Gabriela Cabezón Cámara: “In Argentina the good, the beautiful, the desirable, is the European”

In the book The Orange Tree Girls (Random House, 2023) by the Argentine writer Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, the jungle pulsates. The steps of the protagonists crunch as they step on the branches of the trees whose roots surround everything. Their words, descriptions and scenarios bring to the body the lulling breeze of the leaves of the exotic and leafy bushes of the Guaraní lands; You can feel the fire, hear the birds, sense the proximity of a river, suffer the harsh hand of the conquerors who devastated lands and men and women alike. In the story, Cabezón Cámara wanted to think of the jungle as a territory that shows the way in which living beings relate on Earth, but he was also interested in the Conquest, which inevitably led him to think about the nature of a nation as his: “I was educated in a country where they teach you that Argentines come from ships, that we are a kind of Europeans in exile. That culture in which the good, the beautiful, the desirable, is European. The most shameful and humiliating identification with the master,” she says.

To tell this story, the writer Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (San Isidro, 55 years old) immersed herself in the autobiography of a character who marvels and horrifies equally: Catalina de Erauso, the nun Alférez. A Spanish woman who dressed as a man—some critics claim that this is one of the first testimonies of a transsexual person in a historical document—to embark on a journey to Latin America in search of the promises of riches and adventures that that New World promised on the other side of the sea. Lieutenant Nun, Francisco de Loyola, Antonio, Alonso Díaz Ramírez de Guzmán, are some of the names by which this woman was known, dressed and transformed into a man, while she fought in Araucanía against the Mapuches in Chile, or when she served as a merchant in Bolivia.

The author has chosen, as one of her narrative axes, the words “almost without a trace of emotions” that she found in the autobiography of the nun Alférez—the name given to an officer immediately below the lieutenant in military terms—and He added everything he missed. Thus, it is Antonio who writes a letter to his beloved aunt in Donostia, the land where he was born, in which he tells her of his journey from the moment he escaped from the convent in which she was imprisoned, until his stay in the Guaraní jungle accompanied by two little local girls, a mare, a dog and several monkeys who occasionally throw fruit at him from the trees while he writes.

Antonio has evocations as beautiful as they are astonishing about that unknown and hostile territory, which, however, amazes him, as when he describes the end of a day in that paradise: “The biehrío is silent. Every animal that lives in the green tapestry of the vast jungle and the trees and the vines and the flowers and the mushrooms and the mosses stay still. The tatitná, the cloud that rises from the river until it crowns the trees and wets everything, also stops. It's that minute of the day when everything is peace. When even the tides cease. And nothing kills or dies. Except new men, but even they sometimes forget their newness. They sigh and stare at something they don't know what it is.”

It is not the first time that the Argentine author speaks and portrays a story with specific nuances and meticulous brushstrokes about what surrounds her, identifies her and challenges her. Cabezón Cámara is a fierce activist, feminist and socio-environmentalist. She is the author of the novel The Virgin Head (2009), the graphic novel You saw the face of God (2011), Romance of the black blonde (2014) and The Adventures of China Iron (2017) —whose English version was nominated for the International Booker Prize—. In all of them there is an unmatched way of narrating, a vision of the world that has been told little or nothing about the simple things that end up being definitive and symbolically powerful at the end of the day.

Cabezón Cámara talks slowly about the things that matter to him and about all those ideas that one by one pile up in his head until, at a fixed moment, they all connect and then he begins to write, comparing it to another form of art: “I feel literature like music that vibrates in my body. And for me a book is ready when all those musical lines sound to me like a single composition.”

This book, The girls of the orange tree, had a journey of about 20 years, from the moment in which the author fell in love with the image she saw on a canvas, hanging on the wall of the house of one of the people who would later become one of her great loves. . It was the image of a person dressed in armor, holding a spear, “in a fierce gesture” while murdering another person who was lying at his feet: “And below it said: 'The Nun Alférez' and it seemed very oxymoronic to me, the armor thing, spear and murder. Not because the nuns are all good, but I can't imagine them in armor and with a spear. I found it very curious that mix between determination and the ultimate decision to follow one's own desire and the scoundrel. The text is a kind of horror picaresque,” ​​she says.

