In his country, Elizabeth Duval (Alcalá de Henares, 2000) is a literary star. In Paris, on the other hand, she is just one more university student. The young writer is pursuing a double degree in Modern Philosophy and Literature at the Sorbonne, where she melts into a mass of students who carry tote bags and gobble vegan paninis under the timid sun that enters the courtyard. "Paris is a way to get away from that existence as a public figure," he writes in Reina (Trojan Horse), his first autobiographical novel, for lack of a better name. The book is both a self-fiction and a critique of its shameless devices. “It is a book reluctantly written, that does not want to be read. What interested me was to reflect on the difficult position in which it places you to sign a book like this, to tell a story with the morbid part that involves all literature of the self, "responds the author. In the book, which recounts his first months as a student in Paris, Duval relates how triptorelin is pricked to block testosterone production in his body. But also, or above all, he narrates his peculiar sentimental history with Aurore, the theses on the underground relations of his intimate friend Théo and his brief roll with Rebecca, a young woman who managed to base a good part of her postgraduate memory on which Sylvia Plath was lesbian and was eaten away by heterosexuality (the jury agreed with her).
The 17th-century art history professor has not shown up this March morning, so Duval - dressed in strict black, except for a fake red leather briefcase - takes the opportunity to answer emails on her next-generation Mac in a discreet corner. A few meters away, two students argue: "Be suspicious of anarchism, Marion, you can't do a teleological reading of history!" Alongside them, two young teachers, realistic facsimiles of Louis Garrel, are involved in another major dispute: “Enough of seeing everything as a relationship of domination! My wife, without going any further, exercises great intellectual power over me ... ". It must be what, in her book, the author calls "the Sesame Street of militancy". Duval's life takes place, like that of so many Literature students, in this territory bordering on parody or simulacrum, sipping teas on the terrace of the Paris Mosque - where Reina just reviewed - and in the bars of bars like Le Nouvel Institut, known for its three-euro pints, or La Petite, in the heart of Place de la Contrescarpe, the epicenter of that unbearably picturesque Paris that only tourists now tolerate.
Despite everything, Duval's official domicile is in La Queue-en-Brie, a “contemptible town with a ridiculous name” –in slang, which is the virile member– located an hour and a half away, where he shares a flat with a Spanish paying 500 euros per head. Even so, the writer spends most of her nights in the Parisian neighborhood of Belleville - in bobo territory, by bourgeois bohème -, where her partner lives, a student whom she quotes in passing in the book, who ended up returning more than a friend. “Despite my income, my parents continue to help me. If not, it would be impossible to continue in a city with such a high cost of living, ”he admits. He lives without more luxuries than drinking sugarcane, eating out, buying books and paying a monthly subscription for the cinema and an annual one for the theater. Last Saturday he danced the new Bad Bunny in a neighborhood association center. On Sunday he stayed home and saw The Cable Girls . And on Monday he read Saussure and Bolaño. The epigraph of the book is by Lacan and Derrida. "At the beginning, it had to be C. Tangana and Rosalía," he confesses. In class, some Spanish-speaking classmates recognize her. Sometimes they call it "the star". "I'm funny," Duval smiles.
Two years ago, the writer divided her time between the French capital and Madrid. “They are two different nostalgias. Madrid shows that the past did not exist. Paris remembers it incessantly. " Despite the proven dryness of the natives, acclimatization did not cost him. To begin with, he was fluent in the language - he started taking classes in 3rd grade and then moved on to the French section - and had a certain affinity for temperament. “Despite the initial bewilderment, I am colder than the Spanish average. In many cases, the distance of the French does not bother me as much. I tolerate the idea of leaving the other person absolutely alone quite well. That almost neoliberal notion of the individual as an island suits me well ... ”.
