Enzo Maqueirawriter, journalist and spokesperson for the Union of Writerstalks next to his large library, with a portrait of Julio Cortazar as background. The electric blue sweatshirt, a look that makes you think of the singer Emmanuel Horvilleur and the relaxed way of speaking about him, bring him closer to the image of an electronic music DJ than to the classic style of a writer. Coincidentally, that is the name of his 2014 novel, “Electronics” (Interzone), which many consider “the novel of the 90s generation.” In that one, as in his other books – “Ruda macho” (Lea) or “Do yourself” (Tusquets) – its protagonists walk a path of doubts and questions, where sexuality and social impositions collide with each other. In the magazine “Amphibious” You can read her particular chronicles: a visit to a sadomasochistic club, the media rally she participated in in 2016 where she spoke out in favor of the legalization of drugs and the world of female bodybuilders, among other stories.
Now, Maqueira has just published “Sexual hygiene for the single” (Tusquets). The title hides a key to reading: in 1910 the Spanish writer Ciro Bayo published a book with the same name, a kind of instruction manual for the construction of the sexuality of the heteronormative male. Maqueira’s book is a kind of “hack” of Bayo’s book. In his novel, which takes place between the 90’s and the present day, Junior, a young man with a love for music, grows up suffering from the mandates that society imposes on men: he must be tough, play soccer, have sex with many women and, at some point, get married and settle down, never doubting their heterosexuality.
However, Maqueira leads his protagonist on the opposite path. Junior falls in love with many women, experiments with his sexuality and his relationships, with drugs and late nights at clubs, in a deconstruction process which would perhaps cause Ciro Bayo himself some confusion. It is a “transmedia” novel: the book even has its own theme song, “Toy Poodle”, which can be heard on Spotify and even a video clip on YouTube. With colloquial and overflowing language, Maqueira tells the story of how Junior “rises” above mandates.
NEWS: “Sexual Hygiene of the Bachelor” is a very visual novel, which takes place over several decades, from the 90s to the present, and the passage of time is marked by the music heard or the appearance of social networks. Would you say it is a “pop” novel?
Enzo Maqueira: I think what’s pop is about appealing literary things that are considered “extra” territory of literature or that don’t seem literary, and putting them in literature anyway. They also told me that I write “literature of everyday life.” But everyone does that! (Laughs).
NEWS: “Novel of initiation”, “novel about sentimental education”, “novel of the deconstructed man”, do any of these terms have to do with what you wanted to do?
Maqueira: I didn’t want to talk so much about the “deconstructed man” because I am not so convinced that such a thing exists. A bit of the hypothesis of the novel is: “many men never finish deconstructing themselves, so perhaps it’s about asking themselves what they wanted to build for you.” Recognize the fights and internal battles that occurred based on that construction that does not quite fit with one, and a kind of “reconstruction”, not towards masculinity, but towards another side that we do not know what it is. There is a lot of talk about “new masculinities”, and the truth is that I am not interested in any masculinity, neither good nor bad. I am not interested in fulfilling any role of what “man” is supposed to be. What would a new masculinity be? A father who is present? I don’t want to be a father, nor do I want to be told that I have to be a father. For me there doesn’t have to be any masculinity, we have to go to a world without those differences. What Junior does throughout the novel is let go of a way of understanding himself or others understanding him. Where? We do not know. Towards a place where he is a “mostly straight” guy, who allows himself a different search, which can lead him to be bisexual, homosexual, somewhere else. Except for fascism and voting for Milei, I hope it takes him to other places (Laughs).
NEWS: How much is autobiographical in your novel?
Maqueira: A lot. I always write from an autobiographical point of view. From. I don’t tell my story, that would be a shame. A little bit of what I said in “Ruda macho”: Catholic school, mambos with the church, a few closest friends. This thing of feeling alien, strange, not fitting in with my teammates, who played soccer and who spat at each other and fought. Take refuge in mysticism and religion. And homoeroticism: seeing that Jesus, crucified, naked, with that underwear, and the blood. I’m a Scorpio, so death and sex are all together. In high school I moved to a coeducational, more progressive, secular school. And it was like an awakening, I began to understand the connection with women that was very difficult for me.
NEWS: In what sense?
Maqueira: I couldn’t understand that women had desire, it didn’t enter my head. We had been raised with the idea that women had to be convinced to have sex, in good ways or in terrible ways. With my new novel the idea was to show the base of the iceberg of patriarchy. We always see the edge: murders, abuses, rapes. And what is there at the base? This: men who at 13 are told that they have to go make their debut with a sex worker; that they have to be womanizers, lie to women, deceive them. With those mandates I fought with everyone, except for being a womanizer. That’s when I fell and it was difficult for me to get out. I could not have written this book without experiencing it in real life, to speak from knowledge. I didn’t want to be a “100% straight cis male who is writing about wearing a wig.” No: I wore the wig, I went to parties, I was with women, trans people, boys. I had a great time.