The Jungle and the Conquest many centuries later

A few years ago Cabezón Cámara left journalism —“and journalism left me,” he remembers with a laugh. He got together with some friends and they went to a “green” place to live among the piece of nature that the territory and its resources allowed them. When she was a teenager, she says, she discovered a form of happiness that, although she already sensed within herself, had not yet manifested itself to her, until she saw the mouth of the Paraná River: “The Paraná River is a kind of monumental animal, full of lives, of other animals. And that is, the Paraná delta, the place where I knew the joy of life for life's sake. It was where I met that form of bliss,” she says.

The Orange Tree Girls It arrives at a complex time for everything that revives and vibrates in it: nature, the possibility of tenderness in the midst of horror; the discovery of new forms of life rich in stories, flavors and textures. The author knows it and she suffers from it. The arrival of Javier Milei to the Government of her country feels like a blow that is difficult to assimilate: “Who was going to tell me that this was going to be like this? We didn't know, that's why we are still so beaten up. I live in a country where a far-right government has just taken office, which is ultra-colonizing. He is like the standard bearer of colonization. If there were a historical viceroys' championship, he would win. He wants to be the best. He takes the IMF's slogans further than the IMF itself. He is like the best student who goes with the apple. And that is to deliver even more than what was already the entire Argentine Republic to looting, to death, to desertification.”

That is why it is also a constant in the author's works to tell the story, her own story and that of those around her, through other positions that enrich a story of otherness. Despite the current scenario, Cabezón Cámara has hope in the world, in that land that touches his feet and that offers him an incomparable, indescribable type of love, and he refuses to think that the organization of Armies and the conception of the other as a thing or as a tool, it is not inherent to the human being. [Era evidente lo que había dicho el capitán. Nunca serían Ejército.
Nunca un imperio. Nunca fundarían nuevos mundos. Qué pobres indios bobos. Quién podría culparlos a él y los suyos de someterlos].

He says this because of the terror that he describes very deeply and almost like that other scenario in his novel, that of the arrival of generals and armies to Latin America, who devastated everything that was put in front of them, but that, in his story, , ends up being another element of the world in which love, understanding and the birth of communities from empathy also have a place. “It is also a bit like how evil usually happens in the world. There are few deeply perfidious beings like Hernán Cortés. Most of the people who do wrong are not beings of disgusting perversion, like Cortés's mega-genocidal type. “Those people who are thinking about something else, even, who don't even realize it.”

The harmony between Basque, Latin, Spanish and a pinch of River Plate

In the text, several languages ​​and forms of communication coexist in a single harmony: “I like the friction between language registers, because the letter that he [Antonio] He Writes to His Aunt is written in a parody of a picaresque novel. Afterwards the narrator speaks in a more neutral Spanish tending towards the River Plate, the girls speak in Spanish, but there are 18 words in Guaraní and some syntactic alterations to give a credible effect. There is a character who speaks like a rude porteño, like I speak, for example. There is some Basque, Latin….”

One of the most powerful and symbolic images in the book, which perhaps contains a fundamental part of the essence of this story, is when Antonio, eager to return to Spain, tells the episode in which, instead of burning Indians, the generals themselves throw themselves into the fire: “One hundred soldiers began to move the logs. Some caught fire on their hands and instead of putting them out, convinced firebrands, they threw themselves into the pink, waxy lagoon, with white skeletons like dead trees in a salt flat. There was nothing else left. The Spanish were the ones who burned. They lit the fire with their bodies and prevented the bonfire from going out with so much movement. They crackled. They burned much better than the Indians. The captain made a mental note of the good combustion of his soldiers; “It could be the case that he would sometimes be left shorter of firewood than of men.”

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