Guillermo Martínez: "The literature that interests me most proposes a task of estrangement."

At first, the incident is almost minor: a kitten meows. It meows a lot. A lot. Then, the building's neighbors first become upset, then desperate, and finally, as in every story by writer Guillermo Martínez , the horror will gently gain ground until everything becomes disturbing. The story "A Dead Cat," originally published in the book Una felicidad repulsiva (Repulsive Happiness) (2013), now returns transformed into a graphic novel that, with illustrations by Santiago Caruso and published by Minotauro, only enhances the remarkable handling of tension and a maddening crescendo .

This Sunday, Guillermo Martínez will return to the Book Fair to present Myriam Bregman's book "Zurda" with Alejandro Bercovich, in one of the afternoon's most popular events. Before that, he answered Clarín's questions about the ways in which the unsettling occurs.

–There are authors who are very used to working with artists and illustrators because they write children's and young adult literature or explore graphic novels. What was it like for you to share the book with Santiago Caruso?

–It was a first for me. I was especially happy that Santiago Caruso had agreed to illustrate my book because I greatly admired his previous work, especially his illustrations for The Bloody Countess by Alejandra Pizarnik. We didn't have any prior exchanges, and I thought it was better that way, that he should have a private encounter with the world of the story on his own. At one point, they showed me the first illustrations, particularly the one of the cistern, and I thought it recreated very well the somewhat nightmarish atmosphere I had intended when writing it. I only suggested, with all the illustrations already finished, that the one that ultimately remained be for the cover: the character overwhelmed by ghostly images of cats evoked by Goya's etching "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters."

–The illustration is also a reading of your story: were there aspects of this story, its characters, or its procedures that were revealed to you through Santiago Caruso's drawings?

–Yes, there are several illustrations with intriguing details that expand the story's world. For example, the dice hanging from the taxi that takes the protagonist and his baby to the hospital allude to the suspended fate and the chance that can decide a life. Or an illustration bordering on surrealism of the two main characters "emptied" and condemned to their chairs, now headless, waiting for the crying to stop.

–We live surrounded by violent images and narratives: crimes, wars, verbal attacks launched by the powers of the State. A Dead Cat , in that context, begins with an almost innocent event: the death of a puppy. Which territory is more relevant to you when exploring the disturbing: what (happens) or how (what happens is narrated)?

–I'm interested precisely in this "escalation" of what initially seems minor (the appropriation of a minor crime, the disappearance of a cat) with the progressively worsening consequences, the unpredictable element of human actions that can lead to tragedy. Beyond how horrific or pressing the world around us can be "in real time," with genocides underway amid indifference, or rulers fixated on subjugation and the fascist drive to revel in harming others, my themes and my notes for stories or tales almost always navigate relatively autonomously from that more immediate reality. My father once took for himself a phrase from Bachelard: “We must dreamify reality,” and beyond that ugly verb, I believe that the literature that interests me most proposes that task of estrangement, of “dislocation” or projection of something else into reality, which was the work of surrealism but also of authors such as Gombrowicz, Borges, Cortázar, Clarice Lispector, Patricia Highsmith, Henry James and many others.

–The cistern in the center of the courtyard isn't just a scenic element. What relevance does it have in the overall structure of the story?

–I thought of it as a tunnel blocked in time that connects him to the happy part of childhood but also to the terrors of sleepwalking. It's in a way the "magic" object of the story, because it attracts and traps the protagonist as soon as he sees it and because it "plays" fixed in its immobility (like a chess rook) throughout the entire story.

–Throughout most of the story, we want to find a rational explanation. We wait for it, because otherwise, we'd have to accept either magic or madness. How do you resolve the tension between the rational and the irrational in this story?

–This is something that occurs in many of my stories, and it has to do with the above: the “fantastic” hypothesis is a way of increasing the dimensions of reality, expanding reality to diffuse limits. When Ricardo Piglia read my first collection of short stories, he told me that in almost all of my stories he found that tension between a rational world (or a rationalizable one, which isn't the same thing) and an abyss beyond the reach of that reason. In this particular story, there's a balance between the two possible explanations. Even after writing it, I discovered that premature babies sometimes suffer from a syndrome that manifests itself in crying, and that it was first described as “the cat's cry”! I didn't know this when I conceived the story, and in fact, that will be the title of a film that may be made based on the story. So, until the end, the “scientific” explanation and the supernatural hypothesis coexist, and it's up to the reader to tip the balance.

–How do you feel about the Book Fair? What do you like about each edition, what do you like less, or is there anything you particularly remember about it?

–I thrive during quiet hours, early afternoons on weekdays. I like to feel like I'm in a secondhand bookstore expanded with new releases and books dusted off from storage, and exotic rectangular jewels brought from faraway places. The Fair has something to do with books spruced up for a unique festive occasion. I also like to spy a little on people's relationship with books. I've always maintained that the Fair is not, nor should it be, a church for those already faithful, nor a hidden garden for the initiated, but rather an ecumenical and friendly space to expand the world of reading.

Guillermo Martínez will participate today, Sunday, at 7:00 p.m. in the presentation of Myriam Bregman's book "Zurda" with Alejandro Bercovich in the José Hernández room.