Vulnerable, demanding, spiteful, flirtatious, jealous, eternally dissatisfied, demanding, always sick, “just like Joan Fontaine”, cruel: the mother was, in the words of María Negroni, “the most fervent and harmful occupation” of her life, a decisive part of what he calls “a strange family tree. On her maternal side, pretense of lineage: governesses, chauffeur, porcelain and other perhaps less useless luxuries. (...) On the paternal side, Asturians, country people, illiterates. My mother was touched by art, literature and music, but also pride, sexual disinterest. The lack of streets, according to my father”; when she died, her daughter found herself writing "a census of illegible scenes."
María Negroni was born in Rosario (Argentina) in 1951 and is the author of more than forty books, many of them as unclassifiable as Gotham City (1994), Joseph Cornell Elegy (2013) and Satie Object (2018); Although she has already published two novels – El sueño de Úrsula (1998) and La Anunciación (2007) – her literature is the product of the type of formal constriction and attention to detail that operate in poetry, to which the author dedicated books such as La cage under the rag (1991), Iceland (1994), Exilium (2016) and Dickinson Archive (2018), among others.
And although El corazón del daño is a novel, or so it seems, it is full of elements that we can call poetic: epigrams – “Whoever writes is silent. Whoever reads does not break the silence”, “Books are the music of a knowledge that is ignored”–, words from a language that no longer exists –“ bigardíes”, “tinenti”, “poliladron”, “solero”, “plumetí ”…–, phrases of disconcerting perfection –“With open lips, I didn't say anything”…– and an explicit distrust regarding the possibility that “saying” is not another way of cunningly remaining silent .
But El corazón del daño also has a plot, and the narrative arc that it traces goes from Argentina in the 1950s to the present day – much less noisy than the previous one, in the book – passing through New York City. , where Negroni taught at Sarah Lawrence College and New York University and received a Guggenheim Fellowship; of the father who takes his daughter to the movies and protects her from the Bogeyman but prefers to be in the races and in the corridors of politics than that mother who is torn between love and rejection, between missing her daughter and of his convictions and the wish that he does not have to live a life like his; from the conformation of a sensibility and specific political ideals –with its secrecy, its contradictions, its terror…– until its dissolution in writing, that “clarity of confusion” in which only “the noise of absence” is heard. of noise”.
"Literature is an elegant form of resentment," writes Negroni, but The Heart of Damage is not a settling of scores except for what it does to the prosecution of a missed bond. The mother was, writes Negroni, "the worst of the best things that happened to me"; For the same reason, she could also be said that she was the best of the worst things that happened to her. The racehorse that her father had was called “Yugo”, and under her mother's –and against him– Negroni became an exceptional writer, the author of an extensive work that is not so much read as inhabited, someone who In The Heart of Damage, he also uses the voices of others –Djuna Barnes, Juan Gelman, Clarice Lispector, Edmond Jabès, Virginia Woolf, Hélène Cixous…– to try to understand the link between literature and life, to understand why In this way, the mother is also, among many other things, “a machine for producing origins”.
“At some point, I started writing,” says Negroni. And if her writing seems to tremble at times it is not because she is cowed, intimidated by the size of the task, but because she is naked.
Maria Negroni
the heart of damage
Random House
144 pages €17.90
