The story may be apocryphal, but if it says something about the Artist as a Man of the People, it also presents an interesting avenue to think about literary “fame” as something that’s expressed at the margins. The illicit book trade is a staple of Santiago. Due in large part to the heavy tariffs placed on imported titles instituted in 1976 under the Pinochet regime, this cultural tax was originally an effort to suppress supposedly “subversive” material coming into the country. Even with the fall of the regime and the restoration of democracy in 1991, it never went away.
Mauricio Electorat has said that Chile is its poetry and not anything else. Like many of the military regime’s zealous miscalculations, this tax on the written word created not only a greater thirst for alternatives to neoliberal fascism (Chile still has thriving communist and socialist parties) but also an underground network of pirated literature that became its own radical tradition. While lately it has become somewhat more taboo, the normal run of things for many years was to take advantage of the hyper-affordable printer shops dotting Santiago’s downtown, copying and distributing entire books for friends, family, and customers on the open black markets, in their own diminished but still perfectly readable editions. A book disguised as a book—it’s a concept Lemebel understood well.
Born Pedro Mardones—he changed to his mother’s maiden name in the late eighties—Lemebel grew up in La Legua, one of the most impoverished neighborhoods of Santiago. The son of a baker, raised in a house without books, he first attended vocational high school, where he studied metal forging and furniture making. At the University of Chile, he majored in plastic arts before becoming an art teacher at two local high schools and from which, according to his obituary in El País, he was fired for his homosexuality. After this, he began attending writing workshops around the city because, by his own admission, they were filled with good-looking men and free drinks. In 1983 he won a short story competition with “Porque el tiempo está cerca” (Because the Time Is Near), about a young man who, abandoned by his mother and rejected by his father, moves to the middle-class neighborhood of Providencia to ply his trade as a prostitute. At these workshops, he met writers from the feminist, anti-fascist, and anti-Pinochet literary Left, including Diamela Eltit and Pia Barrios, who introduced him to the underground organizations that operated in the heart of the military dictatorship.
Nevertheless, Lemebel felt ostracized within these groups by their lack of openness toward homosexuality, and in 1986, he staged what he called an “intervention” at a meeting of leftist opposition parties. Dressed in high heels, a hammer and sickle painted on his face, he read aloud his Manifiesto: Hablo por mi diferencia (Manifesto: I Speak for My Difference). While Lemebel specifically calls out the revolutionary organizations’ hostility toward the gay community, it is a work dominated primarily by the paradoxical theme that defined his artistic output: that conformity, in whatever political or social manifestation it occurs, stifles; equality of difference is the only liberating force (“Because the dictatorship will pass / And democracy will come / And then? What will you do with us, comrades?” he writes). Within the year, he would form, along with poet and visual artist Francisco Casas Silva, an arts collective dubbed Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis, or the Mares of the Apocalypse, a play both on the Spanish yegua, a pejorative term for a woman, and the biblical revelation. A joke on its face, the radicalism of the name alone lends a kind of strange feminization to the “plagues” it symbolizes: the fascist dictatorship actively attempting to eradicate subversive elements in society, and that other, more subversive, dictatorship, the AIDS crisis. In their most famous piece, called La conquista de América (1989), Lemebel and Casas Silva dance a cueca, the country’s national dance, atop a map of Latin America strewn in broken glass, at a meeting of the continent’s delegates in Chile. Shoeless, they eventually covered the map in their own blood. The cueca, it’s worth noting, comes from the masculine world of the countryside—yet who is masculine enough to dance it, barefoot, over slicing shards of glass?
Outside of these interventionist performances, Lemebel’s career as a writer came to be defined, for better or worse, by the crónicas he published regularly in many of the country’s alternative and underground newspapers and magazines, only a few of which have been translated into English. A short-form narrative essay, combining reportage, fantasy, and political commentary, the crónica became, at least in the case of Lemebel, an intimate window, a kind of literary peep show, on those parts of society that only occasionally seeped into mainstream consciousness.
