Fernando Vallejo’s El desbarrancadero: Dis/Integration and Care in the Seropositive Latin American Body/Corpus

Diego Falconí Trávez (bio) and Robin Myers (bio)

Introduction: Dis/integrations — The Outline of an Empty Signifier¹

To address disintegration as the starting point for this text obliges me, firstly and briefly, to reflect on the polysemic and contextual nature of words. To begin, for a signifier, there is almost always a series of signifieds diversifying language; however, at least in the Western tradition, each signification reproduces the binary, hierarchical schema of the system (Derrida 12, 39) that enables the existence of a hegemonic meaning, swathed in dominant ideologies, that ultimately defines the word, its variants, and its many different uses. This proves evident in the specific case of the signifier “disintegration,” morphologically constructed as “opposed to.” Its signifieds (separation, weakness, and destruction) never define themselves;² rather, the dominant signification of the binomial (the non-union that defines separation, the non-strength that defines weakness, the non-construction that defines destruction) appears to give this word its meaning, locating it in a constant site of negation.³ In addition to this initial linguistic consideration, I would like to underscore a second thought in the context of gender studies, my chosen focus. It is no longer possible to avoid the relationship between body and language (Kristeva 251-77), particularly when it comes to reflecting on the formation and organization of subjectivity. In this correlation, which is also marked by binary and hierarchical signifieds (Cixous), language, especially when it performs acts authorized by authority (Butler, Género 85-99), has served to demarcate subjects and regulate their actions. In line with this consideration, the words “integration” and “disintegration” are associated with the body, connecting it to medicine and legality. As Ivonne Bordelois asserts: “Thus, [Ancient] Rome, in its organizing genius, defined the doctor above all as someone vested with a social function, which meant being responsible for regulating, reorganizing the body disintegrated by illness, through a corpus of canonical formulae that is the jurisdiction of the medical group” (57; my emphasis).⁴

Medical rhetoric and legality are thus part of a hybrid authority (Foucault 2007) that tinges the hegemonic signification of the signifier “disintegration.” This hierarchical, oppositional perception, besides seeking to normalize the body (and certain bodies more than others), has created the idea of an “immunitary logic” (Giorgi 14), which assumes that the disintegrated body, the “sick body,” inhabits a complex space of absence and silence that only regains its voice when it is “reintegrated” through medicine and the law. I find this approach a productive way to think about certain subjects traditionally viewed as disintegrated—fragmented, reduced, annihilated—that have both performed and answered to the medical/legal truth. Specifically, by using the label “dis/integration,” I will re-present certain seropositive Latin American bodies that wrote their works at the very end of the past century—and that sketched with singular vitality, though they were unable to dismantle the dominant signifieds, other disintegrations in which sick flesh stigmatized by authority was ultimately reintegrated in diverse and loca-lized ways beyond the medical/legal disciplinary rhetoric (Ochoa).

I propose that we rethink the seropositive body, exemplary in the signifying chain of “integration,” through a form of wordplay that involves introducing—contingently and perhaps only for the purposes of this text—the signifier “dis/integration” in the seropositive meditation. This gesture of articulating an “empty signifier,” more than erecting a “signifier without a signified,” seeks to “signify the limits of signification” (Laclau 69, 74). In other words, my intent is that this strange word, “dis/integration,” will bring hegemonic meanings into tension with respect to the countercultural disputes of certain bodies, so as to revalue the cohabitation of illness (Lauretis 17). To do so, I will specifically analyze dis/integrations in the novel El desbarrancadero [The Cliff] by Fernando Vallejo. I have chosen this autofiction, a text of the self that clings to reality in a peculiar way, because it chronicles the intimate experience of seropositive people and their micro-communities that seek to break a disciplinary silence caused by illness and its varied tropes. To develop this proposal and to associate literature with law, specifically by means of bioethics, I have chosen reflections centered on the care of and for oneself, which unite the body’s dis/integrations with the seropositive Latin American corpus.

Care-of-Oneself Yesterday and Today: Texts of the Self and the Body’s Decolonizing Quests

In 1981, Michel Foucault’s Technologies of the Self was published. This theoretical text, which displays the characteristic academic “rigor” of its author,⁵ contains a proposal unaddressed in his previous works (a matter that critics did not overlook).⁶ Indeed, despite his genealogical and discursively critical apparatus, Foucault explores the “care of oneself,” a philosophical principle once practiced in the West that was gradually replaced by a different guiding tenet, “knowledge of oneself,” which, in broad strokes, enabled greater discipline of the body. The postulate of care—quite novel in Foucault’s body of work, at least until the late years of his output—is the one I find useful in rethinking seropositive dis/integrations, hence the need to recapitulate the key ideas and principles differentiating knowledge from care. The first model, that of self-knowledge, inaugurated with Christianity and continuing through the modern period, is presented thus by Foucault:

Everyone, every Christian, has the duty to know who he is, what is happening to him. He has to know the faults he may have committed: he has to know the temptations to which he is exposed. And, moreover, everyone in Christianity is obliged to say these things to other people, to tell these things to other people, and hence, to bear witness against himself.

