Cautery by Lucía Lijtmaer, translated from the Spanish by Maureen Shaughnessy, Charco Press, 2025
Last October was a particularly busy month for news providers in Spain. Deadly, climate change-induced floods ripped through Valencia; the desperate residents of Barcelona and the Canary Islands continued to protest against unsustainable levels of tourism and unregulated property speculation; and in Madrid, sleazy stories of coercion and coverups involving a prominent young politician rattled a progressive left-wing party to its core. Despite the depressing familiarity of such headlines, it almost seems portentous that all of these subjects appear in one form or another in Lucía Lijtmaer’s 2022 novel, Cautery. An accomplished writer and co-director of the acclaimed feminist pop-culture podcast Deforme Semanal Ideal Total, which tackles everything from critical theory to modern dating, Lijtmaer’s finger is firmly on the pulse of millennial Spanish society.
But Spain is the setting for just one-half of Cautery, now published in Maureen Shaughnessy’s English translation. It is a tale of two women, separated by the Atlantic Ocean and four hundred years of time. The first is jaded, in her thirties, and speaking to us from the Spain of the mid-2010s; she is obsessed with the idea of dying, often fantasising in great detail about the satisfaction she would derive from the mutual destruction of herself and her home city of Barcelona in an unstoppable tsunami: ‘It will take all the Pans & Company sandwich shops, the Liceu opera house, the tattoo artists on Tallers street. All the pseudo-authentic wine bars will flood.’
After this morbid millenarian daydream, we meet the other narrator, Deborah Moody, a real-life seventeenth-century Elizabethan anabaptist who actually is dead and buried, now appraising her own life from beyond the grave. The novel proceeds in paired-up chapters which jump between the two women’s worlds, a structure that invites us to draw comparisons across time and realities. In this way, cornerstones of the everyday—such as relationships and property—are stripped to their philosophical core as we contemplate what has changed and what, despite half a century of progress, remains the same.
In the almost present day, the speaker hints that a series of events has led her to move to the ‘scorched plateau’ that is Madrid in August, a large sum of money in hand. The move, she concedes in a tongue-in-cheek nod to the rivalry between the two cities, ‘is not so different from dying, after all.’ Strung-out in a kind of purgatory, she reflects acerbically on the superficial, middle-class sheen of her life ‘before’ and the catatonia of her present situation: ‘I suppose there was a time when it could have been said I was happy. I can prove it by the digital footprint I left online, the same transparent trail made by a slug.’ As darkly sarcastic as she is miserable, it is not long before she begins to address someone—a weighty ‘you’—and we intuit that there is heartbreak here, a romantic catastrophe which has flooded her life, leaving her shipwrecked and alone.
The Barcelonan’s ex turns out to be a sideburn-sporting hipster, one of many in the city who have ‘somewhat ambiguous university degrees and not much practical experience’. This point of tension, coupled with the fact that she out-earns him, becomes a pretext for the unravelling of the charming beloved to reveal his true, manipulative nature. ‘[O]nly when I am with you am I where I should be,’ she assures us, as he tightens his powerful grip on her sense of identity. Meanwhile, just to underscore the significance of this man’s sway, the ‘you’ in Deborah’s chapters is reserved for almighty God himself.
From her subterranean reverie, we learn that Deborah is herself no stranger to loss. A woman from a noble English family, she marries a wheeling-dealing businessman, only to have her fortune and faith in love squandered away: ‘. . . my husband had chiselled away at me, betrayal after betrayal, hardening me.’ Her impoverished circumstances lead Deborah to develop a tough resolve, and she eventually sets sail for the New World to start again in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, reserving all of her devotion for her God and her cause. Still, even her enduring faith fails her in the end, and in death, her obeisance becomes tinged with bitterness. ‘I crossed oceans for you, just to end up buried underground like a worm.’
The limitations of romantic love and its potential for corruption are key tenets of Cautery. As one woman is consumed by a nerve-ridden cynicism, the other gains a stone-like imperviousness, but both resemble a kind of ‘anaesthesia of the heart’—a self-preservation tactic against the serial disappointments associated with desiring straight men, identified by heterosexuality researcher Asa Seresin as a key feature of modern pessimism around heterosexual relationships. By making the two speakers numb to desire, at least while we encounter them, Lijtmaer carves out a unique space for the disappointed: dreamlike and detached from the noise of reality. Here, they can untangle their most rancorous thoughts, understand just how they came to be this way, and figure out where they might go next.
As the contemporary narrator’s recollections drift back and forth, the topographies of Barcelona and Madrid are referenced in chapters named for streets and neighbourhoods. The reader is thus invited on an erratically guided free tour around the specificities of this character’s crisis, as disorientating as it detailed. It makes for an interesting sensation, as the tensions of tourism are felt keenly throughout these chapters. Yet although she acknowledges the insidious encroach of Airbnbs and cruise ships, it is mainly her fellow locals who come under fire, as though she aims to distance herself from their pretentious, insular ways. ‘When it comes to their bars, Barcelona natives are unscrupulously racist, primer els de casa’, she laments, using the Catalan phrase in a pointed way that has doubtlessly raised eyebrows among knowing readers.
