This March that ends I read two spectacular books. Coraby Jorge Fernández Díaz and Father Mugicaby Ceferino Reato.
Fernández Díaz has alternated between journalism, essays and fiction for decades. I particularly lean towards his novels. He still retains the stamina of the authors with whom I was trained: the clarity, forcefulness and singularity of the prose, at the service of a story told with the audacity of a first timewith the unrepentant objective that the reader does not let go of the book until the end.
Reato, since Operation Traviata– where for the first time he journalistically documented the open secret of Rucci’s murder: executed by the Montoneros-, has recapitulated the bloody and bizarre armed struggle of the ’70s in Argentina.
Both books intertwined in my imagination, not only because I read them in one breath, practically at the same time. But also because they support common universes.
In Leadership, his farewell book, Kissinger suggests: “To know a man’s worldview, ask yourself what the world was like when that guy was 20.” Both Fernández Díaz and Reato remind me, not of the world when I was twenty, but of the worldview that I forged when I was that age.
Of course, most of the certainties that I defended in that age inhospitable to the mind and soul – “I was twenty years old,” said Paul Nizan, “I will not allow anyone to say that it is the best age of life” – do 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 brought me, as Fernández Diaz says in his novel, in a devastating metaphor, as the sea returns the corpses, those questions that make up our unique treasure: those that no one can answer us.
I believe that both authors have written charming and magnetic books because they do not know exactly what the enigma they are unfolding is. I suspect that what clients ask of Cora – a sentimental high-school detective, Netflix raw material, inaugural character femme NO fatale noir Buenos Aires -, it is not so much that I get them the photos, the evidence, the data. What they want to know is why they haven’t separated, 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 in this or that way throughout their adulthood.
I am quite sure that if Fernández Díaz had made explicit this silent claim of the clients of his novel, it would not have been as effective as this thriller, absorbing to the point of insomnia, ends up being. Cora reminds us that love is a force beyond the monographs of the 21st century, that his spell has not been decoded by artificial intelligence, neither by genes nor by surveys. Much less because of the statements of its protagonists. Cora’s job is to allow each client to find her answer silently, 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 being in the world. They work hard, they frequently fall in love with those they would prefer not to (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 they remain alive, looking for a new story, as soon as it ends.
Reato goes out in search of Mugica’s murderers. And in this transit there is also a dynamic typical of the police: the victim, the crime 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 false trails that have been planted over more than half a century of manipulation and trickery can be categorically discarded; and sow legitimate suspicions about the possible executors, based on the fragile traces that justice follows (in its transcendent or judicial version): motivations, statements, concomitant actions, antecedents.
But what I found to be the center of gravity of the book was the historical and experiential reconstruction of Mugica and its surroundings. In particular her relationship, celibate or not, in any case romanticwith the young Aphrodite Lucia Cullen.
That melodramatic aspect, unusual in Reato’s other volumes: the sentimental suspense. Mugica shares a room in Paris with the philanthropic young woman: both members of a Buenos Aires aristocracy who has found a dangerous form of entertainment in the slums from his own city. Some of those interviewed confirm a consummated love story, some deny it. But later Mugica, as a priest, officiates Cullen’s wedding with the 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 to commit suicide, who offers it, with his undaunted philanthropy; without much guilt, according to her correspondence.
But does this tragedy come from a previous love story with the charismatic and handsome priest who married them? Is it Payró’s Pago Chico, or Shakespeare? Did Mugica remain in uncertain celibacy to guarantee his transcendence, driven by vanity; unlike Bishop Podesta, who preferred marriage to History?
I send it to Cora to find out on streaming. I manage to have her first case be in the ’70s. It doesn’t seem impossible to me. Then she reappears in the ’90s of the last century: without cell phones or bullshit sociologists.
In her mid-twenties (the age at which we forge our worldview), Cora must reveal the intimacy of that room that Cullen and Mugica shared in Paris; as in a dark room, not electoral but photographic.
This information can determine a political chess move that brings Mugica closer or further away from Perón, from the Church, from his multiple motivations, whatever these may be exactly, if any human motivation can be. The contractor may belong to one of the competing segments: a social welfare deputy from López Rega, a lateral from Montoneros, a commoner from Perón’s polymorphous court. He is Cora’s vocational awakening.
Finally, Cora returns with the truth.
Mugica is killed. Nell, who came from the Tacuara Nazi group, commits suicide next to the train tracks, assisted by his wife, just a few months after the priest’s murder. Cullen is pregnant. Does Cora’s revelation impact that procession of events? Was the political debacle crossed by Shakespearean revenge?
The information arrives late for the contractor, but valid to write the History. Cora burns the conclusions, on paper – there is no other form of preservation – in a sacrificial ceremony in the Vatican. That’s what I get for reading two books at the same time before the end of March.
