Las aventuras, desaventuras y sueños de Adonis García, el vampiro de la colonia Roma de Luis ZapataAdonis García is, thus far, the only male protagonic prostitute of my study. The author puts the story in the mouth of his creation and demands double duty of his readers. As reader, I experience Adonis' narrative via two senses - sight, of course, but hearing as well. It is a twist on the "found manuscript" device and Zapata invokes Lazarillo to great effect. I paraphrase and translate (if one can do both) a bit from the back cover, the hypothetic presence of a tape recorder to serve as the vehicle of an uninterrupted monologue, through which parade moments of a picaresque life in the unknown underbelly of Mexico City. Premature adolescence, homosexuality, prostitution, illness, tedium are the organizing themes that Adonis chooses to relate the stages of his life. Zapata indeed seems to revitalize the picaresque novel, while at the same time extract constants from that genre and reinterpret them in a great American metropolis of the XXth century. The whole novel is an homage to the picaresque novel and is sprinkled with quotes from not just Lazarillo, but also El buscón, El Periquillo Sarniento. This novel is also, thus far, the first to establish, if only intertextually, the "transatlantic" link I've been looking for in the narrative - it is more obvious in film.
cinta primera y tú ¿qué vas a hacer cuan
do dios se muera?
Dios no se muere; parientes tiene (Perico) y padrinos que lo
socorran; ricos hay en México harto piadosos que lo protejan...
JOSÉ JOAQUÍN FERNÁNDEZ DE LIZARDI. El Periquillo Sarniento
( llegábamos a una fiesta un cuate y yo
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Menudo Christmas Day entry, ¿qué no?
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