The general secretary of the presidency was seen last week in a dancing situation animated by Ulises Bueno. Some telephones captured the moment of the swaying. Instants of playful carelessness before returning to manage the State with her older brother. Karina Milei, henceforth K, reminds us of a scene perhaps forgotten because it became naturalized: Punta del Este, in the early nineties, Menem’s impudence. The victors’ parties, the jocular B-side of privatizations and adjustment were nourished by peripheral music. A low-calorie cannibalism was practiced, and buffoons were hired, among them Ricky Maravilla. Susana Giménez embraced them.
Menemism, so much in vogue thanks to the libertarians, implied a triple conversion regime: monetary, political, and esthetic. It could appropriate the popular and at the same time be the founder of new social stratifications. Singing, in short, the farewell song of the class alliance. Dancing music became naturalized as a soundtrack in the cheaters’ bashes as if it were a carnival ritual, although in reverse. After the frenzy, hierarchies are restored. Mauricio Macri used Gilda to warn the unwary from the presidential balcony that he would not regret anything.
Suddenly, there was K, accompanied by advisors and bodyguards. She dances alone. Surely, she knows the song. Not just that one. They must be an object of pure enjoyment. Perhaps “Something to drink?” Why not? “Bring a beer / bring a fernet,” sings Ulises, Rodrigo’s brother. Can we imagine her in her office, singing to herself when thirst calls to her throat? Perhaps she prefers “This is what I bring,” with its praise of the Cordoban quartet. Or one that might tell her something about herself. “Crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy / nothing seems enough / if we do not share it.”
Parables
She appeared in Congress during the debates of the Omnibus Law: unperturbed, mysterious, installed in one of the balconies surrounding the Chamber of Deputies. But where was she eight years ago? What does that period measure in a person’s life? Sometimes it doesn’t explain such extraordinary transformations. In 2016, on January 29, K participated in a television contest. Bienvenido a bordo offered her a chance to win a Smart TV. She was accompanied by an immaculate Swiss Shepherd. It was K’s turn to spin a wheel of fortune. The dog, Aaron, was supposed to help her by knocking down nine pins. Only five fell. She had no luck in the contest, but she did, then, get a minute of notoriety. “How were you at studying?” the presenter wanted to know. “Average,” confessed the contestant, chuckling. “You weren’t very good?” The current civil servant said no. “What do you do for a living?” A degree in public relations. The parents were in the television studio. Kazcka approached them with the microphone. He wanted to know what was the best thing about K. “Her character,” the mother said. Next to her was Don Norberto, who, according to the president’s biography, El Loco, by Juan Luis González, used to exercise physical and psychological violence against his son during his childhood, to the point that already on his way up he went so far as to declare that for him his father did not exist. “And Aaron, isn’t he looking for a girlfriend?” the presenter asked the sister. “If he’s looking for a girlfriend, she has to be white…”, she replied, and burst out laughing (pedigree is not only a canine issue, good people are its equivalent and do not admit crossbreeding). The minutes in Bienvenido a bordo draw a timeline between that insignificant scene and the present. From Guido Kaczka to Kafka, as a friend tells me.
Naturalism
We are getting used to telling her rise to power, or rather, that of her and her brother, as an aseptic hagiography: realistic pictures that only become acceptable by the anesthetizing effect (a blockage of the sensitive, not only tactile, allows familiarity with the frame-up). The masculinization of her pronoun (el Jefe) and her character as de facto First Lady are also accepted. González tells in his book that she hired Celia Liliana Melamed, a specialist in “interspecies communication,” who brought from beyond the grave Conan, the dog that the economist had lost and that lives through cloned mastiffs. K “would end up training with Melamed until she developed the same ability.” On his way to the presidency, the brother never hesitated to assign her a merit superior to his own. And to explain it, he recalled the difference between Moses and Aaron. K’s task could be equated with that of the prophet. He, on the other hand, was merely the disseminator of biblical teachings. Consequently, she had called her Swiss shepherd Aaron, defeated on TV, but ultimately victorious. Are we facing some doggy messianism?
Sosia
Let’s go back to the Club de Gimnasia y Esgrima (GEBA), where Ulises Bueno performed eight days ago. When the video of the general secretary dancing was leaked, there was a para-official effort to deny the evidence. The woman dancing was another blonde, Beatriz Olave, mother of the late Rodrigo. The ruse fizzled out due to notable physiognomic differences. But, let’s see, who does K look like? Another K. None other than Kati Outinen, the fetish actress of Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki. Something like a Nordic duplicity. If we look at The Man Without a Past (2002) we detect striking similarities in the countenances. The film revolves around a man who loses his memory after being lynched. He barely lives in the present because he cannot remember. In that present, he falls in love with Irma, that is, Outinen, who belongs to the Salvation Army: she saves a beaten man. The actress also stars in one of the films of the proletarian trilogy, The Match Factory Girl (1990). It is a dark story, that of a young girl that is rather quiet. Iris is ignored by men until she meets a businessman who gets her pregnant and demands that she get rid of the “tadpole.” Iris plots revenge. She buys rat poison and pours it into the drink the father of her child drinks, not knowing that it will be his last sip. She then repeats the operation, extending the revenge to another man and his abusive parents, until she is taken to prison. Demons of analogy.