(“Tecnologías” 81)

Knowing oneself, then, with the sacrament of confession as an omnipresent template, is associated with a paradoxical structure based on the expiation of the sins of the flesh. Thus, just as a particular form of conduct is condemned, the subject who has committed the fault is responsible for testifying to his actions in order to put himself to rights. In this way, he establishes “a history of the link between the obligation to tell the truth and the prohibitions against sexuality” (46). This self-knowledge contrasts with a certain Greco-Roman view of caring for oneself that “refers to an active political and erotic state . . . [involving] various things: taking pains with one’s holdings and one’s health. It is always a real activity and not just attitude” (58).⁷ In the proposed shift of subjective paradigm, which moves away from confession and expiation, one of the most significant applications involves the literary communicative phenomenon in which processes of reading and writing enable another form of self-exploration: “One of the main features of taking care involved taking notes on yourself to be reread, writing treatises and letters to friends to help them, and keeping notebooks in order to reactivate for oneself the truths one needed. . . . The self is something to write about, a theme or object (subject) of writing activity” (62). I find in Foucault’s argument, besides an exercise that recovers the meticulousness of his own writing, a search to articulate more intimate perimeters so that texts, when they come into circulation, can be shared more than submitted. In this way, they can facilitate different forms of subjectification that aren’t based on an accurate, regulated exposure of the self. Of course, this allows us to consider the importance of autobiographical representations in reconstructing the subject, at least through a paradigm unlike the hegemonic rational/confessional mode as gestated in European modernity. However, I believe that the motion to exchange “knowledge” with “care,” at least in order to think and show oneself to oneself, has greater impact, as it seeks to substitute modes of relating to one’s own body and desires, especially in the space where pathology and illness coexist. Inevitably, these reflections come to implicate Foucault himself, author and body: at least from a historical perspective, he was writing Technologies of the Self when he had begun to suspect his own seropositivity, which he never publicly discussed.⁸ This allows us to intuit that the change in his research may be interpreted as a need to assemble new ideas on the response of the pathologized subject without having to exercise a “confession” of seropositivity (which, according to the logic presented, would be a new public act of knowing oneself). This subjective hiding place in writing, which nonetheless attacks the hegemonic structural signifieds that seek to demarcate the subject, is one possible form of dis/integration. That is, a strategy for the body to rewrite its work, exchanging the hegemonic meaning of said word (“disintegration”) for an alternative.

However interesting, productive, and central to this essay, it seems to me that the core concept of caring for oneself, as proposed by Foucault, should be understood as an aspiration with certain limitations. Indeed, his thinking comes from genealogies that continue to base subjectivity in the individual paradigm of writing and reading that he reproduces even as he wishes to combat them. It is important, then, to analyze two points in order to update and loca-lize this notion in Latin America: the conception of care as a discursive lattice, and the focus on certain proposals of Latin American writing/reading about the body. In terms of the first, through certain Latin American feminisms that have gestated a discourse with respect to care in recent years, this reality has been conceptualized within a historical mold that has affected, for example, the bodies of women in the Third World.⁹ Care is a multidimensional phenomenon that involves multiple people and institutions, and it seeks, from a feminist perspective of difference, to break with established roles. That said, in the past decades of neoliberalization that the Latin American continent has undergone, the obligatory, unremunerated work of women in private spaces has been put in evidence once again—not only in their own countries, but in First World countries as well. The latter, in demanding a workforce to care for some of its citizens, enabled the reactivation of a series of colonial routes that women have been forced to follow. In short, care has been forced to migrate, too.¹⁰ In this sense, as Alba Carosio underscores, “architectures have been produced not only for the survival of their [women’s] homes, but also for the survival of the governments they come from and which receive their remittances” (239). This matter means that care must be located in a particular time and space, to shed light on which bodies must grapple with care under specific conditions.

The second question involves certain other forms of care that do not measure their value from a commercial perspective and which, as Foucault proposes, forge communicative methodologies differing from those of the modern Christian project. The communal Aymara feminism of Bolivia, through the proposals of Julieta Paredes and the Comunidad Mujeres Creando [Women Creating Community], is grounded in this tenet: “We are rooted in community as an inclusive principle that cares for life” (Paredes 8). To do so, this feminism, which bases its actions on shared corporeal experiences, sets forth the following:

To decolonize the concept and feeling of the body, we must decolonize ourselves from that split, schizophrenic conception of the soul on the one hand and the body on the other; that is what the colony has established. We are rooted in the body as a comprehensiveness of corporeality, which ranges from biogenetics to energetics, from affectivity—encompassing sensitivity, emotions, eroticism, spirituality, and sensuality—to creativity. Our bodies that want to eat well and be healthy, that enjoy caresses and ache when struck, our bodies that want to have time to learn and theorize: we want, as women together, to name things with the sound of our own voice. (12)

