How the Whole World Is a Single Animal
As soon as the group leaves the fort-estancia, “Las Hortensias,” the narrator acknowledges that “la risa se nos salía de los pulmones a todos los animales de la carreta” (Cabezón Cámara 2020: 140). This pronoun “we,” foundational to gaucho literature (Rama 1994: vol. 1, 73), now irrefutably bursts forth as an animal to impose itself as the conceptual matrix of the Indigenous people of Kutral-Có and the new Iñchiñ community. Moreover, it is also worthy to note that the personal pronoun “iñchiñ” in the Mapudungún/Mapuche language means “we,” “us,” or “more than two” (de Augusta 2017: 57).
Thus, as they advance toward the Kutral-Có lagoon, the entire landscape becomes animalized, anticipating that relational paradigm that they will find among the Indigenous people who call themselves “seres de Mewlen, del viento” (Cabezón Cámara 2020: 165): “Cuando pasó la lluvia, la tierra croaba, los pájaros se metían en los charcos, agitaban las alas, hacían piar al aire y el arco iris tenía una pata más corta que la otra: desde la salida de la estancia el mundo había empezado a subir” (144, emphasis mine). On the way to the lagoon, China notices that “[e]l aire era una masa viva de animales” (147) and also submits to that rhythmic communion: “yo empecé a respirar con ellos [abejas, moscas, bariguís y mosquitos], me dejé estar en ese ruido grave que a la noche aumentaba por otro más regular, el del croar de tanto bicho barroso” (147). The future aquatic becomings, which end up consolidating an Iñchiñ, animal We, already pulsates, muddy and amphibious in the air of that present.
This “croar de tanto bicho barroso” (147) not only hints at the group’s aquatic becomings but also dialogues with a passage from Mairal’s El gran surubí in which the poet Ramón Paz admits that “me sentí como raro como anfibio” (2013: 10), anticipating the poet’s sexual encounters with his male companions. In 200 años de monstruos y maravillas argentinas (2015), Gabo Ferro points out how the term “amphibians”/“anfibios” was used in Argentina to refer to effeminate men (10, 33).
The stay with the Indigenous people of Kutral-Có marks a milestone in this search for a counter-hegemonic collective experience by offering the group of travelers a concrete model of community life antithetical to that of “Las Hortensias.” In the lagoon, “la gente que se mueve como el viento, los leves somos: no queremos aplastar lo que pisamos” (Cabezón Cámara 2020: 117). For China, this philosophy of life contrasts radically with that imposed by England, the paradigm-nation according to Hernández: “no es del aire Inglaterra, no es de la luz; es de las entrañas de la tierra de donde sale el hierro y apura al movimiento del planeta” (170). Sheltered by the high sierras, the Indigenous people of Kutral-Có have managed to form an idyllic community where freedom prevails, where “ni la ropa ni la forma de vivir está determinada por el sexo” (157). There are no sociopolitical or economic hierarchical differences: all the toldos are similar, and they are not laid out around a central point. Moreover, the natives live in harmony with a heterogeneous group of foreigners. They enjoy music and love stories, consume hallucinogenic mushrooms, practice job rotation (according to aptitude, desire, or need), form families based on emotional ties, live their sexuality to the fullest, raise their children collectively, and share what they hunt equally, among other things.
When the Iñchiñ community is formed, it carries on with the same lifestyle of the Indigenous people of the lagoon: first, the diversity, equity, and freedom of all its members is valued; second, humans and nonhumans are respected; third, a rotation of work and power is promoted; and, finally, enjoyment of free time is prioritized, among other features. China makes the following statement about her life within the Iñchiñ community: “[e]n mi nación las mujeres tenemos el mismo poder que los hombres. No nos importa el voto porque todos votamos y porque podemos tener tanto jefes como jefas o almas dobles mandando” (Cabezón Cámara 2020: 181).
In this third part, the narrator thus assumes a programmatic tone when describing the life of the Indigenous people of Kutral-Có and then that of the Iñchiñ people. In doing so, she reflects on several main points of discussion linked to the “concept-diagnosis” of the Anthropocene and explicitly criticizes neoliberal capitalism (Svampa 2019: 19). Cabezón Cámara then goes back to the critical moment in which the foundations of this project were laid in Argentina and recovers the Indigenous communities that were systematically excluded – murdered, disciplined, or marginalized – to present them as an alternative way of living and being in the world.
