No Desirable Life: On Eva Baltasar’s “Mammoth”
Eva Baltasar| Mammoth | trans. Julia Sanches | 144 pages | And Other Stories, 2024
You and I have been writing to each other while reading a triptych of novels by the Catalan poet Eva Baltasar. Originally published as Permagel (2018), Boulder (2020), and Mamut (2022), they have arrived in English, sublimely translated by Julia Sanches, as Permafrost (2021), Boulder (2022), and finally Mammoth (2024).
Each unnamed narrator in this triptych is a youngish lesbian woman from Barcelona. We’ll refer to them by the title of their respective novels. Permafrost is a suicidal twenty-something squatting in her aunt’s apartment. Boulder (who is nicknamed Boulder by her lover, Samsa) is a disaffected cook on a merchant ship. Mammoth is an aimless postgrad on a mission to get pregnant. While each protagonist is utterly distinct, their voices overlap. They are hungry for the world and take aggressive action to satisfy this hunger. Their narrow perspectives—immersive and beautiful but also claustrophobic—drive them to asocial behavior, and the occasional cruelty.
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The restrictive quality you describe is something that comes out of their entanglements with life. Yes, the intensity of this entanglement drives their choices as characters, but it’s also right there in the unrelentingly powerful metaphors that dominate these books. This figurative language doesn’t float unattached but rather emerges directly out of the life it describes. For instance, in the hot summer before Mammoth leaves for the countryside, she says her beautiful roommate is “made from plums. I couldn’t look at her and not want her.” A meal consists of cherries “as fat and moist as eyeballs.” She eats on her balcony and observes:
when the light dimmed, the birds died and the trees turned blue. They held that silence inside them and seemed to prop up the whole world…I gazed at them and the trees opened their eyes…I held out my hand and the trees reached for it—because someone, somewhere was waiting and they had come to collect me. I could feel the weight of them bearing witness, that everything I said was being recorded…The streets, always vicious, and never calm, sheltered legions of larvae who had all been coerced into the same enclosed life. A sterile, impenetrable life locked in ice. You could tell, even on a sultry summer night.
The narrators feel shut out of the world, but the world also is tangible and full of sensuality. Mammoth sees her roommate as desirable, even consumable as late-summer fruit. Ordinary food takes on eerie qualities, and while the city life is bleak, violent, and stifling, she imagines a sliver of uneasy recognition and rescue. What is it to live in this world that is at once stifling and simultaneously offers modest possibility? This is the constricted perspective that you’re identifying: loving the world while feeling haunted by a huge distance from it, an irresolvable exile.
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These are in many ways Marxist novels, or at least grounded in Marxist critiques of what the wage and bourgeois society do to the human soul. Labor and land are decisive forces on these characters. They squat in inherited apartments or drift on boats. They are sensitive to the jobs they take and alienated by a particularly capitalist society. From Mammoth:
When I worked for someone else, I gave them the most precious thing I had, more precious than my time or my body, more precious even than the meaning of the word itself: my dignity. Every time I signed a contract or agreed to a trial period, I got the sense I was selling myself to an intermediary who confiscated my passport and got fat at my expense.
Mammoth needs to come alive by escaping the wage and the city. She’s motivated by the misery and anger that workers feel when they experience the indignity of wage labor. She plots her escape through the project of getting herself pregnant, which enacts a confused urge to feel alive, to be productive in a way that can’t immediately be commodified.
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But these characters don’t explicitly desire a communist life. They leave steady jobs for other less-depressing and often less-stable alternatives, not in hopes of living out a different political future, but rather to make this life livable. It’s easy to chalk up the narrators’ malaise to their experiences of living in capitalist (post)modernity, but we can’t ignore that we’re talking about questions of control in existential terms. They don’t own their own labor-power, yes, but they’re also having a violent encounter with the fact that life is something that happens to them and fails to feel their own.
Let’s return to Mammoth’s quest to have a baby, for example. It leads her, a lesbian, to have sex with men and experience a series of murkily fulfilling/unfulfilling attempts. About this urge, she says: "it wasn't the desire to have a baby that took me hostage so much as the desire to gestate, to have life course through my body, to create.”
What better way to act on life than reproduce it? But while her seduction succeeds, her body lets her down. (“The bloodstain on my underwear was an insult.”) In the wake of this failure, she resolves to escape what she calls the “drowning city.” She buys a cheap Peugeot and makes her way into the mountains, eventually renting a remote farmhouse miles down the road from a touristy mountain village. Her only neighbor and companion is a shepherd, gruff and simple, who grazes his sheep in the surrounding hills and answers her questions about country life.
From the moment she lands in the countryside, Mammoth enters a period of dramatic change. After ten hours of chopping wood, she wakes up the next day: "I lift my arms and stretch. That’s when I realize that this isn’t my body – my muscles have hardened into armor. The house thunders below my footsteps as though I’ve grown heavy or become a shepherd." And later that same morning: "I don’t know what’s gotten into me today: I cook twice as much bacon, drink an entire pot of coffee, and get the urge to break out of the house. To rub up against other animals.”
She also enters into a new relationship with life’s control over her. She says: "I want life to mow me down, to feel its hand on the nape of my neck. For it to make me swallow dirt while I breathe. Because—because feeling alive means shouldering the burden, now that I know I can bear the weight."
When she eventually becomes pregnant, she no longer needs a baby to feel life in her body. Her labor, hardiness , and self-sufficiency have reconnected her to life; or at least remedied her alienation from it.