The postulate of defining corporeal care beyond its commercial value has helped Aymara women, in their own diversity, struggle with the wounds (and even illnesses) caused by the heteropatriarchy and coloniality.¹¹ In the excerpt cited above, moreover, writing from the narrative voice of a female “we,” which Paredes has practiced with different feminist groups,¹² allows for the articulation of a shared text (Falconí Trávez, “Puruma”), dislocating the idea of the Western author: an individual subject who fulfills a function in language and society (which, it warrants mentioning, Foucault himself clearly explained [“¿Qué?”]). Thus, “care for ourselves,” based on a diverse textual exchange—which does not only adhere to traditional writing, and which in the case of Bolivian communal feminism is also presented through graffiti, audiobooks, and the multiple essays authored jointly by this countercultural group—organizes bodies in a particular way. In doing so, it allows us to understand that in certain subjects and communities of Latin America, care is a project associated with decoloniality and other forms of empowerment.

In this way, and to summarize what I have discussed thus far, Foucault seeks to return to the paradigm of care, as a practice of both resistance and solace, expressed in intimate textual forms. For their part, Latin American feminists propose that we take an historical view of care, one that is also attentive to certain colonial routes and sex/gender impositions on bodies. Further, communal Aymara feminism is an example, not a mere nostalgic possibility, of another vital, resistance-driven, writing-based episteme that articulates new subjectivities rooted in care. It is from this intersection among the care of oneself, the discursivity of care, and the decolonization of care that, I believe, we must reflect today on the sick/pathologized body and its relationship to illness. However, and focusing specifically on my topic of analysis, seropositive Latin American communities in the 1990s lacked the privilege of tranquility that is generally required for the analysis I intend to outline here. Their complex and diverse responses were marked by the circumstances of survival, in trying to resist AIDS as a virus and as a social metaphor that affected the body (Sontag). The impossibility of keeping a critical distance from themselves forged a series of exclusions from other seropositive groups that were already historically excluded (Meruane 95). In addition, far from that hegemonic imaginary of US political organization, which produced queer politics and theory in the collectives ACT UP and Queer Nation, Latin American communities articulated narratives of care and resistance that have not traditionally been part of the global narrative on AIDS. Indeed, it is only in recent years, thanks to specialized studies as well as to activist efforts and artistic activities focused on archival revision, that their scope and meaning has been revalued for the region. My proposed reading of the seropositive body in El desbarrancadero is aligned with this contra-genealogical desire, although I acknowledge the numerous limitations and contradictions of an analysis based on elusive writings of the self and the complex central concept of care. I will recover certain forms of countercultural condemnation, and especially of care, which dis/integrate the body more than they reintegrate it, in order to grant them new meanings in their individual and social dimension of resistance. Echoing the proposal of Victoria Camps, this reflection shifts from a traditional paradigm of “fighting for life” to one of “the will to live that may be considered, definitively, the motive for bioethics” (18).

New Familial “Annals” of “Careless Care”: Rethinking Jus Sanguinis and New Forms of Serodiscordance in El desbarrancadero

The novel El desbarrancadero by Colombian-Mexican author Fernando Vallejo is a case of literature of the self. Using an autofictional template, it presents particular forms of re-inscribing the seropositive body through text, especially through the notion of care for oneself that I have discussed above and which serves as a catalyst for what I have called dis/integration. In the novel, Fernando, the author’s iconic avatar appears not to narrate illness in his own skin but to recount how his brother Darío survives AIDS in Medellín at the end of the last century.¹³ This intra-homodiegetic narrator, itinerant as few others in the twentieth-century Latin American tradition, returns to his beloved/hated Colombia to take care of his brother and give testimony on his disease: “I came back when I learned that Darío, my brother, the first of the countless brothers I had, was dying, though no one knew of what. Of that illness, man, afflicting fags, the current fad that makes them roam the streets like corpses” (8).¹⁴ In this passage, we see an initial outline of that body (those bodies) colliding with illness, as well as an unraveling family life about to sunder any possible fabric of care.¹⁵ The relationship with the individual body (Darío’s) is presented as a reflection of the social body (Colombia), assembling a fairly traditional rhetoric of disintegration.

Fernando’s return to Medellín seems to serve as a way to document the individual disintegration of the individual seropositive body (and of the Colombian social body, subsumed in violence). He, a misogynist, racist, classist character who has neglected (stopped caring for) his family (and his country of origin), is ironically the one who returns to “take care” of his brother (and, metaphorically, to heal possible wounds caused by migration). Nonetheless, Fernando comes home mostly—and beyond any literary trope—because he is part of a little-studied chain of care: that of the self-exiled Latin American fag who ends up caring for another seropositive fag who has stayed home in the Third World.¹⁶ According to the Pan-American Health Organization (OPS, its Spanish-language acronym), in Latin America in 2004, “80% of healthcare services for people with chronic or disabling illnesses . . . [were] performed by women in the household environment” (in Carosio 238). In a sense—and here is where the senselessness comes in—Fernando (damned Fernando) is a person both statistically and pragmatically incapable of care. Even so, he is the one who must return, due to the negligence of the healthcare system, the family, and the seropositive subject himself, to care for a close body in its process of “disintegration.”¹⁷ A missing link of care (the exiled fag brother) caring for another missing link (the hidden seropositive fag), at least in the traditional geopolitical narrative I have just described.

