La Virgen Cabeza (English: Slum Virgin) is the debut novel by Argentine writer Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, published in 2009 by Eterna Cadencia. The plot tells the story of Cleopatra—a travesti who is revered as a saint in a slum in Buenos Aires after she begins to communicate with the Virgin Mary—and her love affair with Qüity, a reporter from a sensationalist media outlet. Among the themes explored in the book are popular religion, social exclusion, political corruption, violence, and sexual diversity, several of which the author would return to in later works.
The novel was well received by critics upon publication and helped position Cabezón Cámara in the Latin American literary canon.
Plot
Qüity is a journalist in search of a good story that will allow her to win a grant to resume her studies in literature. She soon decides to use, as the subject of her article, the slum called El Poso and its peculiar leader, a travesti known as Hermana Cleopatra, who used to work as a prostitute and was now revered as a saint by the members of the community. According to the story, one night when Cleopatra was the victim of a beating and gang rape in a police station, she heard the voice of the Virgin Mary, who then cleaned her clothes, healed her wounds, and left her a cup of tea with some medias lunas (croissants). Upon seeing what had happened, her attackers repented and began to praise the miracle, which launched her rise as the spiritual guide of the neighborhood. The inhabitants soon built an image of the Virgin out of plaster in order to worship her. This statue came to be known as the Virgen Cabeza. The term cabeza here is a reference to the inhabitants of the villa miseria or the slum. It is a pejorative term used to refer to the lower classes. In Rioplatense Spanish, the term is a throwback to the expression cabecita negra, which appeared in Buenos Aires in the 1940s when people began to migrate from rural areas to the capital city as a result of industrialization. The expression was used—and is still used today—by wealthy people to refer in a pejorative manner to those migrants, most of whom were of indigenous descent and, by extension, to all non-white people and the working class.
During her time in El Poso, Qüity witnesses firsthand Cleopatra's attempts to get the neighborhood back on track, including the construction of a pond in which they place carps they have stolen from an upper-class suburb. This soon makes them famous throughout the city due the success with which the carps reproduce, a fact they celebrate at parties in which drugs and alcohol flow freely and cumbia music plays. She also witnesses several of the miracles that Cleopatra performs after speaking with the plaster Virgin, as well as her attempts to get the young people from the neighborhood to stop using drugs and stealing, and to protect themselves from venereal diseases and the abuse that many suffer at the hands of the mafia and corrupt authorities.
One day the police serve them with an eviction notice since there were plans to build a luxury private club in the neighborhood, but most of them refuse to leave. With the eviction imminent, the inhabitants prepare their defense, despite Cleopatra's attempts to calm things down. However, the eviction turns out to be much more brutal than everyone imagined: the police arrive with armored vehicles and begin a massacre that leaves 183 people dead. Qüity had left hours earlier to do something at her place of work, so she managed to escape. Cleopatra witnesses the killings firsthand and is one of the few people to survive.
Some time later, she arrives at Qüity's apartment with the head of the plaster Virgin, the only relic she managed to save. As the days go by, Qüity and Cleopatra realize how they feel about each other and begin a romantic relationship, which leads Cleo to come out as a lesbian. Later, fearing that the police are looking for them, they flee to Miami, where they write a cumbia opera called La Virgen Cabeza based on the events that took place in El Poso, which becomes a raging success. Cleopatra feels inspired and travels to Cuba to preach the word of the Virgin. When Qüity finds out, she decides to go after her to bring her back and prevent her from squandering their fortune, determined to have her prosecuted or deported if necessary.
Main characters Cleopatra: known as Hermana Cleo, she's a travesti who claims to communicate with the Virgin Mary and who is revered by the residents of El Poso, a slum located in the northern part of Buenos Aires. In her childhood, when she still used the name Carlos Guillermo, she dreamed of being a vedette and appearing in television. She was later abused by her father, police sergeant Ramón Lobos, who refused to accept her gender identity. Cleopatra's physical description in the book is of a black woman who stands 1.90 meters tall and wears a blonde wig, which gives her the appearance of una especie de Doris Day de albañilería. She used to work as a prostitute, but decided to leave that life behind to become the leader of the neighborhood and guide it towards salvation after having come in contact with the Virgin Mary, who whispers to her the various changes that need to be made in El Poso. Qüity: she's a 35-year-old crime reporter who launches an investigation into the events surrounding Cleopatra, but who ends up falling in love with her. Her real name is Catalina but everyone knows her as Qüity. The first time she arrives in El Poso, she is fearful of being attacked, a feeling that persists until a traumatic event makes her feel like a member of the community. Along with Cleopatra, she decides to take care of a boy she grows fond of but is left devastated when the child is killed during the massacre perpetrated by the police. After moving with Cleopatra to Miami, she gets pregnant, and they decide to form a family. Daniel: he's a photographer, a friend of Qüity who works for the Secretariat of Intelligence of Argentina. He was also the one who introduced Cleopatra to Qüity. Composition
Cabezón Cámara wrote the novel in the spare time allowed by her job as a media layout designer. She has claimed that her original idea was to write a book that would portray the capitalism of the period of the Carlos Menem administration and its subsequent years, through the story of a shantytown that is constantly watched by security cameras. However, the novel took a turn when she began writing the voice of the character Cleopatra, who was born as a tribute to a friend of hers, a travesti named Paula who was murdered when she was young. This led her to rethink several aspects of the novel and to give more emphasis to themes such as oppression and collective organization in the final version of the book.
