“Whereas English distinguishes between ‘flesh’ and ‘meat,'” translator Mark Schafer writes in an introductory note to René’s Flesh, “Spanish fuses the two concepts in the single word carne, which is used in phrases like ‘flesh of my flesh’ and ‘flesh and blood’ as readily as in ‘meat pie.'” The two concepts of meat and flesh fuse in the Spanish title — La carne de René — as they fuse in its story. This book is a powerful reminder that the human body is a package of meat you will ever read.
I was introduced to the work of Virgilio Piñera when I read Cold Tales, his collection of absurdist, surrealist, yet viscerally realistic short stories. No one’s stories are quite like Piñera’s. If I tossed out names like Borges, Ionescu, or Kafka, you might get some sense of his work — and it’s certainly of the same caliber, worthy of being considered as among the great writers of the 20th century — but you would likely make the mistake of thinking you knew it because you’d read theirs, and Piñera absolutely deserves to be read on his own.
I’m not sure I’d recommend René’s Flesh as the book to start with, though. There’s always a certain disorienting effect to Piñera’s work. As one Goodreads reader put it, his stories take place “in noplace in notime.” Locations are unnamed and the era could be anywhere from the 1920s to today. There are enough details — clothing, furniture, shops, trappings of government and church — to make the settings seem familiar, but at the same time, nothing specific enough to say we’re in Cuba or Argentina, where Piñera lived at different times, or Spain or the United States.
And then there are his subjects, things like the train as big as the world or the climbers whose bodies are broken into smaller and smaller pieces as they tumble from a mountaintop. Piñera takes things we know and stretches them to the point where they seem grotesque or ridiculous or both.
René’s Flesh is a novel that takes one thing we know — that we humans are creatures of the flesh, which means in Spanish, at least, that we are also creatures of meat — and stretches it to lengths that are not just uncomfortable but deeply disturbing. The novel opens as René, a young man just turned twenty, joins a queue outside a butcher shop. The shop is overflowing with meat and the hungry people are clamoring to buy as much as they can.
René, however, is there for a different purpose. His father Ramón wants to teach his son to love flesh. “My dear child, tomorrow, the day you turn twenty, I will put you in possession of the secret of the flesh.” (Bear in mind Schafer’s use of the word “meat” in his translation when talking about the human body and “flesh” when dealing with food, which I’ve tried to follow in this piece. However, as Schafer also warns, “to, as it were, help flesh out Piñera’s vision … wherever the word ‘flesh’ appears, it may be understood as ‘meat,’ and vice versa.”)
Ramón is not a flesh lover: he’s a flesh worshipper. His taste for the flesh is “a preference so passionate as to constitute a veritable priesthood and even a dynasty, something that is passed on from father to son, that is jealously bequeathed to keep the enthusiasm alive.” Ramón is a mysterious figure who’s uprooted his family in midnight moves throughout René’s childhood: “Some people asserted he was a traveling businessman, others, an engineer, some, a smuggler, and there were even people who declared him an assassin.”
Unlike Ramón, René abhors the flesh. His father’s passion for flesh, his murky role in some international conspiracy related to its worship, is the reason his family has been on the run for as long as he can remember. The sight of great slabs of beef, severed pig’s heads, steaks, roasts, and sausages in the butcher shop sicken him. Worse yet, in Ramón’s eyes, his son has yet to accept that being a creature of meat comes hand in hand with the reality of having to endure pain.
Pain — from cuts and wounds and torture — is a given when René joins his father in the Cause. Ramón, like his father before him, is a leader in the Cause, a worldwide revolutionary movement: “I am chief of those who are pursued, who pursue those who pursue us.” That sentence embodies marvelously the isolation, the circular logic, that binds so many extremist groups. For those in the Cause, “The pursuit never ends, it is infinite; not even death would bring it to a close.” When Ramón dies, René will carry on, and so on and so on. There is no suggestion that the Cause will ultimately prevail.
And what is the Cause fighting for?
“Over a piece of chocolate.” Many years before, the ruling powers forbade the people to eat chocolate. Protests led to riots, which led to underground movements that converged into the Cause.
But, René objects, “I’m never seen you drink chocolate.”
“You think we’re so foolish as to be seen with a cup of chocolate in our hand?” Ramón replies, “What we’re defending is the cause of chocolate.”
