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KATHERINE VOLIN
Friday, March 21, 2008
A new publishing of ‘The Carnivorous Lamb’ explores illicit relationship between two brothers
Some months back, after watching two gut-wrenching films set in Franco Spain, I swore off any art related to the era. Then “The Carnivorous Lamb,” by Spanish author Agustín Gómez-Arcos, hit my desk.
Written in French during Gómez-Arcos’ decades of voluntary exile in France, the novel was his first and most acclaimed. It won the Prix Hermes ABLANK in 1975, the year of General Francisco Franco’s death and thus the end of the general’s fascist rule.
“The Carnivorous Lamb” approaches Franco’s Spain from a mostly bloodshed-free point-of-view, but that doesn’t make the book appealing for the faint of heart. As its title suggests, this story of a republican family — the republican here signifies those who fought for a Spanish republic and whom Franco defeated when he came to power in 1939 — is as unnatural as a young meat-eating herbivore.
Narrated by a boy whose name is not revealed until the end, the story traces his isolated, intense relationship with his family, including his mother, who is unable to forgive him for not being the blind freak she thought he might be at birth; his largely absent father; the family maid Clara; and his brother, Antonio.
When the narrator finally opens his eyes for the first time 16 days after his birth, he locks gazes with Antonio. Thus begins the love affair between the boys, which grows to include tutoring, erotic bathtub exploration and sex in a butterfly-filled cave the day of the narrator’s first communion at the age of 13.
Gómez-Arcos, who was gay, is not one to gloss over details. Eroticism pervades the descriptions of the brothers’ lively and loving sexual encounters, highlighting that forbidding fruits doesn’t make their flavor less sweet.
“The taste of the body of Christ had hardly left my mouth when my brother’s tongue hungrily pushed into it, wiping away the last traces. I was frightened and awed. I was shivering, completely lost in this new encounter. Wasn’t my brother ever going to undress, in the filtered sunlight and the swarm of white butterflies?”
GÓMEZ-ARCOS’ PROSE, poetic but economical, is the perfect foil to his chosen subject. He writes beautifully of the boys’ love affair, fully aware of its illicitness. And although the brothers’ mother, father, maid and family priest all know of the boys’ sexual relationship, the insular group both recoils from it and is intrigued by it. No one, however, forbids it.
Once the narrator has reached puberty, his mother realizes the boy’s education is sorely lacking. The narrator had, at that point, never left the confines of his home, let alone attended school. A tutor comes to prepare him for high school, but in Catholic Franco Spain, his religious education must also be addressed, so a priest comes to oversee his moral development.
That this novel was meant as an allegory is difficult to miss. The family’s isolation from their town or any semblance of a social life reflects Spain’s relationship with the rest of the world; red and yellow, the colors of the Franco flag, are sprinkled generously throughout the book, with the mother being particularly associated with yellow and her republican husband with red.
In some cases, the allegory Gómez-Arcos wields is devilishly satirical as in the instance of the priests to whom the narrator confesses his incestuous relationship for his own entertainment. Rather than discourage the narrator from engaging in such relationships, the priests he “confesses” to all drool for more of the salacious details, which the cunning protagonist relinquishes sparingly before withdrawing from the confessional boxes of the now-aroused clergymen.
All of this, of course, makes for a book that is as politically charged and appropriate now as it was at its 1975 publishing.
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