About Dogs and Bitches or China’s Journey through the Desert
“Lo vi al perro y desde entonces no hice más que buscar ese brillo para mí,” the protagonist confesses at the beginning of the novel (Cabezón Cámara 2020: 12). The canine choice cannot be overlooked. Cervantes’ novel El casamiento engañoso y El coloquio de los perros (1613) inaugurates the canine picaresque tradition with its critique “not only of the social reality of the time but of the human condition as such” (Subercaseaux 2014: 106). On the other hand, Kafka’s short story “Investigations of a Dog” (1931), by exploring the question of “identity as an instituted truth,” challenges the category of “species” (Yelin 2015: 67). In Cabezón Cámara’s novel, the protagonist adopts the little dog and names him “Estreya,” as a reminder of that epiphany, and, from that moment on, the adventures never stop. This glow of animal life, perceived thanks to Estreya, will be crucial in this journey from the individual to the collective. The appearance of the dog is so transcendental that it leaves its indelible mark on the protagonist’s new name. Translated into English and suggested by Elizabeth, the radiant canine “Star” coexists harmoniously with “el nombre de la bestia de mi marido” (Cabezón Cámara 2020: 22, emphasis mine). When Elizabeth insists on eliminating the generic “china” (synonym for “woman” in gaucho literature), the dog stubbornly sneaks in as an action in the narrator’s reply: “‘China’, me emperré […] Yo era la China” (22). While the verb “emperrarse” means to persist in something, to be obstinate, it also conceals (thanks to the prefix “em-”) the bitch/perra. The protagonist insists on keeping that past alive to radically undo it: that inherited “china” is now imposed in capital letters, with a definite article, ready to be condensed. Therefore, as soon as she is baptized, the narrator takes her first creative steps and, in a game of rhymes, ends inviting others to join her with the verb “arremolinar:” “la China Josefina desafina, la China Josefina no cocina, la China Josefina es china fina, la China Josefina arremolina” (22).
In Formas comunes: Animalidad, cultura, biopolítica (2014), Gabriel Giorgi points out that the animal “is a political sign that calls into question the evidence of the human, making bodies a contested reality, and placing sex, reproduction, the generic body and the very definition of ‘species’ at the center of the imagination of the political” (2014: 240). Involving the animal in this journey of personal discovery implies interweaving it with “a formal grammar of distinction between species” (Giorgi 2011: 6). In this sense, it should be remembered that, within the Latin American cultural tradition, the animal functioned for a long time as “a systematic reversal and absolute other of the human,” intrinsically linked in the imaginary to the savage, the barbarian, the undisciplined (Giorgi 2014: 11). However, since the 1960s, “a new contiguity and proximity with animal life” is evident, the product of a modification of the place occupied by the animal within culture and an emphasis on everything concerning the body (11).
Estreya dives (or drives/hinca) into the narrator’s horizon, dazzling her: “irradiaba alegría de estar vivo, una luz no alcanzada por la triste opacidad de una pobreza que era, estoy convencida, más falta de ideas que de ninguna otra cosa” (Cabezón Cámara 2020: 11). The dog is a pristine instance where life runs aground, becoming a refractory kaleidoscope of iridescent transcendental experiences that have the body as their protagonist par excellence. This animal-life-body trilogy with which the novel begins constitutes the matrix of biopolitical thought. Taking up Foucault’s axiom of “making live,” Giorgi poses it as one of the configured knots of the contemporary: “what does it mean, in short, to ‘make live’ according to multiple specifications – of class, gender, sexual, cultural, etc. – what lives does a society select for this ‘making live’ and which ones, on the other hand, are abandoned in more or less obvious ways; and, perhaps fundamentally, what counts as ‘life,’ that is, as viable, liveable life” (2014: 19).