Lijtmaer addresses the complex dynamics of cultural identity at play in the city by painting her narrator as something of an outsider, despite the fact that she grew up there. At one point, the Barcelonan reveals that she only truly feels at home when visiting the clothing shop Zara; in the uncertain morass of her current situation, the best comfort comes from a global chain— soothing in its universality and predictability. Throughout the translation, Maureen Shaughnessy too maintains this tension between the local and foreign, resisting the temptation to over-explain and leaving breathing room for the reader to intuit. Those with some experience of Catalunya’s capital will know, for example, that when the narrator declares, ‘I take my pills. I drink water from the tap’, it subtly compounds the fact that she has given herself over to a haze of apathy. The tap water in Barcelona is so grim that drinking it is always an act of desperation.
How our cards are cast and the extent to which we can change them is another question asked in Cautery, the title itself invoking a wince-inducing intervention. In choosing a devout if disillusioned evangelist to provide the counter narrative to the sedative-addled contemporary speaker, Lijtmaer underlines the paradoxical similarity between a deterministic religion and a society that insists on our supposed liberties. Both rely on a faith—the former in God’s grand plan, and the latter in the power of the individual—which ultimately ignores the myriad structural and discriminatory forces at play.
In Salem, Deborah meets the striking Anne Hutchison, a religious mentor whose boundless energy is poured into preaching to the women of the town. As transfixed as Deborah is, Anne has a somewhat confusing attitude towards the subject of free will, telling her congregation of women that ‘we cannot act against fate, we cannot change it’, while insisting to Deborah that she is the ‘mistress of [her] own destiny’. The counterintuitive nature of encouraging the women’s autonomy while admitting their subjection to a higher power feels like a familiar trap; to my mind, Lijtmaer is ridiculing the false comforts of choice feminism—the idea that simply being a woman means that any decision one takes is, by definition, feminist. By writing the story of a self-made colonial landowner, she admits the white feminist urge to laud such figures as role models based on their gender alone, while highlighting the futility of doing so. Even Deborah recognises the irony of it all: ‘Anne’s a saint now, too, and I can’t help but laugh. People are idiots. Only the cloak of time covers all us women who’ve suffered this ridiculous and inane glory, this sanctimonious glory. What good does it do us, once we’re all dead?’
Refreshingly, in Cautery, the stifling confines of gender in both past and present are treated in a way that defies easy essentialism. Instead, Lijtmaer takes aim at the material conditions which dictate feminine ideals, the institutions conspiring to keep them wanting but unable to achieve the transcendence they are promised—forever victims of Lauren Berlant’s notion of ‘cruel optimism’. Especially interesting is the treatment of friendship between women in the novel. In Deborah’s world, she and Anne interpret and debate the scripture, bonding over their shared beliefs with fervour and plotting to start their own colony of women. Similarly, the women of Barcelona pore over Instagram posts and anecdotes of promising first dates in minute detail like ‘raucous birds’. The narrator soon realises: ‘This is the monogamy party. I had forgotten. Now I belong to this club. I haven’t always been part of it. But it’s better to belong here than not to. It gives purpose to everything.’ In stark terms, Lijtmaer lays bare the progression from a society where rebellion meant seeking freedom through faith, to a world where our own aspirations are shaped and curtailed by patriarchal capitalism, accumulation, and the feverish protectionism of the nuclear family—despite all the strides made towards liberation.
Gravesend, the name of the town which Deborah founds after years of battling to make her mark in the New World, is the place she was eventually buried. It goes without mention in the novel, but the sepulchral signposts of ‘Calle Calvario’ (Calvary Street) and ‘Puig d’Ossa’ (Bone Hill) wink at us from the first and last chapters of the book respectively, and a recurring preoccupation with marble slabs leaves us with the certainty that we are all heading for the same place. And yet, the image of the cautery and its cleansing sizzle is referenced time and again: a potential for intervention. Revisit the disheartening news stories mentioned earlier, and you’ll also find investigative journalists demanding answers from complacent Valencian governors, a population’s fierce refusal to be subordinated under the boot of vulture funds and greedy landlords, and the bold testimonies of a few indignant, irrepressible women, urging for justice despite the repercussions on their personal lives. Cautery closes with a wicked act of revenge on the part of the Barcelonan narrator, and though the ethics of her actions are murky, it is an indication that she is finally wresting control over her own life. ‘A life of my own, I don’t say it. My own, I don’t even think it.’ Perhaps it is also a reminder to the dejected among us that, as desperate as things seem, we’re not dead yet.
Maddy Robinson is an English writer and translator from Spanish and Russian. She holds a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature and her work has appeared in publications such as The Kelvingrove Review, From Glasgow to Saturn, El Diario and Pikara Magazine. She lives in Madrid.
*****
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