En - Genoveva | armandoygenoveva

Genoveva

My mother said she believed in the possibility of a happy, human, and creative world.

I think she needed to muster all the ingenuity she was capable of in order to counteract the bitter pessimism of my father.

Unlike him, she adored the human figure-- not an imaginary figure, but the shape of real men she beheld before her. My mother made portraits during many years; she said the most difficult thing to capture in drawing was the “gaze:” “that ungraspable thing every person possesses.”

Was my mother referring to the human soul?

In her youth, my mother was ostracized by her family. It was a time when being an artist was synonymous with bohemia or vagrancy. And more so for a woman. . .

Rejected and alone, my mother met my father at a printing studioin Buenos Aires, their identification was immediate (it seems).

This led to another family segregation: my parents fell in love and lived together without getting married. Apparently, this was inadmissible in the provincial and moralistic universe of the time .

Whereas my father had processed his marginalization with skepticism and a critical spirit, my mother, I believe, processed her own pain, converting it into an innocent and willful hope.

My mother believed that education would transform men. And she tested this hypothesis every day.

My mother devoted twenty years of her life to teaching art to adults and children. She taught at a poor neighborhood in Córdoba: Barrio Yapeyú.

Genoveva’s students were illiterate children, many of them malnourished. My mother taught them the fascinating history of art, the techniques of impressionism and of Rembrandt’s veilings.

As an art teacher, my mother believed that the only possible freedom came from knowledge. “Knowing how” (my mother used to say) is what grants humans the skills to be free.

Freedom, without skills, on the other hand, was not a veritable plenitude.

For that reason, my mother taught art techniques with rigor. Oftentimes, the children who didn’t know how to write. . . learned serigraphy, etching, and lithography instead, and understood Botticelli’s compositions and Leonardo da Vinci’s discoveries.

My mother’s students, learned art history before knowing the history of the world. For my mother, this was healthy. . . because she believed that true history resided in the works left by men (in other words, in hope) and not in the inventory of abuses and massacres that you encountered in the usual history books.

My mother said she wasn’t really an “artist,” that the “artist” was my father. . . But the truth is that she decided to study “formally” at the School of Fine Arts in Cordoba, beginning her studies at age 50. And before and after that decision, she produced an extensive and subtle oeuvre which boasts a stylized stroke.

Maybe her disclaimer of “not being an artist,” was a requisite of the times, a resource of “gender”,but being able to evolve (in practice and without labels) as an artist anyways. . .

In looking at the works, I note that my parents entered an extensive artistic exchange, my mother borrowed her obsessions from my father: she began to paint the same themes.

And my father was a fervent admirer of my mother’s unique drawing.

I can attest that, beyond their romantic partnership (which as a daughter, I don’t know in many respects), they developed a tight artistic bond over the years. . .

When my father died, my mother joined me in Mexico for a few years. Her cancer was in advanced stages. When she emerged from a critical stage in her illness, she returned to Cordoba, to the Yapeyú neighborhood, and dined with the neighbors in the area’s popular kitchens, pressed by the harsh economic crisis of the time.

She didn’t receive any pension or subsidy from the company that employed my father for twenty years: A.C.A. (Automóvil Club Argentino).

When I learned about the situation, I of course shared the little money I had with her.

The day my mother died, we held a wake in the patio of the house where she had taught for so many years.

I asked my young artist friends in Cordoba to help me hang my parents’ works on the walls.

My mother’s neighbors and students were at the wake, praying in accordance with Christian practice. There were also some family members, who avoided looking at the open coffin, in accordance with Jewish custom (they instead appreciated the works on the walls). . . My friends and I were there. . .with no avowed religion, on the roof of the house, simply crying and drinking. . .

And then something unexpected happened. A young trash picker stopped at the door, entered the wake, then left. I caught up to him and asked him if he had met my mother when she was alive. He said he had, that he had been her student. . .and that he would never forget her, because whenever he sorted through trash, food, old iron, boxes or anything that would help him survive. . .he saw the lines of the street. . .and remembered what my mother had taught him--a thing he had discovered many years ago: perspective.

The lines on the street meet at a point in the distance. The young man told me that a very famous artist, Leonardo da Vinci, and another artist named like a cousin of his, Raphael, had discovered “this.” He said that because of that, he would never forget my mother.