Facing the corpse of a child, the war ends for two soldiers from opposite sides.
Deserting, before the hallucinatory Mexican desert, is another beginning rather than an end.
Juan and Lazaro have killed so much that they don't even remember who they were.
Now, left to themselves, they discover themselves: a shared story of which only one will pick up pieces, a life that translates into condemnation and a fear even deeper than the desert and its thunderous violence.
“I would like you to be a woman, Lazaro. That way I would be a normal man ”, says Juan in the darkness of a cave. “What difference does it make that we are: fucking men, women; nobody cares, we are nobody, Juan ”, Lázaro will answer before getting on the horse. He will not return, but the discovery of his secret will throw Juan on an impossible hunt.
The story of
Furia
, the first novel by Clyo Mendoza (Oaxaca, 1993), does not begin there, but that search is its starting point.
“I was very interested in talking about dissidents, voluntary and involuntary.
Be it sexual, political, geographic or neural, a dissent is a way of inhabiting the world.
And many times the self turns against the self ”, affirms the author, winner of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz International Poetry Prize in 2018 - the youngest to achieve it, who this Wednesday presents the novel in Spain and Argentina with the publisher Stealth, after the Mexican edition of Almadia.
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Faced with the loss, Juan searches for his father, a man who claims to be a soldier before leaving his home forever.
Vicente Barrera, a string seller who swept through the lives of women who hate and venerate him like a whirlwind, spends his last days tied up like a mad dog.
A morgue worker, Salvador, gets lost in the desert and mistakes the cacti for the person he loves.
On the echoes of the stories of these broken men - and of their mothers, lovers and companions - Mendoza uncovers the animal impulse that cooks and explodes between pain, fear and desire around a landscape that imprisons them as much as the frees.
Argentine cover of 'Furia', edited by Sigilo COURTESY
"They have taught us to believe in fixed ideas: the truth, God, sex, love," Mendoza says of his characters. "Many men are taught to be stoic, strong, untouchable, concepts that in the long run become very limiting and painful." Behind Juan and Lázaro, Sara and Cástula, mothers abandoned to their fate, who cry selflessly, but who also travel the land of the scorching sun among ghosts and wishes in silence. “Judeo-Christian education says that anger, eroticism, have no transcendental power. I think it is something that women have taught us above all, a morality that the State has also used in its secularism as a system of ideological subjection ”, describes the author. “Both are an expression of life.We must rethink why anger and eroticism have been so frowned upon throughout history, they are a liberating and evolutionary force, two traits that make us the species that we are ”.
In the search for answers, Mendoza's characters face hell, which, more than a fire dominated by a horned man, is the possibility of an absolute truth. In the figure of a merchant who wanders the desert telling stories, each character faces the possibility of knowing what he is looking for. "Knowing the objective truth, not our mortal truth, is something atrocious," says Mendoza. "The disease in the book is that lack of truth: am I a dog or do I imagine I am a dog?"
The daughter of a rural teacher who took her children to tour the Sierra Mixteca, Mendoza recognizes the origin of the book in the stories she heard in the mountains as a child and in her interest in those ruptures that mark a life against the established order. “Certain things are never written, but within families, they are told. Always adding something, inventing, so I wonder to what extent memory has modified it to make it more comfortable or challenging ”, he says. Between the blows of violence on the coast attached to the hot land of Guerrero, a conservative education for nothing else, and an obsessive interest in altered states of consciousness, the literature of this 28-year-old writer distills between the vigil and the dream, with a poetic forcefulness and a fierce mastery of the Mexican oral tradition.
She adds the recognition of eroticism "as a pleasure in life, an experience beyond contact with another person." Something he found in Marosa di Giorgio's writer. In the hallucinatory language and in the world of genealogies mixed with beasts, darkness and an exuberant nature of the Uruguayan poet, Mendoza connects with the experiences that she is most interested in communicating. "My childhood was spent in very exuberant spaces, the jungle, the coast, where an erotic experience can be the water, the little fish that are biting your foot ... but
Fury
is a little more dramatic."
In
Fury
the desert also bleeds, decides, and binds the fate of others. The corporeality of the landscape is a constant in the literature of Clyo Mendoza. In her first collection of poems,
Anamnesis
(Cuadrivio, 2016), a fact of intergenerational violence against women and the nightmares of the soul that enters another body, the voices are a flood and the abyss the ocean. In
Silence
(Fondo Editorial del Estado de México, 2018), a man throws his wife into the river in pieces, the woman speaks of horror, but her voice is an echo in the mountains.
“Witchcraft, the relationship with God, there is a fascination there, especially from the perspective of indigenous peoples. The Mayans say that an altered state that can lead to the evolution of consciousness, because it makes you plant death without dying ”, says Mendoza, a graduate in Hispanic Literature from the Metropolitan University of Mexico. Today he is reviewing a documentary by Alain Resnais and Chris Marker,
Statues also die,
a denunciation of the trivialization of the colony on African art.
The desolation of the statues trapped in museums - "all that was destined for altars, natural spaces, to manifest humanity" - leads the writer to think about language, a territory in which she dissects a future struggle and a preoccupation with the past.
"We are deciding if the language is alive or is it something inanimate, not empathetic," he says, and turns: "What worries me most is if the elderly stop worrying about counting because no one listens to them anymore.
What will happen to us when they stop telling us things?
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