The Brooklyn Rail

This month sees the publication of a new Aurora Venturini novel, and I'm hoping a widespread bloom of this Argentinian novelist's work sweeps through English-language bookshops. As in the much-lauded 2023 novel, Cousins, the narrator of We, the Casertas is a young woman whose intellectual gifts offer some hope of transcending her monstrous home life. Translator Kit Maude has succeeded again in delivering a darkly brilliant, compellingly wry voice—which is essential, as each novel is a wondrous exploration of the narrator's mind. The dark playfulness of the young woman, Chela Stradolini, narrating this bildungsroman will remind readers of Scout or possibly Mick from The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Change the names and a few locations and the novels of Venturini would be at home in a course on the Southern Gothic, but, unlike its American counterpart, the South American Gothic has greater territorial ambitions, with characters unafraid to cross borders. Here, Chela coils under adversity and springs first to Chile and then Italy in search of life wide enough for her capacious mind.

*

It was in a doctor’s waiting room in La Plata that a vision of Luís’s head, a crumbling capital, came back to me, horrifically superimposed between the shoulders of his second wife. I know that I have lost him now and forever, that I shall never again feel his sweet touch, which once belonged to me, because his second marriage must have been a happy union. It is the only reason she would have been able to salvage his head from death, to preserve the features of the only human I ever loved. As part of a normal relationship at least, because I also loved my great-aunt with a passion.

On the long winter nights, I used to hug myself, warmed by fantasies about our loving reunion in the lilac-blue light, the shade of the faithful dead. I now know that he is waiting for her alone, perhaps so she can give him back his head. My mother used to say that married couples who reach old age having maintained a close, harmonious relationship come to seem like siblings. It wasn’t true of her, because my mother bore a resemblance to Mr. Roux. But that’s another story.

After my confrontation with Luis’s widow, even though nothing and nobody can scratch, break, or mutilate me anymore, I’ve been through it all already, I feel an awful horror. The prospect of being completely, definitively, and horrendously displaced now lies before me: I shall shed rivers of tears into Lake Styx after going through the customary seven circles of Hell and ending up in the garret of the next world. I envy the woman. I envy her widowhood. What I wouldn’t give to be Luis’s widow. I, who was never anything to anyone.

Repeated slings and arrows have molded me into a simulacrum of my great-aunt, and perhaps the little woman is waiting for me at the threshold of the arcane mystery, beckoning to me so we can cross through together. I limp up to my attic. The repulsive beast I have become searches through an ancient chest of papers and photographs, teachers’ and psychologists’ reports commissioned by my father to find out just what kind of monster he had sired, to learn whether it was his fault or the effect of some insidious flaw in the maternal line.

I can fit inside, and even get lost in the chest, together with my old woman/dwarf/Proustian soul. After everything I’ve been through, it’s all I’ve amounted to.

Perhaps unnecessarily, I repeat that I am a woman going through a chest of letters, photographs, reports, cards, and yellowing papers. From out of it pops a little girl in an organdy dress: a photo of me when I was four years old. Along with it leaps Dürer’s Allegory of Melancholy. It was in a frame once, but I took out it out to store in the chest.

Soon I shall describe the little girl in the organdy dress, but beforehand I shall describe the present state of my soul because I am Albrecht Dürer’s Allegory of Melancholy and my surroundings are the same as those of the character.

The attic of my country house contains all the objects of my exile, surrounding me while I lean my pale, feverish head on my left hand. In my right I hold the compasses of futile expectation. Also here are the ladder to nowhere, the cupid on the rusty wheel, the broken bell, the frozen hourglass, the unbalanced scales, and the starving dog. All that are lacking are the symbols Dürer added to the engraving representing hope, the star in the background and the seal of sixteen numbers that add up to thirty-four in every direction, ensuring an eloquent solution to any problem.

The little girl.

She is holding a wicker basket containing paper roses. That girl is my past self, a gremlin haunting the realm of my future sorrows while I bury my arm up to the elbow in the chests of autumn and the inevitable winter to come.

I had begun my time in Hell four years before the photograph: the day of my birth. An alert girl, a worm in a cocoon she unpicked and reweaved so as to convulse, rise and burst forth, sometimes serene, others obsessive, always precocious.

I look at the photo and I can see my mother on the day she brought me to have it taken.

