My Tender Matador

Pedro Lemebel published Tengo miedo, torero in 2001, and it remains his only novel. The Chilean writer, better known for his crónicas and his fearless presence in Santiago's queer underground, set the book in the second half of 1986, when the city was tense with protests against Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship. Seix Barral brought it out in Chile in its Biblioteca breve collection, and Anagrama followed in Spain under Narrativas hispánicas. The English title, My Tender Matador, softens the original's fear: the Spanish phrase translates literally as I am afraid, bullfighter, a line from a song that runs through the story.

At its center is a poor travesti who earns money sewing and selling trinkets, and a young leftist guerrilla from the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front. The two meet by chance and drift into an affair that is tender, awkward, and politically dangerous. The guerrilla is part of a plot to assassinate Pinochet, and he uses the travesti's apartment as a lookout and a place to store weapons. Lemebel threads real figures through the fiction: Pinochet himself, his wife Lucía Hiriart, and Gonzalo Cáceres, Hiriart's stylist at the time who later became a television personality.

The novel moves between the travesti's cramped rooms and the streets of a city under surveillance, mixing melodrama with sharp political detail. Lemebel writes in a baroque, slangy voice that refuses to separate camp from tragedy. The result is a love story that doubles as a portrait of life under dictatorship, where desire and resistance share the same small, borrowed space. [edit]