La amante de Gardel by Mayra Santos-Febres
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2/1/2017
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La amante de Gardel by Mayra Santos-Febres
Number 1 The rst issue of Latin American Literature Today features a dossier of Argentine writer Ricardo Piglia, who passed away in January of 2017, and short stories by the outstanding young Mexican author Nadia Villafuerte.
La amante de Gardel. Mayra SantosFebres. Mexico: Planeta. 2015. 200 pages.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The novels of Mayra Santos-Febres suggest a Caribbean aesthetic. Sirena Selena vestida de pena [Sirena Selena] tells us of the negotiation between
Editor's Note
conventional and non-binary genders; Cualquier miércoles soy tuya [Any Wednesday I’m Yours] deals with
Chronicles
disrupted emotions; Nuestra Señora de la noche [Our Lady of the Night] addresses race from a perspective of marginality; Fe en disfraz [Faith in disguise] does the same from the perspective of the academy; and Yo misma fui mi ruta [I Was My Own Route] explores the avatars of the national poet of Puerto Rico, Julia de Burgos. In her latest offering, La amante de Gardel [Gardel’s lover], the negotiation takes place from the perspective of the medical establishment, on one hand, and on the other from the knowledge of Mano Santa: a herbalist, healer and the grandmother of the surgeon Micaela Thorné, who negotiates herself with those who hold power. The bardic figure of Carlos Gardel (1890-1935) gives structure to the narrative through the anxious emotion of his interracial relationship with Micaela, which includes all the problems that such relationships entailed in the Puerto Rico of the 1930s. When Gardel tours the island, he sings in the Teatro Paramount in San Juan and in other towns. His story comes into contact with Micaela’s as he tells her about his life, and she simultaneously narrates both her own experiences and those of the Franco-Argentine singer, actor, and composer. The famous artist’s career is explained in the light of Micaela’s words, through the prism of love, starting with Gardel’s humble origins in the barrio of El Abasto in Buenos Aires. Nobody knows him like she does. Their http://www.latinamericanliteraturetoday.org/en/2017/january/la-amante-de-gardel-mayra-santosfebres
Editor's Note: January 2017
"A Visit to the Casa de hablas" by Néstor Mendoza
Poetry Two Poems by Mikeas Sánchez Dos Poemas de Igor Barreto Three Poems by Ana Enriqueta Terán
Essays "Planet Caicedo" by Alberto Fuguet
Dossier: Ricardo Piglia Piglia in Translation by Sergio Waisman A Scene of Translation: An Interview with Sergio Waisman by Denise Kripper "Literature is a Society without a State": An Interview with Ricardo Piglia by Oriele Benavides The Real and Its Secret Miracles: An Interview with Ricardo Piglia by Rodrigo Blanco Calderón
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La amante de Gardel by Mayra Santos-Febres | Latin American Literature Today
The 17th Rómulo Gallegos International Novel meeting is like a tango because,HOME as Gardel says, “tango is black.” The novel is a MAGAZINE PUBLISH IN LALT GET INVOLVED Search LALT Prize Speech by Ricardo Piglia rewriting of tango songs like “El día que me quieras,” “Sus ojos se cerraron,” or ABOUT “Volver” with a Caribbean rhythm. This rhythm ignites the prose, which swells into
erotic literature. Gardel’s lover (Micaela) is a one-man woman, and the erotic encounter between El Zorzal (Gardel) and Micaela is narrated in self-sufficient poems of singular beauty, like the one that describes the meeting of their bodies with the cadence of a tango: “We dance on time and not on sand; or perhaps on a clock made of sand, on a sandy song, what do I know? His slow, subtle steps slide into the gaps between mine. Then Gardel did a turn that made me lose my balance, and he took the chance to lean over me. I thought he was going to kiss me, but he didn’t: he continued with his face touching mine, looking over my shoulder while he leaned against me.”
