Photo: Silvina Stirnemann
Alicia Dujovne Ortiz
published in Spanish in Hispamérica (Gaithersburg, MD) 82 (April 1999)
Alicia Dujovne Ortiz (Buenos Aires, 1939) is the author of thirty books. She moved to France in 1978 and now lives in Paris. Her many novels include Mireya (1998), Un corazón tan recio (2011; Such a Sturdy Heart), and La procesión va por dentro (2019; The Procession Within), as well as the autobiographical novels El árbol de la gitana (1997; The Gypsy Woman’s Tree), Las perlas rojas (2005; The Red Pearls), and Aguardiente (2022; Moonshine); these were published as a trilogy, Andanzas (2023; Adventures). She has also written several biographies, among them: Maria Elena Walsh (1982), Maradona soy yo (1993; Maradona Is Me), and Eva Perón, La biografía (1995: Eva Perón, 1996), an international bestseller translated into 22 languages. She received the Konex de Platino Prize in Argentina for lifetime achievement, in 2015.
The following interview took place in Paris at her home, on 15 August 1997.
Why did you write a book about Eva Perón?
Quite frankly, I wrote it because my friend Héctor Bianciotti called me several times to talk about Eva Perón, to sound me out—that was in 1990—and ended up proposing I write a real biography. Of course, it terrified me because I’m not a historian, I’m a novelist. I had written a sort of wild biographical book, in first person, about Maradona, a sort of literary joke: Maradona soy yo, glossing the phrase by Flaubert. But I am neither a historian nor a biographer.
For a few weeks I thought about it before answering him, trying to see if I had the subject inside me, if that touched my visceral memories in some way. It did indeed, absolutely. That is, the theme was so much a part of me that somehow it even justified my presence in Europe. What happened with Peronism? Why did it somehow unleash the dictatorship and our exile? The memory of Evita was through images but, above all, through my mother’s hatred, who was from an old Argentine family—landowners who came upon hard times—it was a social hatred. Moreover, my parents were communists and my father was imprisoned during Peronism. My mother was also a communist; a feminist writer, from a traditional family, but completely changed in her mindset.
Was she well known?
She was a writer who could have been well known if she’d had a different nature. She was very shy, and very introspective. She didn’t know how to sell herself; but she was an important essayist. And my father was one of the founders of the Argentine Communist Party, in 1918. So, in my house I had on one side the anti-Peronist ideological discourse of the Argentine left—in spite of the fact that my father was a free agent and also had his doubts about communist rhetoric—and the social class type of discourse from my mother. She looked down on Evita for her bad taste, her dubious origin, the way she mangled the language. My mother was a Spanish teacher, so at home we laughed a lot at Evita. Okay, all this, which was the hateful gaze. And then there was my own memory: the day Evita died, I was coming back from school and in the street I felt people’s pain, in such a way that I, as a girl without prejudice, shut myself in my room to cry, but I shut myself in there so that my parents wouldn’t see me, because they wouldn’t have understood. But that was a personal memory. I worked on it for years, I kept drawing things out of myself, but the origin was a proposal from Bianciotti who somehow thought I could write it, as a woman, because he realized I could bring a feminine gaze.
It was published first in France?
I wrote it in French for the publisher Grasset. It’s a proper French that had to be corrected a bit but in which I would never write a novel. Basically I think it was an advantage writing this story in another language, drawing out childhood memories, from my guts… For me, writing in another language was good because it granted me a certain freedom, I was writing in a playful way, very joyful, even hedonistic, full of wordplay. That is, I had to put on a straitjacket, a corset; and with all those impositions, a very serious text came out.
And you translated it yourself into Spanish?
I translated it because I couldn’t allow anyone to mess around with that text. But it was like taking off the corset as soon as I switched to my own language.
What was the reaction when it came out in Spanish?
I expected a big polemic in Argentina because I had no sympathy for General Perón, far from it. There’s an entire chapter devoted to Perón’s relationship with Nazism. In Evita’s case, I fluctuate constantly between love and rage—rage because of her authoritarianism, her thirst for revenge, her meanness, her sadism, and on the other hand, her capacity for passion and sacrifice. In reality, none of that came about. Facing the chorus of praises and love—in Argentina, the book was a bestseller for a year and people recognized me in the street, because I was on television a lot, they gave me kisses—I was almost worried because there was no polemic. So, I thought: is it because Argentina has gotten over its passions or because it doesn’t have them anymore? I don’t know. In any case, of course there were small groups of old Peronists from the extreme right, practically the Nazis of Peronism, whom I treat with a heavy hand in my book, who got very mad, they came to shout at my book presentation—but since they’re old and weren’t given the microphone, they were somewhat the image of what happens with them, they no longer exist, they have no voice. Apart from that, there was a chorus of praises; I presented the book in Peronist provinces, but there were no bombs. It’s not the Argentina where they could have killed you for this book! That Argentina doesn’t exist anymore.
How long did the research and writing the book take you?
Between four and five years, but full time. I gave up my little apartment in Paris because here I didn’t have enough room for Eva Perón; I went to the south of France, to a huge house that was lent to me, and I worked ten hours a day in front of my computer, alone in the country for at least two years. It was a long time; I wouldn’t have been able to get out from under the mass of information, to put order to it. Not being an academic, I am incapable of making files. I had my own absurd method that worked, but I needed physical space and all my time.
Did you realize from the beginning that it was going to take you so long?
Yes, I did realize. It was obvious that for Editions Grasset I could have done something light, taken from other sources and without research. They asked me for 200 pages and I did more than 400. They asked for it in a year or two, and I took a lot longer, because I felt that it wasn’t for France. I couldn’t know that there was going to be an Evitamania, nor that other books were going to come out. I took it very seriously, and it couldn’t be any other way. An Argentine woman writer who is told, “Write the biography of the woman who left a mark on the history of your country,” that cannot be taken lightly.
Have you read the book by Tomás Eloy Martínez (the novel Santa Evita, 1995, after his earlier La Novela de Perón, 1985)?
You’re going to laugh, but no. For a very simple reason, because my book was already at the publisher when his came out.
Not afterward either?
After, I was saturated with Eva Perón, really saturated. At that point, I preferred to speak about other things and above all to write about other things. I finished Eva Perón, I translated it, or rather I wrote it twice, and then I dedicated myself to writing a novel in Spanish (Mireya, 1998) about a prostitute who was a friend of Toulouse Lautrec, having fun. Enough with Eva Perón!
Did you have that novel already planned for after?
