The Phantasmagoric Code | An Interview with Ave Barrera
Interviews
By Ellen Jones
Set in 1990s Guadalajara, Ave Barrera’s The Forgery opens with its protagonist, José Federico Burgos, leaping from a six-meter-high wall as he attempts to escape the house where he has been held prisoner. Cut to a grimy studio where José, a failing artist, has agreed, in a moment of sheer desperation, to forge a fifteenth-century painting—for a wealthy and eccentric antiques collector named Horacio. Entranced by the man’s beautiful home, José does not immediately notice that it’s impossible to remove the vast masterpiece from the chapel that was built to house it. As he figures out how to copy this painting ensconced in another building, he gets mixed up in an intrigue involving Horacio’s mother, the staff who work in his house, and a homeless man who roams the wealthy neighborhood’s streets.
The Forgery is a fast-paced romp of a novel that pays homage to Mexican greats like Juan Rulfo and Luis Barragán. One muggy Mexico City evening, Ave and I got together to talk about the origins of her first book to be published in English (and translated by Robin Myers and myself) as well as what readers can look forward to next. I have translated the interview from Spanish.
Ellen Jones: I think Robin would agree that one of the challenges of translating your work—both The Forgery and your second novel, Restoration—is your sharp eye for descriptions of interior spaces, furniture, and the details of building facades. Where does your interest in architecture, interior design, and art come from?
Ave Barrera: My dad always wanted to be an architect. He’s a sculptor and is very immersed in both the art world and the world of antiques, which is part of the world of the novel. My interest in architecture began with him, with everything he taught me. He had a pile of interior design magazines and art books, even books on the theory of architecture, and that was my early reading material. I must have leafed through those magazines ten thousand times. I learned those spaces by heart. They fit together with everything my dad showed me. We visited a lot of colonial cities when I was a child, and he’d drag me from one place to the next and say, “That there is a frontispiece”—always that specificity of vocabulary.
Now, when I write, that terminological specificity is crucial for me whenever I’m depicting a particular space. I write with a dictionary by my side, a dictionary of architectural terms. I research a lot of things I’m no expert in, searching for that specificity. Often there’ll be an architectural element—a ventana cuadrilobular, say—that I recognize, because I’ve seen it a thousand times, and I say to myself, “I want to know exactly how to describe that object.” A ventana cuadrilobular is one of those windows shaped like a bulbous cross (a quatrefoil in English). Being able to name something you’ve seen a thousand times is so satisfying. I think those resources allowed me to find a way of building narrative universes and then to find strategies for inviting readers to inhabit them alongside my characters.
EJ: The world of The Forgery is a very masculine world, but it depicts various types of masculinity: there’s the macho protagonist José, the queer art dealer Horacio, and Tona, who is a muxe from the Isthmus region of Oaxaca. What were the challenges of writing from the perspective of a male character, and how did you come to choose this perspective for the novel?
AB: I owe this entire novel to my dad (that’s why the English version is dedicated to him), especially in artistic and intellectual terms. I think that, in a symbolic, subtle, metaphorical way, the book mirrors what happened in my own process of discovering myself as a writer. I think I wrote from a masculine perspective because it was what I knew, what I had learned was valid in literature: to write from the experience of a man. At that moment in my life, I didn’t feel like I had the ovaries to write from a female perspective because I thought—wrongly—that it was less valid. I say this with total honesty because that was a different moment in my life. I didn’t consider myself a feminist, and I thought that, in order to seek validation in the literary world, I needed a male perspective.
However, the novel accompanied me on a process of discovery. As a woman, I had to make things up—to try to put myself in the characters’ shoes in order to write from their perspective, like an actor playing a role on stage. Once I achieved that closeness to the male characters, I realized how fragile masculinity is, how much it cries out to be pulled apart, to be questioned. So the novel starts with masculinities but then shatters them, diversifies them, fragments them, and in some way takes them to the other extreme, extending into the feminine and submerging itself there. The heart of the novel is completely female—the heart is La Morisca and the character of Isabel/Jezebel. It’s Horacio’s own femininity and Tona’s too: the rainbow of gender stretched and diversified. In retrospect, I think the novel itself helped me to go through that process, that diversification of perspective. It starts off with José’s deep machismo and stretches it out into that other dimension.
