The Book Fair as an event of cultural resistance

“The measures that have been tried to be implemented [por el gobierno] “They are attacks on the heart of culture,” he said at one point. “That is why we express: No to the closure of the National Fund for the Arts, No to the closure of the National Theater Institute. No to the scrapping of the National Film Institute INCAA, No to the repeal of Law No. 25542 on the Defense of Book Activity, No to the refusal to purchase just over fourteen million school textbooks by the Ministry of Human Capital, which They were going to be handed over to the public schools, with the childish and smiling if it were not tragic argument: ‘because there is no time.’”

Let us also quote the paragraph that he dedicated to the next presentation of the President’s book: “After an arduous negotiation, in which we agreed to all their requirements, Banco Nación decided to withdraw, after many years, its sponsorship of the Fair, revealing that the order came ‘from above’. But this is not all, the President of the Nation, after despising our Fair, does not blush and asks to participate in this space, which is scheduled for next Sunday, May 12 on the Central Court of La Rural. Her presence at the Fair, an extraordinary showcase, implies a series of extraordinary expenditures, which the El Libro Foundation cannot afford. I tell you with a hand on my heart: There is no money. Therefore, everything related to your safety and that of the people who attend your event will be at your sole expense, or what is worse, it will be an extra expense for the National Treasury.”

After the recorded message of Carlos MoedasPresident of the Municipal Chamber of Lisbon (this year’s guest of honor city), who could not attend because just yesterday Portugal was celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Carnation Revolution (it will arrive in the next few days), and from the words of the ambassador of That country, Joseph Ludovicehe had to go up to Jorge Macrithe only shirtless of the male speakers.

Jorge Macri

The boos that the head of the Buenos Aires government received from a tiny, but very strident, part of the audience made us imagine what would have happened to Cifelli up there.. But Macri He was quick and skillful, and From the first moment, he established a position to differentiate himself from the politics of the Casa Rosada: “It would be unthinkable to imagine that the City Government is not part of this exhibition. Therefore, count on us in this and all future editions”he claimed.

To make his speech more folksy, he went off script and recalled his childhood, when he ran to the newsstand to buy “Patoruzito” and later “D’Artagnan” and “El Tony.” The dissidents, located (as in the National Assembly of the French Revolution) on the left side of the Hall, began to shout at him: “And have you never read a book?” Let’s agree that it was not comfortable to speak in those conditions, but the official continued to enlighten the audience with the story that, when he was older, he dared to go to the library of his elders and became a reader.

And he immediately affirmed his distinction from the national government: he announced that the City launched the Buenos Aires, City of Books program, to reinforce the public library plan with 20,000 volumes, “added to the more than 180,000 books that the Ministry of the Nation bought for the children of public schools”. Finally, he added that they would relaunch the program in the coming days BA Cash Rebate, which consists of a 20% refund of expenses for production companies that carry out total or partial filming in the City of Buenos Aires. At this point, since it was about the audiovisual industry, the same opposition voices continued shouting: “And the INCAA?” As if the Film Institute depended on him.

Instead, the vociferants let their biggest blooper pass in silence, revealing in the process that Nor do they read with the fervor that they demand from the head of Government. In his words of gratitude to the city of Lisbon, Macri mentioned the great triad in contemporary Portuguese literature: José Saramago, Fernando Pessoa… and Enrique Vila-Matas. Doesn’t anyone correct his speeches? ¿Nobody told you that Vila-Matas is more Catalan than Serrat and the Camp Nou combined? The lapse was reminiscent of his cousin Mauricio’s, when in his speech at the Fair as Head of Government he called Borges “José Luis”. Family thing.

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Liliana Heker

Liliana Heker arrived at the end to bring the entire auditorium to its feet, composed largely of several generations of his students from the literary workshops and nostalgic readers of the cult magazine “The Golden Beetle”, marks of a Buenos Aires from the last century that, little by little, is losing those old radiances. The author of “Aquarium”, “Clavage zone” and, among many other titles, “The end of history”which just published “Iceberg news”gave a prior warning that was received with applause (just because it was her): “I have always been inclusive, since I was a child, but please don’t force me to say ‘everyone’ because it doesn’t work for me.” Let us note that even Jorge Macri had incurred in this progressive pleonasm.

