ROME.- Victoria Ocampohis intense relationship with Italian literature, which he captured through the magazine Southhis passion for Dante -which he used to justify his forbidden loves- and his controversial meeting with Benito Mussolini, back in 1935. All of this was discussed this Tuesday in an exciting conference that took place at the Casa Argentina, the cultural space of the Argentine embassy of the Via Veneto. There, Argentine lawyer Juan Javier Negri, president of the Sur Foundation, delighted the public with various anecdotes.
Speaking in perfect Italian and accompanied by Camilla Cattarulla, professor of Spanish American language and literature at the Roma Tre University in this capital, Negri stressed that this year marks the centenary of From Francesca to BeatriceVictoria Ocampo’s first book, from 1924, focused on two opposite women of the Divine Comedy: one, symbol of passionate and forbidden love; the other, of spiritual love that transcends. And she recalled that this writing was the result not only of her deep admiration for Dante Alighieri, but also of the transgressive passion for another man that she had while she was married to Luis Bernardo de Estrada. Estrada was “a man of the same social class and, therefore, impregnated by the prevalent prejudice of the time according to which women should have a purely reproductive and social representation role,” recalled Negri, an expert in cultural law. .
After highlighting that this marriage, which occurred in 1912, “never worked,” Negri said that this uneven couple of newlyweds, from the patrician class, had a honeymoon in Europe typical of that time of good fortune, which lasted no less than than two years, from 1912 to 1914. It was precisely during a period in Rome, in April 1913, when Victoria fell madly in love with Julián Martínez, her husband’s cousin and nephew of the then ambassador to the Holy See. “The moment I saw him from afar, his presence invaded me… (…) The architecture of his face was of surprising beauty,” Ocampo wrote in his Autobiography.
Anibal Greco
On that trip, Victoria participated in several gala balls, impressing with a diamond tiara, and she also had a more than active cultural life, as demonstrated by letters and even works by other writers of that time who were inspired by that woman in their books. so fascinating, cosmopolitan and of enormous intellectual curiosity, coming from the end of the world. The truth is that, upon returning with her husband to Buenos Aires in 1914, Victoria began to live a double life. “On the one hand, she maintained the appearance of a formally correct marriage, but on the other, she did not speak with her husband and carried on a passionate relationship with Julián, which forced her to invent any type of stratagem so that they could meet clandestinely,” Negri said. which stressed that, for the conservative society of Buenos Aires at the time, “Victoria was a scandal.”
It was in this more than conflictive context that Dante, whom Ocampo had begun to admire in 1908, when she traveled to Paris with her family and took some courses at the Sorbonne, became like a spiritual lifeline for her. “Victoria Ocampo began to feel totally identified with Dante, to the point that she wrote ‘I lived Dante’ when she published her first article in the newspaper LA NACION on April 4, 1920, titled ‘Babel’, just three days before turning thirty. years, in which he commented on the XV song of the Purgatory and the differences between human beings, who have different sensitivities and characters, as she and her husband precisely had,” Negri recalled.
That was the first attempt to justify, through Dante, the breaking of the usual rules of marital behavior, due to incompatibility of characters, which was later deepened in From Francesca to Beatricean essay in which, although Victoria presented it as a “personal guide to Divine Comedy”, in reality, it was more of a work that went further, in which he tried to “justify the possible excesses of love.” “In a certain sense, Dante was used by Victoria as a self-justification for her adultery,” Negri pointed out. “Not for nothing is the key character of the essay Francesca da Rimini, who falls in love with her husband’s brother. Victoria, more puritan and prudent, had only fallen in love with her husband’s cousin,” he added, causing laughter in the audience. During the talk, which was attended by the ambassador to Italy, Marcelo Giusto, among others, several other lovers of Ocampo were also remembered, known for inviting intellectuals and writers with whom she had relationships to her mansion in San Isidro.
Apart from reviewing the other, more than intense, phase of Ocampo’s relationship with Italian literature – he met the great names of the Novecento-, which had its peak in a publication, number 225 of the magazine South from the end of 1953, from an anthology exclusively dedicated to Italy, the conference also recalled the famous meeting he had with Benito Mussolini in 1935, during one of his trips through Europe. Then Ocampo, invited by the Italian government and always very interested in meeting influential figures in politics and culture in contemporary history, obtained an audience with the Ducesomething that sparked negative reactions in intellectual circles. “Mussolini impressed me with his presence, his overwhelming strength. The power he exercised could not be ignored, but my admiration was never for his ideas,” he wrote in “Testimonies,” without hiding that he had been impacted by the undeniable charisma of the fascist dictator.
“This meeting was widely criticized, but the truth is that Victoria was always a supporter of democracy and freedom,” said Negri, who finally highlighted that Ocampo was not only anti-fascist, but also anti-Peronist, something that It earned him prison in 1953.