Guillermo Saccomanno He arrived at Villa Gesell in the early years of the nineties. He came from the big city, from the Capital – Buenos Aires from ’48, Mataderos neighborhood – he worked in advertising as a creative director: he was doing very well. At the same time, he wrote comics and had published a few books that threatened to become a work. “One day I decided to throw everything to hell and come here,” he says with his cell phone on his cheek. He’s in a car, in the back. While he talks on the phone he tells the driver where to turn, where to park, in the middle of the block, how much it is, thank you very much, thank you, good day. “What were we up to?”, he resumes. 400 kilometers from God’s offices and with the sea at his feet, he continued with the comics and some sporadic journalistic notes that he wrote, and began to give literary workshops. With that, he caught up with him. “I came here for a purification exercise,” he says. The underlying objective, the essential goal: “dedicate more time to literature.”
On the other side of the timeline, which still continues, which does not let up, is this book: Blackbird: Friendship Notebooks (Seix Barral). “Perhaps one can only be objective with the dead after a time, a long time, when absence distances it and idealizes it,” she begins. In that voice that narrates and remembers, that evokes and dialogues, but that also reflects and poetizes, Saccomanno builds a kind of diary about her friends from Gesell, like the photographer Adriana Lestidoor as the writer Juan Forn, who died three years ago. It is a zigzagging, doubtful, conflicted search that moves forward and backwards, that turns, that looks at the sky, the sea, that zooms in, that distances itself, but is firm in this aspect: friendship is the great multiple mirror of who we are. : “what we are in others,” he writes. And pages later: “Perhaps this compilation of notes, even in its imperfection, makes up a book. Maybe one about loneliness.”
When he arrived in this seaside town —says Saccomanno now, already at home, possibly with the phone on speaker and reclining in a soft chair—, he found “a greater degree of concentration and more time to write.” “And something that a neighbor once told me: when you have a stumbling block, a blockage, a problem, you go down to the beach, walk a while against the wind, and when you return home you have it solved. It seems unbelievable, but it is quite like that. It is working with space. And I think there is something that is fundamental for me: the relationship with nature and with the openness that the sea represents. It is not the same to be in the forest, which is much more inward, than to be in front of the sea, which represents spaciousness, openness. And on the other hand, here I found a solidarity that consists of suddenly you need something at the pharmacy, a Termofren for your kid, and you forgot the money or you don’t have it, and the pharmacist says: bring it to me tomorrow.”
In this change of life (“living in a more spartan, more ascetic way, doing without all the mental trinkets that the city implies”), Gesell becomes a “territory of writing”: “I understood that the best way to know the place was to write about it. At that time I was already collaborating for Page 12 and I proposed to him Cream a series of back covers during a summer about the history of Villa Gesell, which later became a book, Old Gesell, which was widely criticized because I put my finger on the issue regarding family stories; and it had quite a bit of circulation.” The “peak” of that referenced literature was Gesell Chamber“a dark novel that tells the other Gesell, the murky one, the real one, which can be read as a metaphor for the country.” “And although it sounds pedantic,” he adds, “the dream of every writer is to invent a town: Winesburg, Ohio of Sherwood AndersonYoknapatawpha of FaulknerMacondo of Garcia Marquez. “I didn’t invent anything, the town was already there, but it was my territory.”
He usually spends two months in Gesell and then goes to Buenos Aires to visit his daughters. Twenty days and come back. “This is the place where I settled and where I made friends. At some point I felt, and I think this is existential, that at a certain age, one looks back on what we have come, and asks ourselves: what is left to walk, who is there, who is not there? Sometimes it’s like bowling: you are a doll, you look to the sides and everyone around you falls, and you are left with two or three more dolls standing there until next time. If I look to the sides, many of my friends have left, and many important ones. In this book I wanted to bring them closer, take them out of the cholula or figuretti thing, and show them as human beings, because they are my friends. They are also what they took from me, because whoever leaves takes parts of you: You continue to maintain a dialogue, and it is not that I am a spiritualist, New Age or anything like that, but suddenly you find yourself talking to those who they left”.
—I think about the intersection between literature and reality, because there is a construction of characters, you reflect on this issue. It is non-fiction, but at the same time it is also fiction, right?
—There is something hybrid in this book. They are not biographies, nor is it a diary, nor is it exactly a testimony, but it works at times as a testimony of friendship and at times as a diary. In fact, it has a writing that is close to a diary. And it is fiction: the mechanisms with which it is articulated are those of fiction. In any case, like the family novel, it is the novel that one tells oneself. But it is not literature of the self, which seems to me to be fourth-rate. ‘I twisted my ankle and I am writing a novel’. No, literature goes in another direction. I see it as a fashion, a label, and if there is something interesting about literature it is that you can break with conventions. Otherwise, why do you write? Dedicate yourself to something else. Or at least try. In any case, in this book there is something confessional, of the diary, of the account of the past, memory. I raise all of this in the book. And there is an operation with memory, but one that seeks to escape from tearful melancholy and remove the body from self-pity.