“I assume that many of you are wondering something similar to what, for the last three months, I was wondering,” he said almost at the beginning: “Does it make sense to celebrate this new issue of the Book Fair in a country in which poverty and destitution are growing day by day, there are thousands of unfounded layoffs, health and public education are in emergency, public works were canceled, our universities are defunded to the point of running the risk of closing their doors?” And after continuing to list today’s evils, he concluded: “I confess that more than once a breaking piece of news shook this text of mine even before I began to give it shape. And yet here I am, celebrating, like half a century ago at my first Fair, being surrounded by books and a crowd that, I suspect, largely comes here because they are looking for something precise or perhaps vague that they hope to find in a book.”

One of the most celebrated parts was when he joked about the official motto of the “two promises of ineffable well-being that will compensate us for the bad things we are currently experiencing. The first: in thirty-five years this is going to be a powerful country; the second: Argentina is going to return to being that great country it was at the beginning of the twentieth century. Regarding the first promise,” he continued, “the apparent scientific rigor conferred by such an exact figure leads one to wonder: where are the studies that explain why we are going to reach that state of well-being exactly within thirty-five years? Leaving aside that as a consolation it is a bit poor since a good part of the beneficiaries are going to be dead: from old age, from hunger, or from lack of medicines”.

“As for the second promise: to become as prosperous as a century or so ago, leaving aside the fact that, in itself, a historical setback of more than a century seems a little doubtful as an ideal, I would like to know if those who They let themselves be seduced by that promise and asked themselves what the country was like at the beginning of the twentieth century. Do you have any idea that at that time there was a minority group that popular wisdom called ‘those with the tied cow’ because they usually traveled to Europe, and with their own cow so that their children, on the boat, would not be bothered? Was the healthy national milk lacking, while, in general, the people were dying of hunger?”

Last night’s paradoxes: those words were being pronounced in the heart of the Argentine Rural Society, the same property where the name of Martínez de Hoz shines in one of its pavilions; that is, in what was the house of the owners of the tethered cows at the beginning of the century. A paradox, as Argentine, as that of the President himself, who wants to go present his book at the Fair of those “lefties” that he hates so much..

“If to this small anthology of nonsense,” Heker continued, “we add certain outbursts in the style of ‘The State is a criminal organization’ or ‘Social justice is an aberrant concept,’ One might suspect that it would be very difficult for the official discourse – or non-speech – to withstand a minimally attentive reading.. As for the manifest cruelty that can be seen, for example, in the chancellor’s explanation: since retirees are going to die, what sense would it make to give them loans; or in the reasoning of a representative: if a father needs his son in the workshop, he is free not to send him to school; I think that to understand the inhumanity of these ‘proposals’ it is enough to have a minimum sensitivity to suffering, injustice and impiety.”

Shortly before the ribbon cutting in a ceremony that was anything but happy, he added: in difficult times like the current one, an irrefutable reading of reality that does not need prior studies ends up being imposed: it is that induced by hunger and anguish. of having been fired from work without reason, and for any other injustice that hurts close to home. Readings that – universal history and our own history demonstrate this – find their expression in the street. The street that, despite the official intention to demonize it, is the voice of those who have no voice. And those who are not heard. And those of us who want, along with everyone else, to be heard.”

“In reality, this multiple testimony is already beginning to occur. Experts from the most diverse sectors are speaking out with lucidity and passion. Scientists, political scientists, economists, university students, people from the theater, cinema, literature, union members, lawyers, teachers, workers in different areas, small businessmen, retirees, journalists, are making their voices heard more and more frequently and with more clarity. “It is the beginning of a path.”

This is how the 48th International Book Fair was inaugurated, with halls wider than usual due to fewer stands, with a chilling forecast about the publishing industry provided by Vaccaro during his speech (“In 2015 the country produced 129 million books to fall in 2018 to 26 million, in 2023 and after the pandemic the figures reached 48 million copies. This year the final figure is not described with numbers but with words: it will be very poor “), but with its usual number of visitors, who had already begun to visit it since Tuesday. A visit that, for the porteño and the tourist, has been part of their habits for half a century, although some do not see it.