Camila Sosa: "Work is the worst invention in the world, right now we could be bathing on the beach"

Camila Sosa (La Falda, Argentina, 40 years old) froze her smile in November.

She “she was at the Guadalajara Book Fair in Mexico and a journalist told me live on television: 'Well, now you can die in peace.

You already wrote

and I don't think you'll write something so wonderful again '... And she said it to my face! ”, she recalls with her eyes wide open, almost bursting with laughter, still not believing the audacity of that poisoned praise.

Sosa, who speaks of herself as a “transvestite” and not as a “trans” because that is what they were called in her time in Argentina and for claiming the social uprooting that being transvestite entailed, knows that her writing is much more than that debut novel with the that short-circuited the panorama of autofiction.

Although she had already published poetry (

), an autobiographical essay (

) and had taken off as an actress and theater creator in Argentina — where she produced another testimonial hit that led the public to forge tickets to see her undress in the show

—, it was with

(Tusquets, 2019), the one with which they tell her that

, with which everything changed in her life.

"The rings can also be defense weapons," says Camila Sosa, who does not take beauty and appearance as "a minor issue." Gianluca Battista

Translated into German, French, Norwegian and Croatian,

It is about a fascinating group of transvestites who prostitute themselves in Sarmiento Park and decide to raise in community —and in secret— an abandoned baby in the weeds of their workplace.

A mixture of personal experience (Sosa prostituted herself while she was studying Audiovisual Communication) and pure magical realism that was not fully understood as such (the author confirms that she is still asked what happened to Tia Encarna, a transvestite who squirts airplane oil out of her breasts and is over 170 years old), the novel she wrote about partying and the violence that underlies the lives of “barren, sour, dry, bad, ladino, witches, infertile bodies of earth” smashed records.

She won the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award in 2021,

the Prize for Narrative in Spanish organized by the Finestres bookstore in Barcelona and the Grand Prix de l'Héroïne.

An earthquake that contrasts with those who want to corner their career.

“

He has given me money, a lot.

I have seen the world, I have gained a social waist and maybe even self-confidence, something that I cannot boast about because I tend to distrust myself a lot”, she says, recently arrived from the Madrid Book Fair, after spending a relaxing day sunbathing on Barceloneta beach —“I didn't swim because I didn't want to leave my mobile in the sand”— and “crying like a fool”, moved by the impression of seeing Marguerite Duras' true lover in a photo in the retrospective dedicated by La Virreina.

The author passed through the Catalan capital causing sighs, exhausting everything in her path, from the presentation of her new book with Marc Giró to a talk on the power of the lullaby at Primavera Sound.

She, who presumes to be "always on the alert", seems to ignore the halo of fascination that she arouses.

, inspired and moved by reading her novel.

“I understand that my story is very attractive because it is that of a person who has returned from the war safe and sound, because it responds to that hunger for tragedy and heroes.

But I'm not going to stay there”, she predicts, rejecting labels.

Against the writing of the margins

If something anguishes this scathing and thoughtful creator, it is to end up punished on the shelf reserved for those deviated from the heteronorm, as if being born poor and a transvestite did not belong to her occupying the center of History.

“It scares the hell out of me that they say: 'Well, there's the author of the margins, the one with the transvestites,'” she laments.

“Many journalists speak of my writing as marginal, as if my characters were outside of society.

How much passion for ignorance is there to think that they are not central, right?

My life is led by those people.

Beyond transvestites and homosexuals, my grandparents were illiterate, I went to a rural school and lived in poverty, without access to electricity.

These characters are central in the lives of many people ”, she claims, politicized to the core,

Perhaps as a response "to that elite that resists keeping cultural production within a single class" and against those who seek to launch it into that transvestite niche that sounds like a tomb, Sosa now publishes

(Tusquets, 2022), an anthology of stories in which, of course, there are thieves,

racist grandmothers and overtones of self-fiction —the first story, about the legend of the Deceased Correa, works as a prologue and hinge on

—.

But here there are also nuns called Shakira who belong to deliriously terrifying sects, dystopias about hatred and disgust for what is different that don't sound so remote either, rent-a-girlfriends and even stories that are close to the magnetism and legend of Billie Holiday.

“There is a transphobia that thinks that we cannot make language.

I visited a trans community center in Bogotá and the girls told me that in the writing workshops they were always asked to tell their story.

That is an error.

What they have to do is invent: transvestites have always been storytellers and all the time we have magnified our wealth, our poverty, we disguise a very miserable life.

I don't understand how it can be that we are not allowed to make fiction”, ditch.

It is taken for granted that there is nothing worse than prostitution.

I don't know if it's worse to be married in the church to a batterer or to a violent man who is constantly discrediting you."

And to be able to imagine you have to charge.

He still relives the blush she felt when she discovered that renowned Argentine authors were "trafficking" with PDFs of novels (among them,

), and how they excused themselves by belittling the value of those texts.

“They are the ones who tell you that 'writing is not a job, it's giving vaccines', you know?

Coincidentally, they are the same ones who later consider us less writers because we sell more than the rest.

As if the people who write did not have economic needs.

As if we all had enough time to sit down to write and we didn't care if it sold or not.

Also, there is nothing uglier than robbing a transvestite, ”she denounces.

