Gossip, Desire, and Mortality
Lorenzo is a Colombian painter who one day enters a state of putrefaction; the first thing to die is a fingernail. After putting the decision off for a long time, even though his body is telling him in no uncertain terms that something unknown and irreversible is about to happen, he finally takes the plunge and finds out why that body is rotting. He is almost incredulous to discover that he is suffering from a disease caught from a male lover, an illness he in turn has spread beyond its origin, defying geography: He takes his illness from Bogotá to Paris, and then sets sail with other crew members for the Galápagos Islands; that is to say, death. It isn’t exactly clear in the book what disease is being referred to, but it is one capable of turning his body into an open sore. A disease that spread through minority groups and attacked all the good things we know about desire and, therefore, rocked the foundations of morality and the little we understood about sexuality. AIDS. The illness that altered the notion of the invincibility of youth, so that later generations now live in fear of our freedom and appetites.
I’m driving to my lover’s provisional home with one finger wrapped in bloodied gauze. I haven’t experienced desire for years, so I decided to go there anyhow, hiding the unsightliness. My nail is attached to a strip of skin, and a black liquid smelling of death seeps through the gauze and the skin. The pain is like having a dozen pins stuck under the nails of each finger. This little finger infects the others because a nerve that travels from there through the rest of my hand sends a discharge of pain up to my shoulder. But whatever—I’m going there because the sensation might be dulled in my lover’s presence. And he doesn’t let me down. I slide into his bed and my sated body relegates the pinkie to a secondary role. Pleasure extinguishes that fear of death, putrefaction, and the certainty the finger produces that I will one day be carrion. On my way back home, I think of the moment in Fátima Vélez’s Galápagos when Lorenzo, the narrator, muses:
When I’m dead, will I go on desiring? is that it, Pazmarí or will it be worse? As my dad always says, better to start praying now in case everything comes true, but what if, as I’ve often thought, there is a hell for each of us where all our worst fears are realized, in my case the fear of going on desiring without possibility, fear that desire will burst forth with the intensity of a cracked lip that quivers and splits grows so painful.
The cadence of Galápagos makes me forget that beneath the gauze, my own finger is entering a state of putrefaction.
The rhythmic composition of the book is intense; the punctuation also imposes a swaying, unstable rhythm. It is out of the ordinary: a text that, even at the very end, uses a comma rather than a period.
“And we don’t speak anymore because it’s too difficult,”
Nor do I think the space of the sea in Galápagos is deliberately chosen as a protagonist. The sea is, quintessentially, the great belly of this world: the secret, veiled place whose depths are unimaginable. The sea is the mother of life itself, life as we know it, the lubricious place that is also our origin.
The punctuation also converts the text into something aquatic; that and the choice of words produce a sort of babbling noise when I decide to read it aloud. Because this thing I’m reading was definitely read aloud before taking on its print form. There is something in its architecture and argument that refers to oral tradition and to the juicy, topical genre of gossip.
Where else did all the great mythic events originate except in gossip? Anomalies in everyday life that were relayed from generation to generation, adding to the idealized exploit. And above all, as this book displays magnificently through its characters, gossip has sustained our individual and collective existences in the face of tedium and the most unbearable wars; it has defended us from the deepest existential terror during historical periods when leisure and boredom were possible; and it has, alternatively, offered us distraction, dissociation from the ego in times of hunger, persecution, and genocide. In times of war and moral destruction like our own.
What are you talking about? Me? Oh, fine, it was me, so what? Did she really think she had to hide it? If something doesn’t happen pretty soon to stir things up around here everyone will perish from the tedium, they need a little gossip, a little tattle, chatter, a little scuttlebutt, something to dig their teeth into, something meaty, a craving for meat, what a craving for gossip they have,
Those words are spoken by Lorenzo, although the voice telling the story is so diffuse that it could be any or all of the characters who say them.
Gossip is also the primordial clay; it is the only way in which taboo subjects can be voiced, and consequently the way they survive as long as they continue to be addressed through jokes, in everyday language, that way of speaking that apparently legitimizes nothing.
She’s like that, says Lorenzo, Imprudent, she’s always making declarations in that perfumed voice of hers: earthlings are this way and earthlings are that way, she says earthlings but she means people like us, and meanwhile she puts on this who act, like I’m not from here and I’m not like the others,
Not even autocratic regimes have been able to do anything about gossip, because it legitimizes itself in its duration and persistence; the great ideological dethronements begin in the apparently frivolous form of oral tradition.
I think: Isn’t that what sustains us to a great extent? Isn’t it almost a political conviction? The hope that our story continues—not through reproduction, but through our actions—and that our discourse and the courage with which we face life make history, and we are narrated again and again, even in a distorted form, until our story takes root.
During the journey—a maritime voyage that appears in a literal form in a universe riddled with metaphors—the characters support one another by oral narratives and by recounting the things that have harmed them and harmed others. The ordinary is also part of the great epics of this world: Helen’s infidelity, Sisyphus’s boulder, Tantalus’s hunger. This must be noted about Galápagos: It is not a simple narrative because its basis isn’t action—or hardly at all; and the voyage is something that could fall within the spectrum of movement of this book. Action is not a protagonist here. What does have a leading role is the flow of the people and the things around them. And even though Galápagos at times seems like an epic, what is recounted is the heroism involved in surviving or in celebrating the triumph of small things; the life of the minuscule, something so minuscule it is invisible. Like a virus. Vélez tells us: Great power lies in small things.
