“I was adrift and I had to tell a life adrift”

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Some writers alternate writing fiction with writing essays. Regardless of the chronological order of that production, sometimes one series helps to read the other. This is the case of Luis Gusmán (Buenos Aires, 1944), who burst onto the literary scene in 1973 with El frasquito, a revulsive, magnificently written nouvelle, completely contrary to the political effervescence of that year, when the ban on Peronism ended. , Cámpora was president for seven weeks, and Perón returned one day in June that should have been an unforgettable popular festival and ended up being a massacre.

50 years later, there is no better way to define it than using a category proposed by Gusmán himself in the essay La literatura mutinada (2018): if the notions of mutiny and mutiny function as equivalent to “a relationship of uprising to appropriate a literary tradition”, El frasquito and its related texts refer to an author who conspires, who is against what is happening, and who, over time, also seeks to impose as a new tradition the one he has chosen as a banner: there is to know how to deviate from the norm. This principle, taken to an interview, means that when answering you have to know how to deflect the question.

The bottle. (50th anniversary edition). Luis Gusman. edhasa.

–You waited about three years until someone published “El frasquito”. What were the obstacles or objections?

–I finished the manuscript in September 1970 and it was published in January 1973. Literature is like Frankenstein’s suitcase. Pieces are put in and taken out; and depending on the time, books suffer the same fate. Anecdote: I met Alberto Vanasco and Juan Carlos Martini Real after they read the manuscript for Rayuela publishing house. We had a coffee and they asked me, not in bad faith, if I knew “deep psychology”, that is, psychoanalysis. They recommended me to analyze myself. And they didn’t publish the book. Years later, I became very close friends with Juan Carlos, he was the one who most encouraged En el corazón de junio (1983) to win the very prestigious Boris Vian award, which Juan Carlos, Ricardo Piglia and Juan José Saer had won. Another publisher wanted to publish it with a foreword by Federico Smith, a psychiatrist from the Cero group. We had a very friendly conversation. I refused. There was also no bad faith. I’m not even saying that he was going to write something psychiatric… It turns out that over the years I wrote stories and novels with a character named Smith, only he was a weightlifter.

–How did you write it? Was there any clear influence? I say it in the singular, but I think it in the plural.

–The first version, at 18 years old. An oxymoron: Those who were born dead. It was the nest of the serpent. A text already between stepbrothers, as Nabokov would say, a date in the dark, they meet in a cinema and without knowing each other, one gropes the other. Two key people read it. Ochipinti, Racing librarian, who upon meeting “the diamond in the rough” began to give me books to read: at the age of 17 I read Felisberto Hernández. The other person, my literature teacher, whose last name is Ellio. Over time I added a T. He quoted me at the Jockey Club, he was not scandalized and he told me that he was a writer. Later, as the tango says, I came to the center. And Fernando de Giovani, Germán García and Osvaldo Lamborghini began to read to me. Fernando’s influence made him write a very Cortazar text with a game of the time: The Magic Brain. I passed it to Osvaldo, and after reading it, he said to me: “Did you write this?” I tore it up and wrote the first text of El frasquito, which is the scene with the mother (the little mother) in the patio and a lewd turtle runs through her body… a very erotic scene with her, who is sunbathing.

a territory of their own

–Certain topics and symbols from that book recurrently appear in your literature: death, spiritualism, a dark and captivating eroticism, relatively sordid environments. How did the map of that territory, initially unexplored, gradually take shape?

-He was configuring me. The idea of ​​a map, of a territory, was present without knowing it. Yoknapatawpha is, as are Comala and Santa María. The plot plotted me. He was adrift and had to tell a life adrift. I think it was the fatality of the language, that glued to the ear with which Leónidas Lamborghini defines the poet who wrote it. I mean how the tongue writes in me.

–Every once in a while you return to your characters, whether they are from the “El Frasquito” series or not. You mentioned Smith, who, with Walenski, are in “Tennessee” (1997). And then, Walenski is in “Until I Met You (2015) and now in your new novel, “I don’t want to say goodbye to you”… Another way to explore that territory?

–My “first character” was dead or almost a slip, or an error or an anonymous person. Because in El frasquito the character is “the narrator”, spoken, dictated, intermingled with those characters. My first character is, I think, Cigorraga (In the heart of June). He is the donor of his heart to the narrator. It is evident that credibility mattered very little to me, or did not take it (or did not take me) into account. Because a donor is anonymous. In the novel, he even locates his grave. I think that literature does not abound in characters, I could even risk that there were more in the 19th century: Amalia, Fierro, any of the gauchesca, Facundo. Then you have to wait for Erdosain, those of Borges, Morel, La Maga and Oliveira, and Alejandra and Bruno (from Sábato), you could even include Adán Buenosayres, but, I think, they are very long intervals of time. In the same vein as Adam, the alter egos: Renzi, Tomatis, Minelli. And there appears Puig…

–About Puig, when I read “El frasquito” I think if there isn’t something very Rita Hayworth, a kind of glaze, a narrator who moves in scenarios that are not described…

I think Puig is more explicit. The resource of the diaries in The Betrayal of Rita Hayworth, of the letters in Painted Mouths, of the footnotes in The Kiss of the Spider Woman. If I think about it, because I never thought about it, despite the fact that we both obviously adjusted to the plot, I think that in my case the dialogues seem judgmental, I don’t know where to put the implicit, then it occurs to me that the story never ends, there is always a will continue… that’s how the offset comes to mind.

The bottle. (50th anniversary edition). Luis Gusman. edhasa. 114 pages. $3,450. I don’t want to say goodbye. Luis Gusman. edhasa. 236 pages. $5,350.