This plot, doomed to failure, in which the angry, reproachful protagonist hates his mother, hates Colombia, and hates AIDS, reflects a critical moment in the history of care for the seropositive body—a matter expressed in the following assemblage, in which I gather several fragments from the novel:

Here’s the great secret of mothers in Antioquia: they give birth to the first child, they wipe its ass, and then they train it to wipe the ass of the second kid, the third, the fourth, the fifth . . . a man with a penis, I ended up being the babysitter for my twenty siblings . . . The crazy lady was worse than AIDS . . . By kid number twelve, my house was an insane asylum; by twenty, the asylum was hell. A mini-Colombia. We all came to hate each other. To hate each other fraternally . . . . (57, 58, 69, 161)

The mother is like AIDS, AIDS like Colombia, Colombia like children, children like the mother, the mother like AIDS . . . These ideas articulate a(n) (il)logical sequence, whose misogynist but fag/AIDs-friendly gaze simultaneously repairs and breaks down certain bodies. In other words, this is a fragmentary narrative that ratifies and contradicts the rhetoric of corporeal integration in a context of precariousness and violence. In this actantial shift, in which Fernando plays a parodic role of, for example, a traditional Latin American mother (even his own), we can see the traces of a literature that reflects a contradictory castling in the discourse of care with continual gender implications.

Lina Meruane addresses this contradiction in her brilliant study of HIV/AIDS. She describes Vallejo’s novel as based on “female exclusion,” showing how women “contribute to the general state of social decline” and on the way “the idea of survival [of the seropositive subject in the 1990s] is not a solidarity-driven effort, but must be articulated, rather, via binary models of competitiveness and yield” (112).¹⁸ Without failing to acknowledge this denigrating homopatriarchy that acts, moreover, in accordance with all of the characters’ class and ethnic exclusions in the novel and in Vallejo’s other autofictions, it still seems to me that by ignoring the rhetoric of care for the body as part of the analysis, Meruane disregards the creation of localized micro-communities that likewise obey historical resistances—which, in this case, may help us consider political itineraries toward resituating subjectivity and illness today. Meruane’s approach, which is valuable in accounting for the gender norms and exclusions that operate on women’s bodies (once the imaginaries of certain seropositive male communities), nonetheless universalizes the narrative of solidarity that, in never focusing on the specific relationship between the brothers, excludes the “neglected”¹⁹ fag subject from the chain of care. In this way, as her discussion “introduces” the reader to the lack of (feminist) political articulation in Darío and Fernando, it also instantly erases their accounts of pain and attention: their ways of resisting illness. This impedes an understanding and perhaps a historicization of the fact that, in their will to live, in the complex Latin American territory of AIDS in the 1990s, a form of “careless care,” long ignored by gender studies, can prove vital to comprehending a means of resisting HIV/AIDS into the present day.²⁰ In the novel, the character of Fernando symbolizes this paradox, which reconstructs discriminatory attitudes toward certain groups historically denigrated by the system (women, Afro-descendant people, and indigenous people), while simultaneously broaching forms of inclusion of the pathologized subject (in caring for the afflicted body and by condemning family, national, and international [ir]responsibilities toward the fag, positive, Latin American subject), leading to the creation of a “neglected” micro-community. Grasping the peculiar solidarity at work in Vallejo’s text entails, then, evaluating many textual contradictions and strategies that prompt a critique of notions of the “disintegration” and the “disintegrated body” of particular subjects, which we must now evaluate and criticize through different aspects of gender—but also through the ethics of care.

This being said, I will now analyze this double move in El desbarrancadero: for one thing, the attack on authoritarian institutions that should “reintegrate” but actually “disintegrates” a person; for another, the forms of care for oneself that operate in the brother’s body in an attempt to insert the “neglected” fag body into the narrative of seropositive resistance. As for the first actions, those of the attack on institutions that grant hegemonic significance to the disintegrated body, Fernando constantly underscores the virulence of the disease, but also criticizes medical violence, first and foremost at the hands of physicians: “To identify what caused what in my brother, they’d first have him submit a stool sample, then a smear of duodenal fluid aspirate, an endoscopic biopsy, a lumbar puncture to collect cerebrospinal fluid . . . And more and more and more and money money money for these sons of bitches” (173). Medical apathy, which indirectly condemns society to the privatization of health, is stacked on top of unethical laboratory practices, leading Fernando to conclude, “these lab hucksters are sleezebags” (172). This shows the sparse and negligent actions of the state and its citizens in regard to seropositive people’s rights.²¹ As the narrator remarks at a critical moment of the plot, “the local epidemiologists told my brother-in-law Luis, who told me, that in countless houses like ours, countless patients were dying of the same thing, of the shameful ill that no one dared say aloud” (178). Faced with this practice of silencing that is tantamount to death (and which only functions as gossip, documented in the novel), Vallejo uses dark humor to emphasize these grotesque medical practices while also dignifying the seropositive subject. In one scene, without referring to Darío as a person with AIDS, a doctor uses the euphemism “high-risk patient,” which stigmatized people belonging to certain groups affected by the initial outbreak of the virus.²² The physician obtains a response associated with acts of homoerotic desire that won’t be silenced: “‘Is he high-risk?’ asks the wise man then, glancing furtively at us. ‘Extremely high, doctor: he sleeps with sawbones.’ ‘Ah . . .’ he says” (173).