In the evening, Duval meets at La Plaine, a small bar with no attributes attached to the Père Lachaise cemetery, in that richer but more liveable Paris where he spends his nights. He asks the North African waiter for two pints from 1664. "It is no longer coffee hours," he decrees. Towards the end of the book, he writes: "What fiction is there in Paris to stay and deprive those you love of your presence? It seems that you want to find something in Paris that no longer exists, that ceased to exist long ago." He refers “to that fantasy of a Vila-Matas book”, to the fact of living in a small loft and in an effervescent cultural environment, among beautiful settings… ”Every adopted Parisian knows that this illusion soon fades away. Those who, after this brutal disappointment, continue to appreciate what they have before their eyes, remain in Paris. “I thought I would go to the Sorbonne, but I found myself in the Tolbiac faculty, a swamp with 21-storey towers at the eastern end of the city. It is a city full of ugly buildings, with a lot of noise and tremendous rigidity. Exams are the height of Cartesianism: they force you to develop your ideas with thesis, antithesis and synthesis. "And yet, here Duval continues. "For me, Par This is a place where I can work, write and read, without the maelstrom of being in Madrid, where I have professional responsibilities ”.
In the book he admits missing some things. For example, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. "Yes, but only when I'm drunk," says Duval. "He has gained points over time, regarding the degeneration of Felipe González, for example. There are eight million things that can be criticized and I have never voted for the PSOE, but I still consider that Zapatero was the best president that we have had in a democracy ”. In Reina , the author also criticizes Paul B. Preciado, whom she strips of her status as untouchable by queer theory. It makes him ugly that, in his book An Apartment in Uranus , the author writes that he considers himself “neither male nor female”, but “a dissident of the gender-gender system” who disdains these old categories. "We exchanged emails a few months ago, because he was upset when I called him lord in an article," says Duval, who apologized for his anger. “However, it is symptomatic that the intellectual spokesperson for the trans is always exercised by men, such as Preciado, Miquel Missé or Lucas Platero. They can claim non-binarity as much as they want, but at night they are not afraid when they return home. If you are the one who provokes that fear and not the one who feels it, you must realize that you are not in the position of the oppressed and that, whether you want it or not, you also exercise patriarchy, ”the writer replies. For Duval, the genre has not disappeared and remains "as polarized as ever".
Duval also reacts to the irruption of that trans-exclusive feminism that marked the celebration of the past 8-M. “It seems sad to me, because this degree of violence prevents the emergence of a serene conversation on issues such as feminism, identities or gender as a system, which are debatable topics. Pointing to transactivism as a Trojan horse within feminism seems absurd to me. It is explained by the dispute over the hegemony of feminism between the old guard and current trends, on the background of the political dispute between the PSOE and Podemos. " Duval believes that this conflict arises from the importation into Spain "of Anglo-Saxon analysis and concepts" and that it is explained by "the mediocrity of the Spanish intelligentsia, their inability to generate their own ideas and contextualizations and their servility to the Yankee intellectual hegemony", according to he recites reading a text from his mobile, which will be part of an essay on the trans issue that he prepares for 2021. “In reality, gender relations do not have to do, on a daily basis, with genitality. A huge number of the men who approach me on the street probably imagine me with a vulva. It is a matter of perception and not of reality, which does not support a fat brush analysis, ”says the author. “I am not afraid for myself, because I have a certain cultural capital, but that violence can be reproduced towards more vulnerable people. And that does scare me a little bit. ”
The suspicions aroused by his person, who has become the target of abundant attacks on the networks in recent months, could be the product of a certain media overexposure, which started at the age of 14 with his remembered appearance in El intermedio . “It was a comfortable version of what being trans meant. I took advantage of it ”, he admits in the book. Towards the end of the interview, Duval will point to other factors. "It is a matter of envy and congenital frustrations of some people, and how they tend to belittle your achievements based on the labels that are socially assigned to you," he says. For example, she hates being introduced as a trans and lesbian writer in interviews. "How does that influence what I write? My new poetry collection could be written by a man ”, he says about Excepción , recently published by Letraversal. “In Reina , the word trans appears a total of five times. Trans is a reality that has happened to me, but it doesn't mean that much in my life either. I could not tell you how my existence varies due to the fact that I am trans, beyond having to wear a patch every so often ”.