Translated by Robin Myers. United States: Katakanas Editores & Hablemos, escritoras. 2023. 294 pages.
Rosa Beltrán has achieved notoriety in Mexico as one of the most remarkable writers of the last few decades. She excels not only as a novelist and short story writer, but as a discerning witness of Mexico’s realities through her crónicas and essays. A chair member of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua, Beltrán has not allowed her intellectual endeavors to hinder her creative impulse. On the contrary, her six published novels are a testimony to her wit and imagination and her outstanding grip on human nature.
Her latest novel is a link in a chain of achievements, which comes as no surprise, but is not without its gratifications. Do not be deceived by its technical title: Free Radicals, beautifully translated into English by Robin Myers, is teeming with motorcycles, kidnappings, miniskirts, state violence, the zodiac, potheads, American diners in Mexico, and a host of aunts. It tells the story of a fourteen-year-old girl who tries to grapple with her mother’s unexpected departure. Wearing a high ponytail and straddling a Harley-Davidson, the narrator’s mother takes off with her lover towards Guatemala, leaving her household in a state of orphanhood that more closely resembles an autonomous commune than a barren fairy-tale castle. Free Radicals is an emotional rollercoaster ride in which the narrator not only tries to solve the mystery of this getaway, but has to act in loco parentis for herself and her siblings, a task she undertakes to uncanny degrees. She sets out to become her mother by slipping into her clothes, her jewelry and fragrance. “An excellent idea,” the narrator thinks “because as long as I could be her, she’d be there with me, and… no one could blame her for having left us, me and my siblings.”
This candid narrator dives deep and unknowingly into the bright turmoil of growing up in Mexico City in the sixties. She has clear objectives in life: “Three, to be precise: first, find my mother. Second, find a man who would see me as my mother’s lover saw her (or, to put it another way, who would make me see what my mom saw in him). Third, change the world. In that order.” Soon enough, she realizes her objective is only one: losing her virginity. How will losing her virginity bring her closer to finding her mother, finding love and changing the world? She cleverly answers: go back and you will find it is the answer to all three.
The magic and humor of Free Radicals lies in that it can be read as a reversal of a fairy tale. If the protagonist’s quest is losing her virginity, “which,” she says “was frankly one of the hardest things to lose in my whole life,” this narrative undermines the literary commonplace of women relentlessly losing their virginity all too soon, too often, too easily, and tragically, against their will. We have a modern version of Bluebeard, too: the enigmatic lover with whom the mother flees. An obnoxious painter, alleged art savant, and drunkard, the man takes great pride in painting the mother naked. And then, in displaying his oeuvre to a perplexed and disgusted daughter. Beltrán is a keen observer of one of life’s most dangerous specimens: that of the liberal macho, whose chief trait is mansplaining perhaps Marxian concepts or Carlos Castaneda self-help notions to young women to get into their pants. These men, so eager to change the world, have failed time and again at recognizing the importance of female liberation. In the midst of the 1968 uprising in Mexico City, for instance, the narrator’s cousins engage in political activism and plan to attend what turned out to be the fatal rally of the second of October in protest of state violence, now commemorated as the Tlatelolco Massacre. The male cousins go and survive. The girls, however, are sent to Morelia a few days earlier to keep them from participating in the rally. It is with high economy that Beltrán voices over the twofold letdown women felt back then: “They’re disappointed with the government, but we’re disappointed with the government and with them.”
Part Bildungsroman, part biblio-memoir, part Künstlerroman, this untamable novel bears witness to a historical background that permeates the bonds of ordinary people, deep into their tissue. “History is a concave mirror we stare into, hoping to find ourselves,” Beltrán writes. Into this curved surface, Beltrán drops her characters like miniatures, letting them roam free.
“LIKE ATOMIC CLOUDS OF ELECTRONS, THESE CHARACTERS LET US SEE HOW DIFFICULT IT IS TO TELL WHERE ONE NATION ENDS AND THE OTHER BEGINS”
In the heat of counterculture, like a molecule whose bonds are severed, left highly reactive, the protagonist finds that her mother’s liberty has made her find her own. She has started a chain reaction for her daughter, too, whose own struggles make her wield her liberty in new ways, which are at times difficult to name. Three generations of women have to make their way through a series of cataclysms that span sixty years of not only Mexico’s history, but also that of the United States and the rest of the globe. To say this with Wittgenstein, Free Radicals is a novel about finding the limits of our own world, which are always the limits of our language. It is a novel about acquiring a language with which to name a world that is rapidly changing and evolving. If science proffers the words that elucidate our objective experience, literature, then, supplies the terms that we need to make sense of our subjective experience, our emotions and traumas. What happens when we name retrospectively? The novel implicitly asks: Was rape, abuse or neglect what happened back then? Was the intimidation I suffered bullying? Were we living in freedom or emancipation? Beltrán’s is a story about fighting for that language.
This is why I celebrate the fact that Free Radicals is finally available in the United States. It comes as no surprise that Robin Myers has done an outstanding job of translating this novel into English, with great insight and accuracy, as usual, and the publication could not be timelier. Here is a window into a Mexican reality that is often sidelined for coarser literary depictions. Here, the magnetic bonds between the United States and Mexico are exposed in all their complexity and haziness, as a shared history of attraction and repulsion, love and loss. Like atomic clouds of electrons, these characters let us see how difficult it is to tell where one nation ends and the other begins, as a family disperses and combines with that loud background radiation of history.
Intimately spun, written with care and a certain humor that came to me almost providentially in triple-digit weather, Free Radicals is likely to ease into its new, northernmost readership like the coolest, most necessary splash of H20.