A first draft excerpt of the novel appeared as a short story with the title La hermana Cleopatra in the anthology Una terraza propia, published by Norma in 2006.
Structure and style The novel is presented in the form of a supposed manuscript written by Qüity during her stay in Miami with Cleopatra. Throughout the document, the latter makes notes and gives her version of several events in a semantic register of her own. Structurally, the novel is divided into 25 chapters and an epilogue, 20 of which are narrated by Qüity—in addition to the epilogue—and five by Cleopatra. The title of each chapter includes the name of its narrator, as well as a phrase from a speech representative of its contents. Nine of the chapters begin with a quotation that rhymes.
Cabezón's prose builds the atmosphere of the story through the mixture of the poetic genre with colloquialisms, shantytown slang, phrases in Spanglish, and constant references to musical genres such as cumbia or reggaeton. The sections in which Cleo speaks to the Virgin are written in a more formal language, described in the novel as "medieval," with multiple references to the Odyssey and other classical works which, along with the language used by the rest of the characters, creates a style that in the novel is referred to as lengua cumbianchera, an example of which can be identified in the following excerpt:
There are marked differences between Qüity's and Cleopatra's narrative register. While the former has a style similar to journalistic writings and noir fiction, always providing rational explanations to the facts, Cleopatra uses a much more lively and informal language, besides making frequent spelling mistakes, such as adding a letter /s/ at the end of the second conjugation of verbs in simple past tense (as in the case of contastes instead of contaste, or escribistes instead of escribiste).
Another peculiarity of the novel's style is the use of humor to describe tragic scenes, which gives a farcical air to the narrative. It is also characterized by the use of explicit language when exploring the sexuality of the characters, with descriptions that take on a hyperbolic and obscene tone as a way of portraying the rawness of the environment in which the characters interact, as illustrated below:
Central themes Poverty and social exclusion One of the themes explored in the novel is the reality of poverty and social marginalization, and their ties to the systems of exclusion that perpetuate them. To explore these ideas, Cabezón Cámara uses the slum of El Poso as a representation of marginalized settlements in general. The name of the slum itself, El Poso, alludes both to pozo as a reference to the low areas where irregular settlements are usually located, and to poso, in the sense of residues or waste, which can be interpreted as the dregs of society. This exclusion from the rest of the social classes takes physical form in the wall that separates El Poso from those neighborhoods in the city that are of a better social class. Apart from keeping the inhabitants of the slum separated from the rest of the city, this wall also served to make them—and poverty with them—invisible to the eyes of the social elites:
The novel also sheds light on the exclusion suffered by trans women in society, via Cleopatra's story, as she only manages to overcome society's resistance to accept her gender identity when she forges the passport with which she travels to Miami and where she is finally recognized as Cleopatra Lobos. She also recounts her experiences in prostitution, a life she was pushed into because of the impossibility of getting other types of jobs, as she reveals to Qüity: ¿De qué mierda te creés que vivimos las travestis, mi amor? ¿Vos te creés que vas al aviso de secretaria que ponen en el diario y te dicen bienvenida, «señorita»? ¿Viste muchas trabajando en las empresas, vos?
Popular religiosity
Another central theme in the novel is the role of the Christian religion in the lives of marginalized sectors. Several scenes in the book can be read as a rewriting of biblical passages, among them the arrest of Jesus at the Mount of Olives, which is reflected in La Virgen Cabeza with the destruction of El Poso. The idea of a Jesus of Nazareth who identifies with the oppressed social sectors has a long tradition in Latin America, although in the case of Cabezón Cámara, these images are demystified and shown as just another portion of the pantheon of beliefs of the slum's inhabitants, with no greater hierarchy than the rest of the popular figures, such as Eva Perón or Susana Giménez. The novel shows this influence of religion in the lives of the characters by integrating verses from the Bible into the popular parlance of El Poso. Religious references also appear in situations of extreme violence, such as in the case of a verse from the Book of Leviticus that is left as a sort of warning next to the body of a woman who has been murdered.