No, I didn’t know, but on finishing I really needed a subject that would take me totally away from Argentine history. And yet I fell right back into the history of Argentina, because… I chanced upon a text by Cortázar, “Monsieur Lautrec,” where he speaks about French women of the tango. He speaks about a character who is in the foreground of a famous painting by Toulouse Lautrec, Au salon de la rue des Moulins. Cortázar found that this woman, Mireille, one of Toulouse Lautrec’s favorites, went off to Buenos Aires in the well-known route of prostitution. So, Cortázar fantasizes about the idea that Mireille in Buenos Aires became the blond Mireya of the tango, a mythical character in tango. All right, I took up Cortázar’s fantasy and inevitably I had to work with the subject of French prostitution in Argentina and what could have happened to Mireille in a Buenos Aires bordello. What happened to the French girls who were in the bordellos? They invented something, they invented some music. They invented the tango.
What’s the nature of Cortázar’s text?
It’s a book, a short text with drawings, fairly unknown. It begins by speaking about this story above all: Toulouse Lautrec with this Mireille who goes off to Buenos Aires. And Toulouse Lautrec writes a letter to a friend saying that he’s in despair because Mireille went off to Buenos Aires, that it’s a terrible city, that it’s going to destroy her in two years. And I decided that she doesn’t get destroyed, she returns to her native city; well, there’s a whole story where I mix in Gardel too.
Good subject for a novel, and I imagine for you with the whole relationship between France and Argentina…
The relationship France-Argentina, and inevitably I added a subject that couldn’t be left out, which was the most difficult for me. That’s the subject of the Migdal, the Polish Jewish prostitution in Buenos Aires. It’s a terrible issue in the 1920s; there were the French pimps and there were the Polish Jewish pimps. The two milieus were totally separate, but somehow one prostitute could know another. She is a voluntary prostitute who goes to Buenos Aires, because moreover she likes her work, and she meets Raquel who has been deceived. The Polish girls were deceived, they were not prostitutes, they thought they were going to get married. This chapter was a lot more difficult for me. I placed a completely positive male character in the middle of this story of pimps; he had to be a Jewish anarchist who turns out to be the prostitute’s brother. And he was what was hardest; there was an ethical element that was needed but which in the middle of the hedonist atmosphere of the novel entered with difficulty. I know I worked on that chapter more as a moral duty, and I think it’s the worst.
You also had to do research for this book…
Yes, of course. That’s why I was telling you I wanted to get free of history and finally I wind up with a theme that is apparently lighter; it is not. I had to do research about legalized prostitution in Argentina, about the Migdal, etc. That’s how I discovered the Migdal was first called the Sociedad de Varsovia (Warsaw Society). The Polish Jews were in a desperate state of misery; so, the Jewish pimps in Buenos Aires went to Poland, sought out the very religious families who were dying of hunger, to see if there was a marriageable girl, and told them in Argentina there are good religious Jews looking for wives. Afterwards, the girls went to a bordello in La Boca with a hundred men waiting in line at the door. Many committed suicide; it’s a horrible story. One of these pimps was named Migdal and they killed him, so the Sociedad de Varsovia took on the name Migdal in his honor. This network was denounced in 1930 by a prostitute, Raquel Liberman, who gathered the courage to confront the corrupt politicians in the Irigoyen government who were with the police and with the network; she denounced them and succeeded in eliminating the network. She was a great heroine. I had to speak of her in this novel, at least to mention her.
When does your novel take place?
My novel takes place between 1894, when Toulouse Lautrec paints her, and 1945. In the same year, Gardel dies and the bordellos in Argentina are shut down; those two events have nothing to do with each other, but in the story of Mireille they do. There’s an internal logic to the novel. I feel like it’s the first novel I’ve written, because those that came before were in some way autobiographical and I played around more, I wasn’t attentive enough to the internal logic of a tale. Here at last I understood what I had heard said so often, that writers discover a theme and then the theme imposes itself on its own. Within this internal logic, it turns out that she is the one who sexually initiates Gardel, whom she knew since they were kids, and when Gardel dies the bordellos are shut down. At that point, she decides to go back to her city, which is Albi. I decided that it’s Albi, which is the native city of Toulouse Lautrec and of Gardel’s mother—near Toulouse, where I was living moreover—and then Mireille dies in 1945, when the law closes the bordellos in France. At that point, she dies of disgust. So, it begins in 1894 and ends in 1945, and with a lot of tango; it’s a novel of tango.
With many tango lyrics?
No, no, and with very little lunfardo (lower class slang of Buenos Aires). Rather, it’s a feeling of tango, especially of the body of a woman who dances tango. I myself began to dance tango in Toulouse—I had always declined to dance tango as a feminist—and it’s an extraordinary experience. Thanks to that, I managed to understand what she could feel in learning tango and inventing figures.
And of course, you did research in Buenos Aires…
Yes, a little, on the history of the tango. Not too much, because it’s a novel, but I had to be able to situate certain musicians, situate the story of Gardel. On the other hand, about Gardel, I did do some research in Toulouse. I moved to Toulouse because my daughter and my granddaughters were living nearby more or less, as a Yiddishe mama—later, I got tired of being in Toulouse, but I spent a year there. And by chance I moved to the corner where Gardel was born, I could look out onto his house from there. I was told about it, and the house happened to be for sale, I tried to get Argentina to buy it; they did not buy it. But this allowed me to get connected with the Gardelians in Toulouse who gave me a lot of elements, not all of them unknown, but it’s obvious Gardel was born there. The Uruguayans maintain that Gardel was born in Tacuarembó, in Uruguay, and that is again the marvel of Argentine history, which is always mythical. Mythical is the history of my ancestors there. In a way, mythical is the story of Evita, because there are thirty versions regarding every fact of her life, and in my book I open the fan of such versions. It’s a biography, but it could have also been like this or even a little like this. It accepts all the versions, at least it presents them. That was appealing in Argentina. In France, it made an impression because France has a linear way of thinking, but Argentina accepts the multiplicity, Argentina is the multiplicity. Now with this novel of Mireille, I say that Gardel was born in Toulouse, but I also say it would have been marvelous if he were born in Tacuarembó, because Tacuarembó is the mythical cradle of humankind. So, I make it that Mireille goes with Gardel as kids, she initiates him sexually, they escape to Uruguay, and have a love affair with Uruguay. There’s the expression ver la luz (to be born; literally, to see the light), but making love is also “seeing the light,” so it’s possible he could have been born in many ways there.
In 1984, you wrote your book Buenos Aires in French. How was that experience of writing it from here in France? You’d already been living here for five years …
It was very particular. That book is part of a collection about cities done by writers who were born in those cities or who knew them very well, such that they are not tourist texts. I realized to what degree I was doing it from here: five years is enough for the city you’re speaking of to be a mythical city. That is, it was already a city of the past, but in addition I was speaking of the Buenos Aires of my childhood. Anyway, to speak of Buenos Aires—and in the tango that’s always the case—is to speak of the lost Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires is loss, is nostalgia, it’s the feeling for the past that won’t return. That was very clear in my book, but it became even clearer to me through the act of writing it. For me, it was very important returning to Buenos Aires by way of a nostalgic-mythical recreation.
