The Parable of the Knife

The Parable of the Knife
By Juan Forn
Translated from the Spanish by Jorge R. Sagastume

The 25^th of March 1976, one day after the military took over the Argentine government, a Dutch painter, just arrived in Buenos Aires, fell in love with the Argentine light. This was an awful time to fall in love, true, but it is also true that one does not choose the moment to fall in love, the same way one does not pick the moment one's body is attacked by a terrible toxic fever. That's precisely what Pat Andrea says he felt, and the same thing he repeated to his surprised compatriots when he announced, a couple of years later, that he was returning to that Argentina that the military had converted into a gigantic concentration camp.

Andrea had arrived in Argentina for the first time as a result of a series of coincidences: in 1973, a certain contemporary art collector in Brussels was robbed of fifteen paintings, among them two Magrittes that the Interpol later found in Córdoba, Argentina. The collector had to travel to identify the paintings, and while in the country he wanted to see the work of Argentine painters. That's where he came across the paintings of Guillermo Roux, who, according to the collector, appeared to be the "artistic brother" of one of his favorite artists. He made sure Roux and Andrea began to write to each other, and that's how, finally, Roux invited Andrea to visit Argentina. Neither one nor the other imagined that the chosen date would coincide with one of the most fatidic and obscure moments in the history or our country.

Pat Andrea says that, the first time he went from the Ezeiza Airport to the city, even before knowing that the military had taken over Isabel Perón's government, he thought that deciding to make the trip was a mistake. To cross the world to see the same green prairies, with the same cows not by chance called Dutch-Argentine, seemed stupid. He thought this too when that same day they took him to Tigre, to sail through the Delta: "In the schools of my country they teach us that The Netherlands is the great European delta." Even on the roadside, the advertisements about the therapeutic properties of a certain beverage invented in Holland ("A shot everyday / stimulates and feels good," the proverbial slogan by Erven Lucas Bols) appeared as a mockery to Pat Andrea's obsession with traveling so far to submerge himself in the unknown.

A few hours talking to the locals were enough for Andrea to realize where he was. He came to understand this by two different mediums: the soft-spoken fearful conversations explaining to him how delicate the political situation was, and a sensorial shock in the air that didn't need words, but gave these explanations a double eloquence. Because what happened to Andrea that first day in Buenos Aires, was that he felt possessed by the Argentine light, and what that light revealed to his sight was: particles of violence floating in the air, making twice as sharp the appearance of things.

Back then, Andrea was thirty-four years old and had traveled a lot: After traveling through Eastern Europe and Greece in the hands of the military, he had lost a good part of his Dutch candor. But, during those months during 1976, in Buenos Aires, first covering the city by foot and later visiting the northern provinces by bus, experiencing in his own flesh a day of closure (read: "background checks") in an ominous police department in the province of Jujuy, Andrea says that the blindfold fell off his eyes and he began to see things under a different light. According to him, he learned to see what was behind things and began to think about how he could transfer those impressions into painting. For this reason, despite the fact that his European friends were horrified, he wanted to return to Argentina two years...