I use the word “peep show” knowing full well its implications: and indeed, there is a sense, especially in the most famous collection of these cróncias, Loco Afán, Crónicas de Sidario (Crazy Desire, Chronicles of an Infected) that the author understood the paradox of bourgeois sympathy before it realized it itself: that the marginalized have to be made into an exhibition before they can be made human.
Reading Loco Afan, however, one is hard-pressed to find a desire for sympathy, much less a sense of self-pity. There are certainly pitiable characters in the work, and yet the concept of pity itself is often reappropriated: in the defeated husbands that purchase their fantasies in the shadows of the Independencia neighborhood; in those zombified soldiers roaming the streets under curfew, taking refuge, in an aging queen’s brothel, from their mentionable sins in the arms of unmentionable ones. Lemebel peered into the margins of eighties Chile and found in it the inverse of the “Boom” of sixties Latin America literature for those who were forced to live its implications beyond the pages of novels: the community Lemebel claimed lived under a real magicalism, the latter made of a concoction combining AZT (azidothymidine, an NRTI used to delay development of HIV into full-blown AIDS), and the sense, hardly intuitive, that freedom was a function merely of integrating the consequences it produced.
The “real,” of course, is that none of it is magic: “I’m no fag dressed as a poet,” Lemebel writes in his Manifesto. “I don’t need a costume.” And yet the second element has to hold—because it’s literature, and it’s a certain kind of survival for a community whose survival—literally and figuratively—is threatened, and because the costume is the dress is the poet is the costume, etc., in the continuous loop that Lemebel, in the end, demands be taken seriously, as the truth of itself:
But don’t speak to me of the proletariatMy Tender Matador (2001), Lemebel’s only novel and the only full-length work of his translated into English, takes this onto-aesthetic circle and places it around one of the most dramatic nonfictional events to come out of the dictatorship, the assassination attempt on Pinochet by the FPMR (Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front). The story revolves around the relationship between a young Marxist revolutionary who hides boxes in the house of an aging queen in a poor neighborhood. Their illicit affair builds on a tension set forth by the highly publicized events of recent history—softened (one could say feminized) only by the almost comical caricature of an aging dictator, not unlike that of El General in García Marquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch, dominated by a wife whose only sympathy for the gay community is that they continue to provide her with the beautiful tablecloths and curtains of their mansion above Santiago. Between the physical violence inherent in the young, revolutionary lover and the softer, perhaps more radical violence of poverty, sexual orientation, and political victimhood the main character represents, there exists, in the novel, a connection born primarily from a series of paradoxes, a series of characters disguised as themselves: the brute violence of Pinochet’s terror literally making the dictator shit himself when the guns are turned on him; the macho Marxist bedding a poor, lonely queen. By the end, what the reader is left with is a cancellation of these contradictions, and in its place, what comes next for a country that was half a decade from a national election and the timid return of democracy. My Tender Matador was eventually well-received by the literary establishment of Chile and has been translated into two other languages besides English. It is, in some sense, a comedy of manners disguised in domestic and national drama and, to be blunt, the most accessible of his work, by a long shot.
Because to be poor and queer is worse
You have to be fierce to handle it [my translation].
With that in mind, and at the risk of negating the purpose for which I’m writing this essay, one of the questions that could be asked is whether Pedro Lemebel’s work outside of My Tender Matador should be translated at all. The language of Lemebel’s crónicas, the genre he stuck most firmly to, is thoroughly, perhaps even notoriously, Chilean, flowering in the hothouse of a poor, inner-city metropolis, amongst transvestite prostitutes and accented with a deepening, ignored epidemic. How does a translator deal with, for instance, the prickly joke-tragedy of one of the nicknames, “La Ven-Sida,” for the titular character of “Los mil nombres de María Cameleon” (The Thousand Names of Maria Chameleon)? It has the snappy, memorable simplicity of a shout down the narrow lengths of streets or under the glow of streetlamps, but there the simplicity ends: “Ven” being the command form for “come,” which may also double as a plea to ejaculate; Sida, the acronym for the AIDS virus; put together and replacing the s with a c (any native speaker would hear the phonetic play in their head), one has the word vencida, Spanish, of course, for “defeated” or “overcome.”