To cover a bit the more directly biographical aspect, do you have a sense of yourself as someone different before coming to Paris and in the twenty years since you’ve been here?
Yes, it’s absolutely before and after, an absolute cut. That is, while I was in my country—and this can be seen in the two novels and the poems from that time—there is a belonging, no matter how much I always thought I didn’t belong. As a good Argentine woman I thought that, and due to my double origin as a Jew and a Catholic. I felt I didn’t belong, but the true not-belonging begins when a person goes away: it’s both a rebirth and an absolute pain. I think I did not know the experience of pain until I separated from my country. And afterwards, curiously, that became a lesson. As a person who’s unreserved in her feelings, I like to live things fully. Since I didn’t belong, since I felt that I didn’t belong, let’s take that all the way and really inhabit a sort of no man’s land which would therefore allow me enough internal distance to know my native land. I would never have been able to take up the mythical themes of Argentina, like Maradona, Gardel, Evan Perón, living in Buenos Aires. Why? Because living in Buenos Aires, we dreamt of living in Paris. The dream is switched around, and so living in Paris, what is it that might interest you? The Argentina that dreamed of living in Paris, no, since you’re already there. What interests you from the perspective of exile is the mysterious country, the Argentina of popular myths—beside which I passed without knowing it when I lived there. Peronism, tango, and soccer.
How did French culture enter into your experience?
My mother again. My mother spoke French, I traveled with her through Europe for a year when I was eleven years old, because my father, who was incredibly generous (my mother was a writer, I was going to be a writer), considered that for our education we had to know Europe. Therefore, we traveled for a year around Europe, and there I learned French and Italian, such that I began to read French at twelve years of age. And French culture in my house, in my mother’s social background and all that, was extremely important. It was the culture.
So, the desire to go to Paris…
That desire was very strong in me when I was fifteen, reading Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Later, I lost it for a time. I came to Paris for two reasons: I was not a real political exile; that is, I didn’t have to escape, but I worked at the newspaper La Opinión, whose editor Jacobo Timmerman had been tortured; I had friends who were disappearing like flies around me, I had a thirteen-year-old daughter and I didn’t want her to live in that land of dictatorship… I came, therefore, for a negative reason, the dictatorship, and for a positive reason, which was to realize the adolescent’s dream of the myth of Paris.
In any case, you took a while to get here…
Yes, I took a while to get here. That is, I had lived in Europe between ’62 and ’64. I lived in Rome and in Paris, I married a Bulgarian refugee, I divorced a Bulgarian refugee, I had already traveled. And later, I arrived at the end of ’78 with my daughter.
Did you know when you arrived that you were going to stay for a long time?
I wanted to stay for a long time, and again with my extreme manner, I came without a return ticket. I really did burn my bridges. I knew it was going to be very hard, I don’t know if I would have left had I really known how hard it was. From the start, there were very stimulating things that happened in my life here: after six months, I signed a contract with Mercure de France for my first novel, El buzón de la esquina (1977; The Mailbox on the Corner), which had already come out in Buenos Aires and then came out here as La bonne Pauline (The Maid Pauline). My translator was Laure Bataillon, who was a marvelous translator, and it got terrific reviews in the newspapers. So, right away, terrific things happened. I think that encouraged me to stay, but with terrible economic hardships because, since I’m not an academic, I never managed to have steady employment. Maybe there’s a lesson in that: maybe I liked the risk. Each month I liked asking myself: and next month, what will we live on? There’s probably an element of the adventurer in that, my friends say so. I think there was also the fact that I was never asked to do anything else but write and that I discovered I had literary or semi-literary products to offer a market that was asking me for them. Until I came to Eva Perón which really was a bit of salvation, because it sold very well everywhere.
Did you think about returning after the dictatorship at some point?
No, and I reproach myself for it because I returned to the country for the first time after the dictatorship in ’84. My mother was there, my daughter was in Colombia but she could have gone to Argentina, and I decided to return and stay in France, following which I lost my mother because she died a month later. I don’t know if she would have died had I stayed but, in brief, that sort of thing a Jewish daughter tells herself… It’s all because of my stubbornness about staying in Paris, but there was something very strong that motivated me to stay. Let’s call it vanity, to put it in negative terms—or from the positive side, the feeling that here there was a place for me. The feeling that this place, I had chosen it myself and, since I had chosen it, I have the right to make the most of it. Besides, it’s a place where I feel very comfortable, a place that I don’t love excessively, with which I don’t have a visceral, emotional relationship. I have that relationship with Italy, for example. In a different, much more mythical way, I have that with Israel, with Spain, but with France, no. France is the literary cradle and it’s a tranquil place where I can have a little spot to write and where they buy what I write and they give me the necessary peace and respect. At this moment, after Eva Perón, I’m well known and loved in Argentina. I mean, I could return and I feel very comfortable in Argentina when I go…
How have you lived the experience of being a foreigner?
From the beginning, I realized that being a foreigner is an advantage and a disadvantage. The disadvantage, well, there’s the nostalgia, the fact that you’ll never be able to share the secret wink that compatriots have; the French have a mutual understanding that I will never have with them. But at the same time, it grants you an aura that is somewhere between dangerous and appealing, and I like being a foreigner a lot. Argentina has an aura for the French, there’s something that is double mythical, it’s very curious. In Argentina, there is the myth of Paris, but in France, there is the myth of the tango, the myth somewhat of Gardel, there’s something, a mythical route of departure and return that one can really make good use of. Argentina has just the right dose of exoticism for the French.
Did you return often in the 1980s?
The first time, I had been six years without returning. From there, I went back every two years roughly, and since the research on Evita and the book’s publication, I’ve been returning several times a year.
Have you felt some changes in your own writing since you’ve been living in France?
Yes, a lot, in terms of the logic. My Spanish changed from the fact of having written in French and from having heard remarkable questions for an Argentine. When a French translator or one of the people correcting my texts in French would ask me, “And this idea, where does it come from? What does it come out of in the text?” It left me cross-eyed. This logical structure that the French have and that we don’t have at all, because we allow ourselves everything with a lot of creativity and in a very rich way, but that’s absolutely illogical, this helped me. Now I too organize my things, thinking where does it come from, this over here goes on the previous page. I’ll repeat what I said to you at the start: given my effusiveness, writing the text of Eva Perón in French helped me because I needed a corset, and the corset of French mental logic helped restrain my tendency to overflow in Spanish.
But you weren’t tempted to write some creative work in French?
No, and less so each time. I wrote in French because it was easier to propose my texts in French. But now the publisher Grasset, for example, has already signed two contracts with me for novels written in Spanish--Mireya (in French, Le tango de la fille en vert; The Tango of the Girl in Green) I wrote with a contract signed by Grasset, that is they were paying me a monthly stipend to write in Spanish. I don’t think there are many foreign writers with a stipend from a French publisher to write in their own language.
