“I am an artisan, a worker. In certain things I am very precise and, in others, I try to surrender to the constructive void. “It’s what you need when you do a job in the area of art,” he says. Marilu Mariniwho has left Paris for a few months, where he has lived since the ’70s and has developed a prestigious artistic career, to do theater in Buenos Aires.
Stars “The heart of damage”, a one-man show based on the novel by María Negroni, directed by Alejandro Tantanián. A text that cuts through like a dagger—about a daughter’s relationship with her mother—and that Marilú accompanies with exquisite work. To see it is to attend a moving ceremony. Until mid-March at the Picadero theater.
“I am quite childish, I am very close to the imaginary, with that freedom of imagination that children have.. Despite having very strict codes due to my upbringing, precisely to break that, I can reach that freedom. Sometimes, as a result of violent blows, and now with age I allow myself more,” she maintains. Among the distinctions he received are the Platinum Konex, the Brilliant Award and the Order of Arts and Letters in Commander Degree awarded to him by the French government.
News: What are its luminous aspects?
Marilú Marini: The affections and the ability I have to still surprise myself. What surprises me and challenges me is beauty. Not the beauty that responds to established social codes, but the one that goes towards other limits that, at times, can be terrible, monstrous or annoying.. That is something that moves and marvels me.
News: Its darkest parts?
Marini: What I like least about myself are my fears and my inability to trust myself.. I am someone who is very insecure, although I have inner security regarding work and affection.
News: What are those fears like?
Marini: My biggest fear is being abandoned in the middle of the road and not having my own resources to defend myself.
News: Your greatest achievement?
Marini: Having built a family. The relationship with my husband —Rodolfo de Souza, actor— which is beautiful. My relationship with my daughter Laura and my grandchildren Diego (7) and Rafael (10).
News: Have you had the same therapist for forty years?
Marini: Yes, Isaura Verón, a wonderful psychoanalyst, from Corrientes, who lives in Paris. I see her once a week.
News: What did the therapy do for you and what does it do for you now?
Marini: It helped me to rebuild myself, to know myself, to continue growing and to untie the knots of fear and be able to access a quite intimate part of myself. It helped me make my way and to trust that not everything can be controlled. There are things that one does not control, fortunately.
News: What do you feel when you are on stage?
Marini: A great happiness and, at the same time, a brutal fear, before leaving, the uncertainty, all of that. But it is the place where I feel most free. It’s a world that belongs to me.
News: Do you have rituals?
Marini: Before going on stage, I do part of a Feldenkrais class, warming up my voice. I’m in the dressing room three hours early. I have a cabal that Jorge Luz taught me, which is to cross yourself and spit over your left shoulder before entering the stage. It’s a bit like what is done in Greece, in Orthodox baptisms the godparents spit on the demon to keep it away from the baby.
News: He didn’t study acting. How do you compose your characters? Do you have your own method?
Marini: They are tools and ways of working that I acquired through experience. The method differs with each character and I also work on it in analysis. I bring my texts and my characters to my sessions with Isaura and we work on them with respect to me, and that is very precious, very valuable.
News: What did you use to create the protagonist of “The Heart of Harm”?
Marini: She is a writer daughter who, through her relationship with her mother, becomes an artist. I went to my own experience and then to those echoes that María Negroni’s text sent me. It is such a unique text, so poetic, there is no narrative, there is a situation that develops, is symbolized and is sublimated through the text. It was through me that I did it.
News: Why did you choose this work?
Marini: Alejandro Tantanián offered it to me. The adaptation work that he did with María and Oria Puppo was fundamental and also the text, Alejandro’s direction and Oria’s look (set design, lighting and costumes) that orchestrated an essential atmosphere in the staging. The work chose me.
News: What was your experience as a daughter?
Marini: It was a complicated, beautiful experience. She had a distant, Prussian mother, who was coming from a very deep mourning because she had lost a daughter before I arrived. I was a light for her, but she, poor thing, was grieving, far from me. I did not feel my mother’s gaze, the gaze that gives identity. She looked for her all the time. He was a very delicate person and also, in some way, he remained a very childish person all his life. He died thirty-odd years ago.
News: Today do you remember her with love or hate?
Marini: I remember her with love. I can understand her now more than when she was alive.
News: What is your bond with Laura, your husband’s daughter and your heart’s daughter?
Marini: Ah, that’s a delicious link. I am from a generation where the code of being a woman was very strict, very hard, we started reading Simone de Beauvoir, who told us that a woman is not made, she becomes, she works. Laura has given me a lot of love and also the possibility of learning many things about life, leaving me outside the strictness of my education. I came out breaking and with it I can learn to come out of it becoming more fluid.
News: What kind of grandmother is she?
Marini: The worst thing about grandmothers, spoiling, horrible. The other day Rafael told me: “Malus, you must still be very young to play with me like you do.” Our grandchildren call Rodolfo and me Malus and Papus. I was shocked after hearing that.
News: How many years have you been with Rodolfo?
Marini: We have been together since ’89 and along the way we got married, we are a couple with a notebook.
News: What is love like after so long?
Marini: Very deep, it is the result of great work. Love in everyday life, the everyday hand-to-hand, requires a lot of work on the ground, a lot of understanding, a lot of attention to the other and to the relationship. Of course, love changes over so many years. But there is something of what is not said, of what I know that is felt, of what is lived that remains intact and feeds that love.
News: What is your life like in Paris?
Marini: Very calm. It is a very beautiful city, there is a lot of cultural offering and I try to take advantage of that as much as possible. I live on Richard Lenoir Boulevard and I have two open-air markets there. I love buying vegetables from local producers and I love cooking. Rodolfo is very homely, I am more of a jogger down the street, but I also like to be at home.
News: What do you like about French society?
Marini: That structure installed for so long that gives you a certain peace of mind and that, at times, can seem very constricted to us. In France things are more distant between people. I also like the agricultural and peasant side, you see it in the wonderful markets. And the sense of the republic that they have is something that is greatly respected, it is a duty.
News: What do you miss about Buenos Aires?
Marini: The affection, the easy access to the affection that people have here, to direct communication. There it is all much more codified. They are very different codes from ours.
News: How do you see Argentina in this new stage?
Marini: The situation is very complicated. It would be good for the entire ruling class to reflect on what they need to evolve the countrynot the political class, so as not to be so far from the real needs of the people.
News: A dream?
Marini: Make Sancho Panza. It remains in the area of imagination still. I would have to get to work on the adaptation, but I’m lazy. We’ll see, one of those, now I’m leaving.
