If one had to be guided by the strict reality, that of which Christian Alarcon declares himself “boring”, his novel “The third paradise” began to be written at some point in the strict quarantine, in the garden in the outskirts of La Plata that inspired him and in which now, Alfaguara award through, is found.
But if the writer -and the book- are right, and reality is not enough -or enough- to explain everything that happens, the text actually began to be written when Alarcón was a child who escaped with his family from the Pinochet’s chilior when it started showing “feminine traits” and his parents gave him eight shots of testosterone to convince him otherwise, or when he became a prestigious journalist who published a poem in which she recounted this for the first time, or when she told that story to NOTICIAS and her mother, sitting in the hair salon of the same Patagonian town that sheltered them in the seventies, the one where the poem had never reached, read in the magazine that her son forgave her. She read that she “forgave everything.”
This is why, the writer thinks, the book -and he- are not the result of a linear and logical course. It is not only the work of a year and a half of a journalist who, between imprisonment for a covid that almost killed him and the discovery of a passion for gardening that he did not know, travels for the first time to the novel genre. Rather, both (the book and him) are the result of a process halfway between the 22 years on the couch and the devices of the unconscious that do not reach the session. They owe as much to his work on Anfibia magazine and his two non-fiction classics as they do to the hallucinogenic mushrooms he took just to figure out how the novel should end. Conclusions of mechanisms as capricious as the ups and downs of the weather, but as necessary as rain for a garden.
Although all this sounds like an armed phrase – “and I hate the cliché despite the fact that I am a victim of it, because a 50-year-old writer locked in a cabin writing is the most cliché there is” – there is Daniel Vitulich to demonstrate what contrary. That is the pseudonym – a requirement that competitions impose on all writers – that Alarcón chose so that his novel would compete against a thousand others for the Alfaguara prize, one of the most important in Spanish-language. Daniel was the first drama teacher that the journalist had, in his early adolescence, with whom he had not spoken since he left the south at the age of 18, but who “appeared” in some hole in Alarcón’s memory, when there were 15 minutes left before the contest closed. “I could theorize about this but I am a bit more esoteric than is good for a contemporary intellectual. I sincerely believe that there are situations that we do not govern and part of my personal work is to make that happen more and more, that there are fewer decisions to make and thus live more connected to the present, like this moment. I mean, I don’t know what time it is, but losing control over the time is better than having complied with the schedule that was established”, says the writer, while he arranges another champagne next to some slices of raw ham and the recorder turns on, almost three hours after it had been fixed.
News: This search to live more “connected to the present” is on a par with leaving the chronicle to go towards the novel, right?
Cristian Alarcón: Yes, living in the present in a more committed and firm way, with awareness of what is happening, without necessarily speculating about the future, which is something that makes us more obsessive, more controlling.
News: And nature, such a protagonist in the book, what role does it play?
Alarcon: It is essential. The first learning in contact with the garden is that everything is present and that there is no possibility of planning because every decision is absolutely conditioned and contaminated by the mineral, the natural and the animal. And if our species disappears, if we are truly doomed to extinction as most serious scientists unfortunately believe, that forces us in the here and now to be committed. But we are so impeded by narcissism, selfishness and extreme need that we advance across the planet without being able to stop. In not being able to stop there is a negation of the present, because we cannot stop committed to the idea of the future, paradoxically. That is to say, we want to be better off, we want to pay our debts, we want to change the car, go on vacation, or use careful prices to stretch rice and bread to make ends meet. We are always wishing for something that we don’t have, what a nightmare! Why can’t we be happy with what we have now, with this divine flower? What more can I ask for at this moment in my life? “The third paradise” is that, it is the present.
Amphibian
On January 20, Fernando Aramburu, a famous Spanish writer, stood in front of a microphone in Madrid to say that the book was “a beautiful novel with a dual structure, set in various places in Chile and Argentina” and that the protagonist “reconstructs the of his ancestors while delving into his passion for cultivating a garden in search of a personal paradise”. Aramburu also added that for all this, the jury he chaired decided to give the award to Cristian Alarcón unanimously.
In that same city, but almost two months later, the journalist Martín Caparrós asked him if the novel was the result of moving away from “a double duty, which was to be Argentine and write about social violence (for his first books, “When I die, I want them to play cumbia for me” and “If you love me, love me, transa”)”. “When you left this you became a Chilean who wrote about himself,” his friend told him.
News: Was Caparros right?
Alarcón: It’s nice to think of it that way, but I’m not sure. Yes, the amazing thing is that I eat a mushroom here, in the garden, and the plant answers me: “You have to go back to your town” to finish the novel.
News: And in that return to his origins and his identity, he decided to include the testosterone episode in the book. Did she talk to his mother about it?
Alarcón: I had already asked her about my experience and she had told me very little, and when I asked her again, she changed the number of the dose she had received. So I didn’t ask any more. What does it matter if there were four or eight doses? If in fact what happened was that there was a child who had a female identity who was imposed a male identity, through the blow, testosterone, the psychologist, the doctors and bullying. Everything told him that he couldn’t be feminine, everything told him that he had to be masculine to survive, and that masculinity meant strength and violence. Everything is going to lead us to the field of marriage and monogamy and the persecution of the family by generating children who will then continue with the infinite cycle produced by capital. If we stick to the logic of the system we will never be able to experience true non-binarity. Not because I feel like I could be feminine and masculine at the same time, because I am extremely happy in my masculinity. That is to say, with everything feminine that I have been, that I am and that I can be, I am still more masculine. When I think of the testosterone experience I don’t think of a conviction, it’s a question about other men as well. What is testosterone? Perhaps it is the air we breathe and that constitutes us in some authoritarian way. So the deconstruction of the masculine is tremendously difficult because how to leave the place of privilege? Why is it so hard for us to question this place?
News: Are you very happy in your masculinity?
Alarcón: I am very happy in my masculinity. Critical, but I’m happy.
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