Because of the success of Eva Perón.
Absolutely. They saw that this pen works. Now I’m going to start on another novel, also in Spanish, with a historic Latin American theme that I’m not going to speak about. And I feel happy, I feel I’m splashing about freely in my recovered language, but in any case I’ll repeat that in this recovered language there are logical structures that I did not have before.
When did you start to get interested in Jewish matters?
In my childhood, the subject of Jewishness was rejected because my father was a communist. He didn’t feel himself a Jew and my mother was not Jewish. For me, it started with the Six Day War; I had a sort of enormous unexpected shock. Well, I had a girl cousin who would sing me Israeli songs but later, the Six Day War produced a real emotional shock in me, really tremendous! I took to my bed to cry and to watch television for those six days. That was experienced in a really strong manner by people in Argentina. And it impressed my father a lot, because in his later years he began to feel Jewish and to draw closer to Israel. So, he was very impressed that I, who had had no Jewish education and who was not Jewish by way of my mother, would have such a strong emotional relationship. And after, it came through the music—first, it had come through Israeli music, then it entered directly through Yiddish music which is exactly what could drive me crazy. The changing rhythms, the violin, something that stirs me, it’s pure intoxication. Like Russian gypsy music as well…
Well, they’re connected.
Completely. My ancestors lived next to the gypsies in Moldova, Bessarabia. That’s my musical universe. Curiously, it’s a land I didn’t know, but that folklore runs through my veins. I fell in love with my first husband, the Bulgarian, because he sang Macedonian songs.
Does it seem to you that the French have read you in a different way than in Argentina?
Yes, from the first moment I had some success in the press, not in sales. But there was a perception of my work that was quite different from what I had found in Argentina. They were very impressed by the sensuality of the language, with the feminine aspect. Laure Bataillon herself, who translated El buzón de la esquina, spoke to me about the feminine language, and I was very impressed because in Argentina at the time they were not yet talking about that. Progressive people thought there’s only one language while here the feminists had been working on that a lot, women’s vocabulary and point of view. So, that perception regarding the sensuality of the language and of the feminine, the first ones who told me that were the French.
Were you already thinking in that way?
Yes, I was thinking about it and I was defiant in maintaining that. So, it was very important that they confirmed it for me.
How do you define a feminine writing?
It’s the most difficult, the most indefinable thing in the world. I think it has to do with an absence of rigidity, with something fluid, with a concrete perception of details; the opposite of abstraction. For example, I felt the female gaze very clearly when I did the research on Eva Perón. Peronist men would launch into abstract speeches, sometimes to conceal their thinking and other times simply because they were abstract. The women would give me vivid details about Evita’s body, about her way of breathing. I felt the difference clearly in these testimonies. My writing is always concrete. I write a text, a biography with a political theme like Eva Perón, and it’s a book bustling with concrete, living details, because I have no other way of approaching reality. I don’t know if this serves as a definition of the feminine; I don’t think so because there are always going to be thousands more definitions, all of them right. In any case, it is that part of the feminine I happened to work in, that is my territory.
Are there other women writers that you think of along similar lines?
Yes, Clarice Lispector. There are many extraordinary women writers who don’t have this at all, who don’t write in the manner that I consider feminine. In Clarice Lispector, in The Passion According to G. H., the woman who follows a sort of itinerary inside her house, as if they were Santa Teresa’s stages of faith, until she arrives at the cockroach which is the archaic bride with her black veils, it’s a mystical relationship, with a sort of goddess, a female ancestor, the cockroach. That’s totally the universe I lay claim to.
It’s been said that your novel El árbol de la gitana (1997; The Gypsy Woman’s Tree) marks a second stage in your work as a novelist. Do you feel that?
Yes, it’s the novel of exile. El buzón de la esquina, which is a novel about a fat girl in a Buenos Aires neighborhood who has mystical experiences in her daily life, is a completely earthy novel, of not-loss. El agujero en la tierra (1983; The Hole in the Earth) ends with a tree that gets torn out and takes off flying. I didn’t realize that it was a metaphor of exile, but it is—I finished it when I arrived in France. And El árbol de la gitana is absolutely the novel of exile because I try to tell the stories of my ancestors in order to know who I am and where I come from—alone, in France, with the cold and a bad economic situation. I tell these stories and the stories are disjointed, they have no unity. There are chapters in Russia, in Genoa, in Spain, and what happens with all that; I’ve told a group of stories unrelated to each other. So, I ask myself where is the connection. Along the way, as I construct the novel, I am constructing myself, because I am in a moment of absolute deconstruction. It’s even very strange how I happen to tell my stories there—I begin to write the autobiographical chapters that are all about my moving around in France, why can’t I stay put in one place, I’m going from house to house, why do I move around so much. And I realized that wherever I went, there were ruins, debris, things destroyed, as if they were metaphors for what was happening to me. In that way, I go about putting order to the ruins. And on finishing the historical chapters and the chapters about my own moving around, again the novel makes no sense; again, there is something that doesn’t fit.
At that point, two very important things happened to me: there was a trip to Israel, they invited me, I discovered Israel in one week, and I met a Jewish philosopher, a kabbalist and professor of philosophy, Rafael Eldar, and he told me a story that was so fundamental for me that I told him, “I’m going to use it.” He said, “Yes, I give it to you.” What’s more, the ending is mine. The story goes like this: A king sends the prince to study in foreign lands and when the prince returns, the king want to see if his son has learned something. So, he says to him: Do you see that enormous rock in the garden? Raise it up to the hill for me. The prince pushes and uses a lever and makes mathematical calculations, and does not manage to move the rock. Until the father says to him afterwards: “I asked you to raise it, but not for you to raise the whole thing. You could have broken it into pieces.” And where Rafael Eldar tells me the ending is mine and I give it to you, it’s just like the heart—a heart only moves forward when it’s in pieces. Well, I returned with the rock to Paris and I thought: here is the ending of the novel. And then Bianciotti asked me for it (Bianciotti is very important in my life). He tells me: All right, give it to me as it is. I had been on that novel for years. So I told him: I know that it’s not finished, but I’ll give it to you. He read it and told me: Something is missing in the structure. We had one of those dialogues in which we really understood each other, with very few words. I was missing the narrator. So, I told him: Of course, it’s missing Scheherazade. And he said: Of course, it’s The Thousand and One Nights; The Thousand and One Nights is a tree of stories. Couldn’t you invent a grandmother to tell this? I told him: No, I only have two. And suddenly I heard myself answer: No, the one who’s going to tell this is a gypsy woman. So, he said to me: But, what gypsy woman? Do you know one? No, I have her inside me. And that’s when I understood. The ending threads all that together; the stories are told by an internal character who really appears like actors do. The actors do theatrical work that helps unravel the internal parade, the parade of characters. All right, I am many other characters, but there is no doubt that the prevailing character is the gypsy woman. To this day, the gypsy woman keeps telling me about myself.
published in Spanish in Hispamérica (Gaithersburg, MD) 82 (April 1999)
Alicia Dujovne Ortiz (Buenos Aires, 1939) is the author of thirty books. She moved to France in 1978 and now lives in Paris. Her many novels include Mireya (1998), Un corazón tan recio (2011; Such a Sturdy Heart), and La procesión va por dentro (2019; The Procession Within), as well as the autobiographical novels El árbol de la gitana (1997; The Gypsy Woman’s Tree), Las perlas rojas (2005; The Red Pearls), and Aguardiente (2022; Moonshine); these were published as a trilogy, Andanzas (2023; Adventures). She has also written several biographies, among them: Maria Elena Walsh (1982), Maradona soy yo (1993; Maradona Is Me), and Eva Perón, La biografía (1995: Eva Perón, 1996), an international bestseller translated into 22 languages. She received the Konex de Platino Prize in Argentina for lifetime achievement, in 2015.
