A deep and complex look at parents, according to Roberto Appratto

In order to put together the family novel, so appreciated by Sigmund Freud, we must approach, and at the same time move away, from a past that becomes present through deferred and incontestable versions and subversions: fathers speak, mothers speak, grandparents speak, and we, side effects of their narrative, try to maintain the right distance, the impossible equidistance, so that our history does not end up devoured by an alien history (to which, of course, we are debtors). Sartre says something like this, about Jean Genet: it matters, in short, what we do with what others have done to us.

Roberto Appratto surgically investigates these questions in a volume that brings together two books published for the first time together, Intima, dedicated to the father, and The Origin of Everything, dedicated to his mother. The word dedicated is not at all coincidental, as no word is ever coincidental, since the volume can be read as a consecration or an offering of the son to the parents and as the obsessive and unbribable work of the writer in the face of the challenge of form (the ethics of form).

Appratto, from the outset, recognizes the difficulties of addressing his object of study directly, knows that the attempt to transmit, without mediation or delay, the personality of his parents is a mission destined to fail: the object in question (the object in question) overflows the margins, is removed, or is born languid: “It is never easy to be true to the truth, because we immediately fall on our heads hundreds of common places or cultural traces that corrode our way of evoking and turn every biographical story into false”. In view of this latent danger (to degrade the truth in the name of truth), the Uruguayan writer dodges the bundle, surrounds it, turns, retreats, moves forward, and instead of presenting reality aseptically, proposes “the construction of a father from what I can know about me”, a father filtered by his gaze, his memories, his anxieties, but also bets on the construction of a mother, whose figure, is mysterious to her in the utmost degree.

By mother's line, the great biographical pillar of Appratto are the hundreds of films and books that the mother assimilated with an inexhaustible, silent, almost submissive passion during her long existence; along her father's line, music, especially tangos whistled in the morning, when she left the bathroom, “with perfect tuning”. This is how the writer's parents stand out, affectionately plotted to give the child the only priceless legacy: artistic sensitivity, that is, a way of being in the world, although each according to his own imprint; the father, with pompas and enthusiasm; the mother, introspective and lonely.

But before promising the reader a full understanding of his lineage, what his parents were or intended to be (the vital recesses, the sentimental interstices, the stealth manias), Appratto spreads arduous questions, such as the students of Pythagoras: what is a father? What is a mother? , and, by ontological adherence, the question arises about Roberto Appratto himself, an adult, cultured, professional man, contained in what does it mean to be a son? , a question that implies diving into the depths of the filial relationship to warn, “the brutal resemblance to my father” or to recognize oneself in the mother, and then to measure the degrees of mystery and unreality imposed by figures that one inevitably tends to idealize or reject.

It happens that, giving a small turn to the formulation, those questions asked by parents become a specific question about the right materials at the time of telling a life, his own or another, which is the elementary (fundamental) question of the volume, where Appratto, in his literary errance, sets up to examine the most suitable for the purpose of avoiding the status of a child defeated by circumstances. One thing is certain: “Every explanation is a loss”, any attempt to account for the other can fail. And it's not that Appratto's book doesn't fail, it fails in another instance, failure ensues as an intrinsic part of his plan.

Appratto writes: “There is no justification for writing about the mother,” nor is there any justification for writing about the father. “There does have to be so that what you write is, as in any case, something more than writing about your mother. Something else: the real thing resists in any way.” Something else, a rest, an overflow, a crumbling, the real always resists, language always resists and with them and against them it is written, and in that sense, the plus just mentioned preannounces in the text the supremacy of form, the work with cadence, the search for a tone, the question of syntax. This is the last triumph, if you like, of Roberto Appratto, the meticulous creation of a tone, and in tone, or tone, paradoxically, his mother and dad are reborn.

In the last pages of the book, the writer's mother confirms herself as a more complex figure to define that the father, however, “once accepted that he could treat his story with the same feeling of unfinishing, of constant openness to other angles, that a work of art promotes”. The fragment resonates with the famous Borgean definition: “this imminence of a revelation, which does not occur, is perhaps the aesthetic fact”. Let's put it another way, the only works (art, literary, cinematographic) really interesting (at least for me) are those whose meaning remains safe from unanimous understanding, works that avoid or levitate between equivocation, confusion and ambiguity. These qualities distinguish Appratto's proposal and envelop the reader in an atmosphere in which he comes to “understand but not fully understand”. And precisely here lies the vitality of the text (of the meeting of both texts): its oscillation, its faltering character, images that are affirmed and denied in a single movement.

In Appratto's work, finally, there are no apologies or reparations, no reckoning, there is indeed an attempt to walk along the edges, face the family abyss and return home knowing that the Freudian moment of conclusion will never be reached, because in reference to parents, no conclusion is possible.

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