In addition to the medical violence orchestrated by the state and health workers, there is another kind of violence in the novel, one inserted on perhaps a deeper and therefore less visible level: that of postcoloniality, the regime of geopolitical domination initiated in modernity that makes countries unequal from each other (Hall), and which, most of all, creates two differentiated subjective categories. In this sense, given the lack of state medical attention—and, even more so, given the global irresponsibility in response to HIV/AIDS—it is once again the Third World body that becomes representatively attacked. To understand this postulate, diarrhea, symbol of bodily corruption, has been an essential trope for the seropositive body that is disintegrating not only due to the virus or medical incompetence, but also, as we will see in El desbarrancadero, due to the global dynamic. The significance of this body’s fluid appears, for example, in the autofictional play The Normal Heart (1985) by Larry Kramer, which narrates the 1980s: intensely painful years for seropositive people and communities in New York. In one specific scene, Bruce tells Ned, the protagonist, about the inexplicable death of his partner, Albert, on a plane: “Albert loses his mind, not recognizing me, knowing where he is or that he’s going home, and then, right there, on the plane, he becomes . . . incontinent. He starts doing it in his pants and all over the seat; shit, piss, everything” (100). Albert dies before they make it to the hospital, illustrating the impossibility of bodily containment in the face of the virus, which dehumanizes the person.

Something similar happens to Darío in El desbarrancadero, as related by his brother Fernando: “He was dying for months of diarrhea, an uncontrollable diarrhea that not even God Our Father, with all his omnipotence and proven kindness to human beings, could stop” (11). In response, Fernando administers sulfaguanidine, a remedy for this problem-but one used in livestock. The bovine antidiuretic works at first. Fernando also gives him marijuana, as “AIDS took away his appetite, but marijuana gave it back to him” (16). Later, the diarrhea returns and Fernando takes other measures: “When the sulfaguanidine failed and the diarrhea re-declared itself, I went with my sister-in-law Nora to a veterinary pharmacy for amprolium, a remedy for coccidiosis in poultry that I fed him with a spoon” (186). In this passage, in which the protagonist places himself in an ambiguous site of medical science, it is possible to understand the dehumanization of the Third-World, AIDs-afflicted fag body, neglected by medicine and national law.²³ Yet the neglect also comes from the so-called gay and queer resistance in the US, which shows—notwithstanding analogous pains and torments (as we see in Albert’s case in The Normal Heart), several years of difference, and greater possibilities of resistance—that important lessons were not passed down quickly or with appropriate relevance from North to South. As a result, and without having a decolonial project of protest in any way, Vallejo’s angry or sarcastic words allow us to understand how, faced with the discourse of AIDS as a synonym for the disintegration of the fag “sudaca” (a derogatory term for Latin American) body, it was necessary to restore that abused body through a certain use of “language.” Vallejo’s traditional enraged diatribe, ranting freely (in this case against the family, the state, and medicine), correlates to his brother’s incontinent body. El desbarrancadero constitutes a specific forgotten tome of that “history of annals” that reorganizes that traditional logical chain, based on which the son “wipes the ass” (57) of the next son by maternal mandate, in order to consider forms of solidarity, likewise centered on carnal materiality, beyond the nuclear family and the nation that successfully integrates the disintegrated body under another logic altogether.

The second matter I wish to address involves Fernando’s gestures of care. To do so, there is an issue I must underscore: Fernando does not embark from the logic of the healthy body versus the sick body, and so this binary cracks, making way for new forms of representing illness. Probably as a result of the narrator’s nihilism, the sick body and death are not examined as parts of the disintegrated body, but as yet another process of existence. Once again, parody allows for a relativization of illness and death in different scenes. For example, when he remarks, “I don’t know why people feel so ashamed of their illnesses but never of their mothers. Humanity is strange. You only get one mother, people say, but there are actually more than three billion of them!” (176). Or with respect to his and Darío’s father: “He infected you with the AIDS of this life” (139). Or, finally, when he adds in defense of his brother’s life: “If doctors or motherfucking AIDS was going to kill Darío, then why I shouldn’t I! Especially if I was the only one hurting” (176). It seems to me that Fernando, by refusing to succumb to the “immune logic” of the body, is able to fashion new forms of relating to illness. Indeed, the means of shifting from disintegration to dis/integration, of filling hierarchically constructed language with new counter-hegemonic signifieds, passes through a form of care for oneself, based in this wide-ranging conception of the pathologized body.