The following interview took place in Paris at her home, on 15 August 1997.
Why did you write a book about Eva Perón?
Quite frankly, I wrote it because my friend Héctor Bianciotti called me several times to talk about Eva Perón, to sound me out—that was in 1990—and ended up proposing I write a real biography. Of course, it terrified me because I’m not a historian, I’m a novelist. I had written a sort of wild biographical book, in first person, about Maradona, a sort of literary joke: Maradona soy yo, glossing the phrase by Flaubert. But I am neither a historian nor a biographer.
For a few weeks I thought about it before answering him, trying to see if I had the subject inside me, if that touched my visceral memories in some way. It did indeed, absolutely. That is, the theme was so much a part of me that somehow it even justified my presence in Europe. What happened with Peronism? Why did it somehow unleash the dictatorship and our exile? The memory of Evita was through images but, above all, through my mother’s hatred, who was from an old Argentine family—landowners who came upon hard times—it was a social hatred. Moreover, my parents were communists and my father was imprisoned during Peronism. My mother was also a communist; a feminist writer, from a traditional family, but completely changed in her mindset.
Was she well known?
She was a writer who could have been well known if she’d had a different nature. She was very shy, and very introspective. She didn’t know how to sell herself; but she was an important essayist. And my father was one of the founders of the Argentine Communist Party, in 1918. So, in my house I had on one side the anti-Peronist ideological discourse of the Argentine left—in spite of the fact that my father was a free agent and also had his doubts about communist rhetoric—and the social class type of discourse from my mother. She looked down on Evita for her bad taste, her dubious origin, the way she mangled the language. My mother was a Spanish teacher, so at home we laughed a lot at Evita. Okay, all this, which was the hateful gaze. And then there was my own memory: the day Evita died, I was coming back from school and in the street I felt people’s pain, in such a way that I, as a girl without prejudice, shut myself in my room to cry, but I shut myself in there so that my parents wouldn’t see me, because they wouldn’t have understood. But that was a personal memory. I worked on it for years, I kept drawing things out of myself, but the origin was a proposal from Bianciotti who somehow thought I could write it, as a woman, because he realized I could bring a feminine gaze.
It was published first in France?
I wrote it in French for the publisher Grasset. It’s a proper French that had to be corrected a bit but in which I would never write a novel. Basically I think it was an advantage writing this story in another language, drawing out childhood memories, from my guts… For me, writing in another language was good because it granted me a certain freedom, I was writing in a playful way, very joyful, even hedonistic, full of wordplay. That is, I had to put on a straitjacket, a corset; and with all those impositions, a very serious text came out.
And you translated it yourself into Spanish?
I translated it because I couldn’t allow anyone to mess around with that text. But it was like taking off the corset as soon as I switched to my own language.
What was the reaction when it came out in Spanish?
I expected a big polemic in Argentina because I had no sympathy for General Perón, far from it. There’s an entire chapter devoted to Perón’s relationship with Nazism. In Evita’s case, I fluctuate constantly between love and rage—rage because of her authoritarianism, her thirst for revenge, her meanness, her sadism, and on the other hand, her capacity for passion and sacrifice. In reality, none of that came about. Facing the chorus of praises and love—in Argentina, the book was a bestseller for a year and people recognized me in the street, because I was on television a lot, they gave me kisses—I was almost worried because there was no polemic. So, I thought: is it because Argentina has gotten over its passions or because it doesn’t have them anymore? I don’t know. In any case, of course there were small groups of old Peronists from the extreme right, practically the Nazis of Peronism, whom I treat with a heavy hand in my book, who got very mad, they came to shout at my book presentation—but since they’re old and weren’t given the microphone, they were somewhat the image of what happens with them, they no longer exist, they have no voice. Apart from that, there was a chorus of praises; I presented the book in Peronist provinces, but there were no bombs. It’s not the Argentina where they could have killed you for this book! That Argentina doesn’t exist anymore.
How long did the research and writing the book take you?
Between four and five years, but full time. I gave up my little apartment in Paris because here I didn’t have enough room for Eva Perón; I went to the south of France, to a huge house that was lent to me, and I worked ten hours a day in front of my computer, alone in the country for at least two years. It was a long time; I wouldn’t have been able to get out from under the mass of information, to put order to it. Not being an academic, I am incapable of making files. I had my own absurd method that worked, but I needed physical space and all my time.
Did you realize from the beginning that it was going to take you so long?
Yes, I did realize. It was obvious that for Editions Grasset I could have done something light, taken from other sources and without research. They asked me for 200 pages and I did more than 400. They asked for it in a year or two, and I took a lot longer, because I felt that it wasn’t for France. I couldn’t know that there was going to be an Evitamania, nor that other books were going to come out. I took it very seriously, and it couldn’t be any other way. An Argentine woman writer who is told, “Write the biography of the woman who left a mark on the history of your country,” that cannot be taken lightly.
Have you read the book by Tomás Eloy Martínez (the novel Santa Evita, 1995, after his earlier La Novela de Perón, 1985)?
You’re going to laugh, but no. For a very simple reason, because my book was already at the publisher when his came out.
Not afterward either?
After, I was saturated with Eva Perón, really saturated. At that point, I preferred to speak about other things and above all to write about other things. I finished Eva Perón, I translated it, or rather I wrote it twice, and then I dedicated myself to writing a novel in Spanish (Mireya, 1998) about a prostitute who was a friend of Toulouse Lautrec, having fun. Enough with Eva Perón!
Did you have that novel already planned for after?
