Fuerzas especiales offers a particularly topical twist to the issue of VAW in that it possesses additional leitmotifs that resonate in an uncannily familiar way for contemporary audiences who, in 2020–21, have been suffering the impacts of a radical and wide-ranging lockdown caused by Covid-19. It has always been known that some literary works get a second wind years after their initial publication. Steven Soderbergh’s film, Contagion (2011), for example,
opens on a quiet black screen punctured by a single sound: a woman coughing. It’s not just nervous throat-clearing. This is a heavy, phlegmatic cough, one that telegraphs with zero doubt that this person is
sick. Over the course of the next 106 minutes, the cough becomes the heartbeat of [the film], and its primary fear trigger. As casualties mount and paranoia increases, the cough is a reminder that circumstances are about to get a lot worse before they get better.
1 James Bailey, ‘The Ending of Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, Revisited’, Vulture, 30 January 2020; https://www.vulture.com/2020/01/contagion-movie-ending-coronavirus-and-pandemic-panic.html.As Jason Bailey has pointed out, ‘“Funny how
Contagion predicted how the world would react to a deadly virus” is, at the moment, not an uncommon online refrain’.
2 James Bailey, ‘The Ending…’. There are a number of websites out there that focus on literary classics that tell us the story of pandemics of the past, and the round-up has a familiar ring about it. There is Daniel Defoe’s
A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Albert Camus’s
The Plague (1947), Gabriel García Márquez’s
Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), José Samarago’s
Blindness (1995), and Margaret Atwood’s
Oryx and Crake (2003).
3 Tobias Carroll, ‘Pandemics: An Essential Reading List’, Vulture Lists, 10 March 2020; https://www.vulture.com/article/best-pandemic-books.html. These literary texts are multi-layered and one of those layers allows us to understand with greater clarity what is happening to our Brave New World of 2020–21. Eltit’s
Fuerzas especiales shares some of the characteristics of these works. The opening of the chapter entitled ‘The bars are not always the same’ (‘Las rejas no son todas iguales’) provides a good example of this:
A veritable pandemic of policemen was unleashed; their aim was to extenuate the blocks of flats. Within a highly-charged backdrop swarms of helmets, police weapons and the chaos created by the menacing sight of their truncheons. The pacos’ uniforms provide the backdrop with a green tint. The green paco produces a curious optical effect because the cement of the flats is similar to that of a native wood or a camouflage which acts as a facade concealing the operations of a Chinese war game. We are infected with policemen and I’m already contaminated because I’ve got a back-breaking cough. I’ve been coughing all day and I can’t stop thinking that my illness was caused by the toxic water ejected by the cars or the unbreathable clouds scattered by the bombs. I think about the chemicals. I cough and I think. I cough and I think about the extraordinary asymmetrical skirts that I saw yesterday on the website.
4 Spanish original: ‘Se desencadenó una verdadera pandemia de policías que pretenden extenuar los bloques. En medio de un paisaje enardecido nos penetran enjambres de cascos, de armas de servicio y el caos ante la posición amenazante de las lumas. Los uniformes de los pacos tiñen de verde el paisaje. El verde paco provoca un curioso efecto óptico porque el cemento de los bloques semeja un bosque nativo o un camuflaje que sirve como fachada para ocultar la realización de un juego de guerra chino. Estamos infectados de policías y ya estoy contaminada porque tengo una tos que me parte la espalda. He tosido a lo largo del día y no dejo de pensar que mi enfermedad la ocasionó el agua tóxica que lanzan los carros o las nubes irrespirables que esparcen las bombas. Pienso en los químicos. Toso y pienso. Toso y pienso en las extraordinarias faldas asimétricas que vi ayer en el portal’; Fuerzas especiales, p. 113.The odd combination of a variety of ingredients – including the comparison of the police raid to a pandemic, the association between the lockdown and physical illness (‘I’m already contaminated because I’ve got a back-breaking cough’), the oddness of the juxtaposition of aggressive policing with a fixation with the internet, the suggestion that it may all be fake anyway (i.e. the ‘curious optical effect’) – overlap in some significant ways with the experience of today’s lockdown in 2020–21. Curiously enough, while Fuerzas especiales was originally designed to bring to the world’s attention the desperate situation suffered by the social members of Latin America’s subaltern precarious proletariat, its ‘precariat’ as some call it, it also lays before our eyes the kaleidoscope of a post-Covid-19 world: lockdown, self-isolation, despair, illness, repressive policing, and a rampant viral pandemic.