In the pages of Gabo + 8, Angulo refers to Brandestini as a frank and Florentine woman. She remembers that when they got married, she did not speak a word in Spanish and mentions that she was baptized in the same chapel as Dante, as well as “that she came from the cradle of art and civilization”. Brandestini suffered from Alzheimer’s.
“To Vanna, in his labyrinth” is the dedication that the journalist and filmmaker Guillermo Angulo makes to his wife, Vanna Brandestini, in Gabo + 8 , his most recent writing. “The book is about memory loss, the labyrinth of forgetfulness: a paraphrase of the General in his labyrinth,” said the writer in an interview with this newspaper. And it is that this theme is central in his work because his wife had Alzheimer’s.
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In the pages of Gabo + 8, Angulo refers to Brandestini as a frank and Florentine woman. She remembers that when they got married, she did not speak a word in Spanish and mentions that she was baptized in the same chapel as Dante, as well as “that she came from the cradle of art and civilization”. In his book he remembers that some people questioned the marriage of the two because they did not have a photo of the day of the ceremony. The writer narrates how “the official photo” of the union was taken in this way: “Grau opened one of his trunks, full of trinkets and, helped by Rafael Moure, they made Vanna’s dress with two old sheets. The veil was missing, and they improvised it using toilet paper. Hernán (author of the photograph) gave me makeup: he painted a bicycle handlebar mustache, he combed my hair (this has been so long since I still had hair) and he fitted me with a “three-pointed” sandals from Grau. And that’s it. It is a very funny, creative photo, illustrative of what was done at the Colina festivities and a masterpiece of humor and photography ”.
Likewise, he remembers with grace the honeymoon they had: “Once settled in an apartment, after carrying the suitcases up to a fourth floor without an elevator, on the night that should be a honeymoon, the architect Salmona knocked on my door. , and I said:
—Guillermo, you have to do me a great favor: I need some urgent photos, of a model of the Free University high school, made by Manuel Ocaña (a great model maker, an expert in breaching and inventing imaginative excuses to cover his breach). In vain I tried to resist and Rogelio finally came out winning. And that’s how I spent my first wedding night: taking exciting architectural photos. Yes, it really was an unforgettable honeymoon, and I spent it with Rogelio Salmona ”.
You may be interested in a review of the book “Gabo + 8”
In the chapter “Death will come … What a fucking sadness!”, Angulo describes Alzheimer’s thus: “It is the cruelest form of slow death. Feeling that the photographs are being erased as if they had been incorrectly fixed, seeing the shapes of the loved ones dissolve, confusing their names until they were completely forgotten and noticing that the memories are diminishing, the other way around: first the closest ones, what happened just a few minutes ago, to end up also without the company of the oldest. Forgotten songs come to the surface, stored in the old attic of childhood and youth, mixed with old love poems and quotes from Dante’s Commedia, yellowed photos and verses by Neruda or De Greiff, lost in the gloomy byways of the memory”. Hence it is understood that Gabo + 8 is a reflection on forgetfulness.
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