It was a warm but rainy summer afternoon. The turbulent sky covered the ashen city in metallic gray, acid zinc cloud. We were both sweating, annoying beads of sweat appearing on our foreheads as we sat on the green leather seats of the buggy drawn by a dark horse. I look at the shoes in the photo, which are red with a buckle. Water splashed on them and I tried to dry them with my fine handkerchief but my mother cuffed my head. I see the gold chain with the Alpine cameo medallion, which got tangled up in my silver thread purse. I tugged on it and my mother hit me again.

I can feel the rough green leather of the seat, hear the clackety-clack of the hooves over the cobbles, see the trickle of water leaking through the roof of the buggy, and relive that burning desire to speak to her. But she kept herself as rigid as a caryatid in the Erechtheion. The constant dripping on my head made me want to sneeze, but I couldn’t get out of its way because my mother wouldn’t let me move. I did sneeze. “You little freak… you’re going to catch another cold.”

My mother’s classical profile, defined by her perfect forehead and chin, contorted into a sneer. She was only twenty-five, but I wondered what she had been like when she was young.

The truth is that youth came to her only once in life but I banished it at a stroke. When she frowned, wrinkles sank rails across her plains, rails along which ran the train of worry. I was its passenger, the cause of the furrows that eroded her beauty until wearing it away like an alfalfa butterfly caught in a pampas gale.

Her favorite was Lula, her youngest daughter. The chubby blond, a sweet child whom she protected all her life, and whom I bullied whenever I had the chance. My mother sang to her firm-fleshed doll, Maria Salomé, Lulita; they even stole those names from me, foisting the name Maria Micaela on me like an ill-fitting coat; at my tender age it had a bitter taste. As the firstborn, I should have had my mother’s names, but she held them back to give to her second daughter. And to cap off my sorrows, I wasn’t pretty.

I was rebellious and my mother hit me, but I punched back harder without having to raise a finger. Welts formed on the arms I raised to protect myself, inspiring me to invent maladies in an attempt to fit into a scene from which I had already been exiled.

I persisted with the act; or perhaps it was the pain in my soul manifesting itself as mendacious complaints, “I have a headache” or “My feet are cold.”

But it was in vain; my witchy mother could sniff out the lie and a malevolent, manic cackle coursed through me that even now reappears at times of stress, as though I were laughing through the throats of ten women.

Back to the photo, I’m still in the buggy. We got out and in the photographer’s studio I was placed next to a small table on which sat the basket. “Pretend you’re picking up a flower,” the man instructed, with the added plea, “Smile.” But he couldn’t get anything out of me. My arm poked out from my body like the branch of a weeping willow and I was incapable of smiling. My face resembled more the mask of tragedy, pouting and grimacing. My mother’s eyes gleamed horribly when she realized that the photograph would be a fiasco.

The kindly photographer adjusted a pleat on my dress and said, “Look here, little girl, here comes the birdie.” I was mollified and began to giggle; I thought the situation ridiculous.

“I’m telling your father when we get home,” my mother threatened. “Do what you can with the little freak,” she said to the man in a resigned voice.

My mother knew that she could never tame me, she knew without my ever saying a word that I found the idea of having my photograph taken stupid, that I could already read and write in spite of my youth, that I started to read road signs and numbers at the age of three without anyone having taught me. I treated them, the grown-ups, as I saw fit, I made fun of them, I hated them. She knew that I was far superior to other children my age and that I would be the downfall of both her and her favorite daughter. She was afraid of me, and I knew it.

It had stopped raining by the time we left the dark studio. Golden sunlight was flooding down, warming the well-marshaled flowers on Plaza San Martín, the lime trees and the magnolias.

The sun lent a golden sheen to my mother’s silk dress, which was chestnut with little painted swirls and a pleated skirt. Her high-heeled boots were brown and on her head she wore an Italian sun hat, which did nothing to detract from the proud, bronzed skin of a true Argentine woman. She was carrying a plush suede purse, soft as Lula’s skin. The downside, the only ugly thing about her, was what she was dragging along, Chela, Maria Micaela Stradolini, her skinny, dark firstborn, who was nothing but a big pair of eyes.

In the cafés, children with far greater freedom than I lapped up ice creams, cones of chocolate and red and pink fruit. No one was supervising them and at the counters they carried themselves like self-assured dwarves while I dangled from my mother’s hand like a furious puppet. I’d have sold my soul for a lick of freely obtained ice cream, but she went to Confitería La Perla for her tea and dry cookies. I hate tea and dry cookies.

