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“Dr. Pirrelli, that's his name, felt my budding breasts. I wasn't scared until I was there, in the gap of silence that followed his touching me until he pronounced: it's almost normal .” This scene from the book Ni chico ni chica, the latest release from Rosa Iceberg publishing house, could sum up the tone of Belén Mentasti's debut novel.

This is a coming-of-age story in which Malena, a protagonist who spends her adolescence in the late 1990s, discovers almost everything for the first time: she smokes her first cigarette, falls in love with a teacher, breaks up with a best friend, runs away from home, dresses as a boy, and is dragged by her mother to a gynecological appointment. And she discovers that, in the eyes of traditional medicine, she is "almost normal."

And Malena, barely sixteen years old, seems to understand what Néstor Perlongher said endlessly: there is no being and not being, there is becoming . "She isn't unhappy with her sexual variation; she's fine with that, but it's society, through the voice of this gynecologist who presents himself as a kind of 'villain,' who judges her," the author explains.

Belén Mentasti is 33 years old and says she discovered literature relatively recently. Despite her late arrival in the world of literature, she has already received numerous awards: her story "Un re amague" was selected for the Young Art Biennial, and she received a Creation Grant from the National Fund for the Arts to write " Ni chico ni chica" (Neither Boy nor Girl) . She trained in writing workshops with Gabriela Cabezón Cámara and Romina Paula and edited this work with Marina Yuszczuk. Additionally, Belén trained in playwriting in workshops taught by Mauricio Kartún and Ignacio Apolo. In 2018, she premiered the play " Si fueras varón, ¿gustarías de mí?" (If You Were a Man, Would You Like Me?) at Microteatro. In 2019, she directed and wrote a short film called Algo Tenía ( Something Had), which was selected for various festivals, such as FIDBA, FICCE, the Gaze Festival (Ireland), and the Lustsreifen Film Festival (Switzerland).

Writing from diversity in a binary world 

It's no easy task to construct a teenage universe with rawness and tenderness, without judging or romanticizing it. The idea for this project by Belén Mentasti originated in writer Gabriela Cabezón Cámara's studio, and all her doubts flowed through there. For a whole year, a group of women—and just as many cats and dogs—gathered in her home in San Telmo to read and share a different vision of the world. 

“When I brought the idea for this novel, Gabi told me, 'Go ahead.' I didn't know where that was, but she trusted me, and that intuition helped me a lot,” says the author. Then the pandemic came, the workshop went virtual, the groups changed, and that's how she met writer and teacher Lía Chara. “She taught me to name less, to put tension between what is said and what is revealed, which is something she does sensationally.” 

In all these literary encounters, and alongside teachers and classmates, Belén raised the question of inclusive language in literature. She had a strong desire to write this story in a non-binary language, one that would be faithful to her current beliefs, but she ultimately abandoned the idea. Inclusive language wasn't an option for this novel, which, above all, had to reflect the reality of that time. The decision was such that, in the book, she emphasizes the masculine as an exclusive language: through the references to "friends," "classmates," and "students," she reflects a universe that only makes visible the existence of cismasculinities. 

“In the early 2000s, binary culture was very strong. The ambiguity, the inability to define oneself as feminine or masculine, was something that made people very uncomfortable. In this book, I'm interested in exploring how someone who experiences that discomfort speaks,” explains Belén.

The classroom and literature, territories for LGBTIA+ disputes

As a child, Belén was always on the verge of being expelled from school. She misbehaved, but she sensed there was a reason behind that discomfort. She resented the institution, the silence about certain things, the imposed limits. “There’s something very genuine about childhood, and I wasn’t comfortable with those rules. My school was supposedly atheist, but they made us go on spiritual retreats, and I didn’t quite understand why. By the age of 10, I was already out of step with the world, and no one explained anything to me, so I misbehaved to get expelled, and I reached the limit of my misconduct.”  

And then, in a class on flower reproduction, a biology teacher explains something about water lilies. “They're plants that have both the male (stamens) and female (pistil) organs in the same flower.” A teenage girl in the classroom is stunned. “The character of Professor Caferata is inspired by a teacher of mine from school. She was the typical lesbian, although at that time it wasn't talked about and it wasn't mentioned. She dressed in a shirt buttoned down to the last button, baggy pants, she was totally masculine, and even though she kept quiet, she commanded respect. At that time, her mere presence said a lot.”

Yahoo Answers

“This thing I had with my teacher, which was a kind of mystery, that I couldn't fully understand what was happening to me with my sexuality, generated a lot of curiosity in me. And literature brought me some answers and possible worlds.” This is how the character of Caferata, the biology teacher as a metaphor, emerged: “Below, she wrote the word anomaly. Then, a colon: they're inverted flowers. That day I learned that figs weren't fruits but flowers that grew inward, and that male figs weren't edible, but female ones were.”

Malena's character, then, goes to an internet cafe and searches Yahoo for answers, "I can't seem to get it, what's happening, why do I have this abnormality?" because she needs answers. And, in a move similar to her protagonist's, she confesses that literature was the refuge where she often sought answers. "I think that sometimes these other ways of naming, like writing, have to do with explaining things to those around us, or in my case, to my family. No one is obligated to do it, no one has to explain anything to their family, but when I came out as a lesbian, they asked me a lot of things, they asked me questions, and these are possible answers," Belén explains. Later, she would discover that books don't answer questions, but they do open up possible worlds. "And in those worlds, sometimes, things can be a little better."