I
My grandma gives me a big bag made of very hard plastic, with bright colors and horizontal stripes, visibly used and with blatant stains on what I think is the front. “Inés gave it to me, from the ninth floor. Maybe you can find some use for it,” she says. I look inside, not putting my hands in because I’m terribly afraid of spiders, which always seem to pop out wherever and whenever you least expect them. From my quick glance inside, I see magazines, a few papers covered in writing that looks like math, and a few empty checkbooks, with their carbon paper still stuck in. But mostly magazines, basically magazines.
Soon the mystery gets the better of me, my fear takes a backseat, and I dare to once again inspect the contents of this new treasure that my grandma—who is the caretaker of a building and, in some sort of visionary trance, collects everything for which “I might find some use”—has discovered for me.
The first thing I pull out of the bag is an impeccable copy of last year’s almanac. 1988, its big, red, intimidating numbers announce. I set it aside to take out cuttings (at this moment in time, taking out cuttings is my passion). Immediately under the accounting papers appear a poster from El Gráfico, supermarket leaflets, a copy of Tejidos Chic that I set aside for grandma, the odd Billiken and two or three Anteojitos that I set aside as well, succumbing to my childhood vice, so I can later cut them up.
I pick one out that, at first sight, powerfully called my attention. It looks more like a book. Or a “magazine-book.” Of course, what really matters is that it has pictures. “Mafalda,” the title says. But really it says “mafalda,” in lowercase letters. And you’re well aware, at the age of seven, that the names of people and characters are capitalized. Something doesn’t quite add up. Sitting on a step of the stairs that lead from the terrace to the elevators, for a long while I lose myself in reading.
I could not be more surprised, or more dazzled. It turns out Mafalda is a six- or seven-year-old girl (like me) who asks a lot of questions (like me), is unarguably as sensitive as she is idealistic (like me), and has a crazy thirst for knowledge and answers (it wouldn’t take me long to find out this was something else we had in common). But, as if all of this wasn’t enough to cast a spell on me, there’s something else: Mafalda is no more and no less than the story’s main character, and the whole comic strip bears her name.
Such is my memorable introduction to this “magazine-book,” found by happy accident among banking records and scrapbooking materials. And, although I still don’t understand some things, and some go over my head—or don’t make me laugh the way they should—I recognize, in this alert and analytical little girl, my mirror image: a way of saying things with an undercurrent of sarcasm and the intent to teach a lesson, the opened doorway through which to pass from childhood to the heavy, unrelenting yoke of adulthood.
II
That first time I read Mafalda was not by choice so much as by impulse and investigative spirit. I was just a curious little girl in elementary school who opened books and magazines as if she were opening the door to a hidden passageway in a distant castle. Soon, what was destined to happen happened: I entered the mechanical and measured world of “grown-ups.” I grew up in the eighties, a decade as excentric as it was legendary, and in the nineties, which were even more unstable and eclectic than the previous ten years. By the time I got back around to Quino, we had all gone through a lot while coming to terms with relatively little of that fast-paced, uneasy time.
The fact is, the present is almost always fast, demanding, scorching. It swallows us in a single gulp only to spit us out, when we least expect it, onto the pavement. Although, every once in a while, I must say, it grants us an unforeseen breather to cushion the fall.
Looking through some old papers for a text I’m working on, I unexpectedly find a folder with a few clippings from Mafalda strips that I now examine with a more mature and lucid gaze. Like before, one snippet immediately catches my attention.
In it we see Felipe, the lazy, daydreaming little boy, always lost in thought and hungry for fantasies: “Now that I think of it, it’s awful that they print more banknotes than books. Someday knowledge will be valued over money!” Through Quino’s choice of font, it’s easy to understand that the character is raising his voice a little. Then Mafalda appears, in the next panel, to bring him back down to Earth: “Aren’t your ideas a little naive, Felipe?” But Manolito—intrepid Manolito, with entrepreneurial fervor and a thirst for business—has also heard his friend’s “ideas”: “Not naive, they’re dangerous!” he declares.
My new age brings me the awareness that Felipe’s hasty estimation (“they print more banknotes than books”) draws a veil of oblique violence across the page, obeying only a brutal capitalism that seems determined to never go out of style. And, unlike Mafalda or Felipe, Manolito does not get lost in daydreams or philosophical dilemmas. His interpretation of reality is concrete, simple, unadorned. He says what he thinks, with no filter and no intention of pleasing or offending anyone. And, while this strip links such behavior with the mannerisms of a child, it doesn’t take much effort to realize that these same mannerisms call to mind certain distinctive figures of today’s political sphere.
That being said, laying all cards on the table, it seems only right to ask: How dangerous is it for knowledge to be valued over money? How dangerous is it even to think that such a thing could happen?