EJ: Many have commented that the novel has something of the picaresque about it, in the sense that the narrative is quite episodic. But examined closely (and Robin and I examined it very, very closely), it becomes clear that the structure of The Forgery is extremely precise and symmetrical. It’s divided into parts of equal length, and chapters within each of those parts are the same length too. Tell us something about how you developed the novel’s structure.
AB: The structure was very consciously developed, alongside the development of the architectural space. The physical and spatial structure of the novel’s universe correspond with the book’s narrative structure; the house and the plot match. It’s not a coincidence—it’s quite carefully wrought—but it came to me when I was searching for a structure for the plot. After going round and round in circles, I landed on a strategy that would allow me to bring the story to fruition, and that strategy was held up by two pilings. The first piling is the structure, and the second is space, which is also structural. I had a plot that was very scattered, going nowhere, so I went back and told myself, “I need a very clear, strong structure, a sustained arc.” I visualize it as a bridge, those colonial “m”-shaped bridges, like a piece of an aqueduct, with a pillar in the middle and another on either side. Those three points frame the entire narrative arc. One is the moment when José throws himself into the abyss, then there’s a flashback, then there’s the moment when the paramedics arrive and take him to hospital, then there’s another flashback, then the moment when he leaves the hospital, which closes the third act. I wanted to structure it very obviously in three acts in order to teach myself that structure, and I marked it in a very obvious way. Once I had those three pilings, I felt a little more confident developing other aspects of the plot.
EJ: There are very clear connections between The Forgery and the work of Juan Rulfo, and between your second novel, Restoration, and the work of Salvador Elizondo. Can you tell us a little about these connections with other Mexican writers?
AB: I actually learned what literature was through Rulfo, without realizing that I was reading literature or even that I was reading Rulfo. I used to read a lot of things, things from The Bible, things about architecture, adult books that turned up in my house and which I read indiscriminately. There was no children’s literature—I might have read some fairy tales with my cousins but that was it. And I didn’t know that there existed a thing called literature. Then one day I read a book without a cover that I found in a box and I identified with it completely. I didn’t know what I was reading. I just knew they were short stories about the rural lives of seemingly unimportant people. I loved it because the happiest moments of my childhood were spent in the countryside on my grandmother’s ranch, among the cows and cornfields. I absolutely loved seeing those things represented in black and white. I was about fifteen at the time. Much later, I realized the book was El llano en llamas (The Plain in Flames) and that this was literature. I wanted to replicate it of course—I wrote a story that was so, so, so Rulfo-esque. It was called “El olor de la hierba mojada” (“The Smell of Wet Grass”). It was about a girl who had lost her cow in a storm, and it was Rulfo, 100%. I wrote it for a story competition at my high school. It was practically a transcription of Rulfo but they gave me an honorary mention. I couldn’t believe it. That was a key turning point in my life. It marked my entry into the literary universe. “You wrote a story—this is a story! You can write stories! What else can you do?” It was a very personal, natural way to arrive at literature and short stories.
Now, The Forgery: Rulfo plays a very complex role. Rulfo gave me a different perspective on fantasy. Fantasy was relegated to the area of things that don’t exist, children’s things—again, we’re back to what was valid and what was not valid within my social context. Surrounded by religion, fantasy literature was completely invalid, and science fiction was for people who had nothing better to do. Rulfo opened up a new perspective for me, a wink toward fantasy. I took his words, I stole his strategy, I appropriated it. The story I wanted to write wasn’t properly fantasy, but let’s say that Rulfo’s influence allowed me to take a different approach to reality and to break with it, to crack it open slightly. The rules of the universe of Pedro Páramo are the rules I adopt both in The Forgery and in Restoration. That’s the phantasmagoric code. I loved the rules of the game he was playing, so I set out to play my own game with them.
