Mammoth: Eva Baltasar
A wild untamable heroine struggling to survive on her own terms
“As far as I was concerned, the job market, the legal one anyway, was a scam. When I worked for someone else, I gave them the most precious thing I had, more precious than my time or body, more precious than the meaning of the word itself: my dignity. Every time I signed a contract or agreed to a trial period, I got the sense I was selling myself to an intermediary who confiscated my passport and got fat at my expense. As I rode the metro home one evening, tired after a long day of killing lice and picking nits from the heads of pre-schoolers, I felt nostalgic for my university days. It was a journey to weakness that made me keenly aware of the power of exhaustion. People can be persuaded to do just about anything when they’re exhausted. Eight, nine, ten straight hours of work for a lousy paycheck can reduce anyone to survival mode. You lose the ability to think of anything but the basics: hunkering down in one place for as long as it takes to eat and then, when the day is done, sheltering in some hole from the dark and the inclement weather. Thousands of years ago, we referred to these holes as caves. Now we call them leisure, exercise, social media. We retreat to our depressing cells and feel smug, convinced that we are the lucky ones.”
I’d love this book for this passage alone, but I love Eva Baltasar’s trilogy of novels, and I’m slightly sad to have finished the last one. The narrator wants a life outside of the conventional, as you may have discerned from the quote above. She wants to be alone, but she also wants to live through every experience…and experiences rarely can be had alone. The one she most hungers for is pregnancy. Her twenty-four birthday party is painful, self-degrading attempt at sex with a man to further that goal. It fails. She endures sex with random men whenever she find them with the desperate hope that she will become pregnant. She leaves the Barcelona, that well-oiled machine, for a remote countryside village. Her countryside adventures are not remotely pastoral nor idyllic, thus they feel more reflective of the reality of enduring life at the mercy of the elements without the insulation of wealth. She meets a shepherd who fascinates and repels her in near-equal measure, gives her work of more than one kind, and feeds her lamb and almond cookies. She battles feral cats (if you’re squeamish about animal cruelty, avoid this book), learns to bake bread, adopts a mutt that saves her in more than one way, and fights, over and over, to live a full life on her own terms.
Like Constance Debré or Qiu Miaojin, she sees herself as essentially alone even when surrounded by others. Like them, there’s a hunger, a wildness, an aloneness, and the fight to live a life outside the bounds of the normal. Each of these writers is gay, so you could say that desire is to be outside of the heteronormative - but it’s more than just that. Their writing resonates more deeply with me than, say, Carmen Maria Machado or Yael Van Der Wouden, and I think it’s because they, like me, see lesbianism as far more than seuxality, more than being with someone of the same gender and living what Debré would call a bourgeois life, and what I’ve called (being American) call a “white picket fence life”.
