Cora burns the conclusions, on paper – there is no other form of preservation – in a sacrificial ceremony in the Vatican. This is what I get from reading two books at once before the end of March.
Source: Clarin