Thus, through the narrative (and certain intertexts that appear in it), an affective bond forms between Fernando and his brother Darío, one that exceeds traditional family norms and brings their bodies closer together in a transgressive way through the notion of care for oneself. In fact, the narrative of El desbarrancadero exacerbates the physical closeness, the carnal connection. For example, the main site of action is the maternal/paternal home, a somewhat sordid but also intimate place that contains a vital artifact for understanding bodily proximity: a hammock. In one scene, in which the brothers begin to fabulate about an essential moment for the seropositive subject—contagion—Fernando says to Darío: “It’s been four years since you got the results, and now here we are in this yard in this house, in the calm of this hammock, recollecting, mulling over to see if we can figure out who could have infected him, out of the very human desire to know, to know who killed you” (39). The space of the hammock, “furniture” of Taino origin and therefore native to the region, is different from a bed or a couch: it squeezes bodies together, making them lose the distance imposed by the rational Eurocentric mandate. This shared place shows that Fernando does harbor the desire to get to know the illness, but his primary goal is to care for his brother’s body: transmitting vitality to it, like the other side of the viral transmission and the discourse of fear it sparked.

This exacerbated closeness is not based on patri/matrilinear blood ties, but on a fag physical history that twins their blood, seropositive and not. This mixture of fluids, which seeks to disrupt the family space, occurs, for example, when both brothers share sexual partners, a matter that also reflects the contradictory gay world: it liberates the body from a sexual regime based on the family unit, but disciplines it by locating it in a whitewashed capitalist window display that views human flesh as a consumable good and tends to dehumanize the subject. Take, for instance, one representative scene in which Darío and Fernando have a threesome with an Afro-descendant man:²⁴

“We took him back to our Admiral Jet apartment, where I was the super, and put him between us in the bed . . .”

“And we passed him back and forth like a Ping-Pong ball. What a night, brother!”

“And I praised God for giving us that beauty and so many others, undeservingly.” (146)

Beyond this mix of sexual partners, which suggestively invokes the supreme taboo of incest, the novel seeks to mix “sick” blood with “healthy.” This is evidenced by one episode, crucial to every seropositive story: the moment when a person learns from a medical test that they have the virus in their body. In the case of the brothers, they both get their blood work done at the same time, obtaining the results simultaneously as well. Fernando says: “In that moment I begged God to have mixed up the results, jumbled the vials, so that the verdict was the opposite: mine positive and his negative” (38). This non-sexual fluid exchange allows us to see the shared history that writes a particular kind of “family annals” in which a jus sanguinis regime, a blood right, promises the creation of a fag homeland and nation through another kind of solidarity.

The texts that circulate in the story are not only literary and referential ones (including, we might say, the novel itself). Rather, as the previous scene indicates, they include the medical texts that, once shared, lose the characteristic of self-knowledge and become a perimeter of care-for-oneself. In this space of sordid intimacy, shared writing and reading grant a different locus to the dis/integrated body. In this sense, Fernando tells his brother: “I’ve got your whole file archived in the computer of my brain, the entire thing. With syphilis came AIDS, a highly jumbled infection, promiscuous, caused by a riotous promiscuity. But anyway, I’m not scolding you, I’m just telling you. For scientific purposes” (42; my emphasis). The protagonist has read and carefully saved “Darío’s” texts;²⁵ that is, not the texts written by Darío, but those recording his body’s “medical truth,” which marks the seropositive account. Sharing medical texts that lay out percentages and diagnoses in prescriptive language that modifies reality, in this case that of the healthy body versus the sick body, humanizes the novel—a succor, at least in this era of the disease, even in spaces of privilege in Latin America, as is the brothers’ affluent household in Antioquia.

The closeness between the narrator (author/character) and his brother intensifies in the novel. Fernando, recalling past events, dreams that he and Darío fall off a precipice, perhaps referencing Thelma and Louise. Startled, fearing the nightmare might be a deathly premonition, he goes into the bedroom and finds his brother looking at a childhood photo in the old family album. Darío says he dreamed they fell off a cliff, to which the narrator responds:

I couldn’t believe it, dear friend: we’d had the same dream. And let me tell you something: by the end, Darío’s soul was synchronized with mine, dream by dream, memory by memory . . . that photo and that dream of that river express, with the deep truth of what time decants, my relationship with Darío. (161)

The original cover, and several successive ones, shows a photo of Fernando Vallejo and his brother, transposing the connection described in the novel not only to the paratextual realm but also to the autobiographical space, which surpasses the original space of autofiction. Accordingly, all of these entangled associations—which exacerbate the proximity and the reading and writing of many different texts—assemble a form of care for the angry, tender, erotic, Antoquian fag self. I believe that this should be treated as part of the regional sex/gender construction.²⁶ Moreover, and without fully peeling away from traditional authorship as communal Aymara feminist have successfully done, it allows us to consider nuances of life and work that invite us, in turn, to evaluate new subjectivities of the body based on a paradigm of care.