I could hear the joyful burble of the free in the street. My imagination was beholden to images of their multicolored cones while the waiter neatly laid out our order on the tablecloth embroidered with the name of the establishment.

After “Confitería La Perla,” I read out the labels on the jars, the boxes on the shelves, and the brands of sweets while my mother simmered with rage.

The teapot and kettle steamed, the cookies on the little plate made the atmosphere sugary and syrupy.

Pretending to be stupid, I went on reading labels to demonstrate my distaste for the outing. She read my mind. “Ice cream makes bronchitis worse.”

My bronchial lobes were like a spluttering engine, but what harm could an ice cream do to what was already a chronic sickness? Mother poured the tea. “Come on, eat.”

She savored the English delicacy but I’ve always found it bland.

My lonely seagull eyes flew over the solidified water of her diamond ring, across a hostile, miserly sea, the dark waters down below, the ebony beads of her double necklace, her golden earrings.

“Mother, why have you never loved me, not even a little?”

She pointed at my cup. “Your tea’s getting cold.”

The column of steam no longer spiraled up from the porcelain depression, it had been defeated by my stubbornness. I swirled it around twice, like when I cleaned my teeth, and swallowed the disgusting liquid. She ate her cream cookies and the twisted, crunchy palmera pastries while sugared music sweetened the air, the sound of my childhood, evoking images of Charlie Chaplin: “La Violetera.” Shy flowers danced on lilac-blue legs up graceful columns toward a fin de siécle ceiling painted in a naive Baroque style, with ingenuous round capitals and a honeyed rose garden.

1925, when La Plata, the capital of the Province of Buenos Aires, was still a paradise. We’d traveled in from our nearby estate just to take the photo to send to Aunt Angelina, a relative of my father’s, in Italy. Idyllic times, in spite of the bitterness wrought and cast my way by the other members of the household.

My legs danced under the table, silly as Chaplin’s, a madcap dance that if performed in public would make the audience laugh, just as much as they did at the unfortunate Chaplin with his tragic shoes that helped him to flee down long roads after playing the fool.

Watching his films at the cinema upset me. I was a Chaplinesque girl, clumsy and comical. When I was four, I decided that the actor was my spiritual brother.

I am still wounded today by the mimed dialogues, the loving feelings and advances expressed with just a flutter of the eyelashes and contorted eyebrows, the sorrow of the little mustache stuck like a chocolate onto his upper lip, the aristocratic buffoon who embodied the baldness of the skull better than Hamlet. The family remarked on my long, ñandu-chick limbs and my enormous feet, which were as much of a burden to me as Chaplin’s shoes must have been to him.

Mother remained unmoved—she kept her anger bottled up inside—at my lack of appetite, although I nibbled hungrily at my nails.

“Pig… you like that, do you? I’m going to put caca on your nails so you enjoy them even more.” She knew how to put on a performance. Some gentlemen called out a compliment, “What a doll.” She just blushed a little. The men must have thought their doll was urging me to try the cream pastries: Eat, honey, they’re delicious.

She started to put on her gloves. Her hands were those of a failed concert pianist who had sacrificed her career to marry before her little sister. She always had to win. But she always lost.

“You’ll see, the moment we get home I’m telling your father about all the trouble you’ve caused me this afternoon.”

What trouble?

Having been tempted into giggling in a photography studio where I stood stiff as a board and thought the promise of a birdie was stupid and reading out things that were there to be read, of course.

Mother would be getting fat soon. Her pregnancy would bring an end to the tight-fitting dresses, the pleated tube skirts, and tottering around on Louis XV heels.

I already knew where children came from and all the rest although not in great detail. I had simply reasoned it out. My mother thought she was living with a monster.

“Chela is a pest.” My two grandmothers could agree on that at least.

They’d argue:

“Lula is as pretty as her mother.”

“No, she gets it from the Stradolini side of the family.”

The two old women competed over a conventional beauty. A lovely, docile baby.

My nicknames were “Crow” and “Big Nose.”

“Shitty old crones,” I’d scream at them.

I wanted my future brother to be horrible. Maybe it was a sister. No. I knew it was going to be a nasty boy.

“Lula isn’t any trouble, she eats like a little lady.”

They didn’t say a word about me. It was worse than if they’d called me hateful, surly, smelly.

They didn’t deign to use any adjectives at all and the indifference hurt as though I’d never been born. It was a two-hour trip back to the house in the buggy, and fear stalked me all the way. I’m telling your father.

