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The human being is a capricious animal. That may still distinguish us from the rest of the planet’s fauna, now that Peter Singer takes out a book and repeats that consciousness is not exclusively ours and that octopuses also have their thing, even if they don’t go to the psychologist. It is hard for him to imagine another species capable of refining the art of desire so much, which is also that of dissatisfaction: work tires us, rest bores us and love is a huge mess, like freedom. Deep down we are quite insufferable.
The protagonist of ‘Mamut‘ (Random House Literature), the new novel by Eva Baltasar, is twenty-four years old and has had enough of the city. She hates her work as a sociologist (“I discovered that sociologists were technicians of emptiness”), although in reality what she hates is the system: “An exhausted person submits to anything.
Eight or nine hours on your feet for a measly salary reduces anyone to an inferior human model. This happens a lot: extend your misfortune to the whole world, or your success. Politics, that is, advertising, works with that engine.
This woman, who we lose, is full of boredom, so she invents an insurmountable whim: she decides to be a mother, but not to take care of her child, but to gestate it. She wants to feel like an animal again. That’s why she too, she flees to the countryside and ends up living in a semi-abandoned farmhouse where there isn’t even a bathtub. And that is a luxury. “I like it. A house without a bathroom. A kind of pigsty. I like the obligation to focus my head on important things. May the need for a bathtub expel banal thoughts.
From there, the story unfolds like a confirmation of the noble savage, a little along Christopher McCandless in ‘Into the Wild‘. He learns to make bread, to chop wood, to kill the cats that invade his home. “I feel as old as the bible,” she celebrates, in sublime prose. She then adopts a dog to quench her thirst for companionship. He admires the pastor he has as a neighbor, a few miles away. He admires his primitiveness, his virility. He is the kind of man who, to calm a toothache, sticks a still-lit ember in his mouth, at the exact point where he feels it, and bites down hard. Why the medicine, why the anesthesia. “I want to be like that too,” he proclaims.
As she reduces her caprices, she becomes an animal, and as she becomes an animal, she believes herself to be happier, even though she is more alone. “I have no money and no job, but I have half a dozen chickens and a sack of cracked corn. (…) The verb that frees me could be “do without” », she affirms, following a logic similar to that friganismo, a movement rejecting consumerism that consists of looking for food in the garbage. She embraces the simplicity of the lack of well-being, because the problems of survival are much clearer than those of comfort: that is why the mammoths were not psychoanalyzed. But how close is the animal to the beast.
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