Featured Author: Nadia Villafuerte "Happy Box" by Nadia Villafuerte "Whadayalookinfor?" by Nadia Villafuerte "Cosmo Girl" by Nadia Villafuerte "Turn Around?" by Nadia Villafuerte "An immigrant never really arrives": An
The most surprising part of this offering from Santos-Febres is the simplicity of her
Interview of Nadia Villafuerte by Arthur Dixon
language, the explanation as clear and precise as a medical treatise, when she describes the effects of a medicinal plant that will counter Gardel’s syphilis—a condition that will also afflict his lover, Micaela Thorné, at the end of her life. The contamination of one
Interviews A Conversation with Jorge Edwards: Between
blood with another, the exchange of unhealthy bodily fluids, is a metaphor for how
Fiction and Reality by Jorge Eduardo
society perceives interracial relationships and how Gardel’s coming betrayal is a product of the island’s social conventions. But, as Micaela says toward the end of the
Benavides and César Ferreira
novel at her moment of professional triumph: “I became the only black woman who didn’t clean floors, who didn’t serve food, who walked into the hospital through the main entrance. The only black woman who wasn’t there only so they could control her ability to give birth to one child after another, a prisoner to the bestiality of the flesh.” The essential resentment that marks Micaela’s character can be explained as a reaction to the spaces that have been denied to mixed-race and black people over the course of Puerto Rico’s checkered history—a resentment shared in counterpoint with the story of Ricardo, a black man and one of the key musicians in Gardel’s band. The wisdom of the grandmother Mano Santa and of her granddaughter, the future doctor Micaela Thorné, is manifested in the qualities of a plant capable of alleviating and possibly even curing syphilis. In a moment of absolute vengeance, Micaela chooses not to administer a pure dose of the plant’s extract to Gardel, just as they bid each other farewell, when he tells
Nota Bene Nota Bene: January 2017
BOOK REVIEWS Esencial 1982-2014 by Andrés Morales La forma de las ruinas by Juan Gabriel Vásquez La amante de Gardel by Mayra Santos-Febres Lengua de señas by Enrique Winter soledad.piedra by Edson Lechuga La noche de la usina by Eduardo Sacheri
her, “Ciao, negra, look after yourself.” Before this, the narrator clarifies, “I was sure that, if he survived the dose, his throat would never grow inflamed again.” But the greatest treachery, which embitters Micaela’s life, takes place when she reveals the
Yo también me acuerdo by Margo Glantz
secret of how to distill the plant’s essence to another doctor, Martha Roberts, in the Escuela de Medicina Tropical [School of Tropical Medicine]. This secret is the key to her wisdom, and thanks to it she will receive a coveted grant allowing her to become a
Historia oficial del amor by Ricardo Silva Romero
La nostalgia esférica by Federico Vegas
El sol y la carne by Camila Charry Noriega
medical doctor in the North. It is also a betrayal of Mano Santa, her grandmother, the herbalist and healer, who jealously guarded the secret. When she betrays her people, she also betrays herself, but she manages to access the spaces of power occupied by whites. It’s a tit-for-tat situation for the character who, at the end of the story, explains her position as a complete woman through a series of rhetorical questions: “Maybe I’m a woman now that I’m dying alone in this ranch in La Doradilla? What does it mean to be a woman these days: a game with death, an echo that rings from a distance? After everything I’ve been through, is it possible to go back? Now that we’re liberated from the body, is solitude the name of our journey?” This book marks Mayra Santos-Febres’s fifteenth year writing novels, since her career as an international novelist began in 2000 with the publication of Sirena Selena by Editorial Mondadori in Barcelona. The novel was her first international success. With it, she spurred on the internationalization of Puerto Rican literature in the twenty-first century—a process that had already begun in the twentieth century thanks to figures http://www.latinamericanliteraturetoday.org/en/2017/january/la-amante-de-gardel-mayra-santosfebres
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La amante de Gardel by Mayra Santos-Febres | Latin American Literature Today
like Luis Rafael Sánchez, Rosario Ferré, Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá, and Mayra Montero, HOME MAGAZINE PUBLISH IN LALT GET INVOLVED and even more recently when Eduardo Lalo won the Premio Rómulo Gallegos in 2013.
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La amante de Gardel is a perfect novel. In the book, discourses of race, diaspora, and gender intersect like in no other narrative work by Mayra Santos-Febres. Here, the writer meets her words head-on, finally writing the novel that she has been rehearsing for in all her previous works, giving us a complete and well-rounded product. The career of Carlos Gardel and his time in Puerto Rico mark the modernization of this Caribbean island as an experimental space for performances that would later spread throughout Latin America. Gardel’s encounter with the Boricua diaspora in New York internationalized his career, and the singer realized that he could no longer continue singing for Madrid, Paris, or New York: he had to sing for all of our America. Daniel Torres Ohio University Reviewer Daniel Torres
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