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Isn’t she more alienated than ever?
The primary values that she internalizes in the countryside are practices of violence and abandonment. . She observes the shepherd’s ewes, who abandon some of their lambs without so much as a glance (her and the shepherd live almost exclusively on lamb); she hoodwinks and murders a pestilence of cats; twice, she fights off attempted rapists, once with a burning log. This is what “bearing the weight” of life requires.
But when she carries out the ultimate act of abandonment, and refuses to mother her baby, this entire edifice collapses. “I have committed a crime,” she says. “There is no desirable life.”
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There’s a contradiction inherent in these novels. Absent—indeed, refused—is the idea that poetry and art can satiate this need to create and act on life, even while the language here becomes a life-generating force of its own. Books and language are not saviors for these women. Permafrost dissociates by reading biographies, “the fatter the better,” because they’re “the closest [she] could get to neither coming to an end nor arriving at a beginning.” Boulder is suspicious of language itself, which she calls an “occupied territory” while admitting that it “makes you human.” But to Boulder, “No emotion is more indulgent than feeling that you are intensely human.” There are no books or music in Mammoth’s hideaway—there isn’t even a pencil; at the inn she stays in during her journey there, she picks up a bible out of boredom, then puts it down when “the plot languishes.” Art is not allowed to fuel or resuscitate the experience of life for these characters, even while for the reader and, perhaps, the author, clearly it can. Baltasar’s epigraph to Permafrost is: “to poetry, for permitting it.”
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The narrators view language as complicit in life’s violence:
There’s something sacrilegious about Barcelona at daybreak. The city pounces on the still-pale light emerging from the deep sea and seizes it with its lucrative forceps. It’s the hour of alarm clocks and stimulants, of haste, slammed doors, and headaches. A massive apparatus spits and starts, and language keeps it well oiled – a rude, dispassionate language that perverts language’s original meaning. I woke to an awareness of that profanity. Then I showered, put on some clean clothes, and ate processed food.”
For Mammoth, it’s language that lubricates the violent and oppressive machine-city, and has thus betrayed her. How can it be a source of pleasure? How could she trust it? Passages like this disappear when Mammoth begins her exile in the countryside. Her sentences and diction simplify with her lifestyle.
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The narrator of Boulder behaves like a classically selfish heterosexual man. A ship’s cook who loves her solitude and freedom, Boulder falls dramatically in love with Samsa, a Scandinavian businesswoman. After a while she comes ashore to let the relationship grow, and so finds herself marooned in Reykjavík living a bourgeois lifestyle she can barely tolerate. Then Samsa decides that she wants a baby, initiates the IVF process, and hell slowly breaks loose.
Boulder broods, cheats, and stays out drinking with her best buddy. She uses her business—an empanada truck—as an excuse to avoid her home and relationship. The contradiction between her femininity and toxicity confuses me the most. This is perhaps evidence of my own misogyny.
But I think deeper than this, it was difficult to read Boulder when I started to feel that Samsa, from day one, is a sexual object who never achieves any other status, except for some kind of animal/machine when she begins to impregnate herself. Boulder condescends to Samsa's bourgeois taste and lifestyle, her corporate job, and more than anything her desire for a baby, along with every step in her journey of motherhood. The way the two of them fall in love—mind-blowing sex—doesn’t prove to be much of a foundation. Boulder says, “The truth is we’d never made any plans, we’d just taken huge bites out of life.”
Also, Boulder has a disturbing way of looking at sex: “My body . . . demands another body to touch and stimulate and use to satisfy its own monstrous hunger—until that person, her purity, her charms are used up and spat out.”
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What's perhaps uncomfortable is that Boulder is a dick, but she's also responding to real, tough things such as finding that she and her partner come to want wholly different lives for themselves. She tries and fails to find appropriate ways to sustain the relationship, and often seems to be a shitty partner. Still, I am not altogether concerned with her moral character. And it matters that she's a woman, but I can't say I found myself overly concerned with her womanhood either. Baltasar seems entirely disinterested in moral purity.
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I prefer a flawed character to fiction that tries to take its own moral high ground. A recent essay in The New Yorker by Parul Sehgal found Sarah Manguso’s latest novel lacking exactly this type of nuance in its story of divorce. In Sehgal’s description, the husband John is presented as an abusive cheater with endless flaws while Jane is a perfect victim, and responsible for neither her desire for John nor even her decision to marry, which is a “coercion” of patriarchy.
Baltasar’s triptych serves as a cleanse from this kind of fiction. Even though their attempts to strongarm life never fully succeed, these narrators take absolute responsibility for their lives. They assign themselves the task of finding ways to really live. If there’s a didacticism in these novels, it’s the repeated assertion that life always takes the upper hand.
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Three times, that lesson is delivered with a dramatic twist at the end of each novel, in a kind of authorial revenge. Baltasar seizes power over her narrators, breaking into the space between the reader and their tyrannical “I.”. Interestingly, babies—who crash into life, emphasizing its capacity for endurance and renewal, as well as its vulnerability and interdependence—are always agents of this destabilization.
The question then becomes, how will these characters respond? For Permafrost it leads to a softening. Boulder, on the other hand, doesn’t crack. She just rolls back to the life she was living before. Mammoth, however, seems to harden.
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We imagine Mammoth’s realization that there is no “desirable life” to be just as liberating as it is devastating. There is despair over human smallness, but also a shedding of expectation. The tryptich’s questions—what life means for this protagonist, and how she is meant to live it—are once again made new.