2023-12-02 23:15:39
According to her autobiography, on March 18, 1600, Catherine de Erauso fled from the convent of Dominican nuns of San Sebastián where she was interned. The one who would later be known as Monja Alférez cut her hair, made a new suit with the fabric of her novice outfit and launched herself into the world as a man eager for adventure. Her journey took her to places such as Bilbao, Valladolid or Seville, where she enrolled as a cabin boy on a ship captained by her uncle Esteban Eguiño who directed her to what is now known as Latin America. This entire journey was plagued by crimes of different levels that continued, of course, on the continent that the Spanish had begun to raze two centuries before. The Argentine writer Gabriela Cabezón Cámara has taken this character as the protagonist of her novel The Orange Girlswhich has just been published in Spain with the Random House publishing house.
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Catalina, who in the book is already Antonio, is seen from three perspectives. That of the rogue typical of Spanish literature of the Golden Age, that of the atrocious conqueror and that of the caretaker, without a doubt the most surprising. These different visions are also reflected in the three grammars that coexist in the book as well as the three languages that are interspersed: Spanish, Guaraní and Basque. Thus, the novel extends far beyond the protagonist’s experiences to cover topics that reach the present such as extractivism, the environment or racism, among others. Five centuries after the Nun Alférez made her legend, human beings still have not resolved those issues that lead them to the abyss.
“There is the question of his bravery and his extreme scoundrelism. He is a criminal, he is trash, a character in a horror picaresque. This is what is extraordinary, what is scoundrel, what is brave, what is genocidal, because he participates in the conquest of Araucanía and they give him medals,” Gabriela Cabezón tells elDiario.es at the headquarters of her publishing house in Barcelona. The time in which he lived is, of course, a factor that shapes his personality and that allows him to carry out many of his crimes without thinking about the consequences. For example and of course, the perspective he has of America and its inhabitants. “At one point in her autobiography he describes Lima and the only thing he sees is Spain: the convent, the cathedral, the universities. And if you go to Lima today you see a lot that is not the West, so imagine yourself in 1600-something, of course. I am interested in that very limited view because it does not see the other as exotic, it does not see them directly,” the author asserts.
The writer thinks about the invasion in the present because, in her opinion, “the conquest is not over.” Although ‘officially’ it is considered to have ended when the Latin American states became independent from Spain, those states “are colonial and colonized at the same time,” she maintains. “Maybe that conquest ends when the world ends. Because it is intimately intertwined with what capitalism is, with what extractivism is. And we are not managing to stop it even though it is of interest to all of humanity.” For her, the time has come for the colonizers to unequivocally repair the damage inflicted. “The conquest of America was a genocide without parallel. 100 years after the arrival of Columbus, only 10% of the population that existed when he arrived remained. There are quite a few theories that say that a small ice age occurred at that time because so many people were massacred that the forests grew back and the planet’s temperature dropped. “It was a genocide with a geological imprint,” she maintains. “Beyond asking for forgiveness, as López Obrador says, I would take the gold back. I would simply return it to its legitimate owners, who are not us either, they are the native peoples of America [los que habitaban el territorio antes de la conquista]. Afterwards, the Latin American states have continued to massacre them, they have continued to treat these people not even as citizens but as flies,” he says.
In reality, for Cabezón this concerns all those colonizing countries. The writer advocates for global action in which indigenous peoples around the world lead the fight to survive the Apocalypse that is predicted with climate change. “Both Americans and those from other countries. Because where there is an indigenous people, the forest is better preserved. The extermination of indigenous peoples is the extermination of humanity. They are first in the line of war, they are the first victims, but so are we. And if we didn’t wake up, we went.”