In serodiscordant couples, one of the pair carries HIV and the other does not. Fernando and Darío constitute another kind of serodiscordant couple, marked by an instinctive and deeply felt association, more evocative of a pack than of a nuclear family, in which “multiplicities of heterogeneous terms, cofunctioning by contagion, enter into certain assemblages . . . where . . . human beings undertake their becomings-animal” (Deleuze and Guattari 248). At the end of the novel, however, Fernando flees, abandoning his brother at death’s door. In this way, seropositive fag care splinters and exposes that disintegrating “fate,” the “careless care” I mentioned at the beginning of this section, which must be carefully appraised. Thus, the wretched nature of the author/narrator/character impedes us from imagining a long-term community, forcing us instead to seek out substantive subjective changes that understand bodies from their numerous intersections and produce multiple empathies, which are absent from the novel. I believe, then, that several narrative strategies presented in El desbarrancadero allow us to consider the potentialities and failings of certain Latin American fag micro-communities at the end of the past century—and today—that are marked by contradiction, immediacy, and the complex will to live. The wake that Fernando leaves in Darío’s “careless care” is part of the search for a seropositive record of his own, but it also makes it possible to evaluate, today, the dis/integration they both, and various others, undertook between the individual and social body: the strengths and weaknesses that, through the distance and privilege of time, grant courage to the body that decides to coexist with illness.²⁷

Diego Falconí Traváz is an Associate Professor at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, and Professor at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito.

Robin Myers is a poet and Spanish-to-English translator. Recent translations include Salt Crystals by Cristina Bendek (Charco Press), Copy by Dolores Dorantes (Wave Books), The Dream of Every Cell by Maricela Guerrero (Cardboard House Press), The Book of Explanations by Tedi López Mills (Deep Vellum Publishing), and The Restless Dead by Cristina Rivera Garza (Vanderbilt University Press), among other works of poetry and prose. She was double-longlisted for the 2022 National Translation Award in poetry. She lives in Mexico City.

Footnotes

1. This article was originally published in Spanish as “El desbarrancadero de Fernando Vallejo. Des/integración y cuidado en el cuerpo/corpus seropositivo latinoamericano.” Altre Modernità, no. 17, 2017, pp. 1-18. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/10.13130/2035-7680/8439

2. In the original Spanish-language version of this article, I used the three definitions of the verb “desintegrar” that appear in the RAE, translated here by Robin Myers: “To separate the different elements of a whole”; “To destroy entirely”; “To lose cohesion or strength.”

3. In Spanish-language norms, the linguistic definition of the word “desintegración” is a recent one. It is recorded as such in the Diccionario Histórico (1933-1936). In addition, it is worth stressing that none of its definitions or examples is associated with corporeality.

4. Bordelois, in this part of her book, undertakes a linguistic analysis of the root med; without examining disintegration specifically, she arrives at a similar place as the one I intend to address.

5. I use “rigor” in allusion to Foucault’s attachment to it, but also with a sense of precaution and irony: after all, as Susan Winnett remarks, certain words that appear in the academic corpus we use ultimately express complicated patriarchal desires. Specifically, it may serve to consider a certain androcentric perspective that Foucault presented on some occasions, as Frances Bartowski, to cite one example, has pointed out.

6. Although in a 1984 interview, when asked about the shift in his research, Foucault said the following: “In fact, that has always been my problem, even when I have expressed in different terms the framework of this reflection” (Fornet-Betancourt et al. 11). An interesting and in-depth summary of this change in investigative course appears in the fifth chapter of Subjectivity and Truth: Foucault, Education, and the Culture of Self (Besley and Peters 89-92).

7. The author sets this view before and after Plato, and which will later be replaced in Rome by the official establishment of the Catholic Church (Foucault, “Tecnologías” 60).

8. I base this on the date of the writing and publication of this and other works, such as The Hermeneutics of the Subject. While deep and inconclusive debates have transpired over whether Foucault knew he was seropositive before his 1980 trip to the United States, it would be difficult to deny a possible AIDS infection associated with this later phase of his research, in which he returned to Greco-Roman thought. This is James Miller’s conclusion from his interview with Foucault’s former romantic partner and confidant during those years, Daniel Lefert (Miller 380).

9. In 2009, I was an interviewer and reporter in Barcelona for the project Migraciones profesionales, oportunidades para el desarrollo compartido [Professional Migrations: Opportunities for Shared Migration], in which I testified to the ways in which a series of health care professionals from South American countries migrated to Spain in hopes of a better life there, debilitating much of the health systems in their countries of origin. In the case of nurses, who undertake much of the care roles in the medical system, almost all the interviewees were women.

10. We still lack studies of the ways seropositive communities confronted this care, and even on the way certain sexed and feminized bodies have performed various care roles. However, I find it essential to consider these migratory flows from the perspective of Latin American feminism.

11. I note the high mortality rate among indigenous girls as one example.

12. Namely the group Mujeres Creando [Women Creating], the Asamblea de Mujeres Feministas de Bolivia [Assembly of Feminist Women of Bolivia], and, above all, the Comunidad Mujeres Creando [Women Creating Community].