I still haven’t said anything about Salvador Elizondo. I think he represents my teenage phase when it comes to Mexican literature. Rulfo was me falling completely in love with the father, while Elizondo was the death of the father: “I want nothing to do with you, I hate you, you’re a violent macho, I’m angry with you, and I’m going to take a stance.” I think those two phases are very recognizable. That Elektra phase with Rulfo, then the teenage rebellion. Those apparently uncontestable masters accompanied me for a long time. And they form part of my identity: Mexico, Spanish, the cities where I’ve lived . . . Yes, they represent me; yes, I enjoy their literature. But I also have problems with that generation of writers, as many female readers do, and this was my way of questioning their lack of ethics, their deep machismo, by rewriting, literally, the blueprint of Farabeuf. It’s a novel that’s a kind of hypnotic trance, very suggestive and rich in poetic terminology, but in the background there is violence and death, the murder of a woman who supposedly gave her consent, offering her life up for love. When I was doing my research for Restoration, Salvador Elizondo’s work seemed like a perfect way to represent my rebellion, the response I wanted to give. It’s a recognition of paternity but also a way of arguing with it.
EJ: You are also a literary translator, from English and Portuguese. How did it feel to read your own novel in another language, especially after so much time having passed since you wrote it? I imagine it must be such a strange, uncanny experience, on the one hand very familiar and on the other completely alien.
AB: Translation is a sin I have occasionally committed, yes. Something really interesting about this process was becoming conscious of the narrative heart of the book, of what lies beyond the actual words. Reading in English allowed me to see what’s there beyond language. You translators got there but I never did, because I was completely focused on the precision of each word—if it doesn’t say ventana cuadrilobular, then it doesn’t say anything at all! I don’t know how you guys will translate ventana cuadrilobular when you get round to Restoration, but when you figure it out I’ll be able to see what’s behind it. I’ll no longer be reading my own words. I’ll be reading somebody else’s creative interpretation, and that’s fascinating because that way I can see what the story is really about.
It’s like when you see yourself on CCTV: you know it’s you, but those aren’t my cheeks! Or like when you hear a recording of your voice for the first time and you laugh. It’s funny and uncomfortable, but it makes you realize what your real voice is like. Because when we see ourselves in a mirror, we’re not really seeing ourselves, and when we hear our own voice in our head, we’re hearing an echo of our voice. I think that also happens with translations. It’s like, “Oh wow, it’s not me, but it really is me; now I can see what’s really there.”
EJ: Do you think your work as a translator has changed the way you write at all?
AB: At first, whenever I had a complete block, when I was unable to write a single word but still felt the need to write, translation was a kind of game or exercise that allowed me to overcome my fear of writing. Taking something written by others, like a child who takes their mother by the hand in order to learn how to walk, allowed me to lose my fear of words.
EJ: Can you tell us a little about the novel you’ve just finished writing?
AB: It still hasn’t been published; it’s being considered for a competition. It’s called Notas desde el interior de la ballena (Notes from Inside the Whale). I think I really needed to write this novel, because it’s a very intimate, very personal book. It’s a story that’s been waiting to be told and that I managed to get out thanks to conversations with other women and to other books written by women about mother-daughter relationships, about grief, but grief beyond the idea of “getting over a loss.” It’s an autobiographical novel about the process of grieving for my mother, but it’s mainly about her life. We often think the grieving process only has to do with death, with processing the fact of an absence. What we don’t take stock of is everything that person’s life represents, including all the conflicts it involved. The tragedy of a mother who dies before any kind of reconciliation or conciliation is possible is that she is no longer here to settle scores, to allow emotions to evolve toward forgiveness or affection or closure. Thankfully, this topic is becoming more and more common in literature—more books are focusing on the link between mothers and daughters in a way that demystifies it—a way that breaks with myths both about motherhood and about the relationship between two women so close as to be almost, but not quite, the same person.
Ellen Jones is a writer, editor, and literary translator from Spanish. Her recent and forthcoming translations include Cubanthropy by Iván de la Nuez (Seven Stories Press, 2023), The Forgery by Ave Barrera (Charco Press, 2022, co-translated with Robin Myers), and Nancy by Bruno Lloret (Two Lines Press, 2021). Her monograph, Literature in Motion: Translating Multilingualism Across the Americas is published by Columbia University Press (2022).
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