No, I didn’t know, but on finishing I really needed a subject that would take me totally away from Argentine history. And yet I fell right back into the history of Argentina, because… I chanced upon a text by Cortázar, “Monsieur Lautrec,” where he speaks about French women of the tango. He speaks about a character who is in the foreground of a famous painting by Toulouse Lautrec, Au salon de la rue des Moulins. Cortázar found that this woman, Mireille, one of Toulouse Lautrec’s favorites, went off to Buenos Aires in the well-known route of prostitution. So, Cortázar fantasizes about the idea that Mireille in Buenos Aires became the blond Mireya of the tango, a mythical character in tango. All right, I took up Cortázar’s fantasy and inevitably I had to work with the subject of French prostitution in Argentina and what could have happened to Mireille in a Buenos Aires bordello. What happened to the French girls who were in the bordellos? They invented something, they invented some music. They invented the tango.
What’s the nature of Cortázar’s text?
It’s a book, a short text with drawings, fairly unknown. It begins by speaking about this story above all: Toulouse Lautrec with this Mireille who goes off to Buenos Aires. And Toulouse Lautrec writes a letter to a friend saying that he’s in despair because Mireille went off to Buenos Aires, that it’s a terrible city, that it’s going to destroy her in two years. And I decided that she doesn’t get destroyed, she returns to her native city; well, there’s a whole story where I mix in Gardel too.
Good subject for a novel, and I imagine for you with the whole relationship between France and Argentina…
The relationship France-Argentina, and inevitably I added a subject that couldn’t be left out, which was the most difficult for me. That’s the subject of the Migdal, the Polish Jewish prostitution in Buenos Aires. It’s a terrible issue in the 1920s; there were the French pimps and there were the Polish Jewish pimps. The two milieus were totally separate, but somehow one prostitute could know another. She is a voluntary prostitute who goes to Buenos Aires, because moreover she likes her work, and she meets Raquel who has been deceived. The Polish girls were deceived, they were not prostitutes, they thought they were going to get married. This chapter was a lot more difficult for me. I placed a completely positive male character in the middle of this story of pimps; he had to be a Jewish anarchist who turns out to be the prostitute’s brother. And he was what was hardest; there was an ethical element that was needed but which in the middle of the hedonist atmosphere of the novel entered with difficulty. I know I worked on that chapter more as a moral duty, and I think it’s the worst.
You also had to do research for this book…
Yes, of course. That’s why I was telling you I wanted to get free of history and finally I wind up with a theme that is apparently lighter; it is not. I had to do research about legalized prostitution in Argentina, about the Migdal, etc. That’s how I discovered the Migdal was first called the Sociedad de Varsovia (Warsaw Society). The Polish Jews were in a desperate state of misery; so, the Jewish pimps in Buenos Aires went to Poland, sought out the very religious families who were dying of hunger, to see if there was a marriageable girl, and told them in Argentina there are good religious Jews looking for wives. Afterwards, the girls went to a bordello in La Boca with a hundred men waiting in line at the door. Many committed suicide; it’s a horrible story. One of these pimps was named Migdal and they killed him, so the Sociedad de Varsovia took on the name Migdal in his honor. This network was denounced in 1930 by a prostitute, Raquel Liberman, who gathered the courage to confront the corrupt politicians in the Irigoyen government who were with the police and with the network; she denounced them and succeeded in eliminating the network. She was a great heroine. I had to speak of her in this novel, at least to mention her.
When does your novel take place?
My novel takes place between 1894, when Toulouse Lautrec paints her, and 1945. In the same year, Gardel dies and the bordellos in Argentina are shut down; those two events have nothing to do with each other, but in the story of Mireille they do. There’s an internal logic to the novel. I feel like it’s the first novel I’ve written, because those that came before were in some way autobiographical and I played around more, I wasn’t attentive enough to the internal logic of a tale. Here at last I understood what I had heard said so often, that writers discover a theme and then the theme imposes itself on its own. Within this internal logic, it turns out that she is the one who sexually initiates Gardel, whom she knew since they were kids, and when Gardel dies the bordellos are shut down. At that point, she decides to go back to her city, which is Albi. I decided that it’s Albi, which is the native city of Toulouse Lautrec and of Gardel’s mother—near Toulouse, where I was living moreover—and then Mireille dies in 1945, when the law closes the bordellos in France. At that point, she dies of disgust. So, it begins in 1894 and ends in 1945, and with a lot of tango; it’s a novel of tango.
With many tango lyrics?
No, no, and with very little lunfardo (lower class slang of Buenos Aires). Rather, it’s a feeling of tango, especially of the body of a woman who dances tango. I myself began to dance tango in Toulouse—I had always declined to dance tango as a feminist—and it’s an extraordinary experience. Thanks to that, I managed to understand what she could feel in learning tango and inventing figures.
And of course, you did research in Buenos Aires…
Yes, a little, on the history of the tango. Not too much, because it’s a novel, but I had to be able to situate certain musicians, situate the story of Gardel. On the other hand, about Gardel, I did do some research in Toulouse. I moved to Toulouse because my daughter and my granddaughters were living nearby more or less, as a Yiddishe mama—later, I got tired of being in Toulouse, but I spent a year there. And by chance I moved to the corner where Gardel was born, I could look out onto his house from there. I was told about it, and the house happened to be for sale, I tried to get Argentina to buy it; they did not buy it. But this allowed me to get connected with the Gardelians in Toulouse who gave me a lot of elements, not all of them unknown, but it’s obvious Gardel was born there. The Uruguayans maintain that Gardel was born in Tacuarembó, in Uruguay, and that is again the marvel of Argentine history, which is always mythical. Mythical is the history of my ancestors there. In a way, mythical is the story of Evita, because there are thirty versions regarding every fact of her life, and in my book I open the fan of such versions. It’s a biography, but it could have also been like this or even a little like this. It accepts all the versions, at least it presents them. That was appealing in Argentina. In France, it made an impression because France has a linear way of thinking, but Argentina accepts the multiplicity, Argentina is the multiplicity. Now with this novel of Mireille, I say that Gardel was born in Toulouse, but I also say it would have been marvelous if he were born in Tacuarembó, because Tacuarembó is the mythical cradle of humankind. So, I make it that Mireille goes with Gardel as kids, she initiates him sexually, they escape to Uruguay, and have a love affair with Uruguay. There’s the expression ver la luz (to be born; literally, to see the light), but making love is also “seeing the light,” so it’s possible he could have been born in many ways there.
In 1984, you wrote your book Buenos Aires in French. How was that experience of writing it from here in France? You’d already been living here for five years …
It was very particular. That book is part of a collection about cities done by writers who were born in those cities or who knew them very well, such that they are not tourist texts. I realized to what degree I was doing it from here: five years is enough for the city you’re speaking of to be a mythical city. That is, it was already a city of the past, but in addition I was speaking of the Buenos Aires of my childhood. Anyway, to speak of Buenos Aires—and in the tango that’s always the case—is to speak of the lost Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires is loss, is nostalgia, it’s the feeling for the past that won’t return. That was very clear in my book, but it became even clearer to me through the act of writing it. For me, it was very important returning to Buenos Aires by way of a nostalgic-mythical recreation.