I had put ants in Lula’s diapers, mother blamed a careless maid. I drew ugly animals on her mosquito net: reptiles, hippopotamuses, herds of prehistoric beasts, from the bright, colorful pages of Caras y Caretas. She cried when I pinched her, or put up with the wasp sting pretending to be asleep. I hated her. I was two years older than my sister and was stubbornly inventing a new enemy.

Even though it was a warm night, I felt cold. It was the kind of cold I only ever got over once in my life. I had a pain in my chest. Similarly, I only ever got over that pain in my chest once in my life. The hinges on the gate creaked and we headed into bitter territory.

My father, as usual, was reading in his study while he smoked his oh-so-dainty meerschaum pipe. His colleagues had just honored him with a promotion. Maybe he’ll be in a good mood, I thought to myself. Mother kissed him as she came in. “Mama… mama,” the idiot Lula cried.

“Chela was very naughty.”

“Go to your room without supper.”

They didn’t even bother to tell me off. I threw myself onto the bed and cried. I have shed many tears over my father. Never over her. I wet my pillow with tears of rage, I wanted to die.

In the morning, I invented pastimes to keep me busy, I invested objects with my dreams, I made up characters, I became the proud accomplisher of thousands of feats. My psyche and my soma were harmoniously integrated and wandered through idyllic landscapes, some of them real, some of them fantasy. I didn’t like doing chores. Well, I did get great pleasure out of washing mother’s fine porcelain and the knickknacks from her display case. I would add a great deal of soap to a large tub, a veritable drift of soapy snow, and used a cloth to clean the delicately carved objects, little stoneware artworks, Murano glass, porcelain from Austria, Germany, and France. My mother loved these mementos. She clung to the dead gilded universes to escape her domestic reality as a failed pianist. I would clean the English pottery, the oriental Buddhas, the gleaming Venetian silhouettes so mysterious with their specks of embedded gold, gondolas from the Lido, sailing over the Adriatic. And in the big soapy tub the landscapes would float around under my scrubbing hands.

“Be careful, they’re heirlooms… I don’t know why you insist on doing that,” lamented my mother.

I would rub the cloth over the carvings, the gilt, the tiny signatures that affirmed this or that provenance or ancient date. And after covering them thoroughly in suds, I would wipe clean glasses, little bottles, amphorae, Neapolitan wine flasks whose jeweled blood flowed on, still alive after being emptied like the shell of a firefly. While I did the chore I had chosen for myself, I fantasized about Europe and Asia, I brought whole continents into the rustic air of the estate. I was already clever enough to read History of Art and Europe was my goal. The supervisor continued to plead, “Careful, they’re memories.”

I intentionally knocked the odd thing against the edge of the tub, or might carefully allow a glass with a wobbly base to sway back and forth and catch it in midair just as it was about to hit the ground. My mother suffered.

Camelia Obieta, who was something more than my father’s friend, would screech, “How can you let the child horse around with the objects from the display case?”

During my chore, I would invent little plays, one of whose titles was Falsity, and the protagonist was Camelia Obieta. I couldn’t understand why my mother, who knew everything, put up with it. I thought that my mother was as indecent as they were. But sometimes, to reassure myself, I’d reflect that perhaps only I had realized what was going on. Pondering the “Camelia” issue, I washed the lid of a soup dish with a beautiful landscape of the Bay of Naples painted on it. There was Capri, with its ragged trees, the splendid sky over the marina, Santa Lucía and the Roca della Madonna. Suddenly, Vesuvius erupted. I saw great clouds of smoke billow upward and rivers of lava flow downhill, scorching everything in their path, and horrifying ruptures appear in the earth’s crust. The lid flew and smashed to pieces.

From a remote shore, I heard the cry of the Gorgons: “When your father gets home.”

I froze. I was as bereft as a hero who has lost their sword and shield. A pair of wings like dead leaves sprouted from my heels. I was standing alone at the door to an orphanage, but I didn’t cry. I gathered up the ancient fragments, I think that I kissed them. I felt my chest shatter too, and coughed; my bronchial lobes were a pair of sputtering engines.

I’d read about the banquet of the gods and I sat at the table and listened to the clock chimes open the doors of fear; half past twelve, one, half past one, and so on until four o’clock, when my father would arrive.

