Gabriela Cabezón Cámara: “Before, you could be poor and live with dignity.”

Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (San Isidro, Argentina, 1968) says she feels at home in Barcelona. She won the Premi Ciutat de Barcelona here last year for Las niñas del naranjel (Random House, 2024), which tackled the irreverent historical character of the Nun Ensign. Yesterday, she returned as one of the star guests of the KM Amèrica Latin American Literature Festival, which is organizing all kinds of activities until Friday. “It’s like landing here and I’m happy. Shortly after arriving at the airport, I already had a time to go to Barceloneta to do stand-up paddleboarding.”

Her comfort is evident, not only in the way she places her feet on the table, but also because she knows that now, here and in the rest of Spain, readers will be able to get to know her even more with the arrival in bookstores of her first novel, The Virgin Head , thanks to Random House. A book with which she laid the foundations for her literature in 2009 and which follows Qüity, a journalist who falls in love with Cleopatra, a charismatic transvestite devoted to what the Virgin dictates.

School My transvestite friends had the most creative use of language I've ever heard.”

He has always said that this novel is his letter of introduction.

The funny thing is, this book was actually going to be a different one. I was writing about a young woman, about 30 years old, a cocaine addict and, at the same time, a hard worker, living in a paranoid world where nation-states, which are a plague, had fallen, and only corporations remained, which are satanic.

At what point does the plot change to something completely different?

When the dialogues began and Cleopatra's voice appeared before me, without me even looking for it. I think it appeared out of love.

Why do you say that?

It sounds a lot like the voice of a friend I loved, a transvestite girl with whom I formed a beautiful friendship during my teenage years. She and her friends welcomed me. They were incredible. They were about sixteen years old and alone, on the streets, kicked out of their homes and working as prostitutes because they had no other choice.

What did those around you think about you going with them?

At that time, being a transvestite was a crime in Argentina, and just for stepping out on the street, if a police officer saw you, they'd put you in jail. And the third time they caught you, you'd go to a regular jail. Imagine one of these girls in a jail alongside boys. I admired them, and nothing else mattered. They laughed all day, despite their misfortunes. And they had the most creative use of language I've ever heard. A twisting of syntax, a play on periphrasis, a lexicon from the underworld, yet, at the same time, incredibly rich... Artists, in every sense.

Readers have always applauded your language and how you innovate with it.

Nothing they haven't done before. Sometimes you learn more on the street than in school.

You set this novel in the slum, or villa, of El Poso.

I've been interested in this since I was a child, when I saw a photograph of San Isidro, where I lived, taken from the air. On one side, there were six or seven mansions, with swimming pools and all sorts of luxuries; on the other, about 300 very shabby little houses.

Where did you live?

In the middle. I didn't know either world. It was a shock to experience both extremes and to know that I lived surrounded by those contrasts. Not just me, but the entire planet. So, when I started writing, I incorporated it into my literature. And it seems to be a collective and current interest. At least in Argentina, where poverty has fallen from 4% in the 1970s to just over 40% in recent years. Before, you could be poor and live with dignity. Now it's becoming more and more difficult.

What interested you about mixing the mystical with the marginal?

What is considered marginal? These friends of mine, and many characters in my novel, were considered marginal, but they don't seem that way to me. Who decides where the center is and how many people are part of it? As for the mystical, I must say that the attempt to connect with the sacred has always seemed like a very interesting experience to me. And I think that, from the peripheries, one can always think more about it, despite the establishment's insistence that we don't. Precisely because that's where there are the most ties within communities.

There you combine the popular with the queer and the revolutionary—elements that are already a hallmark of your writing.

The only thing I'm interested in is breaking with the dominant order. That's what I've been doing for years, on the pages and in my life.