The actress stands alone on stage, in a room that smells of patchouli and feminine cream. The woman she plays is desperate, sobbing and choking; is on the phone with a man. The Human Voice by Jean Cocteau will be presented on stage. The actress finishes the show, goes to her dressing room, has sex with the director and gets into a taxi. “It is the moment when she stops being the crazy Cocteau,” writes Argentine author Camila Sosa Villada in her novel “Thesis on a Domestication” (Tusquets, 2023), “to become this simple-minded and phobic transvestite , which is on her way “to her home”.
Sosa Villada, who has been everything – street vendor, house cleaner, prostitute, actress, singer – is in Buenos Aires to present the novel. The book tells the story of a transvestite actress married to a gay man who is the mother of an adopted son with HIV. As the three cross the mountains of Córdoba to visit the actress’s family, she feels that this bourgeois life is suffocating and boring her. The book had an initial print run of 5,000 copies in 2019 and was only sold in newsstands. When Tusquets suggested republishing the work, the author accepted and effectively rewrote it.
“A lot has happened in my life and in my head [desde 2019]”, Sosa Villada (La Falda, 41 years old) tells EL PAÍS. Among other things, the author gained international fame with her book “Las Malas”, which follows a group of transvestites who prostitute themselves in a park, and made the film adaptation of ” Thesis on a Domestication “, directed by Javier Van de Couter and starring Sosa Villada by Mexican Alfonso Herrera and produced by La Current del Golfo. “I know more about how famous actresses are treated, how they are eaten,” says he in a room reserved for the interview in the basement of a hotel, which smells of verbena and cedar.
Sosa Villada, September 27th.Mariana Eliano
Questions. What does domestication mean to you?
Answer. The family. This is the greatest domestication. And love. They are the two things that make people renounce the savagery and horror of being human in this world and in this time. The actress [la protagonista de Tesis sobre una domesticación] He keeps trying to escape and can’t get out, he’s in prison.
Q. There is also something he likes.
R. It is love! He’s cornering them more and more, and he’s doing it with a tool that has been used to tame us all. My family included my aunt Sara, who is suspected of being a lesbian. She settled alone on a hill, built her ranch, and died there at the age of about one hundred. To all of us in the family who are a little more crazy, they say, “You’re going to end up like Aunt Sara.” It was like a threat; She tested her loneliness.
Q. The protagonist’s mother points this out to her. He tells her, “Loneliness suited you great. You always have time to go (…) You have to accept that you have to be alone in order not to be manipulated.” In the novel he contrasts family and love with a professional career and loneliness.
R. I am currently in a somewhat difficult family situation. Have you read “At the Bottom of the Stairs” by Lorrie Moore?
Q. NO.
R. It’s about a girl who studies at a university and works as a nanny for a couple who are about to adopt a child. She is a cook and he is never in the house. They will meet to meet their future child and the husband never comes. Then she leans against a wall and says: “God invented the fetal position for times like this.” Wonderful. A couple is there for those moments when you come home and are terribly alone, with your sadness, with your pain and no one to hug you. If we could look at it that way, love would be a little kinder. But this thing they both have [los protagonistas de Tesis…] it is unbearable.
Q. The main character is a multimillionaire, married and mother of a son… In Argentina, the reality of transvestites is not usually like that. Why did you choose her as the protagonist?
R. When I started writing about her, she seduced me, even though she is a rather despicable character. I began to imagine her alone in the dressing room or waiting for her husband. She seduced me because of what I imagine about myself, because of the times I’ve been in dressing rooms like the one she’s in, because of the applause I’ve gotten… They tell you, “You “You’re doing extremely well.” [uno de los aeropuertos de Buenos Aires] and there was no one waiting for me. I come here and no one is waiting for me. There is something about all of this that is not enough.
Camila Sosa Villada poses in a hotel in the Recoleta district. Mariana Eliano
Q. Do you never take off your glasses?
R. I’m at home with glasses. I’m Graciela Borges in La Ciénaga. Wick, with the glass of wine [se refiere a la protagonista de la película La Ciénaga, de Lucrecia Martel, que interpreta la actriz Graciela Borges]. That’s what happens in France [Juliette] Binoche; In the USA there is Meryl Streep and Jessica Lange. But there is no other like him in Argentina, no other Borges was born.
Q. Author Valeria Vegas writes in the prologue that actresses and transvestites know that “reality is overrated.” How big is your imagination?
R. Oh, it’s very small now. At one point it was huge. Now it’s like it’s been reduced. Furthermore, the quality of the imagination has nothing to do with its size, but with its beauty, with the beauty it can create in you as a person. I can tell you that I have a fantasy of double anal penetration, for example. Or I have a fantasy of going on vacation for a week somewhere with a friend. At some point I had other fantasies, for example a family, a love or my house… But they failed.
Q. Because?
R. For reality, and because I’m no longer interested in that. I prefer a week-long vacation with some friends at the beach. It’s much healthier than having a house and definitely much healthier than having a husband.
Q. Would you like to appear in “The Human Voice”?
R. I did “The Beautiful Indifferent” by Jean Cocteau, the work he wrote for Édith Piaf, which is like a sequel to “The Human Voice.” The good thing about acting alone is that you don’t interact with actors and you don’t have to act with anyone. I have been doing work like this for 10 years. Actors always act to win a prize, to be better than their partner. The only one I like is Poncho Herrera, the protagonist of Thesis on a Domestication.
Q. He wrote the novel and then wrote the screenplay for the film. How was the film adaptation?
R. The adaptation was good. It has some errors. For example, [en la adaptación para cine] The actress is not doing The Human Voice, she is doing a different work than when we adapted it [Pedro] Almodóvar premiered this aseptic short film starring Tilda Swinton. What a mess… It seemed like a mistake to me. It is well adapted and the choice of actors was very good. I don’t know if there is a man in Argentina capable of doing what Poncho does. She is a great actress. It’s all generosity and all talent.
Q. The filming is over.
R. Yes. When it was over – to be honest, I didn’t have any fun filming it at all – it was as if I had finished meeting the protagonist of the novel.
Q. What happened?
R. It’s a movie theme. The industry is very sexist and very cruel towards actresses. What is said in the novel: It eats you up. As [la actriz argentina] María Onetto won’t open her veins? How can Verónica Forqué not commit suicide? If they use you, they eat you… Your hair is analyzed by a person, your face is analyzed by the makeup artist, your body is analyzed by the client… I was there 12 hours a day because I was there. There were none only scene in the film that I didn’t take part in. And if I had to suffer in a scene, it was repeated 20 times. I couldn’t rest. I lost five kilos. I was devastated and emotionally tired. It was very painful.
Q. He said that he finished the encounter with the protagonist. What have you discovered?
R. That the protagonist is alone on the sacrificial stone and that she is the only one put there, that she has no replacement. This is very hard. It’s like being an only child, there’s no one who can replace you. Because there was no one who could replace me in filming and because there was no one who could replace me on a promotional tour.
Camila Sosa Villada, actress, playwright and author.Mariana Eliano
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