¿De qué manera abrigarnos de lo que corre dentro de nosotros?
José Luis Zárate’s La ruta del hielo y la sal expands on an episode from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, namely Dracula’s sea-voyage from Varna to Whitby, from the perspective of the nameless captain of the Deméter. it is a pensive, tormented, deeply horny novel of coming to terms with queer desire in a violently homophobic world, and it is also a novel that does not quite manage to break away from its predecessor’s flaws.
the novel is divided into three sections. the first narrates the journey from Varna across most of the Mediterranean, where the captain meditates on his desire for men (and the limits imposed on it by his position as captain and the conventions that structure life aboard ship) and on the unsettling dreams he’s been having — where a mysterious figure in the form of his young lover Mijaíl alternately teases and torments him — and on the rats who seem to have come aboard with the mysterious cargo of earth that the Deméter has been hired to convey.
the second, in the form of logbook entries, is a prelude to the full horror, as crew members begin to disappear, one by one, as the Deméter passes from the Mediterranean into the Atlantic, too rapidly approaching its destination. in the final section, the captain and his first mate — the last remaining crewmember — come to understand both the reality and the identity of the strange figure that crewmembers reported seeing but whom they could never find. finally alone, taunted by the vampire, the captain makes one last, desperate attempt to prevent the Deméter from reaching land and to record the truth in writing should they be wrecked in spite of this.
the focus of the novel is the captain’s ambivalence about his desire for men. he is unabashed — it is a deeply horny novel — but he has also internalized the stigma of the homophobic world around him. the death — the murder or lynching, in fact — of Mijaíl is a key part of this: he blames himself for initiating Mijaíl into the world of gay sex. the vampire’s (ultimately vampires’) thirst (or Thirst) is eventually used metaphorically to allow the narrator to absolve himself — what matters, what can be judged, he concludes, is not our desires but how we choose to act on them. his love for Mijaíl wasn’t violent — even if it was a “sin” — and so he bears no responsibility for Mijaíl’s death. the vampire, meanwhile, is violent desire embodied, ready to consume everyone and everything in its path in order to satisfy itself.
I was more struck, though, I must say, by what the novel does not address than by what it does.
the novel does center on an Eastern European character — the captain and most of his crew are Russian — giving his life to prevent the vampire from making landfall. silent, still, though, are the “szaganys” (presumably meant to be Hungarian cigány, i.e., “G*psy”), who speak only a strange, foreign language that the captain does not understand, who stand as uncertain objects of desire for their hard masculinity and their strangeness and also their ambivalent servitude: the captain reads them as serfs or slaves of some unknown person, absolutely subjected to that person’s will. Eastern Europe is voiced, but only the (presumed) cosmopolitan world of Black Sea and Aegean maritime trade; the (savage) inland of the East remains Other: “¿En las estepas de Valaquia aún hay invasiones, vo[ivode]s, señores guerreros incendiando castillos, avanzando con sus hordas por la nieve oscura?” the Roma speak only one sentence, in German.
and despite his exercise of sexual power over one of the Roma — an unknowing partial reenactment of the vampire’s, taking one of them by the neck and sucking the salt from his skin while the man and his companions can only stare with hatred, constrained as they are by the vampire’s violent authority — the captain’s desire still inclines, first and foremost, towards whiteness. by preference he seeks northern European sailors, sailors unfamiliar with the Mediterranean heat, far from home (more vulnerable? less able to leave his ship?). one imagines he would like Tom of Finland’s fascist-inspired iconography. I was particularly struck by his characterization of the crew as prepared to “lanza[r] a un pogrom contra un solo hombre” (i.e., the vampire) — aligning the crew and his own position as a queer man (one of “quienes llevamos nuestros apetitos como estigma”) with the hegemonic power of antisemitic violence. it ultimately sort of attempts to reverse this by identifying the lynching of Mijaíl as an expression of perverse desire, equating this to the vampire’s violence, but I found its handling of this a bit diffuse.
and when the captain is the only one left alive, haunted(?) by the ghosts(?) of his crew, he compares them to supposed blood-sucking rats from Ghana, culminating in the affirmation that “son monstruos de Ghana con la terrible maldición del pensamiento”.
in the end La ruta del hielo y la sal, alas, is a book that cannot escape the colonial framing of its source material. it’s a compellingly written, gripping book in many ways, but it nonetheless didn’t move me as I had hoped it would.
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