A little over a year ago, dear reader, I wrote here about sleeping tongue, that great book by the Mexican Franco Félix that, if you didn’t get it then, I allow myself to insist that you look for it and read it at once.
But well, I bring back here that book conceived in the north of the north because about a few days ago, on the tour of the ascending south that we have been doing lately, I read Who we are now, by the Peruvian writer Katya Adaui, who made me think a lot about sleeping tongue, although not only because of its most obvious themes – mother, family, loss and death.
“The previous times and now, death in the stomach. A little lower, at belly level. It fits there, not in the head. Death is uterine. In my native language, death is feminine and it is masculine in another language I know, German: The death. It hurts like menstrual cramps. It is also natalicia, it comes out of the navel like a root and radiates. / I couldn’t put them on the same level but it happened. / The bones of my parents and those of Mara were forming a new skeleton, the same skeleton, the structure of my emotional memory.”
Above all, the peripheral
Who we are now It also made me think about sleeping tongue for how it takes the reader along the roller coaster of its apparently peripheral themes – the very fact that both the central and peripheral themes are only apparently so, already twins the books of Félix and Adaui -: writing, pets, syndromes, reading, illnesses, the passage of time, language, escapes, abuse and anger as contours of care and affection, care and affection as hearts of anger and abuse, intimacy and its many metamorphoses, memory, sexuality, precariousness, pending accounts, settled accounts, internal and external views or humor as an emergency door, a humor remembered, revived or conceived on the page, an elegant and hurt humor , which is sometimes evident and sometimes suggested, as well as suggestive.
“During her illness, I stayed a few nights to sleep with her. / Back in our old room, my sister’s and my names still on the signs on the door, and only one single bed and not two, I woke up at five in the morning surrounded by a tremendous noise. / I covered my head with the pillow and fell asleep again. / My mother went to wake me up. I asked him what that noise was. / She pointed to the court: those birds of the devil (they had escaped or she had freed them) multiplied. And they wake up at the same time I fed them. / The trees turned into a dark forest. They blocked the view, they covered the basketball hoops, and a murmur that could have been melodious escaped from the peaks. / Waking up in hyperacusis robbed the neighborhood of the first pleasure of the day: entering the morning into one’s own silence. / More than twenty years passed. / From generation to generation, parakeets passed down a schedule. “My mother’s insomnia schedule.”
What is strictly related to Who we are now already sleeping tongue, However, it has to do with something that its authors find more important than what their books tell: the way they tell it to us. And the Peruvian woman’s book bets and emerges victorious – unlike its protagonists, who lose everything to the slot machines, in a memorable, terrible and beautiful scene – after throwing their chips in the roulette wheel of the unique books, those who understand that the reader should be challenged and not pampered and that, like life, reading should be governed by a certain dizziness, a certain vertigo and a certain strangeness, not by clarity or impossible balance. Who We Are Now delivers the pieces of a story that must be put together in the head of the reader, who only at the end understands that a life is all the possible editions of it.
Who are we after?
After reading Adaui’s book, in addition to understanding that a life is all its possible editions, we understand another essential issue of literature that is being written in our latitudes: dizziness can be born from certainty, just as vertigo can make balance possible. . And the thing is that the Peruvian writer, through a language—as is clear in the couple of fragments that I have cited—that could not be more direct, manages to turn the language around and transform her prose into the shadow of verse, while at the same time It rarefies and blurs the logic, time or once upon a time of what is narrated.
“How lucky you are, they are very small. They will never fall off. / I enter the shower, I turn my back to him. / Not like me. I breastfed them and they collapsed overnight like the twin towers. / It was an attack, mom, not an accident. / He turns off the faucet and rinses my head. / Well, in the case of you two… it’s both.”