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2023-11-12 04:53:02

Puerto Ruiz is a few kilometers from Gualeguay. Juan L. Ortíz was born there and we go there one sunny morning in mid-October. The street on which the house stands is, of course, named following the poet and on the old construction there is a plaque that gives an account of the historical value of the site. A family lives there, probably fishermen like most of the town’s inhabitants. What do they think every time two or three people get out of a car and take photos on the sidewalk? On the other hand, his house in Paraná, the last one where he lived, has nothing that marks it as such. The location is a kind of password that we pass to each other. How much of us will remain within the walls we have inhabited? I once went to Olga Orozco’s house, in Toay, it is a very beautiful place, with bright rooms and trees in the patio… but Orozco left there when she was three years old. We are attracted to the homes of writers, to see how and where they lived or grew up or were simply born; where they wrote, where they read. Houses attract us just like tombs. They are loving pilgrimages towards those people who give us the happiness of being readers. We (Ferny Kosiak, Lilian Almada and I) also take a selfie at Juanele’s house.

Then we continue towards the port. The town is tiny and almost seems deserted if it weren’t for some women chatting on the sidewalk and some dogs that sleep in the street or the one that follows us on our walk. The Gualeguay River is beautiful in the morning, splendid under a blue sky, so blue that it looks like a postcard. On an island opposite there are cows and horses. They tell us that in the 19th century the port was the second most important in the country and that Puerto Ruiz was also one of the first places where the railroad arrived. Now the old sheds remain standing, stubborn, as if not wanting to give in. On the pier, the small altar of a virgin is missing the figurine of the virgin. It seems that it was stolen several times until the commune got tired of it and left the little chapel empty.

We came to Gualeguay to present the book we made with Lilian and Ferny, The Innocents: an illustrated book of stories, published by the Provincial publishing house. Did you know that Entre Ríos had the first state publishing house in the country? I didn’t know, I’m going to find out that night, when Ferny says it in the room full of people at the Quirós Museum. We will also see several paintings by Quirós: in the Mastronardi Library, in the Social Club…

But I come for something else: to meet Tuky Carboni, a great, almost secret writer outside the province. I recently read her novel The Tanned Desired Face, written in the mid-eighties, winner of the Fray Mocho, published in the nineties, unfindable for thirty years and recently republished by Oyé Ndén. It was thanks to her editor, Nicolás Darchez, that we learned regarding the novel and sent it to our Book Cub. And it is also through her that I exchanged some emails with Tuky and he is waiting for me at her house. I think this is how you have to enter the writers’ house, when they are still inhabited, when the small table in the living room is filled with glasses, when the midday air comes in through the open window, when we go out to the patio and the dogs María (Granata) and Sara (Gallardo) cross our path. When I see Samuel (Be-ckett) and Margie (Yourcenar) cat-likely stretching out in the shade of the plants or Michi Meow, the only one without an illustrious name, sneaking behind a pot.

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