And she is especially annoyed that their social class is ignored.

Like the razor-sharp portrait she makes of the rich transvestites, whom she nicknames "las cuervas" in

, those who walked around in

authentic in their park, with fine-haired wigs and perfect manicures, and they prostituted themselves without charge "because they played at living a life that was not their own."

The origin of money, at Sosa's house, always on the table.

“It is that we never talked about how impoverished we were and the work that society did to impoverish us, to leave us cornered in prostitution or now as activists.

We even come to assume it, without having faith that we are capable of occupying other places in cultural production, without having to be related to stardom, hairdressing or kindness.

Because this is another, they constantly ask us to be good.

They accuse me of not being humble, they say that I have an attitude of eating the world.

But I live a modest life, I am not ostentatious.

Actually, what they want is to see me fall, ”she challenges.

She is trained in preventive defense.

Like that instinct of the transvestites who quickly and agile climbed the trees in the park to hide from police raids or carried "tremendous rings to attack a client in an emergency."

She rejects the condescension with which prostitution is treated.

“It is taken for granted that there is nothing worse.

And I don't know if there's anything worse than that.

I don't know if it's worse to be married in the church to a batterer or to a violent man who is constantly discrediting you, in private and on the street”, she reflects.

And she alludes to Maria, the protagonist of

, one of Joan Didion's novels that you just finished reading.

“Look, they force that woman to have an abortion, to smile, to not be able to say what is happening inside of her.

I read this and I think: 'Well, I don't know if it was better to be in the park with them'.

He does not deny that in his texts he also seeks "revenge" for the murky and wild episodes on which they work sex, but he also opens an ambivalent path to his own experience: "There is a violent spirit, but there were also nights amazing, amazing.

Clients who were beautiful, who in addition to treating you well, in addition to making love to you, paid you.

So you say, 'Well, really, is it worse or not?

And you start breaking it down, because I also cleaned houses and toilets or bidets full of shit and there I thought: 'Well, this is definitely worse than sleeping with a guy with money'.

It does not find differences with the logic of supposedly decent employment.

“The system is prostitutive and work is the worst invention in the world.

Right now we could be bathing at the beach.”

“An old woman inside a forty-year-old”

Impeccable with her appearance, she feels "like an old woman in her forties."

Time in transvestite life takes on another dimension.

"She ages rapidly, as dogs and wolves age: one year of ours is equivalent to seven human years," she writes in

And she confirms it in person: “I am physically very tired.

He thinks that I have been the recipient of a lot of aggressiveness, of insults.

That exhausts you a lot because not letting your guard down is never very tiring.

And with all the transvestites I talk to, we always repeat the same thing: 'I'm so tired'.

In addition, we got the energy from the drug, and that ages a lot”.

She is still trapped in that tyranny of being beautiful, you have to suffer.

“There is something in the interpretation of beauty that has to do with pain”, confirms who in his youth spent an hour and a half a day pulling out the hairs on his chin with eyebrow tweezers, one by one, in front of a mirror of increase.

Last year she went through something similar again when she had her breasts operated on.

“When I put on my boobs I spent two months without being able to force myself,

I was wearing a girdle, a bra that oppressed me sleeping on my back.

There was no way to sleep any other way and when he went out on the street she lived it with real terror.

He was afraid of bumping into someone”, he recalls, to exemplify to what extent this, as much as some frivolize it, “is not a minor issue”.

The hypocrisy with which we treat the reality of bodies bothers him.

“It's like the meme that says, 'Who says money doesn't matter?

The rich people.

Who says beauty doesn't matter?

The beautiful people.

Now there may be many girls who do not wax, but there are also many who spend fortunes on false nails.

And not only does the physical canon hurt, it ensures that "desire produces suffering", from the romantic to the carnal.

“I took a bottle of pills for a disappointment.

I spent many hours thinking about men who didn't love me or who didn't know how to love me.

There is a complexity in the relationship between guys and transvestites.

There is a social apparatus that is saying: 'Not those, you

n't love those'.

But at the same time, Argentina is that country in which it is shouted: 'Who hasn't eaten a transvestite at some time!'

I remember in the

gay

, that the most handsome boys in the city, from the most luxurious neighborhoods, came to look for us.

I already spent a lot of time and energy crying for those men, for those kinds of men.

Those are lost loves and I no longer suffer ”, she clarifies.

Although she perceives progress, she is convinced that masculinity is built on something very fragile.

“My father made a very big change.

Now even he washes the dishes!

I don't know what it was.

The same because he had no other left with me.

I guess he thought, 'Either this, or I grow old without one of my daughters.'

That's fine, running out of options."

Something that has also happened to her current partner.

"He's a bit like that too.

I have known him for 16 years and it has been very difficult for him to open up to me: talk to his friends about me, go out with me on the street.

It's a long process,” she reflects.

She believes that in life, the key is the ellipses of ten years: “If you think about it, everything comes down to that: the career of a writer, that of an actress, a love, a reconciliation, healing.

Everything in life is, always and at least, a decade”.

It makes sense, in transvestite logic,

that's 70 years.

"The way bitches age."

book cover 'I'm a fool for loving you', CAMILA SOSA VILLADA.

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