I lay down on the root of a willow tree. I didn’t eat. From where I was, I could hear mother and Camelia’s stupid chatter. I had the indecent hope that when my father saw the femme fatale he would forget about me. Lulita was having lunch in the dining room. I peeked in at her and saw a single plate on a pink tablecloth and the silver cutlery that had belonged to mother when she was a girl. Lula used everything like a little lady.

In my childhood, I was never able to eat with cutlery, I ate with my hands to finish more quickly, to just get it over with and start on something else. Chela is a beast, they said, and it didn’t bother me. I loved animals, so I didn’t see it as an insult. My father would say, “She might be very intelligent, extremely gifted, but she eats like a pig.”

Now I was chewing on grass because I was thirsty. My tummy itched and I lifted my shirt; I saw red dots on my skin as though wasps had been at it. I realized that I was sick and was possessed by a savage joy. They’d finally realize I was alive, that I was human enough to get sick, just like other children. The high fever dried out my throat and my eyes began to weep. I fell asleep praying to the gods that it was the black pox.

My father called me.

I woke up. I went to the study. My father was smoking, not reading. He didn’t bother swiveling his chair toward me.

“You have done something atrocious, you have broken a collector’s piece that my mother, your grandmother, gave to your mother when we married. You have committed a crime against beauty.”

In response I let out the peep of an ailing bird.

“Hush, you are bad and devilishly rebellious, you don’t act like a daughter of mine or your mother’s.”

Peeping isn’t talking.

My mother and Camelia came in and saw how red I was.

“What’s wrong with the girl, why is she so red?”

“Just what I needed, I’m three months pregnant. If it’s rubella, woe betide me and the baby…”

“Is it measles?”

“She’s had it.”

“Chicken pox?”

“Rubella!”

“You may not get it.”

“I’ll lose the child.”

I was naked as a celluloid doll and they prodded my bare child’s body. I thought they’d gone mad, I was the sick one, why were they worried about their future son?

I was confined to the attic together with Sara; it was where I spent all my illnesses. I sank roots in that attic, roots that would last forever. Through the narrow window I could see the pinkish evening, the same color as the peach jam that was recommended for the sick. Jam on the inside and out, that and the constant feeling that I was going to vomit. Sara brought a potty and said, Vomit. Sara was black and looked as though she was made of rubber. She blended into the shadows of the room and I was left alone in the wreckage.

Sara and the mumps, Sara and the measles, Sara and scarlet fever, Sara and chicken pox, and now back with me along with the seething, burning welts.

Sara and the nightmares that turned the floor into crumbly pastry for strawberry ice cream, or made scraggly scarecrows run across the attic and leap onto my bed, macro-encephalitic dwarves with pointy teeth and eyes like hard-boiled eggs.

I screamed.

“Don’t be scared, it’s the fever.”

The doctor came. “Let’s take a look at your tongue, my girl…”

The term of endearment moved me. I cried. But the doctor didn’t notice because my condition produced tears. I knew, though, that I was crying over the novelty of tenderness.

“Ice cream, doctor, strawberry ice cream…”

“Sara, give her an enormous scoop of ice cream, it’ll be good for her.”

Sara asked after my mother.

“I’m worried about María Salomé, this disease in the third month of pregnancy.”

“The poor madam.”

“I’ve advised an abortion, it would be the most prudent course of action. But they’re with the priest now and the church wants nothing to do with abortions.”

I made deductions from my bed.

I recovered. Like a swamp creature I left my lair and went out into the fields.

Sara began to hate me for what happened to mother. Before, when Sara loved me a little, I bathed. Now I wouldn’t take the trouble. I ran through the countryside, my pajamas sticking to my skin. I slid down the banister like a shooting star. My messy braids, tied up with ribbons, bounced off my back. Health was a plant whose roots were nourished by mud, a wild happiness burnished the sky.

The randomly scattered fruit trees began to swell with seeds for another season lurking inside the little apples. There were peach trees, satsumas from the east, pomegranates from the south of Spain, the American grapevines known as “chinche” with their soft, tightly packed bunches, and early plums that dripped their blood onto the paths. On to the next honeyed burst of fig with its sugary, golden tears, I ran through it all, messy and free. Dirty and soiled, I enjoyed unlimited independence. And I climbed trees in the shade, so clean were the willows whose crystalline sap was like tears calling for a green handkerchief to soak in, the upright poplar, the even straighter, elegant cypress. I ran across the fields of Buenos Aires, a carpet burning in places with red and blue thistles like vegetable roosters, across patches of tiny flowers entangled with the clover.