An Animal Stampede: Sentience and Family

As a synonym for “on,” the prefix “em-” lingers on the narrator’s body to cover it and populate it with a stampede of other lives. As she covers herself with delicate imported fabrics (silk, wool, leather, cotton), China states on her journey through the desert: “todo era otra piel sobre mi piel” (Cabezón Cámara 2020: 25). The animal claims the protagonist’s body to cram it with a plethora of sensations: “sentía detalladamente; todo mi cuerpo, toda mi piel estaba despierta como si estuviera hecha de animales al acecho, de felinos, de pumas como los que temíamos encontrar en el desierto” (Cabezón Cámara 2023: 53). The initial dog/bitch now becomes a ferocious pack to propose that body “not as the affirmation and seat of the individual but as its critical point, as a line of opening and relationship towards the common that constitutes it and crosses it” (Giorgi 2014: 297).

Experiences sensorially condense China’s body so that those others that flicker within her can emerge. In her journey through the desert, China discovers that “the body is a proliferation of the sensitive” and, above all, that the proposition “[I] feel, therefore I am” fits perfectly with her individual awakening (Le Breton 2009: 11). Given the pre-eminence of the animal in this novel, this emphasis on sentience is logical as ‒ in the field of animal studies ‒ it is this conscious capacity for suffering or enjoyment that defines whether or not one belongs to the animal kingdom; in other words, “the scope of sentience in the animal kingdom is commonly assumed to match the scope of physical pain, because having that capacity is a sufficient condition for being sentient” (Varner 2018: 367). However, for Hernández, there is no pain that slows down the frenetic pace of the capitalist machinery because that pain is constitutive of that productive system. The rancher states bluntly: “un pueblo que pasa de amasijo de larvas a masa trabajadora, imaginesé, milady, que no será sin dolor” (Cabezón Cámara 2020: 92). Hence the existence of Campo Malo, that “urdimbre de carne y sangre” (114), where even minor crimes are punished with “estaca, cepo o con nudos de maniador mojado” as if the gauchos were animals to be tamed (112).

Unlike the desert, on the “Las Hortensias” property, having “otra piel sobre mi piel” is a clear sentence of violence and death (Cabezón Cámara 2020: 25). For this reason, the arrival at the fort-estancia is preceded by an unstoppable exodus of animals frightened by the pit that surrounds it and the pecked corpses of six Indigenous men. This omnipresence of death on the estancia is essential for, “to produce the human exception, to produce the human as an exception with respect to other living creatures, an animal, or the animal has to die” (Giorgi 2011: 2). For Hernández, gauchos and cattle are interchangeable and, for this reason, he also subjects his workers to “an economic rationality, of a calculation of capitalization or disposal” (Giorgi 2011: 13). The narrator states, “[Hernández] consideraba a cada gaucho tan parte de su hacienda como era cada vaca y no dejaba que se le muriera ninguno sin razón” (Cabezón Cámara 2020: 102).1 In Hernández’s words, these gauchos also become “bandadas de pájaros” (Cabezón Cámara 2020: 100), “hacienda” (102) or “larvas” (92, 105). The novel denounces this economic, ontological, and symbolic exploitation of the animal in the name of the human (Yelin 2015: 192), through which the category “animal” becomes a mere synecdoche or remainder:

Now, what happens to those bodies classified as “animals” when – from Hernández’s perspective – they have already completed their cycle on the property or dare to challenge his regime? Some end up like that Wellington steak served as the main course: the pain of death retreats behind the puff pastry so that the guests can savor the morsel without any responsibility. Others, like the deserting or murderous gauchos, are sentenced to the cruel “matambre” punishment in Campo Malo: the body bucks scandalously, wrapped in cowhide, until it expires, suffocated and squeezed by the dead animal’s skin under the sun in a merciless existence. Hidden behind the puff pastry or turned into a “matambre” spectacle-punishment, cattle and gaucho are linked and writhe in pain. In that tanned leather, animal life is intertwined with death ‒ to the maximum extent possible ‒ in an agony already accomplished and another in progress.

