Solid police about a common man who dreams of being a murderer

While he sleeps, a banker comes to inhabit the real life of a criminal in “Dream or die” (Revolver) novel where Tato Tabernise, From dirty realism, it adds intensities from other genres. Oscar Tato Tabernisea prominent film and TV scriptwriter, surprised from his first detective story, “The dead man”. We dialogue with him:

Tato Tabernise: “Dream or Die” begins with a guy who carries out a bloody murder and suddenly realizes that it is not him, that he is inside another body. That was the starting point: a murderer and the man who inhabits him in dreams. Crime for Beltrán, the murderer, is what he dedicates himself to. The other, Fabián, is the opposite, a bank employee, unattractive, with a flat, gray life. I wanted to know what happened to someone when they found themselves inside another’s body, what their journey was, how far they went. It had everything to be a pulp novel.

TT: I am always very interested in the plot of the story, and the story took me through those tones. Furthermore, the central characters are two worlds. Unlimited violence, blackness, drugs, pornography, on the side of the murderer. The neat, the desire for promotion, the romantic, achieving a partner, on the employee’s side. “Dream or die” begins: while the Ninth Symphony was playing I hit him with the Sevillana, taking out his guts. One chapter ends with Fabián saying: and Sheila and I hugged each other in a spoon, and the next begins, already inside the criminal, he penetrated Cicciolina. The violence is there from the beginning, as well as the erotic. The story took me through those genres of “dirty realism” until they reached confluence. I am not motivated by genre but rather by saying something different from what has already been said, and almost everything written.

Q: What made you quote movies from time to time?

TT: It is the freedom that dreams grant. In dreams, things that were experienced, seen or read are mixed. This is how they appeared in the dreams in which Fabián enters the body of a stranger, lives with the murderer, sees himself committing rapes and crimes. He enters a bar where Discépolo is in a scene from “El fan” and the action takes place at the next table. Demi Moore contours in the pipe of “Striptease” and is actually La Débora, who calls herself Sheila. I had to Google porn pages that I didn’t know about to give a special scene in a shower. There are also several references to gore and horror films.

Q.: Genres valued thanks to John Fante and Bukowsky. Although his relationship is with Stevenson.

TT: Absolutely, the central characters have to do with “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” The irony, two things that attract are crime and humor, is that I pay tribute to Stevenson with “Dr. Jekyll and His Sister Hyde”, an English film by Roy Ward Baker, from 1971, where Jekyll, upon becoming Hyde, cross-dresses as an evil woman.

Q: Was Borges’ appearance in your novel an inevitable tribute?

TT: It was another of the connections that arose when unfolding the story. It has to do with making quotes from series or movies. There is a very famous series, “El marginal”, which takes place in a prison and one of the characters is called Borges, he gives orders to a group of prisoners, especially a dwarf. Now that’s in the novel. Duality that the illustrator of the novel, Juan Bezzati, highlighted. Well, Borges said that dreams are the oldest literary genre.

Q.: Do you cite Argentine cinema as a precursor to crime novels, pulp, soft porn, gore, trash?

TT: The prison part led me to tributes to “Atrapadas” by Aníbal Di Salvo, to those of Emilio Vieyra, to those of Isabel Sarli.

Q.: What led you to go from TV and film scripts and scripts to detective novels?

TT: For every writer, the temptation of the novel is an impulse that is difficult, if not impossible, to ignore. In my case, the first thing that appeared as a narrative was theater. My friend Enrique Morales, with whom I wrote “Tócala deagain, Cacho”, a comedy that plays with the police officer, invited me to a theater course with Alberto Irizar. That’s where it all started. Then came work on TV. Ten years as an assistant director and then I got to direct. With Enrique we wrote a program for Moria Casan. Then I wrote “Poliladrón”, “The Sign”, “Poné a Francella”, among others. They were industrial projects, here and abroad. There came a time, after having achieved a certain place, when the TV business began to bother me, the manipulation, the taking over of one’s ideas, I came from when TV gave an opportunity to the author’s project. I told myself I’m going to stop writing professionally, I’m going to write for myself, and I started with police stories.

Q: Were you able to escape professionally?

TT: No, “El muertito,” his first novel, became a screenplay and the film “Aguas Dos Porcos.”

Q: What did you feel about the Loan Case, which has some relations with “El Muertito”?

TT: It was not the first time that a boy was kidnapped in the north of the country. If events like this are perpetuated, it is because political, judicial, economic, police interests, gangs supported by very powerful people, intersect. I was surprised by the continuity of the news, I was waiting for it to go silent. The relationships with “El Muertito” are things that appear in writing and when they arise in reality they are more powerful, much superior to what you could write, unfortunately. I wish that kind of thing didn’t happen.

Q: What are you writing now?

TT: “Virus” is about why the pandemic arose, from a guy who, by sending a memo, finds himself involved in an international quilombo, a spy novel “a la Argentina.”