Madrid Me Mata — or Madrid Murders Me, to replicate the alliterative Spanish — was the name of a short-lived but iconic magazine from the mid-1980s that chronicled the explosion of free expression in Spain’s capital during the post-Franco era. People danced, talked and partied to exhaustion while a deadly heroin epidemic emerged as the dark underside to the art, sex and music. The all-consuming intensity of life in the city seemed to have the power to kill its residents, figuratively and literally.
The unnamed madrileña narrator of Alana S. Portero’s affecting and poetic debut novel, “Bad Habit,” comes of age in the ’90s, after this period of “androgynous splendor” has passed. Nonetheless, she has a deep, if complicated, fondness for the city. “Madrid was that beat-up sofa that really should be replaced but is so comfy and has so many memories attached to it that no one could bear to kick it to the curb,” she thinks.
Though she has embraced Madrid, she fears the city will not embrace her back — not because she parties too hard but because she is a girl, born in a boy’s body, living in a working-class neighborhood where being queer turns you into an outcast.
The novel, which was translated from the Spanish by Mara Faye Lethem, follows this character as she struggles to accept herself and express her identity in a time and place in which there’s no clear, safe path to do so. To get by, she denies her true identity, hiding her experiments putting on makeup and masking her fascination with the world of women, a negation that makes her feel very nearly dead — her own personal version of Madrid Me Mata. But coming out as trans would bring the threat of physical violence.
The narrator feels an ongoing sense of isolation, which Portero devastatingly conveys in the vignette-like chapters and character portraits that make up much of the novel. “All trans girls grow up alone,” the narrator reflects.
Eventually she begins taking covert steps toward living as her true self. As she enters her teenage years, she manages to venture out into the gay neighborhood of Chueca. She has a liberating first romance, though it is cut painfully short when her lover’s father learns of the relationship. Later she throws herself into the druggy nightclub scene, where she finally dresses as a woman. Yet this double life still leaves her alienated, since her daytime identity remains male. It’s only when she makes friends with older trans women, coming to feel “so powerfully part of a tribe that it seemed it was my birthright,” that she realizes she, in fact, isn’t alone, that “gender euphoria did exist.”
“Bad Habit” has been a critical and commercial success in Spain; now it’s being translated into many languages and published across the world. In a marketplace of often narrowly defined literary categories, Portero’s book — like the best books that feature trans characters — shows us that a “trans novel” can actually be anything it wants to be. “Bad Habit” is about identity, yes, but in its keenly observed realism, it’s also a family story of parents and children, and at the same time, it offers a fresh angle on narratives of the working class. And undoubtedly, it is a tale of a city, taking its place in a rich lineage of Madrid novels by other Spanish authors, from Rosa Montero to Almudena Grandes, Camilo José Cela to Javier Marías.
“Bad Habit” reminds us that our ideas of cities are inseparable from the people who tell stories about them, and we all benefit from new tales about old places. As Portero’s narrator puts it, “I couldn’t escape being from Madrid just like I couldn’t escape being trans.”
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