Few stories in our contemporary time deal with the bodiliness of the human experience. Call it a casualty of the Enlightenment, a side effect of our virtual experiences online, or just our general disgust with our aging, often sick physicality. Yet, Márcia Barbieri’s, The Whore, is a novel that revels in its flesh, not for its own sake, despite the title, but in order to glean the deeper meanings of human experience. It is both a titillating and repellant experience, but the reader cannot help themselves to be carried away by the prostitute, Anúncia’s, drug-fueled reflections on her life. Focusing on the various relationships that came in and out of her, our insightful lady of the night presents a colorful, if not vulgar, depiction of humanity at its most base, but most authentic, beginning with herself.
The stream-of-conscious prose style will remind the reader of the best of the moderns, yet it retains some element of self-awareness because the book is written as a long, single monologue. Sprinkled throughout Anúncia’s retelling of her life are sharp indulgent amorphisms; “People devise morbid solutions to survive boredom…No one deserves to be the victim to reality’s whims…As far as I know, there are only revolutions and they always fail.” They remain at this high level never becoming too specific, but never as overly vague as it could veer, coming across as casual observations until you notice their content. At times, these become much cruder comments:
Details are for pussies…I’d pity the enemy who had to break bread with a man. I pity the wives that think they’re better than whores. I pity the man who thinks he’s better than a beast…A whore is like an old car you like taking for a spring every once in a while, but eventually, you pass it off to someone else.
These snippets build all around Anúncia, like a distinct mythology as if she is a Socrates in her own right, which isn’t far from the truth. Preaching from a land that has been ripped apart by war and disease; “Our old civilization went into decline and snuffed itself out, and we had to start over from scratch.” The Whore sees everything and will not turn away from the worst of humanity. She cannot afford to, she must welcome it to her breast.
The prose itself is littered with contradictory fragments and Anúncia herself cannot seem to keep her story straight, even as she feigns melodramatic turns. “My words are a straight line. I don’t get lost in God’s varicose legs. Men who talk in pretty rhymes hide evil in their souls.” We listen as she attempts to reconcile her profession, and her relationship with her mother, who has been committed to an asylum. She details the passing passions of former lovers, named the Philosopher and Poet. It should not be a surprise to the reader as to who she favors—the Poet.
The underlying thread that can be traced, even with much difficulty, is that Anúncia is trying to reconcile who she is amongst all of the people who have seen her over the years. She holds this strong bitterness towards her mother, but she also retains vitriol towards men. “A man is not a simulacrum of a woman, we are two separate species and the only thing that unites us is the spine in our backs.” The men who seek her comfort are at her mercy, because they have their own lusts to state, while she chooses to give them a real versus simulated experience. She may take her own pleasure at times during her duties, but it is not always such a pure transaction.
Even when she has the opportunity to leave her chosen profession by becoming pregnant, she attempts to remain, because she has folded her identity into it. She attempts to rid herself of the unwanted pregnancy, but is defeated by the fetus, who clings to her uterine wall and will not be removed despite all of the abortionist’s efforts. Yet, even upon the birth, she remains apart. Watching from afar as her lover, Flamenca, raises the boy and even breastfeeds him herself. “I never understood breastfeeding as a gesture of love, it seemed more like an act of desperation, of solitude.” Anúncia does not raise a finger, despising the boy and mourning the loss of her lover with this unspoken chasm that has yawned between them. As the years pass, the boy grows and soon he and Flamenca disappear, hitting the road, leaving the Whore behind to tend to her clients.
The self-reflection of those passages may be lost amid her lurid and often vivid descriptions of the body’s functions, told in excruciating detail that may make even the sternest reader wrinkle their nose. The visceral nature of these sections works on the reader, and they work well. Barbieri may be using these lines to draw attention to what she hints at between the lines. If nothing else, it confirms the skill of Barbieri, as well as the adept translation by Adrian Minckley to preserve the perverse nature of the narrative.
The vulgar, but rich physicality of The Whore cannot be ignored and is actually a bright light in the West, where our stories have become more theoretical and opaquer to reflection. They skim the surface of our unconscious, while The Whore reveals how the body interacts with our inner life. Our thoughts, feelings, and passions bubble up from our interiority and present themselves in the daylight, naked and bare. This is where Anúncia feels the most empowered, because she is able to say what others cannot. Her place in this new society allows for that freedom where previously it would have been better to ignore her or not say anything at all. The reader is challenged by this. How are we to respond to this work? How should this affect us? Is The Whore correct in saying what she does? These questions and others may leave the reader considering them and reflecting them on their own.
Overall, the prose creates a very complicated, but stirring chronicle that may be more of a spiral than a line of thought. It plunges deeper and deeper into the human psyche, demanding readers to take it wholesale, defying dissection and further analyzing. The Whore’s words map a lifetime of feeling and thought, threading through a broken world and broken soul of the people that inhabit it. The Whore herself is beyond an everyman and becomes something else. An idea that we ourselves are not too far from her profession. It is a work that will not make everyone comfortable, but it feels like a distinctly important novel and one that breaks into the English-speaking world, much like Anúncia’s life.
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About the author
Alexander Pyles is a writer, editor, and reviewer based in the Chicago area. Originally from Virginia Beach, he finds himself stranded in the Midwest among the corn, but he has come to enjoy the rural setting. He holds an MA in Philosophy and an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction. His fiction has appeared in Radix Media, Trembling with Fear, Black Hare Press, and other venues around the web. His nonfiction has appeared in the Chicago Review of Books, Dark Matter Magazine, Three Crows Magazine, Horror Tree, and No Sell Out Productions. When not writing or reading, he is attempting to cook, garden, or play video games when his two toddlers allow it. You can find him at @Pylesofbooks on Twitter or www.pylesofbooks.com.
