An upside-down Chinese wall, which leaves a scar on the pampas. A story of obsessive love that generates a very palpable madness. A twist to “civilization and barbarism”. A feminist cry (“No means no”) emitted in the howls of the Argentine State, from the tolderías. And a fantastic turn that accelerates towards literature, no matter who falls, with an unprecedented freedom.
All that fits, and much more, in The woman of the raidthe latest novel by Daniel Guebel (Buenos Aires, 1956), a narrative machine that delves into History, present-day politics and feminism (you can do that reading, if you want), and ends in a delightful display of invention.
The historical “photo” is the Zanja de Alsina, a defensive device designed to stop Indian raids, incursions like the one painted and romanticized by Ángel Della Valle in The return of the raid. Indian drilling to take livestock, goods and women to the wild side. On the other side, the Nation was being built.
In the novel, the ditch, the gash opened in the earth, is the product of a love affair. There are three characters, more or less: Adolfo Alsina, Sarmiento’s vice president and Avellaneda’s Minister of War and Navy; María, the object of desire that sets the plot alight; the Frenchman Alfredo Ebelot, hired to supervise the defense system that included ditches, embankments and fortifications in the years 1876-1877.
Almost as soon as the novel begins, María sends Alsina a letter in which she asks him not to look for her. If she is called “captive,” she is one of those who want to stay.
In what could be the beating heart of the novel, María tells the idiot lover that she is living among the Indians with an intensity that she did not know: freedom, open skies, good sex too, she allows herself to show off. She asks him not to rescue her, because she is full of her. She has found a sisterhood.
Washing the dishes
–How does the tip of the story appear in your head that later becomes a book?
–According to the book of Genesis, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” The little mystery is always: what happened before the beginning? What was going on in God’s head? Problems of theology. In my case, The woman of the raid It occurred to me when my hands were moving over the surface of the water in my kitchen sink while I was washing dishes and listening to an old radio program by Alejandro Dolina dedicated to the Alsina ditch. Dolina quoted a phrase by Roca in which he intended to stone Alsina, which said something like: “This idiot from Alsina wants to build the Chinese wall, but the other way around,” or something like that, and that’s when it went off in my head. Of course, the attentive reader can detect a similar phrase in Sergio Bizzio’s novel, At that timea novel that I recommend and a phrase that Roca evidently deserved to know. I did not have Bizzio’s book in mind, but it is evident that in some way the anecdote, in the displacement and circulation of the corridors of time and reading, updated a series of texts and evocations that I will detail in the following response, because words have a long resonance.
–Is there a decision to incorporate references?
–To go from the Bible to the gaucho, the references accumulate and flow, they appear in my books “like spring water.” Any interesting book condenses and organizes series of multiple references in its own way, because writing is organizing a library, and a library is a world. Before the idea of the Alsina ditch occurred to me, I had been thinking about two texts by Kafka, “The Construction of the Chinese Wall” and “The Burrow”, and from time to time I remembered War on evilof Commander Prado, and of Martin Fierro and the Fausto Criollo (my protagonists are like two gauchos who act stupid), and while I was writing I was looking for information… and there appeared the French engineer Alfredo Ebelot, builder of the ditch, and “The South” by Borges, and Vathek, by William Beckford. The combo of echoes and references is assembled.
–One of the themes of the book is the dichotomy “civilization and barbarism.” But in your case is it altered, accelerated, updated?
–Yes. But to the classic dichotomy between civilization and barbarism, between Indians and whites, another is added, that of the civilization of the periphery (Argentina) versus European civilization, represented by the Frenchman Ebelot. In one dichotomy, the opposition is absolute. In the other, the story is told of how the center and the periphery merge… in the periphery. Let’s say, the novel also tells the story of how the Frenchman becomes an Argentine equivalent, and an Argentine woman becomes an Indian equivalent. Explorations of otherness.
–María asks Alsina not to look for her…
–It is a possible reading. But let us also allow the existence of Alsina, who believes it is impossible for María, a cultured and refined white woman, to give herself over to “barbaric enjoyment”, instead of giving herself to him, and therefore thinks that she was forced to write that letter, but in reality she is still a captive whom he must rescue.
–Does the fact that it is a woman who expresses this vision of the “desert” (which is not such) and of a possible existence connect the novel with female empowerment?
-Definitely! What Alsina calls “wild”, for an empowered and joyful woman (so it seems María) is a full-fledged civilization. That separates my novel, as I imagine, from the sappy romantic and historical novels. If before, according to Perón, we were all Peronists, now we are all feminists. A bad guy
–When you write, do you investigate the topics or environments you are entering?
–As I usually get into topics about which I know nothing beforehand, I look for information that I need to write, but its lack does not stop me. I grab Wikipedia, look for a couple of facts and I start there. And if I don’t get them, I make them up. I do not let truth or knowledge stop me, literature may well be the history of false attributions and erroneous understandings and of resistance to all verification. Then history, science, metaphysics, theology, mathematics, psychology, or any knowledge we can list, will have the right to kick. But the reader of fiction may well ignore it all and lose himself in the pleasure of the book, just like the author.
Love failure
–Is “La mujer del malón” a novel of love and madness?
-OK. Alsina, in the novel, dazed by passion, misinterprets all the signs, the messages, the events that are occurring, he twists them until he adjusts them to his conviction that the love of his life wants to return from the tolderías, but is prevented from doing so. do it. The refusal to accept a love failure leads to a megalomaniacal and compensatory construction. But it is clear that Alsina seems like an idiot, and Ebelot another, a little more lucid and cunning, perhaps, like a good “crouched” Frenchman. On the other hand, María… in this novel, women have everything to gain.
–Did those mounds with which the Indians responded to the Zanja de Alsina really exist?
–Yes, I didn’t know that, I thought they were my invention, a hyperbole of a fact I read in Death and transfiguration of Martín Fierro, by Martínez Estrada, many years ago. That the gaucho, while eating a roast, was throwing the bones behind him. I imagined that as an augmented scene and I thought: “If the white people build a wall in reverse, by digging holes, let’s make the Indians be like Chinese and build real walls.” But after the book came out, someone sent me photos from a Uruguayan newspaper that showed mounds built by the Indians, which served as a place of defense and meeting, as a cemetery and ritual setting. I think they call it “Indian hills.” In Uruguay they are considered historical monuments, and here they removed them all. Well, the Alsina ditch is also abandoned.
–There is a moment in the novel (there are several that hint at it) in which you insert a fantastic twist. It could be attributed to that freedom, to that breadth of register that critics detect in your novels…
–Thank you. I hope what you say is true.
–Alsina’s “madness” of digging a trench takes the story to an underground world (one could even imagine that this trench is connected to Sábato’s “The Tunnel”) and is in line with a literary delirium that attributes its realization to a fauna of native rodents that includes a supernatural being. Are you interested in inoculating magic? In honoring the power of invention of literature?
–Poor Sábato and his pestilential simulation of knowledge and seriousness! I read The tunnel A few decades ago, I don’t remember anything. Magic? Yes. Invention? Yes, hopefully, too. Move around its little magical planets.
- The evil woman. Daniel Guebel. Penguin Random House. 126 pages. $16,000.