To cover a bit the more directly biographical aspect, do you have a sense of yourself as someone different before coming to Paris and in the twenty years since you’ve been here?
Yes, it’s absolutely before and after, an absolute cut. That is, while I was in my country—and this can be seen in the two novels and the poems from that time—there is a belonging, no matter how much I always thought I didn’t belong. As a good Argentine woman I thought that, and due to my double origin as a Jew and a Catholic. I felt I didn’t belong, but the true not-belonging begins when a person goes away: it’s both a rebirth and an absolute pain. I think I did not know the experience of pain until I separated from my country. And afterwards, curiously, that became a lesson. As a person who’s unreserved in her feelings, I like to live things fully. Since I didn’t belong, since I felt that I didn’t belong, let’s take that all the way and really inhabit a sort of no man’s land which would therefore allow me enough internal distance to know my native land. I would never have been able to take up the mythical themes of Argentina, like Maradona, Gardel, Evan Perón, living in Buenos Aires. Why? Because living in Buenos Aires, we dreamt of living in Paris. The dream is switched around, and so living in Paris, what is it that might interest you? The Argentina that dreamed of living in Paris, no, since you’re already there. What interests you from the perspective of exile is the mysterious country, the Argentina of popular myths—beside which I passed without knowing it when I lived there. Peronism, tango, and soccer.
How did French culture enter into your experience?
My mother again. My mother spoke French, I traveled with her through Europe for a year when I was eleven years old, because my father, who was incredibly generous (my mother was a writer, I was going to be a writer), considered that for our education we had to know Europe. Therefore, we traveled for a year around Europe, and there I learned French and Italian, such that I began to read French at twelve years of age. And French culture in my house, in my mother’s social background and all that, was extremely important. It was the culture.
So, the desire to go to Paris…
That desire was very strong in me when I was fifteen, reading Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Later, I lost it for a time. I came to Paris for two reasons: I was not a real political exile; that is, I didn’t have to escape, but I worked at the newspaper La Opinión, whose editor Jacobo Timmerman had been tortured; I had friends who were disappearing like flies around me, I had a thirteen-year-old daughter and I didn’t want her to live in that land of dictatorship… I came, therefore, for a negative reason, the dictatorship, and for a positive reason, which was to realize the adolescent’s dream of the myth of Paris.
In any case, you took a while to get here…
Yes, I took a while to get here. That is, I had lived in Europe between ’62 and ’64. I lived in Rome and in Paris, I married a Bulgarian refugee, I divorced a Bulgarian refugee, I had already traveled. And later, I arrived at the end of ’78 with my daughter.
Did you know when you arrived that you were going to stay for a long time?
I wanted to stay for a long time, and again with my extreme manner, I came without a return ticket. I really did burn my bridges. I knew it was going to be very hard, I don’t know if I would have left had I really known how hard it was. From the start, there were very stimulating things that happened in my life here: after six months, I signed a contract with Mercure de France for my first novel, El buzón de la esquina (1977; The Mailbox on the Corner), which had already come out in Buenos Aires and then came out here as La bonne Pauline (The Maid Pauline). My translator was Laure Bataillon, who was a marvelous translator, and it got terrific reviews in the newspapers. So, right away, terrific things happened. I think that encouraged me to stay, but with terrible economic hardships because, since I’m not an academic, I never managed to have steady employment. Maybe there’s a lesson in that: maybe I liked the risk. Each month I liked asking myself: and next month, what will we live on? There’s probably an element of the adventurer in that, my friends say so. I think there was also the fact that I was never asked to do anything else but write and that I discovered I had literary or semi-literary products to offer a market that was asking me for them. Until I came to Eva Perón which really was a bit of salvation, because it sold very well everywhere.
Did you think about returning after the dictatorship at some point?
No, and I reproach myself for it because I returned to the country for the first time after the dictatorship in ’84. My mother was there, my daughter was in Colombia but she could have gone to Argentina, and I decided to return and stay in France, following which I lost my mother because she died a month later. I don’t know if she would have died had I stayed but, in brief, that sort of thing a Jewish daughter tells herself… It’s all because of my stubbornness about staying in Paris, but there was something very strong that motivated me to stay. Let’s call it vanity, to put it in negative terms—or from the positive side, the feeling that here there was a place for me. The feeling that this place, I had chosen it myself and, since I had chosen it, I have the right to make the most of it. Besides, it’s a place where I feel very comfortable, a place that I don’t love excessively, with which I don’t have a visceral, emotional relationship. I have that relationship with Italy, for example. In a different, much more mythical way, I have that with Israel, with Spain, but with France, no. France is the literary cradle and it’s a tranquil place where I can have a little spot to write and where they buy what I write and they give me the necessary peace and respect. At this moment, after Eva Perón, I’m well known and loved in Argentina. I mean, I could return and I feel very comfortable in Argentina when I go…
How have you lived the experience of being a foreigner?
From the beginning, I realized that being a foreigner is an advantage and a disadvantage. The disadvantage, well, there’s the nostalgia, the fact that you’ll never be able to share the secret wink that compatriots have; the French have a mutual understanding that I will never have with them. But at the same time, it grants you an aura that is somewhere between dangerous and appealing, and I like being a foreigner a lot. Argentina has an aura for the French, there’s something that is double mythical, it’s very curious. In Argentina, there is the myth of Paris, but in France, there is the myth of the tango, the myth somewhat of Gardel, there’s something, a mythical route of departure and return that one can really make good use of. Argentina has just the right dose of exoticism for the French.
Did you return often in the 1980s?
The first time, I had been six years without returning. From there, I went back every two years roughly, and since the research on Evita and the book’s publication, I’ve been returning several times a year.
Have you felt some changes in your own writing since you’ve been living in France?
Yes, a lot, in terms of the logic. My Spanish changed from the fact of having written in French and from having heard remarkable questions for an Argentine. When a French translator or one of the people correcting my texts in French would ask me, “And this idea, where does it come from? What does it come out of in the text?” It left me cross-eyed. This logical structure that the French have and that we don’t have at all, because we allow ourselves everything with a lot of creativity and in a very rich way, but that’s absolutely illogical, this helped me. Now I too organize my things, thinking where does it come from, this over here goes on the previous page. I’ll repeat what I said to you at the start: given my effusiveness, writing the text of Eva Perón in French helped me because I needed a corset, and the corset of French mental logic helped restrain my tendency to overflow in Spanish.
But you weren’t tempted to write some creative work in French?
No, and less so each time. I wrote in French because it was easier to propose my texts in French. But now the publisher Grasset, for example, has already signed two contracts with me for novels written in Spanish--Mireya (in French, Le tango de la fille en vert; The Tango of the Girl in Green) I wrote with a contract signed by Grasset, that is they were paying me a monthly stipend to write in Spanish. I don’t think there are many foreign writers with a stipend from a French publisher to write in their own language.
Because of the success of Eva Perón.
