Jayber Ladino Guapacha
Dear Jeff,
Thanks to you I have had the opportunity to find authors and books that would have taken me a while to get to, when it turns out that they are necessary to achieve a bit of that possible redemption, thanks to reading one’s own life in that of others. .
Today I thank you for having acted as a mediator between the novels of Catalina Navas and my reading spirit. I remember you well when you left the room where The movement in the chrysalis was presented, during the 2022 Pereira Book Fair. You told me two or three things you heard and they were enough to encourage me to buy it and ask the author for her autograph.
Well then, with the wink he made to Teresa de Jesús and her poetry, I delved into the story of that neighbor who returns from the United States in a cocoon about to burst. Well, you suggest categories to accommodate the deep meanings of this work such as affections, illness, the archive, fiction and narration as a practice of caring for and inventing the other.
You caught my curiosity when you raised the diada piety and faith. In the title itself an interior transformation is promised when alluding to the chrysalis. As the pages progressed, those features between the devotion and the transgression of that first-person narrator, HIV positive, showed me that Saint Teresa was right when she said that a soul without prayer was like a body unable to move. Where the hagiography to which we have become accustomed would have turned him into a chaste and blessed patient, Catalina Navas breathed into him enough love and courage for him to rise from prostration. That is why I can understand why she participated in a rally inside a church, during the Eucharist, shouting “Stop killing us. Stop killing us. Stop killing us.”
The bitterness at the end of said act of vindication is not due to the shock that they have sought in the good consciences that attend mass, but to the challenge that he still has with himself: “My name fell in full and in that church I was baptized for the second time. I was not Peter the friend of Jesus but Peter the coward; the one who denies Jesus three times. I left embarrassed, not for having attacked my faith, but for my cowardice. He had betrayed them, he had not been able to put his face to the cameras or his wrists to the handcuffs of the police ”.
We have heard about the internal conflicts of those who suffer from terminal illnesses when they ask questions about the transcendent. Illness like a sieve in which the shavings remain and only the valuable passes through, which is just dust. Catalina Navas responds from that masculine body, a man of science and desire, wondering about the drugs she is prescribed, the speeches in which she is made invisible, the sermons in which she blames him for the evil she suffers.
The veracity of the human complexity with which Navas brings us closer to this reality can be strongly felt in the superimposition of images that the protagonist has when he receives the result of his HIV test and then goes to pray in St. Patrick’s Cathedral: “ I sat in front of the altar and looked at the emaciated body of Jesus hanging on the cross […] I saw him raise his hands to heaven, turn the wine into clean blood, the bread into the sacred body […] If this miracle happened in all the churches, in all the masses in the world, couldn’t it also happen in my body as a believer, as a faithful son of God and of the Virgin? I wanted the true miracle of transubstantiation to take place in my body […] Transform me, mutate me, modify me. Change my blood like dialysis machines, cleanse me and remove all toxins from me, Lord Jesus.”
What survives then is that wisdom that makes us strong in the face of life itself, without vain illusions or exhausting hopes, but awake to magic: “I told him that it was easier to be surprised when the good was not expected than to be sad and go to bed every night.” days like this for not having it”.
As a vestige of that uterus in which the butterfly is formed, a series of collages appear in the novel that are already in themselves a parallel poem to the prose. His presence is not arbitrary, but rather justified by the narrator’s profession as an entomologist. Leaves, flowers, wings and clippings from family photographs investigate memory as an attribute of the soul.
Jeff, after a pandemic like the one we’ve just gone through and that I don’t think we’ve meditated on enough, a work like this, to which you approached me at a good time, helps to heal losses. AIDS sufferers were cruelly judged for two decades and there are still fears and prejudices today. We don’t learn that it’s together that we take care of ourselves and heal. Getting up on the lips of Jesus was not a solitary and privileged option: the true miracle was reincorporation into community life.
Yes, the butterfly-man in this novel simply flutters. On his iridescent wings, I embrace you.