Ensayo de vuelo

Paloma Vidal writes her Ensayo de vuleo literally returning home while reading the books of the girls who, for their part, are heading in the opposite direction, toward exile. Argentine girls living poorly on paltry scholarships in Germany and England while invoking their mothers or, better yet, fleeing from them while forcing a new language that doesn't include them. It doesn't matter so much that she narrates the details of Ensaio de voo here , where the writer pauses to try to understand why these two girls decided to emigrate from their country alone, averaging about 40 years old, and without knowing very well how they would manage upon reaching their destination. Nor does it matter that she says here that these two openings to books impel her to wonder about the fate of her own sister, who had also just made the untimely decision to emigrate to France without any concrete plan for survival. What does matter is that reading Ensaio de voo clarifies something for me: reading and writing are a pairing that can only be separated when one lifts one's head from the pages of others to lean it back into one's own. Reading these pages transformed for me, as for Vidal the two beginnings of the girls' books ("moças" in Portuguese), into the motivation to begin writing a book, to search for something that sometimes, as happened to Vidal, is only a beginning.

Tamara Kamenszain

Ensayo de vuelo
Paloma Vidal
EME, 2020

16 x 20 cm, 40 pp; Spanish