After one, two, three seconds of waiting where his secretary passes the call, Ginés González García He picks up the phone and says: Hello? She says it with his characteristic tone, between robotic and murmuring. He attends from the ISALUD University, a private institution that he founded and directs as dean, on Venezuela Street, in the Monserrat neighborhood. It is not the pandemic, nor is it some virus that wakes up early in the coming winter; The reason for this brief conversation is his first novel: Lovers and alchemists, which has just been released by the Ciccus label. “Look,” she begins without being familiar, “I am an admirer of something that almost does not exist today but was very important in history: the alchemists. I read a lot about alchemists. Many of them were doctors and made great advances in medicine. In fact, they are the fathers of chemistry. And about 25 or 30 years ago I started writing about them, especially on trips: I would wake up and write something related to alchemy.”
The novel begins by following the steps of Hilario, in love with María. The stage is set in 1830, in San Nicolás de los Arroyos, the city where Ginés was born. Thus, with this prose, the journey begins: “He never liked naps. He seemed like a way of dying, a way of not being in the world, a loss. So, at that time when the light and silence were complete and the city entered into a useless drowsiness, Hilario preferred to walk slowly, sometimes aimlessly, without anyone other than the bugs to interfere with him. He liked that strange feeling of solitude, without neighbors or carts or horses and, above all, without stares. Weeks ago the book presentation was made. They were present Héctor Daer, Carlos West Ocampo, Nicolás Trotta, Adriana “La Gata” Varela and Ariel Ardit. The historian William David and the novelist Hugo Barcia They recorded messages that were broadcast on the big screen. The same Jorge Asiswho wrote the back cover.
The laudatory words of the “Turk” include a synopsis and evaluation: “Lovers and alchemiststhe surprising first novel by Ginés González García, is about love. Hilario and María compose a sublime story, which accumulates the ambitious inheritances of gauchesca literature, with a succession of stalls, facas, yerras, streams, cafés and pulperías that pay tribute, while at the same time they praise and pay homage to the author’s small homeland as “a city with superior cultural background.” And later, always on the back of this fiction book: “This text captures the emotional tension of the mythological cinematography of the Leonardo Favio of Aniceto or, perhaps, Juan Moreira. The natural persistence of beauty is here a mechanical act. Language merges with geography, while the dynamics of the action capture the reader and install Ginés González García on the highest step of Argentine literature. Reading Lovers and Alchemists turns into a passionate adventure.”
“I never thought about writing a novel,” says Ginés, on the other end of the phone. “Everything I wrote I lost: I have no memory or testimony. But once, while traveling outside the country, it occurred to me that it could be a novel: it made like a backbone. Then I tried to write it when I went as Ambassador to Chile, where I stayed for eight years. I thought I was going to have more free time, but no: I didn’t have time. And the last time I was in the Ministry, when I left, when I returned to teaching, I began to write it with a different rhythm. This was in the last two years. I dedicated myself to the novel, not full time, of course, but because I didn’t have any impulse that would take me back from that, but I mixed a little my knowledge of history, which I really like, with the knowledge of alchemy, which “I know a lot,” adds a man from a “different background” about the writing process: a 78-year-old surgeon, now a narrator.
“Alchemy, transmutation, what alchemists seek, is to convert a lower substance into a higher substance,” says Ginés. The figure of the alchemist runs through much of history. It was linked to magic, but at the same time it was practiced by those who had greater scientific knowledge. There are many paintings that allude to alchemy and experimentation in the laboratory. “Transforming lead into gold, for example: that is transmuting. It also happens with vegetables and they make heavier syrup, more important things. And all this game that is transmutation I was carrying or trying to carry in the novel to what they were doing with substances and minerals. Transmutation to something higher was given to them through love. This is basically the theme of the novel, which is set in the town where I was born, in 1830, a very complicated year due to all the Argentine civil wars that were at their peak,” he continues.
Robert Boyle, Roger Bacon, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Tycho Brahe, Thomas Browne and Ramon Llull They were all scientists who practiced alchemy. “Newton “He was an alchemist,” he adds. “There were even people from the church who were alchemists. It was not a secret trade: it existed and they were usually topics that changed the established order, they wanted to find innovations, new things, and in that they did run the frontier of knowledge. And perhaps at some point what runs the border of custom at that moment are the lovers. That is also an analogy that I have made in the novel and I found it very fun to make. Because I studied a lot the customs of the time, which was the most difficult. The great story is easy, but the everyday story of what life was like together, what the kids could be like, having a love in a small town at that time, those everyday things are not… well, I worked hard to reproduce the situation. of the time”.
Ginés González García As a child he accessed a large family library. He had a grammarian grandfather, a literature teacher mother, and a poet uncle. “The thing was hanging around my house,” he says. But he studied Medicine: he graduated as a Surgeon from the National University of Córdoba, he obtained the Diploma in Public Health with Specialization in Health Administration from the University of Buenos Aires, and many other degrees. He was awarded the Honoris Causa Doctorate from the University of Buenos Aires, the National University of Córdoba and the University of Morón. He was, furthermore, a technical cadre of politics but a politician nonetheless: Minister of Health of the Province of Buenos Aires between 1988 and 1991, Minister of Health and Environment of the Nation between 2002 and 2007, ambassador to Chile between 2007 and 2015 and Minister of Health of the Nation between 2019 and 2021 during a crucial and tumultuous period: the Covid-19 pandemic.
That last experience ended badly. A scandal over what was called “VIP vaccination” forced him to resign. Weeks ago, in an interview in Radio with you, said: “They found me guilty before I could defend myself.” He also stated that he felt “politically abandoned” by the government of Alberto Fernandez, but he assured: “I am totally calm and at peace with my conscience.” In this way, he renounced practicing health policies, a topic to which he dedicated several books such as Health for Argentines and Medicines: health, politics and economics. However, he remains active in that field: “I have never been a professional politician. I have done health policy. I went back to university, I’m still a teacher. I maintained my academic profile. Politics always worries me. And the country occupies me. I try to contribute by teaching and training many people at this university. But I have no plans to do anything that is not academic and university.”
What would you like to see happen to readers with this novel? “Let them move you, impress you, generate this exaltation of feelings. The novel has tension, of course, but it is a novel that rescues deep values,” he answers and inevitably, speaking of values, the question about the present appears. “We are not in a good moment,” she maintains. “When one believes that the market can replace policies, especially health policies, they are policies of values. The market has no values. The market is a price system. The market can never replace health policy,” he says and concludes: “I am a spontaneous guy who indulged in this, and I liked it, but I do not plan to pursue a career as a writer. It was something I had been thinking about for a long time. Maybe one day I might write again, but that’s not my intention.”