'The Girls of the Naranjel', by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara: adventures in the jungle of Monja Alférez

Portrait of Catalina De Erauso by Juan van der Hamen (1626).ALAMY / CORDON PRESS

For the Argentine author Gabriela Cabezón Cámara—finalist on the

shortlist

of the Booker International Prize (2020) and the Médicis Prize (2021) for

The Adventures of China Iron

—books are made in layers.

Slowly.

One thing unfolds, then the other.

Each image is carved.

It is being polished little by little.

Like this, until it shines.

A craftsman of the language.

And of time.

Her last work took six years.

For six years she worked on writing a novel that is based on historical testimony, to advance against genres and against anthropocentrism, and to respond poetically to the call of the jungle.

The Naranjel Girls,

published by Random House in 2023, is a novel inspired by the legendary Nun Alférez, who was born in Spain as Catalina de Erauso in 1592, fled from the San Sebastián el Antiguo convent where she was a novice, and became a transvestite. as a man to the Conquest of America, under the name of Antonio.

Muleteer, shopkeeper, soldier, cabin boy and page, Antonio took up the sword and plunged the dagger.

He committed atrocities and disloyalties to his army, and thanks to the Virgin of Naranjel he managed to save himself from the gallows and escape from a military barracks with two starving Guaraní girls, captured by the Spanish.

Along with Michi and Mitãkuña, who hides as best he can in his clothes a pair of monkeys that cling to his legs—Tekaka, the largest, and Kuaru, the smallest—, the mare Orquídea and her foal Leche, and the dog Roja who He follows them, goes into the jungle.

The Paraná jungle that Cabezón Cámara herself was encouraged to explore in the company of photographer Emilio White, to stop in silence to see and hear and smell and feel the creatures that inhabit that landscape, and then describe in her book that the jungle is a animal made of many: “To cross it it is not possible to walk in the way of people;

There are no roads or straight lines, the jungle makes you its clay, it forms you in the shape of itself and now you fly an insect, now you jump a monkey, and now you crawl like a snake.”

However, Antonio has a promise: to write a long letter to his aunt, prioress of the convent from which he escaped as a novice, where he tells her all his adventures.

The 25 years she lived since she fled the cloister, when she herself designed the man's suit that would open the doors to the world ("My entire body stretched, aunt, my muscles forged: I was free. The world seemed within reach" ), going through the crimes he committed in America, until reaching his last days, already a fugitive again, now trapped in the jungle.

The Naranjel Girls

uses the metric of the Golden Age and breaks it.

She alters it syntactically.

He rewards her with a present.

She pays tribute to him in a mix of languages ​​ranging from Guaraní – she uses 18 words – to Basque songs, to Latin prayers.

It also includes the music of the jungle and the creatures that inhabit it (“The croaks. The roars. The hums. The trills”), in addition to conceiving them as subjects of experience.

Creating a world made of many worlds.

Polyperspective, not univocal.

A literary display that starts from the historical phenomenon of conquest to think about the contemporary extractivism that stalks Latin American territories.

A story that tells the destruction of America, but also life.

How connections and respect between human beings and animals and their environment can build networks that prevail in the face of brutality.

And they will manage, perhaps, to save us.

Look for it in your bookstore

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