Ensayo para una familia
By Agustina Comedi

1.
First photo
A painting by her father crowns the marital bed; it is Fiorela decontextualized: from the cover of a Playboy to the family scene. Naked and reclining, she seems to be looking at the photographer while her father and her sister sleep, their arms intertwined, their cheeks brushing with the backs of their hands in a gesture of tenderness or impending closeness.

In death, sex.

In the marital bed, filial tenderness.

Second and third photos
Geraldine kisses Edie. Liz kisses Geraldine.

Fourth photo
Jennifer surrenders to Isabel’s kiss, who smiles and presses her cheek with hands that are still those of a child.

2.
"The first time I declared my love to my mother, I was three years old," this is how Cristina Peri Rossi’s Primer Amor begins. Unlike the father, who appears and disappears without warning, exerting a power that inevitably saddens her mother, she, a three-year-old domestic animal, understands her emotions and keeps her company. Many years later, the once-child thanks her mother because the reason for her rejection was not that they were both women. "She made me grow up with the conviction that, for the purposes of love, the sex of those who love each other doesn’t matter." Toward the end of the story, she recounts that every time she sees her mother again, the joy and tenderness are the same. "It has been our particular way of changing the law of men."

What exists beyond the laws that disconnect life from desire is, both in Primer Amor and Ensayo para una Familia, a kind of ecosystem from which to build one’s own life. Suely Rolnik recounts that the spider throws a first thread of silk into the environment. This thread has the property of tuning into the spectrum of vibrational frequencies of the vital forces of the ecosystem. Through the thread, all that information travels to the spider’s body, which decodes it with its legs, turning it into a compass. It is from this thread that the spider decides where to anchor the threads and with what architecture to weave its web. The spider rewrites its web every time the web stops adapting to its needs; to do so, once more it throws that first thread, through which it can feel the world. It rehearses.

Where the laws of men draw immutable borders, the images of Geraldine rehearse a line, which, like a coastline, moves without haste, covering and uncovering the geography of affections. It is not about building a wall to separate us from what came before; it is about throwing that first thread, flexible and resilient, again and again.

3. 
Geraldine looks at the camera, sitting on a staircase, while injecting her abdomen with Menopur.

Where there is no wall, things can grow.

4.
In March, I receive, from the delivery room of a hospital in New York, three photos.

First photo
Geraldine on a stretcher, with a towel on her head and knee-high soccer socks. Exhausted.

Second photo
The excited face of Hannah, covered by a light blue mask. The caption says, "Hannah cuts the umbilical cord."

Third photo
Crowned with a huge pink bow, Amadea's eyes swollen from entering the world.
The caption: "Poor Amadea, they already put a bow on her."

Ensayo para una Familia asks us: There, where there is no wall, can I grow a daughter? This question, thrown into the world, makes us part of the fabric.


Agustina Comedi
December 2023