Books

World Books Interview: Death and the Beauty Salon

By Bill Marx

Mexican writer Mario Bellatín’s growing international literary reputation as a leading Spanish-language experimentalist suggests that he’s a pop innovator focused on the grotesque, playfully obsessed with the consciousness of the outcast. A recent New York Times interview piece on Bellatín, who was born in Mexico City in 1960, underscored the autobiographical impulse behind the image.

The article observes that “the writer is missing much of his right arm, the result of a birth defect that he says he ‘plays with, takes advantage of and acknowledges’ in his work by ‘writing with my whole body.’ He jokes about ‘my left hand knoweth not what my right hand doeth,’ and depending on his mood, he sometimes appears in public wearing a prosthesis with an attachment, chosen from his collection of more than a dozen, that gives him the appearance of Captain Hook.”

Friend and fellow writer Francisco Goldman adds in the NYT article that “one of my favorite aspects of him is this sense that he is writing for all the freaks — either literally freaks or privately and metaphorically, that he really touches us.” But “Beauty Salon,” the first work of Bellatín’s fiction translated into English (by Kurt Hollander), turns out to be a resolutely off-key but acutely haunting fable that deals with how we confront the inevitability of death.

The slim volume is set in an unnamed city victimized by a mysterious plague (AIDS?). A gay transvestite transforms his salon into an unauthorized haven for the sick and marginal called The Terminal, a peaceful place for the afflicted who have no safe place to die with dignity. However, despite the narrator’s heroic service to suffering humanity, his dreamy yet narrowly calibrated voice remains disturbingly indifferent to the pain and loss around him, his mind mixing chaste memories of his sexual past and stoic reflections on the implacable illness with his passionate love of exotic fish. The savage imperturbability of “Beauty Salon”‘s tone is its most striking quality.

The World’s Bill Marx e-mailed Mario Bellatín some questions about the novel and his literary views. Christopher van Ginhoven provided the English translation.

The World: In what ways is “Beauty Salon” representative of your work? Many critics talk about your impishness as a writer, but this short work feels disturbingly serious.

Bellatín: I pretty much wrote this book in a state of unconsciousness, while recovering from an emotional crisis, so that many of its characteristics became apparent to me only after it was finished. Curiously, I discovered that the book had become the repository of a series of motifs I’d been working on almost since my childhood, for instance, the loquacity of silence, the creation of closed, self-contained worlds, ruled only by their own rules, and the body as a central element of these universes—in my view, the more luminous the more abject.

The World: Would you consider yourself a “black humorist”?

Bellatín: I try not to think of myself as being anything, because I know that the day I feel I’m carrying with me some kind of label will be the beginning of the end.

The World: At one point the narrator talks about feeling “a somewhat sad joy when I realize that for the first time I’ve imposed a certain kind of order upon my life, even if the way I have achieved it does seem a bit gloomy.” Was your challenge as a writer to evoke that “sad joy”?

Bellatín: Perhaps, and I suffer more and more every day on account of it. As time goes by, writing beings to unravel for me. Before, the need, the desire to fill one blank page after another, was more blind, more brutal. It seemed to appear out of nowhere, and my mission as a writer was only to placate that word, to give it a sense, to make it transmissible. I now realize that the game was in a certain way about creating realities where reality would actually be real, spaces in which I in the first place could enjoy the true life, rather than the pale imitation in which we are immersed every day. I discovered this precisely on the occasion of a theater adaptation of “Beauty Salon.” As a spectator of that play, I was able to confirm that, when it comes to reading themselves, writers are incapacitated. In this case it had to be an artistic manifestation of another sort that helped me to see the key to everything.

The World: Critics have compared the nameless plague in “Beauty Salon” with the mysterious afflictions in Albert Camus’s “The Plague” and Jose Saramago’s “Blindness.” Is there a political significance to the book’s vision of people on the margins of society facing an implacable illness?