Here, I should mention the writer’s specific experience with the Wichi population of Chaco, especially the women, as a result of her travels to the village of Altos de la Sierra on the Argentine-Bolivian border. In her text “La comunidad wichi” (2022), which is part of the volume Volver a contar. Escritores de América Latina en los archivos del Museo Británico, Cabezón Cámara focuses on leather charms of root and leaf powders to denounce the state of abandonment of these communities. The writer also highlights how the economic exploitation of the region has devastated the environment and affected everything from diet to the group’s ancestral medicinal practices.
In the debate on the Anthropocene, the practices and knowledge of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and feminist contributions are thought of precisely as possible solutions to this apocalyptic scenario:
Thinking about the paths of the Anthropocene from Latin America leads us to inquire into those collective experiences that are nourished by ethical and relational values. From the point of view of alternatives, there is an eco-territorial perspective, of a propositional nature, focused on agroecology; an Indigenist perspective, of a communitarian nature, focused on decolonization and good living; a feminist perspective, focused on the ethics of care and depatriarchalization. These approaches suggest the decommodification of common goods and the need to strengthen viable proposals, based on local and regional economies, experiences of agroecology, community spaces (Indigenous-peasant), among others. (Svampa 2019: 36)
Cabezón Cámara’s proposal blends these three aspects with that of the Indigenous experience – intensifying it – as a counter-hegemonic response to the speech of the character José Hernández and, of course, to the canonical Martín Fierro. In this sense, both the Indigenous people of Kutral-Có and later the Iñchiñes propose “new ways of living” that respond to “a political-environmental narrative associated with concepts such as good living, rights of nature, common goods, post-development, ethics of care, among others” (Svampa 2019: 29). Both communities adopt other “forms of social organization, based on reciprocity and redistribution” (29). And, above all, both groups back relational (and not dualistic) approaches to nature, recovering the experience of animal becomings, always latent in gaucho literature, to direct it according to these “immanentist visions of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas who conceive of the human being in nature, and not separate from it” (31). For this reason, China highlights the compassionate attitude of the Indigenous people in Kutral-Có when sacrificing a lamb, that is very similar to Rosario’s: “a pedirles perdón a los corderos y jurarles que nada de ellos sería sacrificado en vano y tomarnos su sangre apenas degollados abrazándolos y hablándoles despacio en las orejitas, pobrecitos, para que mueran amados” (Cabezón Cámara 2020: 165).
When China Josefina whirls/arremolina, the animal magnetizes everything. To feel the other is to become animal-universe-everything: bodies are overwhelmed and merge in a pristine interdependence that makes everything reborn, saturated with new glimpses of the world. The animal then assaults the forbidden erotic scene of the gaucho literature to populate it with a “entrevero de cuerpos” (Cabezón Cámara 2020: 129) in that muddy lagoon of Kutral-Có that “está viva, la laguna es un animal” (153). When China and Kauka sexually embrace, the couple metamorphoses: China becomes surubí and Kauka pacú and, later, “echó manchas de tigre y, tararira ya, me mordió como si yo fuera un anzuelo, me mordió y se quedó ahí, como colgada de mí, mi pescada” (153).
Cabezón Cámara revives the river landscape of Mairal’s El gran surubí and pays homage to it: that monstrous surubí to which poet Ramón Paz clings, that precipitates his transformation, now runs aground on the body of China to imagine other ways of living and being in this world. In her article “La última vuelta de la gauchesca,” Cabezón Cámara states that the power of Mairal’s work relies precisely on his reinterpretation of gaucho literature. With Mairal, the furious, intransigent surubí-poetry displays its strength to reaffirm its most absolute freedom (Campero 2022: 134). In doing so, he rolls out a new literary horizon for Argentine poetry (149). Against this new background, Cabezón Cámara’s surubí-tararira seemed to be outlined: that flaunted freedom is fished out and claimed by China to think about herself, her environment, and her Iñchiñ people.
After her union with Kauka, the protagonist admits that she would like to be who she was and allows a machi, who had glimpsed her tararira soul, to paint on her skin. Sexual fishing becomes ontological. The animal’s remains (its bones pulverized in paint) once again settle on China’s body to inscribe the animal that wriggles at the bottom of her inner lagoon. Body and soul: the animal proliferates both fragmented and as a whole; it becomes ubiquitous.
Later, when China is a member of the Iñchiñ community, she drinks a psychostimulant tea and reaches the heart of her journey and the quintessential lesson of the entire novel: “cómo el mundo entero es un solo animal” (Cabezón Cámara 2020: 180). This animal constellation, which already shines in the brilliance of Estreya, now offers itself iridescently from the divine ray of a drop of tea.