In the heart of the heat

I'm not sure if it was two or three issues ago, dear reader, but in the one entitled Knowing how to

, our newsletter addressed a couple of books that traced your interest back in time —or traced back time in your interest— to In a certain way, to discuss the idea of ​​progress or the form that this idea has given to Latin America.

Those who have read it will remember that these were not novels that were satisfied with the mere dissection of an event or a historical person, as if there had been nothing else around that one or those, that is to say, novels of those that They suggest that everything could have been different so that everything would remain the same, but from books that dared to propose radically different possibilities, based on a reimagining of what happened, a new way of looking at the past to imagine another present.

After all, the idea of ​​progress that has been sold to us, writers included, is the Leopard of the history of the continent, as it suddenly seems to have been assumed and faced by literature —perhaps there has not been, until now, more radical in this sense than that of the incredible

, by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara—, as is also clear when one reads

, the most recent novel by Yuri Herrera: “You will see,” said the New Yorker with the joyous purity of someone about to share a revelation—the business of progress is not just knowing how to put a new idea into practice, but knowing when that idea has become old.”

Know to arrive first

Literature, like art and music, tends to be, when it remains in the hands of authors such as those in the aforementioned installment, such as Cabezón Cámara —with that queer, hypersensual and multi-ethnic Martín Fierro— or like those of Yuri Herrera —"What What does the drawing mean?" asks Benito, who has become obsessed with that image little by little, at some point to Thisbee, who answers: "What you see: not by going forward, one abandons what comes behind ”—, the first to reach certain topics, because somehow it is like those slaves of kings, emperors or tlatoanis destined to taste the food of their masters, lest it come poisoned —the terrible risk of this, of course It is, there are plenty of palates that, thinking they are putting something new in their mouths, do not recognize the flavor of a recipe repeated hundreds of times.

Yuri Herrera, it is clear to anyone who has read his previous books —just like, once again, Cabezón Cámara—, in the manner of that character in Beckett who put small pebbles in his mouth so as not to die of starvation but also so that, later, after savoring them, after drooling over those little bits of the world, returning them to it transfigured, he has not only been able to arrive first at certain topics —The transmigration of bodies and The fire at the El Bordo Mine are examples of what has been said—, but he has also been able to arriving first at certain forms, which is the same as giving a recipe that has been repeated hundreds of times an entire character, absolutely new — Works of the kingdom and, above all, Signs that will precede the end of the world, are examples of this other.

We must not forget that, in literature, as has been repeated over and over again here,

Back to that other Gatopardo

I return to the leopard of history, that is, I return to what I was saying about progress, although the subject is not exactly this, but the seeds that the authors of that other installment, that Cabezón Cámara and that Yuri Herrera sow, literary, to contradict it and oppose him

And it is that The swamp station, in addition to arriving first at a new form —remembers, that form, the sculptures that result from emptying molten lead through the mouth of an anthill to later unearth the knot of shining stalactites that, through its multiple and diverse arms, allows us to see that the heart of the anthill is, in reality, the entirety of the anthill—, it operates in a similar way to the novels by Cárdenas, Larraquy and Cabezón Cámara —it takes an instant and a character, although its entrails are even more radical.

captures a certain moment in history, Benito Juárez's stay in New Orleans, but it reconstructs it based on fiction, that is, it imagines, with absolute freedom, what could have happened during that year and a half.

By turning the answer to that question into literature, Yuri Herrera —impossible not to recognize here one of the highest moments in his work, as well as a new door in our tradition— not only finds a different form, not only arrives earlier in a way different from facing a moment, it not only comes up with another way of unraveling the ideas that entrench the past and not only moves the borders between fiction and non-fiction, it also sets in motion a new mechanism, a kind of mobile structure that is capable of carrying the heart of the story from one theme to another, from one character to another, from one idea to another, from one feeling to another.

And it is that, in

, Juárez is only a main character when the main character is not New Orleans or the heat or disease or music or fires, just as the main theme is exile only when the main theme is not uprooting or conspiracy or freedom or slavery or colonialism.

In addition, there is the language

In

there is another character who is also the main character, when this is neither Juárez nor the other main characters I named: the tongue, here, presumes a body.

Just as there is also another main theme, when this is neither exile nor the other themes that I named: language, here, presumes a contradiction.

And it is that language, as in most of Herrera's books, is even the time and space of the novel, the X and Y axes around and from which it unwinds, first, and dismasts, then, the vine of the imagination that weaves this unique jungle that, page by page, swallows up that moment in which Juárez had to go into exile in New Orleans.