Absolutely. They saw that this pen works. Now I’m going to start on another novel, also in Spanish, with a historic Latin American theme that I’m not going to speak about. And I feel happy, I feel I’m splashing about freely in my recovered language, but in any case I’ll repeat that in this recovered language there are logical structures that I did not have before.
When did you start to get interested in Jewish matters?
In my childhood, the subject of Jewishness was rejected because my father was a communist. He didn’t feel himself a Jew and my mother was not Jewish. For me, it started with the Six Day War; I had a sort of enormous unexpected shock. Well, I had a girl cousin who would sing me Israeli songs but later, the Six Day War produced a real emotional shock in me, really tremendous! I took to my bed to cry and to watch television for those six days. That was experienced in a really strong manner by people in Argentina. And it impressed my father a lot, because in his later years he began to feel Jewish and to draw closer to Israel. So, he was very impressed that I, who had had no Jewish education and who was not Jewish by way of my mother, would have such a strong emotional relationship. And after, it came through the music—first, it had come through Israeli music, then it entered directly through Yiddish music which is exactly what could drive me crazy. The changing rhythms, the violin, something that stirs me, it’s pure intoxication. Like Russian gypsy music as well…
Well, they’re connected.
Completely. My ancestors lived next to the gypsies in Moldova, Bessarabia. That’s my musical universe. Curiously, it’s a land I didn’t know, but that folklore runs through my veins. I fell in love with my first husband, the Bulgarian, because he sang Macedonian songs.
Does it seem to you that the French have read you in a different way than in Argentina?
Yes, from the first moment I had some success in the press, not in sales. But there was a perception of my work that was quite different from what I had found in Argentina. They were very impressed by the sensuality of the language, with the feminine aspect. Laure Bataillon herself, who translated El buzón de la esquina, spoke to me about the feminine language, and I was very impressed because in Argentina at the time they were not yet talking about that. Progressive people thought there’s only one language while here the feminists had been working on that a lot, women’s vocabulary and point of view. So, that perception regarding the sensuality of the language and of the feminine, the first ones who told me that were the French.
Were you already thinking in that way?
Yes, I was thinking about it and I was defiant in maintaining that. So, it was very important that they confirmed it for me.
How do you define a feminine writing?
It’s the most difficult, the most indefinable thing in the world. I think it has to do with an absence of rigidity, with something fluid, with a concrete perception of details; the opposite of abstraction. For example, I felt the female gaze very clearly when I did the research on Eva Perón. Peronist men would launch into abstract speeches, sometimes to conceal their thinking and other times simply because they were abstract. The women would give me vivid details about Evita’s body, about her way of breathing. I felt the difference clearly in these testimonies. My writing is always concrete. I write a text, a biography with a political theme like Eva Perón, and it’s a book bustling with concrete, living details, because I have no other way of approaching reality. I don’t know if this serves as a definition of the feminine; I don’t think so because there are always going to be thousands more definitions, all of them right. In any case, it is that part of the feminine I happened to work in, that is my territory.
Are there other women writers that you think of along similar lines?
Yes, Clarice Lispector. There are many extraordinary women writers who don’t have this at all, who don’t write in the manner that I consider feminine. In Clarice Lispector, in The Passion According to G. H., the woman who follows a sort of itinerary inside her house, as if they were Santa Teresa’s stages of faith, until she arrives at the cockroach which is the archaic bride with her black veils, it’s a mystical relationship, with a sort of goddess, a female ancestor, the cockroach. That’s totally the universe I lay claim to.
It’s been said that your novel El árbol de la gitana (1997; The Gypsy Woman’s Tree) marks a second stage in your work as a novelist. Do you feel that?
Yes, it’s the novel of exile. El buzón de la esquina, which is a novel about a fat girl in a Buenos Aires neighborhood who has mystical experiences in her daily life, is a completely earthy novel, of not-loss. El agujero en la tierra (1983; The Hole in the Earth) ends with a tree that gets torn out and takes off flying. I didn’t realize that it was a metaphor of exile, but it is—I finished it when I arrived in France. And El árbol de la gitana is absolutely the novel of exile because I try to tell the stories of my ancestors in order to know who I am and where I come from—alone, in France, with the cold and a bad economic situation. I tell these stories and the stories are disjointed, they have no unity. There are chapters in Russia, in Genoa, in Spain, and what happens with all that; I’ve told a group of stories unrelated to each other. So, I ask myself where is the connection. Along the way, as I construct the novel, I am constructing myself, because I am in a moment of absolute deconstruction. It’s even very strange how I happen to tell my stories there—I begin to write the autobiographical chapters that are all about my moving around in France, why can’t I stay put in one place, I’m going from house to house, why do I move around so much. And I realized that wherever I went, there were ruins, debris, things destroyed, as if they were metaphors for what was happening to me. In that way, I go about putting order to the ruins. And on finishing the historical chapters and the chapters about my own moving around, again the novel makes no sense; again, there is something that doesn’t fit.
At that point, two very important things happened to me: there was a trip to Israel, they invited me, I discovered Israel in one week, and I met a Jewish philosopher, a kabbalist and professor of philosophy, Rafael Eldar, and he told me a story that was so fundamental for me that I told him, “I’m going to use it.” He said, “Yes, I give it to you.” What’s more, the ending is mine. The story goes like this: A king sends the prince to study in foreign lands and when the prince returns, the king want to see if his son has learned something. So, he says to him: Do you see that enormous rock in the garden? Raise it up to the hill for me. The prince pushes and uses a lever and makes mathematical calculations, and does not manage to move the rock. Until the father says to him afterwards: “I asked you to raise it, but not for you to raise the whole thing. You could have broken it into pieces.” And where Rafael Eldar tells me the ending is mine and I give it to you, it’s just like the heart—a heart only moves forward when it’s in pieces. Well, I returned with the rock to Paris and I thought: here is the ending of the novel. And then Bianciotti asked me for it (Bianciotti is very important in my life). He tells me: All right, give it to me as it is. I had been on that novel for years. So I told him: I know that it’s not finished, but I’ll give it to you. He read it and told me: Something is missing in the structure. We had one of those dialogues in which we really understood each other, with very few words. I was missing the narrator. So, I told him: Of course, it’s missing Scheherazade. And he said: Of course, it’s The Thousand and One Nights; The Thousand and One Nights is a tree of stories. Couldn’t you invent a grandmother to tell this? I told him: No, I only have two. And suddenly I heard myself answer: No, the one who’s going to tell this is a gypsy woman. So, he said to me: But, what gypsy woman? Do you know one? No, I have her inside me. And that’s when I understood. The ending threads all that together; the stories are told by an internal character who really appears like actors do. The actors do theatrical work that helps unravel the internal parade, the parade of characters. All right, I am many other characters, but there is no doubt that the prevailing character is the gypsy woman. To this day, the gypsy woman keeps telling me about myself.