Estreya and his captivating brilliance thus cancel out the echo of the verses uttered by Martín Fierro, in the homonymous work, when recalling his three years on the border: “en mi perra vida he visto / una miseria mayor” (Hernández 1963: 42, emphasis mine). The “bitch”/ “perra” modifier used as a synonym for “very bad” or “unworthy” (Real Academia Española 2023) returns to the fray now in the anonymous insult “¡perra puta, so vo, china de mierda!” (Cabezón Cámara 2020: 128) when ‒ after the “entrevero de los cuerpos” in Hernández’s room (129) ‒ everyone gives free rein to their sexual desires. This meaning of “bitch”/“perra” as “prostitute” (Real Academia Española 2023) also permeates Martín Fierro with the story of infidelity suffered by Cruz, whose aversion to women becomes canine: “Ya no he probar fortuna / con carta tan conocida: / mujer y perra parida / no se me acerca ninguna” (Hernández 1963: 75).
The body of the bitch, that “Inca la perra” (Cabezón Cámara 2020: 13), is inscribed in the novel as a misogynistic and xenophobic quote from
Martín Fierro that needs to be destroyed: “se llevaron también al gringo de ‘Inca la perra’, como cantó luego el gracioso, y se quedó en el pueblo aquella colorada, Elizabeth, sabría su nombre luego y para siempre” (13). China repeats this play on words from
Martín Fierro to explain the origin of Oscar, Elizabeth’s husband. In Hernández’s work, the expression “Inca la perra” is used to refer to the country of origin (England/
Inglaterra) of the foreign ditch digger who escapes to the sierras to avoid the law on conscription (Hernández 1963: 34). Hernández resorts to this vulgar and sexually violent phrase to explicitly feminize and animalize the Englishman: “Inca [hinca a] la perra” translates to “to hammer/to fornicate the bitch” (Tiscornia 1930: 87).
1 It should be noted that these three passages are the only references to the female dog/bitch in Martín Fierro. In all other cases, Hernández refers to the male dog. As Ludmer explains, “[t]he voice of the gaucho defines itself as a ‘man’ facing the foreign ‘woman,’ and, moreover, ‘bitch’; his country is no more than the masculine member […] to define the gaucho as an Argentine man the foreigner’s sex, gender, must be changed […] Only the gaucho’s motherland belongs to the masculine gender” (2002: 35). In response, Cabezón Cámara nails (or
hinca) the body of the “bitch” (China’s, Elizabeth’s) to her writing to cross it again and again with other bodies. And, in that turbulence/
arremolinar, the protagonist discovers herself.
According to Giorgi, queer animals crystallize a “hypothesis about the body” (2014: 246), posing “the instance of another temporality, another politics, and other potential meanings of sexuality” (247). In the novel, that silenced desire slips through the interstices left by the tacit subject of “Inca la perra” to propose another homeland that harbors a plurality of bodies and voices. In this sense, the novel is related to other works of the neo-gaucho literature (“La intrusa” by Jorge Luis Borges, La china by Sergio Bizzio and Daniel Guebel, and “El amor” by Martín Kohan) in which the always obliterated sexual life of the gaucho is made visible (Gamerro 2015: 61). And, more recently, I would add the work El gran surubí by Pedro Mairal.
By propelling China’s life in an unexpected direction, Estreya and Liz function in the same initiatory way. So much so that the lessons imparted by the foreigner become an intimate relationship, vital for the narrator:
Ella era mi polo y yo la aguja imantada de la brújula: todo mi cuerpo se estiraba hacia ella, se empequeñecía de ganas concentradas. Fue bajo el imperio de esa fuerza que empecé a sentir y hoy creo que es posible que siempre sea así, que se sienta al mundo en relación con otros, con el lazo con otros. Me sentía viva y feroz como una manada de depredadores y amorosa como Estreya. (Cabezón Cámara 2020: 54)
Estreya and Liz express a desire for other lives, for other bodies beyond those bequeathed by tradition. Moreover, their overlapping already anticipates the fusion of humans and nonhumans in the Iñchiñ community. This intersection between animals and queer desires brings to light “alternative epistemologies and politics of the living in which what is at stake is a reinvention of what is common between bodies” (Giorgi 2014: 241). Cabezón Cámara’s novel thus reveals how the force of desire unites bodies, and, for this reason, her writing makes sentience its lodestar.