Tom Spanbauer: The Man Who Fell in Love With The Moon. HarperPerennial, 1992. [Edición en castellano: Barcelona, Muchnik, 1994]

La escritura de Spanbauer es minimalista. Independientemente del ensayo de Palahniuk al respecto, creo que el minimalismo tiene dos características principales: en primer lugar, la sencillez absoluta, la frase desnuda y, en segundo lugar, la voluntad de ir a las cosas mismas, a las mismísimas tripas del asunto.

En mi opinión, hay dos voces que resuenan en la escritura de Spanbauer: el Salinger de The Catcher in the Rye y el Burroughs de, por ejemplo, The Place of Dead Roads. De Salinger toma Spanbauer la narración en primera persona por parte de alguien que está más cerca de la verdad porque está más cerca de la locura. «A crazy story about crazy people told by a crazy». Burroughs, por su parte, fue quien introdujo la homosexualidad masculina en la novela a finales de los cincuenta. La crudeza de los detalles y lo políticamente incorrecto están tan presentes en Burroughs como en Spanbauer.

The Man Who Fell in Love With The Moon es la historia de una familia peculiar en un atípico pueblo estadounidense de principios del siglo XX. Los miembros de la familia son Ida Richelieu, dueña del prostíbulo en el que trabaja el narrador, Out-in-the-Shed (porque es en el cobertizo donde ejerce de chapero; su verdadero nombre, Duivichi-un-Dua), Alma Hatch, la hermosa prostituta que habla el lenguaje de los pájaros mientras trabaja, y Dellwood Barker, pistolero, filósofo y enamorado de la luna.

Es una familia mejor que cualquier familia ortodoxa, porque el amor y el sexo fluyen en todos los sentidos. Ida prostituye al narrador y, al mismo tiempo, lo trata como a un hijo. Out-in-the-Shed está enamorado de Dellwood Barker aun sabiendo que puede ser su padre. Alma Hatch, amante de Ida, también está enamorada de Dellwood Barker pero al saber que disfruta más del sexo con el narrador la devoran los celos y los persigue a tiros…

Señalaré cuatro elementos filosóficamente relevantes en la novela:

1. El genocidio de los nativos americanos llevado a cabo por el hombre blanco recorre todo el libro.  Las masacres y el confinamiento en las reservas que padecieron todos los pueblos indígenas fueron la causa de que América perdiera su espíritu y sus hombres sagrados. Spanbauer logra construir una metáfora que explica la brutalidad de dicha aniquilación:

«Then General O’Connor came,» Porcupine said, «and it was all downhill after that. He and his troops killed the Shoshone, killed the Indian people, killed us all at the Bear River Massacre—men, women, and children—killed us all. Two hundred and fifty bodies laying around dead. Cut women’s throats while they were fucking them. The snow was bloody red. The waters of the Bear River were red.»
«They killed Chief Bear Hunter,» Owlfeather said. «An American soldier put his bayonet in the fire til it was red-hot and then he stuck the red-hot bayonet in the ear of Chief Bear Hunter and ran it through his head til it came out the other ear.»
«Shoshone have never been the same,» American Flag said.
«They still got that hot bayonet in their heads,» Owlfeather said. «We all do.»
Then: «The enemy is within us now and we kill ourselves,» Owlfeather said.
(p. 160)

2. El enfrentamiento entre el idealismo a lo Berkeley que sostiene Dellwood Barker y el realismo de Ida Richelieu. Dellwood cree firmemente que si un árbol cae en el bosque y no hay nadie para oírlo es como si no hubiese caído porque la realidad no es nada aparte de nuestra percepción, de nuestra mente. Para Ida, que vive en un estado de permanente guerra con la realidad, eso no es más que una cobardía, una renuncia al mundo, una huida hacia la Luna.

Finalmente será Ida quien gane la discusión, muy a su pesar.  Cuando Dellwood tenga que enfrentarse al dolor y la muerte de nada le servirán las filosofías de Platón o Berkeley y perderá la cabeza.

We sat around the kitchen table the way any family would and talked about business, about our customers, talked about big dicks and little dicks. We talked about philosophy, Dellwood and Ida disagreeing.
The biggest argument they’d had so far was over a tree falling in the forest. Dellwood said if there wasn’t anybody there to hear it, the falling tree wouldn’t make a sound.
Ida said that was horseshit, and that anything that fell made a sound, whether someone was there to hear it or not.
Dellwood said, in fact, there weren’t even trees, or forests, if you weren’t a person who was telling yourself the story of trees and forests.
Ida said if you fell down and broke your arm, your arm’d still be broke even if nobody saw you fall down and break it.
Those two could go on arguing forever. Especially over that tree falling. Dellwood said, though, that what he and Ida were arguing over wasn’t the tree—was philosophy. What they were arguing about was what was real. Got to be their only argument after a while: real and what real was.
(p. 237)

3. El rechazo del puritanismo y del fanatismo religioso. Las críticas de Ida a la secta de los mormones son contundentes y agudas. Seguro que se subiría por las paredes si se enterase de la candidatura de Romney a las próximas elecciones.

Dellwood and Ida were similar that way. Both of them believed that all human beings were created equal—like it says in the Constitution of the United States of America—that is, except for Mormons. Ida Richilieu believed that Mormons weren’t human beings—along with most Catholics, and some of her own people, the Jews, and maybe some Baptists because, as Ida put it, most religious people had given up their right to being human beings by claiming they had the God’s truth and nobody else had any truth.
«A person without her or his own truth ain’t a person at all,» Ida said. «Anybody who tells you different—is a jackass, and no longer deserves to be called human being.
(p. 239)

«I told you them Mormons were up to something,» Ida said. «Conniving bunch of cutthroat businessmen parading as a religion! No wonder they were so frisky. Only time a Mormon shows any signs of life is when he’s buying more property or getting ten percent,» Ida said.
(p. 332)

4. Aunque sea un absoluto fracaso, mi filosofía es el idealismo de Dellwood Barker. El mundo no es más que sueño y la única forma de fijar las cosas es a través de la palabra, de las historias. Y las mejores historias son las verdaderas. Contarlas es la tarea del hombre sabio, del chamán, del BERDACHE, Out-in-the-Shed.

«Smoke and wind and fire are all things you can feel but can’t touch. Memories and dreams are like that too. They’re what this world is made up of. There’s really only a very short time that we get hair and teeth and put on red cloth and have bones and skin and look out eyes. Not for long. Some folks longer than others. If you’re lucky, you’ll get to be the one who tells the story: how the eyes have seen, the hair has blown, the caress the skin has felt, how the bones have ached.
«What the human heart is like,» he said.
«How the devil called and we did not answer.
«How we answered.»
(p. 45)

First thing I learned by my own self, without Ida or Dellwood or Alma or anybody else telling me, my own first truth was this: fucking was the same way as with everything else—what you thought you were doing was not what you were doing. What you thought you were doing was sucking and penetrating and kissing, holding, and ejaculating. What you were doing, though, was telling a story.
First off, thing is, you got to know you got a story. Then you got to have to tell it. Knowing how to tell your story good is important, but the secret to good fucking is how well you can listen. Fucking only gets good when the two stories start being the same story—the human-being sex story—when the two bodies stop being two bodies and start being the big excruciating, the one heart beating.
(p. 124)

Una lectura apasionante, capaz de mezclar risa y tragedia en la misma página. Tiene defectos, los estereotipos raciales o la influencia new-age, pero quedan ampliamente compensados por una historia inolvidable, que es de lo que se trata. ¿O no?