I’m standing in front of a mirror, getting ready to go to a party. The hot water in the shower has finally managed to separate my nail from the dead skin that was holding it in place and along with this comes an eruption of vile-smelling blood. I can’t believe that my body is capable of containing such a liquid. Even if my makeup is all in place and this green dress suits me, my finger reminds me of something I can’t cover with makeup: the invincible fate that is death. I drive to the party, and on the way, completely possessed by the memory of what I have been reading, I can’t help but notice the number of roadkill dogs alongside the highway. Yesterday, the original form of their bodies was still discernible, the pristine color of what is now just brown, tinted by off-white fur. Who or what has devoured them overnight? The sun, vermin. The minuscule again. Vélez’s book has made me prone to that type of observation, she has ensured that each day I have the book with me is littered with memento mori. But that isn’t anything awful; since I became a mother, even I am afraid of dying. Because Fátima Vélez has also written a satire, and in her book language doesn’t exacerbate our destiny. In this book, language turrns the abominable into something entertaining and intelligible. The Polish writer Ryszard Kapuściński said that one important lesson he had learned from the African nations had to do with laughter: It can be a form of opposition.
“Laughter for me is very important, it’s what distinguishes the living from the dead, says Galaor.”
The roadkill dogs—animals without names, without a voice of their own—make me think of something: The characters in Galápagos tell one another their own and others’ life stories after dying (or being born into death) as they sail together on a boat that takes them not to a definitive end, but to the consecration of their desire. In the word lies the prolongation of their bodies in the others’. We can’t call that Death. Death is total silence, the obligation to say nothing. The characters talk among themselves and so they come to know one another, ergo they possess, desire one another, and it is possible that some enter others, without the need for physical contact, without contagion. Death doesn’t enter into that alliance; it isn’t possible for it to do so. Scheherazade told stories so as not to die, but these characters tell stories to distract themselves from the close, unavoidable fact of their death.
I haven’t wanted to read anything about the author so that the book itself offers me an idea of her biography. Nevertheless, I can say that Fátima Vélez is a poet, that, as I have attempted to do, she has implanted that prized genre in a book critics consider to be a novel. I believe I know that Fátima Vélez is a mother (or maybe I read that in the short biographical sketch at the beginning of the book); only someone who has given birth, or has suffered a long, strange illness, can so sincerely express the corporeal horror and the levels of repulsion and fascination a body can feel for itself. I believe I know that Fátima Vélez has in some way come back to life, that she was in a state previous to or after death and her powers as a medium enable her to narrate that voyage to the belly of nothingness so wisely. In the book there are also women who have recently given birth and whose sanity is under threat, children consuming their mothers’ bodies, breasts swollen with milk, characters in a state of putrefaction, and in a state of desire: This is Galápagos. And it is perhaps also the crude nature of this world. We all die a little each day, we all desire. In this horrific reality from which I write, some even dare to desire and act out their most awful fantasies. But Galápagos speaks of something else, something more common and more beautiful: the condemned desire of homosexuals, the condemned desire of mothers, the condemned desire of the old, the condemned desire of the ugly and the ill. Of all the world’s outcasts who gather in this book to tell us: I, too, am capable of feeling. To recount their domestic lives, their meager amorous adventures, and at times, the narration of all this is—only just—embellished in scenes that have been idealized in the world: the sea, France and the opulence of the heirs to millions, an artist’s studio. But even there we find trash and pestilent things that invite us to remember the chaotic nature of the experience of being alive. In the warp and weft of the most ordinary events and their repercussions in all that we are:
The body always finds a way of asking for what it needs, the pressure in that low place eludes me, things are happening within me that I can’t imagine, but if I could glimpse the unknowable inside me, my digestion, for instance, or pus production, or hormone secretion, how naive we are to what goes on inside us, how can people dare say Just be true to your body, listen to your flesh, it’s so unnerving always having to be attuned to the same thing, our transformations so imperceptible unless there’s a symptom, like falling nails.
He asks me if it still hurts. A new nail, not unlike a solid gut, grows on my little finger. The gauze has fallen off in our contortions and displays the deformity of a finger that is healing. My lover asks me how I feel, asks again if it still hurts. I take a quick glance at the recently denuded unsightliness of my finger before hiding it again. I am not as ashamed of the rest of my postpartum body as of this finger. It doesn’t hurt now. But it made me realize I am going to die one day, and that is more painful. But perhaps it’s why I am here, with you, I say. And he asks me what would become of us all if we possessed the arrogance of immortality.
Clyo Mendoza (Oaxaca, México, 1993) is a poet and novelist. She is the author of the poetry collections Anamnesis (2016) and Silencio (2018), which was awarded the Premio Internacional de Poesía Sor Juan Inés de la Cruz, and the novel Furia (2021), which was awarded the Premio Javier Morote by the Confederación Española de Gremios y Asociaciones de Libreros and the Amazon Premio Primera Novela. She has also collaborated on various transdisciplinary projects and experiments with painting, photography, and sound collage. Silencio is forthcoming in Christina MacSweeney’s translation from Seven Stories Press.
Christina MacSweeney is an award-winning translator who has worked with such authors as Valeria Luiselli, Daniel Saldaña París, Elvira Navarro, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Julián Herbert, Jazmina Barrera, and Karla Suárez. She has also contributed to many anthologies of Latin American literature and has published articles, interviews, and shorter translations on a wide variety of platforms.
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