—You were talking about solidarity, and it could be said that we are in elusive times in that respect: times of individuality, of self-improvement, of exhibitionism, of self-sufficiency. I wonder how this novel fits in with the times.
—There are several things. Raymond Carverwhom I discovered a while ago, a teacher, has some intimate texts like my father’s life, which for me is a model. And on the other hand, Carver also has an article in which he talks about Santa Teresa and he says that we must return to the word tenderness, which is discredited today. As if talking about love were the preserve of women’s magazines with New Age advice or it does not fit into everyday life. In this crisis of representation that we are experiencing, words have lost significance; tenderness too. Why not talk about love and manly love? What’s wrong with it? Why look for a pigeonhole? Friendship between friends, what is it called? Isn’t love what arises between friends? Doesn’t a feeling flow through a friendship that they call solidarity, also fraternalism? And furthermore, with friendships something of the order of the brotherhood is established, and it seems to me that that is in the book. That of the three or four who get together to tell stories in the hotel, the relationship that is established between the characters and the fictionalization of their lives. When telling their lives, even though some stories are very close to reality, to what happened, like that of Ricky, Patri and cancer, when telling them I had to fictionalize them. I’m thinking, I don’t know why, of an author that Juan and I really liked in the beginning: Carrère. In Of other people’s lives works with autobiographical material. In some ways it does too Sebald either John Berger. It’s hard for me to define this book, because it’s not that I sat down and decided to write a novel, it was written. And I am also convinced that the book was written for me. Although it can be a deceptive experience, it began to organize my past and why I am here, what I do here and who I am. Or in any case, the central question: who am I?
—It’s not a common experience to sit down to read and not really understand what you’re reading. Even with movies or series. In general, one goes in prepared. Not with this book: one goes forward and doesn’t really know what it is. The confusion and uncertainty remain. Do you think that’s a value?
—Yes, because everything is labeled, classified. Suddenly you fall into the literary novel category, how, the other novels are not? Aren’t romantic novels? I feel surprised with what is happening with my literature. Planeta launched the Saccomano library. Does this mean that I have a style? Don’t know. On the other hand, you enter a chain bookstore, a shopping mall, a Cúspide or Yenny. On the first table are bestsellers and Japanese literature, which books by Japanese authors are widely sold in certain bookstores. Then come women’s literature, a category in which I do not believe. Not in trans literature either. There is good literature and bad literature and everyone knows what this means. And then comes self-help and then comes politics and everything is separated by labels. Does a writer have to think about where he is going to fit himself? Thinking about where you are going to focus is thinking about who you want to sell your book to. It implies thinking about the money, about the sale.
There are no books by him in the Saccomano library. This morning, when he wanted to bring her a copy of Blackbird to a friend, she realized she didn’t have one. So she stopped by Alfonsina, the bookstore Pepe Rozaand bought one. “I don’t have any of my own books for the following reason: if you look at it you might think ‘I used to be better at it’ or ‘how could I write this nonsense?’ It’s not healthy to have your own books in the library,” and he laughs. But when he hears an allusion to the speech he gave at the opening of the 2022 Book Fair, he lets out a forced yawn and says: “Soup again?” He avoids the repetitive memory of the intense debate between editors and authors about the permanent tension between literature and the market. He also avoids the pamphleteering, but never the political: certain aspects of his materialism have crept into this conversation, but now, at the end, he grabs the shotgun, kicks open the door and goes out to hunt the last depoliticized hare in the mountain of readers:
—Literature is political, but more than anything it is ideological in the face of reality, no matter what you write: science fiction, poetry, fantastic, police, realism. Ideology enters everywhere: the reference to reality is there and it is not. Viñas said that the texts must be dated. He told me this way: ‘You have to date the texts, little brother.’ What does he mean? That when you read a text from a few years ago and you want to have a fuller reading, you can investigate what was happening at that time. And when you read authors like Liliana Heker, Marta Lynch, Beatriz Guido, David Viñas, Dalmiro Sáenz, Abelardo Castillothat whole generation, you have to look at what was happening around: the left was present, it was strong, there was the experience of the Che Guevarafrom Cuba, the commitment was discussed, and that literature was in a certain way a literature of denunciation, not always explicit, because good literature is not down-line, but it was crossed by reality.