13. Fernando intertextually traverses other texts such as La Virgen de los sicarios (1994), La Rambla paralela (2002), Mi hermano el alcalde (2003), and the five novels that constitute El río del tiempo (published as a single volume in 1991).

14. Though in this case, in truth, there is no testimony, at least not in the traditional sense: as a narration by a person who survives certain events and who, through one person’s account, encompasses the collective experiences of many other people. It seems to me that El desbarrancadero should be seen more as a hybrid genre in which autofiction incorporates certain testimonial elements.

15. The following excerpt summarizes, in a way, the body afflicted in extremis by illness: “As Darío drifted into the void, I started to review the list of his possible ills: histoplasmosis, toxoplasmosis, cryptosporidiosis, blastomycosis, aspergillosis, encephalitis, candidiasis, isosporiasis, leukoplakia . . . . Any of these or several of these or all of them together, plus the bacteria and the virus and the Kaposi’s sarcoma. All I knew for sure was that in the very foundation of the imposing medicalpathogenicoclinical building my brother had become, what was there was AIDS” (174).

16. The novel recounts that his brother Fernando is the only person who knows Darío is seropositive. Later, three other friends find out. The narrator remarks: “The last to hear the news were people from home [Medellín], in the last month, when Darío came back to die” (49).

17. At one point in the novel, he remarks that one week before he returns home to care for his brother, his family decides to go on vacation, leaving Darío alone with their mother, which prompts the conclusion that the brother isn’t a priority for the rest of his relatives.

18. Fernando’s actions in the novel are actually more exclusive with respect to his mother (with all the possible metaphors that this figure entails) than to other women. In fact, multiple episodes show Fernando’s collaboration with his aunt, sister-in-law, and housekeeper. This does not refute the narrator’s essential misogyny, but it does allow us to see a critique of the polysemic mother figure, while also articulating a space that seeks to reaffirm an exacerbated male closeness that, as I will explain below, has certain purposes beyond misogynistic exclusion in this novel.

19. [Translator’s note: in his original Spanish-language version of this text, the author uses the phrase “cuidado descuidado,” which can translate to careless or neglected/neglectful care.] I use the word “descuidado” in both of its senses. First: minimally meticulous with certain bodies, such as women’s bodies. And second: ignored by various discourses in its particularities. For example, the discourse of care that, as I have discussed here, also has a history of crossings and exclusions, marked by the sex/gender template.

20. I am thinking about how the conversation about the obligatory nature of Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), which has sparked many debates on care and solidarity in the present day (especially but not only in First World countries), could be more productive if, in addition to involving an analysis of gender-based identity politics, it overlapped with the care of oneself as a bioethical principle—especially when it comes to refusing to justify medical attention to gay men, or men who have sex with other men, who are living “unruly,” “irresponsible,” or “careless” lives. I hope to expand on this reflection in the near future.

21. Passed just eight years after the commitments enshrined in the Montreal Manifesto of 1989, the Colombian law Decree 1.543 of 1997 defines the terminology relevant to HIV/AIDS and regulates diagnostic activities and free access to antiretroviral drugs, although it does so far less completely for activities of care. This reflects, when it comes to regional legislations like Argentina’s, less attention to seropositive bodies.

22. In the US, it was nicknamed the 4H disease: for homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin users, and Haitians.

23. As Fernando thinks about how to cure his brother, a mango falls onto his head like an analogy for Darwin, man of science. At other points, however, Fernando uses medicinal remedies (such as cat’s claw from Bazil, a plant that was ironically planted in the family’s yard in Medellín) or spiritual ones (like the soothing palo santo, or bursera graveolens) in attempt to heal Darío.

24. This scene also appears in Vallejo’s earlier novel, Años de indulgencia (1989), albeit with a plot variation. In this other novel, Fernando says: “My invisible presence withdrew into a discreet corner. They folded the black man, turned over the black man, unfolded the black man” (370), leading us to understand that he was not a participant in the sexual encounter, only a voyeur. Of course, this does not eliminate the sense of exacerbated closeness between their bodies, one veering on incest.

25. The original phrase in Spanish is “la computadora del coconut,” “coconut” being a colloquial term for the brain. Although this phrase serves as a metaphor for the author’s mind, it remains somewhat ambiguous with respect to a digital file in, for example, an Apple computer.

26. In chapter four of my book De las cenizas al texto: Literaturas andinas de las disidencias sexuales en el siglo XX, I propose that this text can also be understood as a contribution to (sub)Andean seropositive literatures.

27. With this analysis, I don’t intend to glorify the male redemption that appears, in some way or other, in Fernando’s character. That would mean glorifying “the tears of the misogynist homosexual,” with respect to what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick says of heterosexual male tears: “The sacred tears of the heterosexual man: rare and precious liquor whose properties, we are led to believe, are rivaled only by the lacrimae Christi whose secretion is such a specialty of religious kitsch” (191). On the contrary: I seek to understand how sex/gender constructions and novels contain complex itineraries that must be studied using different apparatuses, especially those constructed with respect to fag subjectivity.

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