Dealing with this “triple inventiveness,” as Gwendolyn Harper put it in her notes on translating one of Lemebel’s crónicas, may shear something from the symbolic universe the writer chose to create in the original version, it’s true. However, it may also be wise to rethink Emerson’s critique of the modern: “We cannot let our angels go; we do not see that they only go out that archangels may come in.” Lemebel’s prose is an example of metalinguistics par excellence—it, like the queens of the La Vega neighborhood it describes in, for example, La noche de los visones (The night of mink coats) is ornamented, baroque, and often so inflected with the micro-dialects as to seem to exist nowhere else in the world. Fine, but how much more glorious will the archangel (Emerson, we can assume, meant by this the “universal”) appear once it’s descended on those places it seems, for whatever bigotry, artifice, or political expediency, least likely to?
In this, Lemebel shares something with other Latin American writers who suffered more than crises of conscience under regimes that despised them. The list is long, but one that comes to mind is the Cuban painter and writer Severo Sarduy, who also elevated the concept of queerness and transvestism into broader metaphysical realms. There are major differences between the two, however: while Sarduy exiled himself to Paris when Castro’s regime began suppressing homosexuals and writers and especially homosexual writers, Lemebel stayed; while Sarduy’s queens, especially in his most famous work, Cobra, ride mystical motorcycles through a kind of ever-replicating mandala of gender-bending subversion, Lemebel’s clack the pavement in heels and wait on often diluted, black market antiretroviral medication, demanding the same space, the same polluted air, the same sacred assholes and diseased genitalia as everyone else. As in life, language too: the difference might be as simple as the methods employed for dealing with similar kinds of tyranny. One is to shame its smallness under the gaze of eternity; the other is to reinforce it where it won’t even recognize itself, and in that way, expose it for what it truly is. In the end, of course, these methods of exposure are vital both where they originate and, perhaps even to a greater extent, as export.
Roberto Bolaño called Lemebel “the greatest poet of [his] generation, even though he didn’t write poetry.” Bolaño arranged for Loco Afán to be published by Alfaguara, a Spanish imprint which also published many of the latter’s novels. Loca Afán was Lemebel’s first international publication, and on the heels of its success, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and conferences on his work were held at Harvard and Stanford. Throughout his career, he would publish three more collections of his crónicas: Zanjón de la Aguada, Adiós mariquita linda, and Serenata cafiola, all of which touch on the themes of poverty, epidemic, and a post-dictatorship Chile. In 2013, he won the José Donoso Prize, already ill with the laryngeal cancer that would take his life less than two years later. When he found out that he had also won $50,000 with the prize, he is reported to proclaim he would use the prize money to buy himself “a new pair of tits.”
And then? It’s a good question. The joke of those theoretical breasts he could have purchased with his prize money—right up there with “Professor” Irwin Corey’s acceptance speech for Pynchon’s National Book Award—begs the question: did literature, in the end, get Lemebel what he wanted? Maybe and maybe not. It is somewhat hard to imagine such a subversive figure being accepted into the establishment; his “pair of tits” seems more like a pound of flesh owed by a part of society that ignored his community for far too long. And in any case, that’s probably not the right way of thinking about it. A better way might be to acknowledge the irony of what came out of his late-career recognition: it might be called the undressing of literature. Beyond, or maybe underneath, the conferences and prize money is the understanding that the purpose of literature is, if anything, to poke at life’s veil of illusions and propaganda. In another irony, and especially in the case of writers like Lemebel, to undress is to dress up. But the result is the same: not only is it vital that there are writers that hold themselves to similar standards, but that their work is exposed to as wide an audience as possible.