Precisely, one of the characters that accompanies Antonio is nature itself. Part of the story that Cabezón tells is set in a clearing in a jungle that has its own life and language. To get the most accurate portrait possible of that environment, the writer herself delved into the ins and outs of it together with the naturalist photographer Emilio White. One of the most exciting parts of the documentation, which, on the other hand, was not complicated for the author since many of her interests converge in her book: medieval Spanish literature, the culture of the native peoples and the relationship that is intertwined between different languages that coexist. Although the weight is carried by Spanish, the few words that she uses in Guaraní (around 18) and in Basque allow her to capture a particular way of seeing the world. “There is this kind of parody in a loving sense of the Spanish of that time, on the one hand. Then this way of talking about the girls, which I had to invent because they don’t speak in Guaraní but in Spanish with some grammaticality and with different music. And then a third-person narrator in contemporary Spanish” develops the writer.
One of the most surprising parts of the novel is the one that shows Antonio’s humanity. Despite being a bloodthirsty criminal, when he settles in nature with the girls, his caring, protective side comes out. He finally manages to consider two people from that land as people. “There he is forced to stop: his life is like a spiral that has more and more speed and he sees more and more horror. And there, due to the most wrong circumstances, he is forced to stop,” explains Gabriela Cabezón. It is the first time in his existence that he stands freely and not because he is literally detained by authority and even on the verge of hanging. And the little ones are the key to this voluntary slowdown. “Children are a light in almost anyone’s life and it affects them. It becomes part of the fabric of life, it is part of something, it belongs to something. “The most radical transformation there is happens.”
Despite everything, the stay in the jungle is only a parenthesis in the adventures of the Monja Alférez who, upon leaving nature, has to manage to escape the sentence. She even ends up returning to a convent after confessing all of her bloodthirsty acts, including her passage through the world as a man and not a woman. However, despite her thefts and murders, she obtains her forgiveness thanks to the fact that she still preserves her hymen intact (an inexplicable miracle) as certified by some midwives. “She tells it like this in her autobiography. She talks about the hierarchy of sins of the time. Almost serial killer yes, but no whore. A hug, the bishop crying with emotion, a delirium,” the writer responds. “If he became a non-virgin, he would surely end up at the stake,” she says.
The journey itself
This is the fifth book by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara. She previously published two short novels You saw the face of God (2011) y Romance of the black blonde (2014) and the novels The virgin of the head (2009) y The Adventures of China Iron (2017). With this last title she was a finalist in the shortlist of the International Booker Prize (2020) and the Medici Prize (2021). But before becoming a writer translated into more than 10 languages, Cabezón had many different jobs far from the world of letters. “I left my parents’ house when I was 18, very orphaned, without contacts to get jobs, without money,” she recalls. “I worked whatever I could: in a bakery, selling car insurance on the street, entering data for Edenor, selling automatic circuit breakers door to door, in printing presses. I did a lot of different things,” she says.
They were complicated times, very precarious, in which he often had to stay at friends’ houses because he could not afford to pay the rent. Until he finally got a position in the art department of the Clarín newspaper, he achieved economic stability and was able to study a degree in Literature. He was over 25 years old. “I always wrote, but I couldn’t display that writing until I had the mental space of not anguishing about how I was going to live and where I was going to live. So, with stability I was able to begin to give the necessary encouragement to that. And well, one day I finished a novel and here we are,” he says. Now he combines his books with creative writing workshops and media articles, as almost all writers in Argentina do, he says.
Now his immediate plan is to rest and go “rowing to the Paraná Delta.” But like so many other people, she is worried about the political situation in her country. She found out about Milei’s victory in the elections on November 19 on the plane to Spain and she is still in shock when this interview takes place. Her prediction for her immediate future is negative although she does not lose her optimism. “Whatever was already bad is going to be worse because it was already bad. It is a way out of the fury of a country that has more than 42% poverty, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses. But that account does not include spending on housing, because they must think that the poor are owners,” she explains. “Meanwhile, the country is devastated by extractivism in a colonial order, desertifying, losing water. But let’s hope that this darkness makes it possible for us to generate something new because we need it. And if not, see you here soon,” she says without losing her smile.
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