El espejo del monstruo*
Juan Ramón Biedma
Ediciones B
Zeki
Translation: Jean Burrell
‘As
infection inevitably makes a path for itself through the organic
fabric with which it is in contact, so in academic literature there
arise mutants emerging from its exposure to the different types
of genre/genetic engineering.' So the author said recentl. And in
truth he takes pride in demonstrating as much in his new book.
Indeed El espejo del monstruo passes
through the gloomy spaces of gothic romanticism, dark gore, an
aftertaste of the weird and fierce social critique. The narrative
is determined to ‘reveal to the light of
day' – so to speak – aspects of ourselves that we obstinately refuse
to see in our day-to-day lives. This is a self-satisfied society,
where no one over a size 8 is photographed and which bases its achievements
on unrealistic aesthetic values that compel people to compensate
for deficiencies by dressing themselves up in consumer purchases.
The right to be different has become a dangerously subversive desire
capable of destroying the group consensus. That is the looking-glass
that reflects back our image.
Biedma uses popular literature's most varied techniques, from the
soap opera to the suspense and horror story, to shape a thought-provoking
narrative discourse that holds readers in its grip as they view the
succession of sensationalist engravings akin to the ones that used
to illustrate 19 th -century newspapers. At the same time this suggested
narrative wrapped up as a tale in which adventure and mystery are
combined, seasoned with elements of phenomenology and the mechanics
of the detective story and transposed to the setting of a gothic
tale, becomes a disturbing vehicle for a series of questions and
very widespread attitudes on the connections between aesthetics and
ethics.
A collection of ‘monsters' has turned the town into a homicidal
Barnum's circus. In a rain-sodden, gloomy Seville where the forces
of the ‘bizarre' are unleashed, Inspector Vendimia, a police officer
whose face is disfigured by scars left by fire and Set Santiago,
an ex-lawyer just released from prison where he was held for the
murder of one of his daughters, are the men who, each for very different
reasons, are trying to disentangle the truth behind the nightmare.
People with unusual deformities, a
Cyclops, a gay with stumps of wings, a doctor with a dwarf stuck
to his body, someone with horns.. .someone else with three legs,
etc. … are the victims of a series
of horrific murders that follow the pattern of ancient tortures inflicted
on saints. A woman boiled in a cauldron, another cut in two like
Saint Daniela … another victim, whose body is covered in scales,
has her teeth pulled out after having her lips cut with scissors… The
roots of this blood-soaked madness lead back to an old hospice, a ‘charitable
institution' set up by a certain Dr Galera.
As in his previous novel the typical
picture of a Seville resplendent with sunshine, gaudy show and
bullfighting is counteracted by a constant gloom: dark alleyways
that house a shadowy city with slum districts, sombre zones harbouring
junkies and whores. The author does not leave the smallest room
for empathy with the characters… the ‘least bad'
one has thrown his daughter from the fourth floor and the vain attempt
to sympathize with the ‘monsters' is stopped dead. They are just
as evil as everyone else.
Juan Ramón Biedma warns respectable citizen as to the dangers
of ‘warm sentiments', false compassion erected like a wall of hypocrisy
between those who are ‘different', and whom we would like to see
as full of goodness, and the ‘right-thinking' people who need to
redeem their sins. Without grandiloquent speeches or moral lessons,
laying out the facts is enough to reveal what really underlies the
story: the reflection of a society distorted by its contradictions.
* The
monster's looking-glass.
