Cuando pienso en mi falta de cabeza.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara
• Position: Review

Cuando pienso en mi falta de cabeza, by Adolfo Couve. Intro., Adriana Valdes. Santiago, Chile: Seix Barral/Planeta, 2000.

Reading Adolfo Couve's new novel gives you an eerie feeling, not only because the book consists of variations on the themes of madness and death, but also because Couve, one of Chile's most celebrated writers, committed suicide in the summer of 1998, about a year before the book was published. The title--which might be translated roughly as, "I can't believe how I lost my head," or more literally, "when I think about my lack of a head (that is, my foolishness)"--reflects the author's obsession with "headlessness" in both a literal and figurative sense. The trauma of "losing one's head"--acting without thinking, going mad, dying--is the leitmotif of this dark comedy. Humor is the means by which the author struggles to cope with his demons, to distance himself from them and to overpower them.

The relationship between madness and art is the theme of a number of Couve's books. In this one, Camondo, an artist, whose model, Marieta, makes him "lose his head," disguises himself in the hooded habit of a Franciscan monk in order to make his lack of a cephalic appendage inconspicuous. Of course, he doesn't shed a tear because he doesn't have a head! The artist is not only headless, but also made of wax, which makes him sometimes pliant, sometimes hard. He finds his newfound headlessness both liberating and oppressive. On the one hand, it removes him from the constraints of time, allowing him to transcend the rigid chronology invented and imposed by human reason. On the other, it distances him from other people.

Marieta herself has lost her head. About a year before removing Camondo's, she goes crazy and begins committing all kinds of outrages. One by one, she places objects--a sewing basket, an iron, a mirror--in the street and watches how people react. One day she places her own nude body in the street in hopes that someone will carry her off the same way people carried off her possessions.

Instead, a crowd forms around her and neighbors debate whether to take her to the police station or to social services. A man named Enrique, who had taken her mirror a while before, persuades the others to take her to the police, then leaves for home to get dressed for a party. When he realizes that instead of his own bedroom, Marieta's mirror is still reflecting hers, with its jumble of sheets and old clothes, he has the impression he's...