‘A handful of arrows’, by María Gainza: writing to tell something else

It happens in a random bar, well into the early hours of the morning. Buenos Aires summer and it is, obviously, hot. It’s already late, she tells herself, too late. And there is an abundance of humidity, mosquitoes and, above all, the desire to leave. However, she, the writer María Gainza—who is not yet a writer at the time—is forced to stay there a little longer because she acts as an improvised translator between her husband and the film director Francis Ford Coppola, who is in Buenos Aires for the filming of Tetro. And it is then, wanting to leave, in those minutes of garbage – which is when what is important happens – when Coppola, absorbed, out of nowhere, starts: “You know, the artist comes into the world with a quiver that contains a limited number of golden arrows. (…). He can shoot all his arrows as a young man, or shoot them as an adult or even as an old man. He can also launch them little by little, spaced out over the years. That would be ideal, but you already know that the ideal is the enemy of the good.”

This inspiring anecdote gives the title to a handful of arrows, a book with which María Gainza (Buenos Aires, 1975) returns to that hybrid genre, halfway between essay and narrative, such a trademark of the house, in which Gainza, flash after flash, travels the border paths between art and life. In the 15 pieces that the book includes, themes that range from the theft of a cezanne for a walk through the Walden of Thoreau, from the painted memories of the town where Nicolás Rubió spent his childhood to the elusive personality of the sculptor María Simón, or from a cursed painting by Titian to the infinite delusions of a bizarre collector.

But they are not the pearls but the thread, as Flaubert said, and here – as happened in his previous books The optic nerveeither The black light— the thread is not the topics themselves. The miraculous is the ingenuity, the sly disbelief, the infinite curiosity, that inexhaustible wonder, always accompanied by humor or those contradictions so honestly manifest. In ‘What is this painting doing here?’, the essay in which Gainza recalls her years as an art critic, she brings up something akin to a commandment: “You will speak simply of the things you see.” And that is one of its greatest virtues: to cover the complex with apparent simplicity, to open, where there is only darkness, prodigious cracks without revealing – never that – the mystery.

One always writes to tell something else, said María Gainza in The optic nerve, and since then, I read it as if those words were a watermark, a reminder that what is important lies somewhere else. Therefore, upon reaching the end of a handful of arrows, I returned again to the conversation with Coppola. Gainza says that beyond the fact that the filmmaker was being self-referential, in turn, she felt that he was giving her a gift in advance: he was speaking to the person that she did not yet see in herself and perhaps he was conversing with her that sweltering summer night. . There are people who have the ability to see where the rest of us don’t and perhaps Coppola belongs to that select group – I wasn’t there so I have no way of being sure – but when I read Gainza I know that his texts point to those very places. seemingly full of nothing. I know that is where she is able to see shadows, flashes, veiled messages. I know that is where she is able to see everything.

Maria Gainza
Anagram, 2024
248 pages. 17.90 euros

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