★★★ For some it was a true celebration of language and thought, for others a sacrilege. The concrete thing is that the presentation of the writer Alessandro Baricco, in our splendid Teatro Colón, did not go unnoticed.
The visit, scheduled within the Great Interpreters cycle, aroused the anger of some subscribers. According to them, the inclusion of the Italian author in a subscription that included the singers Plácido Domingo and Roberto Alagna, among other outstanding lyrical artists, was questionable. Ingeniously, they compared it to the arrival, centuries ago, of European conquerors and their giving of gifts to native peoples. In this case, the colored mirrors came in the form of a very interesting theory, although perhaps forced in its hypothesis.
Baricco enumerated the final course of King Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette, the captivity, the escape through Varennes, the subsequent capture and the transfer to Paris, where they were finally executed. That gave rise to an explanation about how the news spread throughout France and how relative the passage of time is in the lives of human beings.
His other point of support for the exposed conjecture were the last days of Leo Tolstoy’s life, the explanation of how he abandoned Sofia Behrs, the woman who had accompanied him for so many years, and how the illness and subsequent death of the author of “War and peace”, for the vast Russian territory.
Both historical events, according to his thinking, are an example of what he calls “the wound of time” and, in his conception, that gap can only be overcome thanks to love. To reinforce his proposal based on the fact that “only love can close the wound of time in an instant”, he read excerpts from “Love in the time of cholera”, where García Márquez tells the story of Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza, “Romeo and Juliet”, by Shakespeare and “The Odyssey”, by Homer, dwelling on the passion that united Ulysses with Penelope.
Although the chosen passages are beautifully written, and it is praiseworthy that they remind us of the importance of affection, the main flaw was that Baricco is not an actor and lacks expressive nuances when narrating. A translator participated next to him, both with microphones. However, many fell captivated by the proposal, perhaps more trapped by his figure than by what happened on the scene.
