On "Baroni: A Journey"
Baroni carves wooden figures. In general these are religious figures, virgins or angels. Baroni’s art is very personal and eloquent; she conceives of it as a kind of mystical devotion, as she conceives of almost all her activities. In fact, she begins to carve wood when, decades earlier, Our Lady of the Mirror restores her sight. In two dreams Baroni recovers her sight, which she had lost during one of the habitual nervous breakdowns she suffered during that time of depression and psychological instability. She begins to carve as a way of giving thanks to this virgin and to also obey a command, because the virgin asks Baroni, in a third dream, to make “her,” that is, to carve a figure of her, in order to spread her cult. Over the past few decades, Baroni has been an important artist in Venezuelan culture, in large part because she updates and disrupts a perennial myth, that of the self-made artist, through whose work a negotiation of meanings between the rural world and the so-called modern world is produced. Another significant point is the mystical relationship she has with death. Baroni has suffered various attacks of catalepsy, and on two occasions a wake was held as if she were dead. In her house she has built her own coffin, and she lies down in it every Good Friday. But I should clarify that the novel doesn’t try to dispel the ignorance surrounding her or explain the unknown; it aims, rather, to present her.
The novel also refers to other things: obviously, to a journey, as the title announces, or rather, to the idea of a journey, although in this case that’s a bit misleading, or anticlimactic, because unlike a literary journey, there is no moral or any clear lesson to be learned. Instead, the narrator will feel a combination of disillusionment and perplexity because of the inconsistencies he encounters and experiences along the way. In this sense, the novel is about a series of journeys that are useless, other than forming part of this story.
If I had to explain the book by sketching it out, I’d say that the novel relies on a dramatic structure that does not appear as such in the text: the journey, and three characters. Of these three characters, one corresponds to a real, existing person (Rafaela Baroni herself); another is the artistic representation of a miracle-working doctor at the turn of the twentieth century (José Gregorio Hernández), and the third is a wooden figure, with no explicit human referent. Though unique, this character has two names: the Crucified Woman (the name Baroni prefers) or the Woman on the Cross (the name I prefer). There is a fourth person, the narrator; but as an entity that appears in all stories, we can take his presence for granted.
The novel relies on a series of events and associations that are presented in a fairly arbitrary and partial way, much like this description. During the journey, the narrator first sees the Woman on the Cross, which he interprets as a derivation of Baroni herself. One could say that by means of the Woman on the Cross, Baroni displays part of her past: some of her possible lives frustrated by adversity. At this point the first scene ends. But the Woman on the Cross has a delayed, not immediate, effect on me. It’s only the day after contemplating it in the plain room where Baroni exhibits her works that I feel attracted to the figure and want to possess it as a collector. I then call Baroni from a somewhat distant city, because I have already started my return trip, to agree on the sale and ask her to hold the piece for me.
The narrator’s interest in Baroni, and the high esteem with which he holds her work, leads him to commission a new piece months later: I now ask for a saintly doctor (a figure representing José Gregorio Hernández). You can see the saintly doctor in the image. Over time it has become damaged. The novel opens with a description of the crack that runs from top to bottom, along with another one on the side, which turns into a mysterious and hidden cavity at the level of another cavity, a natural one let’s say, the ear. A cavity, perhaps, that gives rise to thought. My request for a saintly doctor initiates the third scene.
The novel takes for granted the existence of these three principal characters. They have distinct lives. The life of one of the characters is real, so to speak (the case of Baroni); the other two have lives that are, for want of a better word, assigned. For the woman on the cross there is only one body. She is like a real person, since she has a single physical manifestation.
However, the saintly doctor, José Gregorio Hernández, is multifaceted. His must be the most reproduced and altered image in Venezuela.
Given his powers to cure and protect against illnesses, he is venerated by a great number of families and has spread beyond the borders of the country. Innumerable picture cards, small statues, and shrines can be seen across the land and on public and private altars.
He is also a frequent subject for artists and artisans, who vary his figure according to their own imagination or according to the interests of the client who has commissioned the work.
The most widely-spread image of the saintly doctor, which serves as the model for plastic statues in a range of sizes imported from China, and for paper or laminate cards with a prayer on the reverse side, is based on a photograph taken in New York City, to be exact, on 57th Street, I believe, about ninety years ago.
The novel dwells on the characters’ appearance. Their dress, the ornaments and accessories they wear, the overall composition of their figures, reveal the past as well as the future. The past because these are well-known characters, identifiable by what they wear, which has always followed certain conventions. And because their dress will never change, their future is antici-pated as well, as this sameness guarantees that they will continue to be themselves. They are lifeless dolls, and everything they convey follows from the content Baroni has assigned, which is in turn borrowed from iconographic religious conventions. The superficiality to which these characters are condemned (as half-formed characters, inert figures) and the profundity attributed to them (related to their ability to cure or protect) produces a kind of contradiction or conflict which is fundamental to the composition of the novel. It’s as if Baroni, the character, were say-ing: an individual can have countless manifestations, and each will be autonomous. Once again, it is the logic of religious figures; and the novel cannot help but ask itself what kind of life it is that populates the world with non-autonomous yet independent characters, like zombies immobilized by an inner obstacle that in all probability lies in their will.
This partial recounting or fable doesn’t intend to tell the story of the novel. It’s a way of commenting on it by means of another kind of story. We’re talking about a fiction that still doesn’t exist and can therefore adopt any form. I won’t say that the narrator will feel trapped by a world of people who make images and by figures with an apparent life of their own. In the novel I will be confused, a bit curious, and half-hearted in my enthusiasm.
Something the novel won’t say is that the narrator would be capable of sacrificing all he’s written and reflected on, all he’s experienced during this ambiguous journey that is many things at the same time, in order to assume, if only for a moment, the life of one of those beings, real or inanimate. Why don’t I admit it? Because then this novel would be useless. I don’t believe in fictions that seek to reveal the truth; rather, I’m interested in those that have two or more faces. Novels that invent a truth not to refute it, but to present it as made for the occasion.
Baroni: un viaje was published in 2007 (Alfaguara, Buenos Aires)
Translated by Margaret Carson.