Cabezón Cámara’s writing strives to show what the cowhide/puff pastry tries to silence: all death is significant. Cabezón Cámara’s operation thus consists of going from the part to the whole: if the animal is fragmented again and again in terms of the human, in this work the animal is multiplied to encompass everything. That cowhide, which is now soaked again with gaucho blood, is a remainder or synecdoche where human and nonhuman merge to propose an animal “we,” ready to shelter everything. There is no such thing as a trivial death. Nor can an “anticipated, calculated, and capitalized death” be justified (Giorgi 2011: 13). In the novel, “it is death that deconstructs the supposed sovereignty of subjectivity, and it is death that unites us with the rest of the living, including animals” (Cragnolini 2014: 25). This lesson about pain and death, which contrasts with the lesson learned by gauchos at the estancia, is encapsulated in the scene of the calf being slaughtered by Rosario:

In Cabezón Cámara’s novel, this painful orphanage is the starting point for a new community based on a broad concept of “family:” there, standing upright, the animal offers itself. It is worth remembering that, in the first part of Martín Fierro, Hernández denounces how the Argentine government has completely abandoned the gauchos: they are orphans. The prefix “em-,” as a synonym for “within” (Real Academia Española 2023), pushes China in that constant search for a home, for refuge. The narrator reflects: “encontraba Estreya en mí una certeza, un hogar, algo que le confirmaba que lo suyo no sería la intemperie” (Cabezón Cámara 2020: 17). Immediately afterwards, the roles are reversed, and it is the protagonist who looks at Liz “como un cachorro” for that same security and containment (17). The narrator rediscovers her surroundings when she literally puts herself in the place of Estreya, the birds, and the oxen: “Probé todas las perspectivas en esos días de descubrimiento: […] Y empecé a percatarme de las otras perspectivas; no era lo mismo el mundo desde los ojos de la reina, rica, poderosa […] que el punto de vista de, por ejemplo, un gaucho en su tapera con sus cueros y sus fogatas de bosta” (32). Entering other bodies, inhabiting them for a while, getting to know their dreams and fears entails a key political lesson: in those animal bodies one can find a home, a community. The search for a home also involves the search for a language. Spanish, English, Guaraní, and Mapudungún/Mapuche are organically intertwined in Cabezón Cámara’s novel to forge a plural language always open to others.

In this way, the animals insist on becoming that centripetal force that shelters others. Rosario thus becomes the protective mother duck of the lamb Braulio, of a guinea pig, of a hare, and of a foal. Furthermore, the narrator confesses: “[m]e había enternecido el gaucho amamantando al [cordero Braulio] guachito” (Cabezón Cámara 2020: 45). Later, Martín Fierro behaves in the same way with the children of the Iñchiñ community.2 For a study of gaucho’s sentimental side refer to Peluffo’s essay. It is no coincidence that it is precisely these “bad” gauchos who take on the care of others. The writer thus questions that division of labor by gender characteristic of the prototypical patriarchal nuclear family (Jelin 2017: 59). The cattle, stolen by Rosario, also seek the “protection” provided by the cart and its crew (Cabezón Cámara 2020: 43). In an interview, the Argentine writer acknowledges that this journey of China in search of the freedom to be whoever she wants to be is linked to a new way of understanding the concept of “family:” “[y]es, [the protagonist frees herself] from everything, from the socioeconomic condition, from the cultural condition, from the gender condition, from everything that had been determined for her life, and she builds another one. And in that other one, in that journey, freedom is also forming a family with whomever she wants” (Bertolini 2017). Cabezón Cámara makes visible the process of “democratization of the family” that is in effect in Argentine society today, which implies “a growing multiplicity of forms of family and coexistence” (Jelin 2017: 72). This longing materializes at the end when China admits that “[l]as familias nuestras son grandes, se arman no sólo de sangre. Y esta es la mía” (Cabezón Cámara 2020: 165).