NEWS: When Junior is with the trans girl in the novel, at first, he doesn’t have it so well.
Maqueira: The same happened to me! At first I said “oops, what did I do, how did I do this”. And then I said, “nothing’s wrong, everything’s fine.”
NEWS: In relation to the idea that women do not desire, Junior has several partners throughout the novel that represent a bit of the social changes in how to think about relationships in each decade. One of those couples, precisely, is a woman that she desires, to the point that she is polyamorous. Is it the moment where he has to ask himself how to have another type of relationship?
Maqueira: AOther than that, I have been observing that women are increasingly encouraged to do more things. All of that taught me a lot and opened my mind. The women who passed through my life who were like that taught me a lot. Before I lied to my partners, I hacked around, Olmedo and Porcel style, and I had a bad time. And when they proposed this type of relationship to me, I realized that it was another paradigm. I learned a lot from women and the gay community. I have many gay friends who are in triejas, or in open relationships. There is another way to establish bonds, which has nothing to do with forcing monogamy and a totally false idea of fidelity. I even know straight people, 60 years old, who are into that type of opening.
NEWS: Is it a novel about the suffering of men? It seems like a topic not as talked about as that of women.
Maqueira: It is very little told. In all my novels I worked on these themes in one way or another. These are topics that have always interested me, but starting in 2015, with the emergence of feminism, I began to think and talk more about this and write things about this topic. I received a lot of criticism, from the right and the left, for talking about these things. They told me “why does a man have to talk about these issues?”, and I kind of wanted to ask, “I’ve been talking about this for five books, I have a personal story, and I’m not the only one, many of us suffer, and I had “I want to take a novel to tell deeply what this is about.” In universal literature there are many stories of machirulos, about how men are victimizers. And yes, we are responsible for a lot of shit, but that responsibility doesn’t come from the air. We are children of the patriarchy that taught us this. There is an education matrix. I lived it, I went to a boys’ school and priests, it couldn’t be worse. And in those microclimates, once the dictatorship ended, the dictatorship continued.
NEWS: In what sense did it “continue”?
Maqueira: You had teachers who beat you up, who treated you like soldiers. You suffered a lot from not being able to meet the expectations of others regarding being a man. You couldn’t talk about what was happening to you or your emotions, you had to exert force, violence. I wanted to show that. That men are vulnerable, especially in childhood. Maybe they don’t abuse us as much as women, but the pressures of patriarchy are there all the time. You can’t wear a pink sweatshirt because you already have some idiot saying “isn’t that for men?” And there are statistics: 80% of suicides in Argentina are men. It is very difficult for me to think that it has nothing to do with the mandate to be successful in life, to take care of a family, etc. Some people think that men cannot be feminists. Well, give me another tool, where do I get the tools to fight against the pressures of patriarchy? “It is not the fight of men” they tell you. Of course it’s my fight: I don’t want to be a bored, frustrated man who has to secretly seek happiness outside his house.
NEWS: “Hygiene…” is a “transmedia” novel. “Caniche toy”, which is the song that Junior composes during the novel, is a real song, which is on Spotify and even has its video clip on YouTube. How did the idea come about?
Maqueira: I have musical training, I studied piano from a very young age. I understand little about pop music and computers or digital music. But he had composed that song many years ago, in joda. And when I was writing the book and the musician character appeared, who asks himself all the questions in the song: “Am I or am I not?” I realized it was a good time to make that song exist, and turn that joke into an experience. And I wanted to desacralize literature, once again. It seems that literature, especially that written by men, has that serious, boring tone. And immediately the men who run away from that point out to us. And since it is a “transmedia” novel, about “transformations”, “transitions”; I wanted the book itself to accompany that: go from paper to screen, to YouTube, and for the character to have a life beyond the novel. Break with that idea of literature as something closed on itself and untouchable, and encourage myself to play with that as well. It is an aesthetic, political and artistic positioning. We filmed the video clip with friends, who are people who also have their own searches on these topics. And I sing, helped by Auto-Tune, and with the work of Ornella Piazzo and Paulina Ámbar who added choirs and made magic.
NEWS: Is Junior your alter ego?
Maqueira: Junior is the character, it’s not me. Alter ego or not, we don’t know. Now who’s stopping it, right? He left the pages to YouTube. Who knows what a mess he’s making out there.
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