Sob o signo de capricórnio

"But there are two initiations in Corto Maltese’s itinerary.

The first opens up to fortune by carving out a gash which, according to Durand, converges with the images of the vaginal furrow; the blood which bubbles up adds a cluster of signifiers which would require a more extensive analysis.

And that cut is made by a cut-throat razor, the antithesis of the feminised and isomorphic sword wound, one of the three basic archetypes according to which Durand establishes his dialectic of systems: the sceptre-stick, the sword, the cup and the wheel-denarius, according to the classification of suits in packs of cards, and especially the Tarot.

The second initiation is the real appearance of the character in the vignettes of The Ballad of the Salt Sea, more the child of the sensibility of Conrad and Stevenson than of Defoe.

The line drawn lights him up in a sea by sheer chance, burnt by the sun and tied to planks of wood in the shape of a cross.

And we should not forget how Pratt begins his Ballad: "I am the Pacific Ocean and I am the largest …" And it is not Ishmael but the waters that speak.

And so, if underlying the first initiation was the synthesis of daytime, male and separating -the razor- with the female structure of the wound, the second reconciles the archetype of the cross with the supreme icthyomorphic swallower, the antiphrasis of fatal femaleness.

The dominant is never diaeretic in the relation of the waters with the moon -the dramatic epiphany of time for Durand- in the Corto Maltese stories. Hence the curious confusion of the female star at the beginning of The Golden House of Samarkand, the two talking moons in Tango...All in the Half-light, or their surprising absence in the sailor’s most decidedly dreamlike story, The Helvetians, the catamorphic and Carrollian opposite side of a quest for the grail begun in the dwelling of Herman Hesse and in the company of a strange avatar of the knight Klingsor.

Acceptance of the cycles and the sensuality of deferment go with an adventurer whose behaviour adjusts to a peculiar assimilation of the code of military honour in which Pratt was educated.

Meditative, with his sharp profile smoking a Tre Stelle cheroot and his apparent feminine passivity, Corto Maltese goes to Siberia to steal a shipment of gold, to Ireland to avenge his dead friend and member of the IRA Pat Finnucan and to blow up an English army barracks, to Kafiristan to usurp the Great Gold, the mythical sun hidden in a mountain and protected by the Persian god Ariman, or to Buenos Aires to avenge at any cost the murder of Louise Brookszowyc - Tango...-.

According to the isomorphism pointed out by Mircea Eliade and Gilbert Durand, Maltese takes on the role of the binding hero, who is also capable of resorting to the weapons of the daytime imagery to openly confront the dangers that beset him.

He therefore justifies his erratic determination to pursue and pillage treasures that he never achieves or to take revenge and he is accompanied only by Rasputin, a compulsive killer without the slightest scruple and a murky sense of humour.

That search, which Corto knows is fruitless, reconciles the sublimation of the motivating object with the euphemistic cynicism of a horizontal and not ascensional awareness of the journey.

If Denis de Rougemont says that there are no stories about happy love, the sailor’s history is packed with events.

When his friend Esmeralda, a prostitute, asks him if he has ever been in love, he answers in a forced twilight tone that that was all too long ago.

A myriad of female characters -Pandora Groovesnore, Lady Rowena Welch or Banshee- who are no less worthy of study than Corto Maltese himself cross his path, but Pratt shuns the happy end which the classical cinema would have guaranteed, as would the stories of the Golden Age by Caniff, Noel Sickles, Coulton Waugh or Frank Robbins.

A diffuse eroticism emanates from that passivity of Corto’s; he always disappears after changing the course of events. Pratt uses taciturn male models from the thriller genre and redraws the character of Pat from Terry and the Pirates or Johnny Hazard to construct a disillusioned, anarchic and romantic -in the least degraded sense of the word- character, but not as sour as Lieutenant Koïnsky in The Scorpions of the Desert, a series that Pratt developed alongside the Corto Maltese albums."



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