Something else I observe upon this new reading is that Mafalda (not the character, but the comic strip per se) succeeds in depicting the “stereotypical” family at its peak—the inherent model of a middle class with aspirations of respectability and social prestige, and the essential paradigm of certain bourgeois values that were passed down from generation to generation over the course of decades: the breadwinner father (tired, quick to complain, overwhelmed by debt), the housewife (the traditional model of femininity, in which marriage, motherhood, and maintaining one’s status define both interests and occupations), the children going through their formative years (protesting, getting ideas, and asking questions that drive home the generation gap), and, finally, the children’s friends (little hyperbolic symbols of many differing social archetypes). A few years later, a quote from Isabella Cosse would invite me to find new meaning here:
the strip was read, discussed, and used as an iconic representation of the middle class, and was consumed especially by this same social sector. (…) The hundreds of thousands of copies sold, the disputes they awoke in public opinion, and the social significance they received turned the strip into an extremely valuable reference point with which to study the middle class at the historical moment when it emerged and became a success.
In brief (and going to great pains to outline a possible synthesis), my rereading of Mafalda pulled me aside as an adult, in the midst of my life’s current, wrapped up in some habits out of routine and others out of capitalist obligation, although—I must say—I was much more thoughtful than the inquisitive, alienated little girl I once was, who sought to hold on to her similarities with the protagonist at any cost.
On the other hand, this adult who now dwells within me (and rereads) does a substantially better job of understanding and assimilating the way Quino—from the pinnacle of a sharp, intelligent sense of graphic humor at its finest—was able to express, through a comic strip, fundamental relationship dynamics that reflected reality and, little by little, influenced that same reality in social, cultural, and—as I’ll note below—essentially political terms.
III
A varied and complex list of reflections, positions, and reasonings, proper to an adult but coming from the mouth of a little girl who pauses to observe the world and subject it constantly to scrutiny, tests, deep investigations, and disheartening diagnoses. This is the raw material of Quino’s humor. Whether consciously or not, in his most endearing character he patents an ironic maneuver that brings the public into dialogue with the private, and evinces, at the same time, the moral tensions of an era and the grim political ups and downs of the mid-sixties.
Thus, the character of Mafalda is able to express the unease of a whole generation, which, in this dark historical period, seeks answers and solutions in a society marked by violence, senselessness, and hypocrisy in official discourse. Mafalda’s concerns are, at the end of the day, a reflection of the concerns of a nation, and the unequivocal sign of a continent fit to burst.
As is common in Quino’s work, the entire strip demands active participation from its readers, who must figure out the meaning behind every panel for themselves, and must often come up with a possible ending, too. “The goal of educating his readers was not explicit. On the contrary, he presumed he had an active, intelligent, and on-board reader who would take pleasure in the sense of belonging to an elite, critical, casual circle,” Isabella Cosse would say fifty years later.
The fact is that his humorous constructions only take on meaning when they are activated by their interpreters. The author—who, of course, is entirely aware of this—is also aware of the political and popular roles that humor plays in societies (especially those of Latin America).
This, the mandatory requirement of “learning to read between the lines” that Quino put in place necessarily takes on new meaning in Argentina during the de facto presidency of Onganía (1966-1970), whose dictatorial rule bans political activity, takes over universities, jails opponents, and oppresses students. The confiscation of books, raids on public dances, and the censorship of films, among other things, become recurring practices of the country’s everyday political reality.
In very broad (and very general) terms, it is evident that Mafalda’s voice embodies the disenchantment and weariness of a wide range of the urban population, firsthand witnesses to how the “grand ideals” of the twentieth century were gradually erased before their very eyes, under the shadowy wings of bureaucracy, mass consumption, and one form of repression or another.
Through her contrast with her parents—representatives of a working class resigned to its fate—and her friend group (each member of which represents a specific social archetype, generally in opposition to the others), Quino distills, in the fiction of this intellectualized little girl, the many faces of Argentine reality and, somehow, of Latin American reality too. Felipe’s anxiety, Susanita’s ambition, Manolito’s capitalist harshness, Libertad’s idealism: each of them brings to light a dilemma worthy of being examined and debated, at the expense of said discussion becoming ever more intricate, implausible, or chronic. The press of the time summarized it thusly:
Mafalda is what might be called an involved little girl. For this reason, because she gets involved in what’s going on in her surroundings to the extent that the grown-ups around her can no longer follow her tracks, Mafalda disturbs us, moves us, amazes us, scares us, embitters us, spoils our digestion, disgusts us, and, simultaneously, makes us laugh.
And this is why Mafalda has never gotten old. Despite having been published over a relatively short period of time (1964-1973), this unusual group of characters (just like their distinctive and profound cultural groundwork) continues to be relevant to our present day. The problems the comic strip addressed—among which, by way of summary, I might mention consumerism, racism, social justice, censorship, poverty, the space occupied by women, and the decisive (and, in most cases, negative) role played by the mass media—are all still in play, affecting the everyday lives of millions of people.
Without a doubt, the words of this “inquisitive” and nonconformist little girl have become part of Latin America’s cultural heritage, and her analytical gaze is still with us, shining a light on the shady nooks and crannies of our current reality.
At times when some seek to silence or simplify thought and our capacity for judgment, at times when the fantasy of printing “more books than banknotes” has become a utopian dream, this little visionary from the sixties reminds us of the value of doubt, of asking questions, of empathy and resistance.
As far as I’m concerned, I will keep returning whenever I can to that modest but momentous gift from my grandmother, which set in motion a mechanism of search, self-awareness, and drive toward knowledge and a critical spirit, which was undoubtedly the key to my professional growth and which crucially marked my intellect, my analytical skills, and my way of being, resisting, and carrying on in the world.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
