Pedro Lemebel, queer artist and radical provocateur, was acknowledged to be an “essential figure of Chile” in his own country when he died in 2015. His work and life–“more than a writer; he was a free man” (per Wikipedia!)–are now becoming better known in El Norte. A documentary film, Lemebel, came out last year and Lemebel’s book Loco afán: crónicas de sidario (Crazy Desire: chronicles of the AIDS ward) has just been translated into English. What follows is a swatch from that report on gay life and death in a Latin American city of night.
The Death of Madonna
She was the first one struck by the mystery in San Camilo. Around here, almost all the travestis are infected, but the clients come anyway, it seems they like it more, that’s why they want it without a condom.
She called herself Madonna, she used to have another name. But when she saw the gringa on TV she fell in love, went half-crazy imitating her, copying her gestures, her smile, her way of moving. La Madonna had a Mapuche face, she was from Temuco, that’s why we teased her, we called her Madonna Peñi, Madonna Curilagüe, Madonna Pitrufquén. But she didn’t get mad, perhaps that’s why she dyed her hair blonde, blonde almost white. But the mystery had already weakened her hair. The peroxide burned her roots, and her brush filled up with hair. Her hair fell out in locks. We said she looked like a mangy dog, but she never wore a wig. Not even the gorgeous platinum one we gave her for Easter, which cost us a fortune, all of the travestis scraping our coins together for months, peso by peso, to buy it downtown. Just so la linda could go back to work and pull out of her depression. But, proud, she thanked us with tears in her eyes, and, holding the wig to her heart, said stars couldn’t accept such gifts.
Before the mystery, she had the most beautiful hair, the bitch, she washed it every day and would sit in the doorway brushing it dry. We’d say to her: Get inside girl, the patrol’s coming, but she didn’t care. She was never afraid of the pigs. She’d be cocky whenever they’d stop her, shouting that she was an artist and not a murderer like them. So they gave it to her hard, beating her until she was crumpled on the pavement, and la loca didn’t shut up, she kept shouting at them until their van was out of sight. They’d leave her soft as pounded quince, bruises covering her back, her sides, her face. Giant welts she couldn’t cover with makeup. But she’d laugh. They hit me because they love me, she’d say with those pearly whites which later fell out one by one. After that, she didn’t want to laugh anymore, she gave herself to drink, she’d drink everything until she was sprawled out drunk. It was hard to watch.
Without hair, without teeth, she wasn’t the same Madonna who’d make us all laugh when the clients didn’t come. We’d spend nights in the doorway, cold as shit, telling jokes. And she’d imitate la Madonna in her sliver of a skirt, really an oversized turtleneck. A ribbed turtleneck, made of wool and lamé, the kind sold in secondhand shops with American clothes. She’d hike it up with a belt into a chic miniskirt. She was so creative, la loca, she could make a dress from a rag. When she got silicone put in she switched to V-necks. The clients went crazy whenever she’d put her tits on a car’s windshield. And she sounded just like the real Madonna saying: Mister, lovmi plis.
She knew all of the songs without having any idea what they said. Repeating the English phrases like a parrot, adding her own illiterate charm. And she didn’t really need to know what the blonde’s shrieking meant. Her cherry mouth modulated the tuyú, the miplís, the rimernber lovmi, just fine. Closing your eyes, she was Madonna, and you didn’t need much imagination to see her as an almost perfect Mapuche copy. Thousands of clippings of the star wallpapered her room. A thousand Madonna body parts constellated la loca’s heavens. A whole world of newspaper pages and glossy papers covered the cracks, papering over the mold with Monroe winks and kisses, over the fingers with blood wiped on the wall, the marks of that violent rouge covered with snippets of the singer’s jet-set entourage. Like that, a thousand Madonnas orbiting the fly-clouded light yellowing the room, endless reiterations of the same image, in all shapes, in all sizes, at all ages; the star continually reincarnated in the velvet fanaticism of the coliza gaze. Until the end, when she couldn’t get up, when AIDS had laid her out on the mattress reeking of bed. The only thing she asked for as she made her goodbyes was to listen to a Madonna cassette and for us to put a photo of the star on her chest.
Translated from the Spanish by Montana Ray.
You can read an extended excerpt from Loco Akan here.
First’s Zalokar/David Golding steered our readers to Lemebel’s life and times in this 2014 essay. Their testament hints he’s is one of Lemebel’s children, since writers get to choose their own parents. I’m guessing Lemebel would’ve been a proud papi even when Zalokar/Golding points out limitations of their hero’s “metaphysics”:
If anything, for Lemebel, those who can’t be forgiven, those whom it is impossible to forgive, are those who forego the erotics of exploitation: the empty-headed and empty-hearted bourgeoisie. Like Genet, but more humanely, Lemebel draws an absolute and annihilating metaphysical line: the ones who love and are capable of being loved, and those who don’t and aren’t.
Like every metaphysics, the metaphysics of love and hate (which are the same thing for Lemebel) has its limitations. Because a writing like Lemebel’s, a writing so steeped in conviction, can get carried away on the current of its own emotion and forget that there are people (the majority, perhaps) that don’t give a shit whether they’re loved or hated or not.