Mass politics
According to the pollster Zubán Córdoba, K has 35.3% of positive image. There is something certain in that valuation criterion: it is pure image. Silent and indolent surface. We should go beyond appearances. There is talk of her mute strength, so feared by other factions of La Libertad Avanza. Some days ago, she left her office in the Casa Rosada and went to meet some followers. She signed autographs. The beneficiaries, a group of children, not only took with them a graphic treasure but, surely, the sound of her voice, the one who has the final word inside the Government of the brotherhood.
That dive at the Plaza de Mayo was disconcerting: a glimpse of an imminent mass policy? What to do with the masses? That question drilled into the minds of the power builders. “No one has so far doubted that the strength of the contemporary movement lies in the awakening of the masses,” writes Lenin in What Is to Be Done. The alienating slumber had to be interrupted to fulfill revolutionary goals. “I do not come to lead lambs, I come to awaken lions,” preached the brother. Leninist then, coincidence or one more perversion of the investment game? Now, what place does he assign to K in the task of awakening those deceived by collectivism? Could an ex-confectioner design it?
She dabbled in drawing and painting. She had a tire shop and a caloric venture, Sol Sweets, which offered through Instagram “homemade scones, fresh from the oven” and other delicacies. Would she have been inspired by Arte de repostería, an eighteenth-century manual written by Juan de la Mata, in charge of making the courts of Felipe V and Fernando VI sick? Did she cook with microwaves or following old convent recipes (flour, sugar, honey, milk, almonds, cinnamon, butter or olive oil to produce the Yemas de Santa Teresa or the Huesitos de Santo)? Perhaps, in light of her brother’s Torah and Talmud readings, attached to the precepts of kosher cooking, she once prepared on Chanukah the chocolate coins that are handed out to children, but we should not discard the triangular cookies that are kneaded for Purim or the cakes with raisins, dates, apples and honey of the Rosh Hashanah tables, because they remind us of the shofar (the ram’s horn that used to sound in the electoral acts of La Libertad Avanza). This past as a confectioner invites us to feverish conjectures. However, we do not only let ourselves be dragged by speculation. Noticias magazine published a photograph of the cake she made for his brother’s birthday in 2016 with the formula of Milton Friedman’s quantitative theory of money (M x V = P x Y). Ideology also enters through the palate, and perhaps, rather than mass politics, we can better understand, from the design of the cake, K’s current role: her zeal when it comes to participating in the new distribution of the cake.
New ways of distributing the cake (excursus)
“Are you guys hungry? Come, I will write down your ID, your name, where you are from and you will receive help individually,” said the Minister of Human Capital, Sandra Pettovello. Let them come one by one.
The signature
“The contract will be approved for the provision of freelance professional services entered into under the regime of Decree No. 1109/17, of Santiago Luis Caputo, as Presidential Advisor.” The order bears the signature of K. What is that rubric if not an exercise of maximum authority. We never swim in the same river nor do we always have the same signature. The brain orders the hand to trace on paper the same path, but it is never an exact replica of the previous one. Graphologists maintain that the signature is a stylization of the writer’s self-image. It expresses drives, values, senses of success or failure, feelings, aptitudes, obsessions, ghosts from the past. Legibility reveals a way of acting in the world. Hers is illegible, a mystery, like that of her praxis as seen by outsiders. I observe in a photo her signature stamped on an electoral document. The letters cannot be understood. The angularity of the lines does not approximate the graphemes we expect from a name and surname. It has something of a squiggle. We cannot follow a directionality, as if that projection, slightly inclined downwards, were telling us about this incomprehensible era or, specialists would say, a hidden and unmentionable pessimism. It is not even possible to detect the initial capital letter.
It is not a minor matter. Because, wouldn’t that be the sign of this era, a new K era?
The letter, so much history. And I am not talking about the generic capital letter that has marked these last 20 years as a consonant expression of contempt for a surname. Abbreviation for the worst of otherness. No, K has a richer and more troubled past. I read in Franz Kafka’s Diaries an entry from January 27, 1922: “although I have clearly written my name in the hotel, although they have also spelled it correctly twice already, in the register below they put Josef K. Should I clarify it for them, or should I let them clarify it for me?” The Trial introduces him as a character. “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.” Sometimes, the narrator just calls him “K,” as indeed the surveyor is introduced in The Castle (“It was late evening when K. arrived. The village lay deep in snow,” we read at the beginning) and that initial will be a real interpretative powerhouse: K as the epitome of the victims of an anonymous and bureaucratic power or the nonsense of the rationality of capital? The anti-Kirchnerist language appropriated the letter that summarized a surname, a policy, an astonished look at the world, subtracted it from the universe sighted by the Czech, that “enunciation device” that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari had detected, and which they called the “K. function.” Now we are faced with another transhumance of meanings. A series that brings us back to this Argentina after reviewing the Kafkaesque as a disturbing feature. Josef K, just K, JK, Javi and Kari?
* This text was originally published in Spanish in elDiarioAR. It is reproduced with the permission of the author.
