Tell your fingers
accompany you into the abyss, how
I've known how much I
pushed farther into the depths, where my dream
most bitter
has slept with heart you in bed
wrenkling possibility of my name.
Paul Celan, Reverses breath , translation J.-P. Lefebvre, Seuil, 2003
The work of Gabriel Banez, great Argentine writer too soon reveals itself gradually disappeared in French-speaking reader, through editions The Last Drop of which I mentioned here . The following children disappear, beautiful meditation on time, childhood, irretrievable loss of innocence, Christopher and Nathan Eberhardt Sedierta include in their beautiful catalog extraordinary novel, originally published in 1998: The Virgin of Ensenada.
Here, the center of the world is a small town in Argentina, Ensenada, partido of Buenos Aires province, laid along the ocean. Port of arrival but also the starting point, it is teeming with a cosmopolitan population that is activated in a disorderly manner around the church of Notre Dame, but also on the docks and in bad neighborhoods where cross marine gangsters and prostitutes, paupers expelled from their homeland by the various dictatorships which are born in Europe at this early Thirties. Just like Argentina, Ensenada is at the mercy of people who pour their ships afloat unfortunate, Croats, Greeks, Turks, Italians, Germans and ... Belgian Divas as Sara and her father, a widower, who fled anti-Semitism and hopes to sell hats. The movement is constant, the pitch of the hulls of boats moored in the port is transmitted to the whole city seems unable to fix or offer its people any chance of stability. Even the father figure can not resist this impermanence: the failure of his business - due to the impossibility of being understood: indeed, he does not speak English - Sara forced to look elsewhere for the balance it aspires.
All men are made of water.
This somewhat cryptic sentence is imposed on it immediately and never leave. Fleeting, fickle, they can they provide support to the little girl of nine years who wanders the streets of the city inhabited by migrants? Thus begins the quest for Sarita: that of language - she wants French forget that it is odious, but also that of a human connection, and subtle solid, stable and evanescent as love. Guided by the smells, the voices that whisper sweet prayers in an idiom which is still unknown, mixed babbling prayers, she reaches into a place that would become his landmark: Church of Our Lady of Mercy, which the priest, Bernardo Benzano the collects. In him it does not recognize a father, but despite his young age, a man with beautiful gray eyes and head to sea. Between them creates a bond that is as much of the mind and heart as a forbidden sensuality but that materializes with transience, such as perfumes the composition of which it initiates:
Benzano taught him the rudiments of traditional perfumery and encouraged by the study of species of flowers and roots, trying to discover the odor of sanctity. She spent whole days in distilled extracts, to classify the pollen, and when at last she was about to make a discovery, she shut the perfume in small vials of Funchal blue glass and spun to submit to the verdict priest. Benzano bent over, took off the cap and, as a wine of the divine, squinted and let the scent is released into the atmosphere. He could stay in that long olfactory ecstasy minutes, even hours: after having taken possession of the senses, then the tide flooded the sky in memory of unexplored corners, he said. Thus the need to savor this fragrance. Not just to breathe. To feel he had to travel. The odor of sanctity was so rare and so wild that it led to innocence, a place thought Benzano located somewhere between the knees and the waterline of childhood.
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| Personal Photo, museum Unterlinden |
Perfume, delicate balance between meeting immaterial sense, mysticism, the purity of childhood, is engraved in the memory where it leaves an indelible imprint, but a body, more than matter. The ethereal fragrance of rose, orange blossom, lemon verbena, juniper substitute for caresses, touches on in contact with the body. Benzano to the memory of the woman survives in the memory of a smell, as the effluvium syrupy body of a prostitute he can not forget. Between man and the little girl spirit installs relationship fails to materialize so that ephemeral, such as the appearance that occurs once: Lady, sad-eyed mother figure, it is revealed. Evidence of his innocence - a theme very present in the work of Gabriel Bañez - it is also a manifestation of femininity, because it embodied Virgin then a woman, a prostitute and the priest child surprise open frolic with Sarita's father and that the player will identify the latest Eva - Evita, a prostitute with whom he also maintains Benzano an affair. The Virgin is the woman she becomes flesh; error Sara is also that of all the Argentine people who could see Evita Peron an angelic figure. Thus, the small daughter does not discern the evil where it is located; this purity can connect to its surroundings. But can it survive the irreparable leak that time blessed child? Miracles are long. Such as perfumes evaporate and die, the links that are created can not exist at the time. The filial love felt by the priest for child turns into desire. Refusing to indulge in them, it tries to expel the girl by entrusting it to the soup of the Child, a charity to which it continues to escape to find the man she loves.
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| Ushuaia |
The world in which bears and Sara Bernardo is inconsistent. Ensenada, a small town trying to prosper in the shadow of Buenos Aires, is like a world in microcosm: they speak all languages, they also forget; meet there all those held by driven from their countries political disorder. Eva Virgin - prostitute, is the wife of one Joseph Broz that readers will recognize! The fantasy novel which intertwines history with individual destinies, founding a common mythology, both are similar cataclysms suffered by all peoples. The Virgin watches over a world beset with misfortune, wars, dictatorships existing and emerging ... Love can not flourish, as everyone is aware of the role it should play. The priest who aspires to sainthood, noting carefully any miraculous event he witnesses, can not help but be swept away by the passion he feels for Sarah. He attempts to deflect the course indulging in the sensuality of her relationship Eva, then away as far as possible, in a dual quest for purity and of itself. This desperate flight from Argentina this odyssey, letters arrive at Sarita, however belatedly: impressions of a desperate poetry, they also reflect the gradual abandonment of self-awareness. Bernardo Benzano renounces his identity, then forget it. Only love remains passionate and heartbreaking, whose testimony occupies the end of the novel. Falcino Pietro, Bernardo's mentor, could not fully substitute for him the letters he sends Sara is loving, but also of madness. The distance between two people seems to abolish it, as the girl occupies the thoughts, the heart of one she is loved.
; ; Ushuaia Friday 26Dear Sara,We were raised so high. Things die slowly. But at times, our souls are in unison. And each of those moments, I feel like being alone with you.Pietro Falcino
Thus, there is a journey that we undertake is carried by the desire, but can stop at any moment, as this miraculous streetcar can not go to the destination - which, incidentally? And as the wonderful flavors fanning themselves, happiness is fleeting and can not be sustainable, as everyone's life is subject to the whims of a universal destiny that crushes the individual. Spectator and sometimes officer of this disorder, a character that we have not even mentioned, Filadelfio, the puppeteer, who tries to watch over Sarah and Bernardo, but whose kindness is hampered by the violence of this world ... and time, which prevents him to accompany those he protects. But the memories remain, those of Sarah, who at death's door, she remembers those times we offer these subtle and heady scents, these tastes, the sounds, those languages that blend and enriched, dying to be reborn into a new idiom as this Lunfardo Buenos Aires. The belle traduction de Frédéric Gross-Quelen restitue à merveille cet univers foisonnant de sensualité, de tendresse et de désespoir, de chaleur et d’humanité aussi.
To find Argentine literature and its riches, we refer also to the beautiful site of Irene Meyer, who The Virgin of Ensenada is dedicated : Argentine Writers . You will discover treasures and many pages Gabriel Bañez.