At this stage in the Cause’s history, what it’s defending has, in fact, become irrelevant. All that matters is that the Cause is a struggle for which its believers must be willing to experience pain as well as to inflict it. In fact, given the circular logic of its belief, the two acts can be fused into one. shows a painting of St. Sebastian, the early Christian martyr. But unlike traditional depictions of St. Sebastian, this martyr is his own punisher:
This St. Sebastian was drawing arrows from a quiver and sticking them into his body. The painter had shown him in the moment of sticking the last one into his forehead. His arm was still raised, his fingers now removed from the end of the arrow and seeming to fear that this arrow hadn’t sunk definitively into his flesh.
For this reason, René is sent off for training. His school has a specific purpose: “Knowledge must be beaten into a person,” its director informs him. The only textbook at the school is the human body — “everything a man needs to forge his way into the flesh of another man.” If the Cause is going to produce men prepared to torture their pursuers, it must also teach them to experience pain: “a body deprived of pain isn’t a body but a rock; that the greater the capacity for pain, the greater the vitality.”
As one of fifty freshmen, René is muzzled, strapped into a chair, and subjected to increasingly powerful electrical charges. Their skins burn and sweat drips off their noses and fingers. Then, the rest of the students are instructed to creep up, to sniff around their bodies, trying to detect the subtle differences in the amount of pain they are suffering.
When René fails to show an acceptable level of pain, he is singled out for special treatment. He is forced to listen to a record endlessly repeating the same insistent lecture:
Attention, René! René! Attention, René! René! René! … Why do you not want? Do you not want because wanting, you do not want or do you want because you want not to want? Do you want wanting or do you want not wanting? How do you want?
When this brainwashing treatment fails, Swyne, the school’s chief torturer, decides that René is too impervious to pain. He must be softened up through the most direct method. And so he sets to licking René from head to toe. Soon, squads of students are stripped to the skin and put to the task. The licking goes on for hours. Days. It’s essential they succeed, for it’s René’s destiny to be a leader. “Cannon fodder comes in two categories,” Swyne tells him: “leader meat and mass meat.” Leaders are those “who aren’t just tortured, but who torture themselves and in turn torture others, inventing new models of torture.”
René’s Flesh follows the conventional formula of a Bildungsroman, covering the formative years and education of (usually) a young man. But writing 200 years after Voltaire, Piñera’s Candide is hypercharged with the forces of mass production and totalitarianism. There is no garden at the end of René’s journey.
There is so much to unpack in this book I can only scratch the surface. I haven’t even touched on the use of doubles (René meets a man who’s paid to have himself surgically altered to look exactly like his father Ramón), or the collusion between church and state, or deformity (the millionaire known as Ball of Flesh) or dual significance of arrows (Cupid’s arrows vs. St. Sebastian’s arrows). This is not a book one likes, but it is a book one admires — although, as Raymond Souza put it, “Pinera’s writings inspire the kind of admiration that a surgeon’s scalpel produces.”
Piñera was a gay man who lived under the dual repression of the Catholic church and reactionary leaders like Juan Perón and Fulgencio Batista. What he would have experienced as the pleasures of the flesh were considered deadly sins and criminal acts. It’s not surprising that the Cause takes St. Sebastian as its ideal. As Richard A. Kaye has written, “gay men have seen in Sebastian at once a stunning advertisement for homosexual desire (indeed, a homoerotic ideal), and a prototypical portrait of tortured closet case.”
René’s Flesh is often grouped or compared with José Lezama Lima’s novel Paradiso. Both writers were Cuban and homosexual, both novels dealt with young men growing up as outsiders in their worlds. However, René’s Flesh is, in my opinion at least, a much more relevant and accessible book. Despite the strong role of Catholic symbolism, Piñera’s use abstraction and exaggeration make this a story that can be appreciated by just about any reader on the planet. I called Cold Tales the best discovery I made in 2017, a year I devoted exclusively to short story collections. Barely one month into this year, I’m not afraid to call René’s Flesh my discovery of 2021. If Rhinoceros and The Trial can be considered 20th century masterpieces, then so can René’s Flesh.
[Although René’s Flesh was published in Mark Schafer’s excellent translation as part of outstanding Eridanos Press Library series in 1990 and two years later by Marsilio, it’s been out of print for decades and the few used copies available go for prices starting at $140. Fortunately, the book is available in electronic format on the Internet Archive (Link), which is how I read it.]