(here's what I read)
Good evening everyone. I am honored
to be here to celebrate the literary genius
of Edgardo Cozarinsky in the company of such lovely, distinguished friends.
I’m here to unveil something that will
no longer be a secret.
But before that, let me say that
before I read El rufian moldavo in the form of a novel, I experienced it in the
form of an opera. The opera Ultramarina
was premiered in Buenos Aires in the fall of 2014, in 5 shows that were
completely abarrotados. It was really hard to get in, I watched it sitting in
the stairs of the theater in the barrio of Almagro, thanks to Miguel Galperin
and the propio Ed, who let us in. The creative team was outstanding, the music
by Pablo Mainetti, composer as well as bandoneonist, the régie by Marcelo
Lombadero, probably in the epicenter of his powers. The spectacle was an immersion
in deep Cozarinsky land. This was an author
who had made a style –even more so, a living form in prose- in texts where
fiction verged into essay and essay felt and read with the intimate gesture of
a story told entre nous, flowing
freely like fiction: an author whose films were always akin to literary
mischief, where the whisper of chisme
embraced the haughtiness of History. Edgardo entertains the crucial tropes of
the passage of the century into the other with the grace of a master.
The
opera testifies to the immense
influence Cozarinsky has had on contemporary Argentine culture -an influence he
would never vouch for, nor he would ever confess, as it follows the shape of a
century that Edgardo carved first, and carved better.
In
the opera, like in Edgardo’s works, the arrabal of Argentina verges into the
mists of MittelEuropa. The story of El rufian moldavo and Ultramarina unveiled the
passion and pathos of the girls under the Zwi Migdal,
the world organization of women trafficking
that operated between 1906 and 1930 with headquarters in Buenos Aires. There
was a tango looming over the Vienese atonal experiments, as in a rioplatense version of Woyzzeck. By the end, the haughty European tones of the music metamorphosed into
the rhythm of cumbia: on the stage, the images showed video captures of
prostitutes today, in Constitución, showing that time is an illusion, that
perversion and oppression is always near, present and alive. And it was
so utterly Edgardo, in his repeated line in the libretto El mundo es uno solo, sang bitterly by one of the captives, that we
could see how the occult passage between this mesmerizing changes of genres was
in fact a pasadizo into a Cozarinskian system of mirrors in which the world is
illuminated again not by the goddess of apparent change, but by the cruel
sameness of evil, of war and vulnerability, unveiled. A little digression: this past Wednesday, probably a million of women marched in Buenos Aires,
Rosario and Cordoba and many other cities in Argentina under the flag #Niunamenos, against the killing and forced prostitution of women.
Edgardo’s novel, El rufián moldavo, is being hailed as the Argentine novel against trafficking,and is now being read in a
strongly political vein.
On that night, after the opera, we,
the friends who had gone to see the show, we
started a sect.
We
started the sect in the car. We were talking one on top of the other. We were
excited by the lingering tango meets MittelEuropa meets Viena and Cozarinsky’s
words beating inside mashed up with the Constitucion cumbia of the finale. Was
there any other living author
in Argentina that excited us in the same way?
As
we talked and talked in a pizzería in Corrientes over diet cokes and beer, I
realized something very funny. I realized we were all kind of pissed. Many of our discussions reflected the lenghts
of our dissappointment with regular Argentine
literature. I mean regular versus extraordinary, literary, wonderment, high style,
the one Edgardo honors in his writing and his récherches in film. We concluded we
were majorly pissed at our youngster milieu, at the people around us. And we
were sick of Deleuze, apparently, too, over any other demigod. Wasn’t Argentina’s
contemporary literature’s attachment to Deleuze another way to to pay tribute
to the god of capital, the god that makes every sign turn into something else?
Things turning into other things, trivially, robotically forming small books
that were becoming smaller and smaller. That relaxed liberalism of words, de
buen tono, was making us sick. It was the promise of a revolution under the
most conservative of forms: relegating all meaning and beauty to boring procedures, and ultimately, turning
literature into another little machine of capital. If everything turns into something else, if everything @deviene@, substance and beauty and art matter no more. And even if
we recognize the modernistic gesture of leading to a limit, playing with the
horizon as if the limit was real, it wasn’t an inspiring
gesture anymore, as -we could now see it- it was deeply philosophically flawed.
Of course, when we speak about disappointment
we were talking about great authors -in Argentina, even the most mediocre scribes are passable entities- in sum, our bar is very high. As we trashed
Cesar Aira and his epigones, we were holding on dear to Edgardo’s operatic
world.
One of these nights, with
Lucas, Fernando and Martin, we started out our Coza sect. We wanted das Ding an
sich, the cosa in itself, the chose, we wanted the Coza and the rinsky
too. We get together every month or so, to discuss Edgardo minutiae over diet
cokes and beer. Sometimes we manage to lure Edgardo in, and he gentlemanly
takes us to a milonga, where he unveils for us his Fassbinderian Coza hidden
world, and he let us see the way a certain elderly lady only dances with the
young tango hot shots -things we see thru his eyes- until he does one of his
ninja bombs, and dissappears completely, leaving behind only
the trace of a bottle of champagne. In his literature remains the promise of
commitment to art and thought that never relegates the discovery of History
that is tantamount to beauty, in which we recognize something bigger than
love -that metal which, like Literature, that never loses its power when
extending unto other souls, as Shakespeare had it.
