We want to be a ‘cussa’, not a ‘perra’ nor a ‘bitch’

PalmaI remember it like a hit on the radio, a little song you can't stop listening to: “How shy this girl is” or “Has the cat got her tongue?”. They were referring to me, in the third person singular. Never you, always her. Never addressed, always pointed at. They decided that I was shy before I even knew what that was. And from that moment on, I carried those six letters: ‘shy’, like a slab that reduced my existence and my possibilities. A very small little box, perfect for the size of a person who was still two years old. A script, too, that guided my sentences. A circumference within which I had to unfold my movements. A tone of voice. A pre-established way of being, which arrived before me and paved the way.

Shy because the words only came out if I whispered them into my mother's ear; because I lived hidden between the legs of my grandmother; because I had lost the shamelessness of demanding that everyone play with me. 'Shy' was the word that made it more bearable that, just after my parents' separation, they stopped hearing my voice. No one imagined that, even though it hadn't been any trauma, my world had changed so much that I no longer knew how to address it.

Shyness was a solvent explanation; it didn't ask for more questions, it closed the debate. And I accepted the pact. Being shy gave me permission and the excuse to withdraw into myself and dedicate my time to what deserved it—crafts, Disney Channel, and Bratz—to not make efforts to face people I wasn't at all interested in—my godmother's sister, a friend of my mother's, or a distant cousin. It was a very comfortable trap, made of cotton. And for a long time, I pretended they had gotten it right, just like when you receive a transfer that doesn't belong to you. None of that was true, but I wanted to believe it. I suppose that's why I now always have this bundle of nerves in my stomach. Perhaps some word remained encysted inside my stomach: syllables that move around like fish through my guts, trying to expel the truth.

I wake up from my nap remembering all that I once was, aware that in a few hours I will be barking in front of 50 people: What if they were right? What if I am too shy to handle it? I think about all this during the three days that my friend Clàudia Darder has us locked up, inside a ‘cage’, in Búger, which will result in a public showcase. There are Aina Maria Cantallops, Mar Grimalt, Mariona Jaume, Marina Ripoll, Maria Adrover, and me. We think, live, and create Com una cussa, Clàudia's poetry collection. And I, if I had ever been shy, stop being so. I crawl on the floor when Mariona proposes the practice of Katsugen; I follow a rosemary leaf with my sense of smell, guided by Mar; I moan against the wall the sounds that Maria dictates to us; I try to find the equivalence of “wound”*, “hunger”, or “stench” in a gesture with my body, at Marina's suggestion. And we all end up hugging, sweaty, enchanted. We have a vermouth, eat pasta salad, and say goodbye until coffee time.

We explore the female dog. As Aina Maria says, we wring the female dog like a rag: we turn it over and over. A female dog can be many things, depending on whether it is in full “Delirium” or if it “Suspects”, for example. The lexicon is important. Above all, because it is not the same to be a female dog as it is to be a “perra” or a “bitch”. In the female dog we find a brand-new word, “spotless”, “precise”, as Clàudia would say. It is a territory still uncolonized, empty, to go in and live. And we settle in for the whole weekend.

In the “one, two, three” days that we “give ourselves to the word” we debate everything a bitch can do. A bitch can have “feline suspicion”, be abandoned or rabid, can crawl like a “barren reptile”, or can be a “runaway mare”, mark territory or flee, can see “God in small gestures”, sniff the master from meters away or let them “lick her bones”. We reach the conclusion that our bitch has no breed, but we debate whether it is advisable to spay her –if that kidnaps her instinct, her animality, her desire– and if we do her any favor when we let them domesticate her. Are we infantilizing her, when we smother her with care, let her get on the bed and buy her little clothes? Or, on the contrary, do we provide her with a safe space, where she can feel sheltered?

Clàudia lets us do as we please, until one day she bursts into tears, exhausted by everything. She laughs, sobs and returns to sing No me sap greu, by Guillem d’Efak: “We were two little birds, who were always partying”. And we accompany her, barefoot, dancing, through the piano room of ACA (Area of Acoustic Creation). We end up developing a kind of hive mind. We have the security and confidence of a reality created by seven women. A mirage that we build, word by word, to see a single reality all together. We reach our primitive state and lose our modesty. It is the power of the bitch-pack.

All the words in quotation marks belong to verses from the poetry collection Com una cussa, by Clàudia Darder.