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Alana S Portero’s debut novel became something of a sensation when it was published in Spain last year. It spent seven weeks on the bestseller list, won several awards and was purchased for translation into 13 languages.
The main character, Alex, is a child growing up in Madrid during the transition from dictatorship to democracy. However, her Madrid is not the hedonistic city of La Movida Madrileña, the counterculture movement that transformed Spain after the death of Franco, rather Alex lives in San Blas, in poverty. Her Madrid is closer to Harlem than James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, a city of despair, a bloodied community and drugs. Indeed, the first time Alex feels the urge to kiss someone, it’s her neighbor Efren, dead from a heroin overdose. “If it’s possible for a five-year-old to fall in love,” she wrote, “then my love was poured out on this tragic wreck.”
Like Baldwin, Portero writes from within an outgrown religious tradition. Just as Baldwin’s writing is heavy on the pulpit rhetoric he first used as a young Pentecostal priest, so Portero’s style is indelibly Catholic. Alex’s world is one of ex-votos and pietàs, where Lily Munster and Madonna become angels of intercession. The litany of saints is cast upon her poor neighbors, and the effect is deeply moving. Portero paints a world of violence and petty cruelty in which her character moves with a kind of blissful compassion and the precocious ability to distinguish damaged people from the damage they do.
Make no doubt that Alex is suffering. She is harassed and abused not only because she is a young woman, but also because she is a young transgender woman. A friend of her father manipulates her, pretending to penetrate her, “doggy style, exaggerating his thrusts and moans.” Lustful strangers on the street pester her, a brutally sexualized beating leaves her unconscious. The last of these sequences is particularly harrowing, but as with the rest of the story, it’s told without self-pity. Such restraint adds to the book’s power.
The novel is also filigree filled with ironic humor. Alex uses stoic wit to protect himself from both the scumbags on Madrid’s street corners and his victim status. On her way home at dawn, she stops at a park bench to change into something less attractive while a man in a plastic poncho masturbates in front of her. “Without looking away,” Alex says phlegmatically, “I started removing my makeup with the wet wipes I always carry.” It’s the scene disturbingly funny because it rings so true.
I don’t mean to say that Portero’s Madrid is populated only by petty crooks and perverts. Perhaps the most memorable characters are Alex’s neighbors in San Blas, whom we see transformed through her innocent eyes as fairy-tale figures, albeit more Angela Carter than Walt Disney. “The Wig” is an old lady, so named for the “extremely shoddy” hairstyle she wears, capable of cursing expectant mothers to give birth to monkeys. “Lady Godiva” is a young woman imprisoned by her rapist father, whom she appears to kill and partially cannibalize. “The Headbutter” has been known to knock out fascists. “Lil Crip” never got vaccinated against polio.
Then there are women like Margarita, a transwoman, now middle-aged, who bears the scars of beatings by Franco’s policemen and cosmetic surgeries performed by congested doctors. If at first they terrify Alex with their awkward bodies and scarred skin, in the course of the novel they become the brightest angels, illuminating the path she herself must walk. I can’t help but feel that Bad Habit, a work of deep humility laced with prose as rich as double cream, will function in much the same way as a guiding star for readers staggering wounded toward their own personhood.
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