Bellatín: At the time I wrote “Beauty Salon,” I was developing a kind of Biblical trilogy, and this book belongs to the theme of the plague—to its constant recurrence, to the different disguises it adopts on each appearance, and to the rhetoric that almost immediately grows around it. And as I wrote—as I said, in a state that was like that of a zombie—people were dying around me in the most atrocious way and in the midst of an even more terrifying social discretion. These people, these friends, didn’t even have the right to complain, to scream, to be heard by anyone before they died. It was as though what existed didn’t actually exist. Reality was creating a book that lived up to what I had always wanted a book to be. Maybe this one contains something of the echo of a voice that is trying to pierce through a gag.

The World: You have referred to literature as a “game.” Does your subversion of literary tradition owe anything to writers from the 1960s or later? Do you see yourself as a “post-modern” writer?

Bellatín: I still don’t understand very well what people call post-modernism in literature. And in spite of not understanding it, I have seen it come into the world and die as a term many times. That’s why I think it’s something dangerous. It has the capacity to accommodate to any kind of situation that in some way escapes a more traditional canon. The only thing I believe in relation to this topic is that literature can’t be something that doesn’t move, something static, as certain literary studies pretend to approach it. Literature must be in constant motion, forward and backwards, discovering again what has already been discovered, and plowing fields it’s supposedly not concerned with. In a way, I believe that each writer must reinvent writing, begin from the presupposition that there was no one preceding him or her, perhaps only the sacred phrase, now so trite, which states that first there was being.

The World: The narrator in “Beauty Salon” makes a point of banishing all religious imagery from the Terminal. In what ways has your conversion to the Sufi branch of Islam influenced your writing?

For Mexican author Mario Bellatín writing should confront the infinite.

Sufism’s revelation appeared in my life shortly after I finished “Beauty Salon.” I was most impressed by the discovery, what unfolded in a very tangible way, of the parallels that exist between mystical and artistic experiences. I began to attend Sufi gatherings out of a strictly scriptural interest, as it were, in order to perfect my own method of writing and so as not to feel like a marginal being who tries to chase after what he thinks he should do, which in this case would be to write, overlooking what others think of such a decision.

Compared to my system and the doubts I had, these people were obviously after something unattainable—to inhabit paradise while on this earth, and not to limit themselves, as I did, with finishing a book. That’s why I began to attend those gatherings as if I were going to a writing school until, at a certain point, I began to think it was foolish of me to confine my work inside intellectual boundaries, when I had in front of me the very possibility of the infinite. My writing changed the day I recounted, without having ever learned about this historical event and without knowing where the words were coming from, the gallows used in the execution of the Sufi saint Mansur Al Hallaj. From then on, nothing could be the same when I confronted a text.

The World: Your use of long paragraphs and plain language in “Beauty Salon” evokes a dreamy, stream-of-consciousness quality. Do you have a philosophy of language?

Bellatín: For years I tried to create for myself a method of writing that would be my own. I called it the No Method, not because it was influenced by the Japanese theatrical form of that name, but rather because it was about appending a “no” to all the elements that supposedly make up literary texts. No adjectives, no dialogue, no space, no time, no omniscience, no names, and so on and so forth, until I had compiled a long list of noes. It was in that way, restricted all the way down to the most minimal aspects, that I began to see that, in a certain sense, things could be named anew.

When I began to write, the load that the Latin American tradition brought with it was very heavy. There was something like an unwritten Decalogue specifying what should and what shouldn’t be done. Reality was in check, there was no space to say things the way one thought should be said. And I always write in a fragmentary way. Each fragment is almost always completed in what my sessions of work last, sessions which I try to enter and leave without bringing anything without taking anything from my quotidian reality.

The World: Why do you think your writing is more popular internationally than in Mexico? Has the critical reaction at home changed what and how you write? Are you writing for an international audience now?

Bellatín: I don’t think so. I really don’t know what happens with books. Sometimes I find someone who’s read something, but most of the time it’s people that know I’m a writer and that’s what interests them. Almost always it’s with them that I get along the best, since many times the mediation of writing between people forestalls a more personal dialogue, which is what really interests me. To save myself from my own writing, from a writing that is made for itself in the first instance, but upon which I try to bestow the elements that a reader needs in order to traverse it, a writing that is produced with the sole aim that it allows for the appearance of more writing.