A modest circus company tours northern Mexico. Its two owners, the Mantecón brothers, fight. Each one takes half of the numbers. One is left with Computencio, who takes square roots and “amuses no one”, with the conjoined twins So-and-so, with Timorato the Reckless or with the elephant. The other brother opts among others for the dwarf Nathanael, the bearded woman Barbarela, the strongman Hercules, the magician Mandrake and a pig. A group that, somewhat tired of the wandering life, upon finding an abandoned town, decides to found a new community. A new society. And sort through the roles that each person will play in it: from the doctor to the soldier, the priest, the black man – “it is not possible to live in a place where we are all equal,” warns the illusionist – or the prostitute. The new place will end up reproducing in a stark way many of the worst aspects and the same absurdity of the normal world: Santa María del Circo, title of the novel by David Toscana (Monterrey, 1961) that Candaya is now recovering.
After winning the Vargas Llosa Biennial prize last year with The Weight of Living on Earth, Candaya reissues this celebrated novel that the Mexican author published 25 years ago. Without changes. “There are colleagues who change things in the reissues because it seems that today we are more limited with the language. But in the end and the story is the theme of the novel is that: the characters are racist, homophobic, they have old roles with respect to women. This allegory of society was to address this,” Toscana points out from a bar in the center of Madrid, where she lives. And she reflects that “today we writers can deal with many topics, but not these anymore. Some creators fear that readers will confuse the characters’ plot with the author’s. And if he shows a scene of racism they say: ‘Tuscany is racist.’ But we writers always defended that the characters were not our spokespersons.”
In fact, he reflects, “I have not met a single person who tells me that they like political correctness. And yet there it is. And people who say they don’t like cancellation are canceling. They say: ‘I don’t like it, but this one had to be cancelled.’ “Then in the wine and private conversations we changed the discourse a little. Whenever there is the feeling of a power that you feel is judging you you can be pushed into doublespeak. And if we have it in everyday life, I would always defend that it cannot be had in the novel. I think that the novel has to survive with strong discourse and with ambiguous discourse as well. The unambiguous novel is not exactly a novel that comes from learning the classics,” she points out. And he assures that a film like Tod Browning’s classic Freaks could not be made today.
The only people Tuscany had problems with when the novel appeared a quarter of a century ago were not the defenders of political correctness – a film and a play were even filmed – but the circuses of their country. “They didn’t like the novel and threatened to hit me. Deep down, when I wrote it, I didn’t dwell much on the circus, I realized that I didn’t like it, but I did like these characters from the freak show, the phenomena. I have always liked these characters who are a little disturbed, borderline, out of the ordinary. The novel becomes a novel about circuses but not about a circus. And circuses who want to be something else. And it begins to gain strength as the allegory of many that perhaps we are trapped in something and we want to get out of there.”
Perhaps the most surprising thing is that, just as its characters take papers out of a bag to know what role they should play in the new society, Toscana did the same to grant them them. “I did the little papers myself. I got them in… with a certain trick, because I knew that the strong man was going to play the prostitute. In some cases I got jobs that I couldn’t do much with, but in others I didn’t even think about them. I could have written the work with a different distribution, but something that has always fascinated me about the novel is that even though it could be an infinite number of things, it ends up being what it is.”
Thinking about the current situation in his country, he says that perhaps if he wrote Santa María del Circo today “he would have put in the bag a piece of paper that I didn’t even think about putting in: the drug trafficker.” “There is a huge difference between that Mexico and now. I remember when he traveled abroad. They told me: Oh Mexico, paradise! In certain bars in Europe he said he was Mexican and they didn’t charge me for beer. Now they tell me: violence, drug trafficking.”
“What happened? The cocaine world that had its center in Colombia began to move little by little towards Mexico. And organized crime does not work if it is not organized with political power. All institutions began to be corrupted little by little. But in Mexico it was said for a long time: ‘What does it matter to us that there are drug traffickers, this is a gringo problem.’ But then there begin to be kidnappings, extortion, gangs that fight against each other, political controls in a lot of places, they begin to control mining, agricultural production. They tell us that avocado is more expensive because you have to pay so much to drug traffickers, that everything increases in price because it carries a drug tax. And that is our problem. But the discourse has changed a lot since the presidency so that we talk about social changes and not about what is the main interest of Mexicans, which is security.”
In a way, he remembers, the history of Mexico already influenced him when writing Santa María del Circo. “The theme of failure was very deep-rooted at that time. The year 94, when I began to write it, was the time of economic failure in Mexico. It came to be called the tequila effect. Carlos Salinas leaves the presidency and Zedillo enters and suddenly the peso falls, interest rates skyrocket and those of us who had debts to pay for a house suddenly owed three times as much money and began to lose our properties. And employment. Furthermore, I had given up a promising career as an engineer to dedicate myself to literature, a life perhaps of failure.”
At that time, he acknowledges, he wrote a lot “about this recurring theme.” “To a certain point I have stopped, but I have continued with these somewhat borderline characters, who see the world differently because they are circus artists, because they are drunks, because they have some mental problem, because they are simply deranged in the style of Don Quixote. It follows me I like it because I can play more with language. If a good part of the novel is in the imagination, if I don’t have to respect certain rational worlds, the universe expands. Although now sometimes I give them the opportunity to do well in what they do. looking for”.
