Aurora Venturini: “The Cousins” – Art as Sanctuary

With The Cousins, Aurora Venturini made her literary breakthrough in Argentina in 2007, when the writer was 85 years old. This story alone is worth telling. Also extraordinary is her short fiction, which we German readers can finally see for ourselves thanks to Johanna Schwering’s wonderful translation.

Yuna is the first-person narrator of “The Cousins”. In the first sentence she wrote about her mother: she was “an elementary teacher with a cane and a white coat and very puritanical”. This sets the mood. In this women’s house in La Plata, Argentina, in the 1940s, things were stale.

The father has left, money is tight, and Yona’s sister Bettina, who is severely disabled, is given more than adequate care. Yuna’s chronic cold is reinterpreted as an attempt to get attention. She is considered “disinherited” because she stutters quickly when she speaks. The narrator says in the first person: “We were not, if not ordinary, ordinary.”

Yuna struggles through the hostile daily life, but finds an escape: painting. She attends a painting and drawing course at the Art School. A professor noticed her talent and put her paintings in an exhibition. Like all the men in this sinister novella, the professor who will guide Yuna’s support the way is ultimately a violent lecher.

But women are not angels either. They all have some kind of defect (crazy, short stature…) and they have to overcome in this atmosphere of male brutality. Aurora Venturini tells us with a very strange tone of bitterness and black humor about their “weird and common” cousins ​​(and aunts) who get hurt by men, but who don’t give each other anything either. In this fanatical and prudent family, everyone is their neighbor.

Writer Mariana Enriquez was a member of the jury that awarded Aurora Venturini the Premio Nueva Novella in 2007. In the epilogue, she stresses the “risk-taking and exoticism” of the text. This appreciation is aimed not only at the content but also at the style.

Yuna jots down her memories almost without a period or comma, as she loses thread with punctuation – both verbally and in writing. But Yuna, despite being a “corrupt and degenerate scion of a clan”, is smart and funny. She develops a certain eloquence, develops a larger vocabulary with the help of a dictionary, and eventually even manages to teach students at art school.

Aurora Venturini, who died in 2015 and can now finally be discovered in German, not only tells a strange, cruel coming-of-age story, but also how language and art can show a way out of the darkest of tunnels.