In 2007 I published a novel titled Caviativá! or how to disappear completely with which I have never been completely satisfied. However, this aesthetically immature text, which owes much to North American authors like Chuck Palahniuk and Hunter S. Thompson, has given me some surprises over the years. The book tells the story of Nicolás Silva, a bored and jaded cool-hunter and silver-spoon rebel who gets sucked into a Christian sect that’s cooking a rather strange plan. To begin with, Jaime Caviativá, the congregation’s pastor, assures his brethren that the world has already ended:

And thus, lost from the grip of our father’s hand, wallowing in disappointment and ecstasy, we have survived the Apocalypse without realizing it. We have gone beyond our destiny without a scratch. What is this I say, a miracle? A miracle to have been exempted from imminent judgement? No, an aberration, an anomaly that must be corrected as soon as possible [...] “We do not live in our destiny, that is our only sin, we live in an malefic distortion.”¹

Soon enough it becomes apparent that the sect is planning a very peculiar collective suicide. According to the pastor, the fire in which they will immolate themselves will give “eternal light to their bodies and eternal life to their bearers.” However, the bodies in question are not those of the members of the congregation: they are corpses stolen from a morgue that are going to supplant them during the ritual in which they will die to the world—the malefic distortion—and be born to God’s kingdom. 

While rereading parts of the novel a few months ago something caught my eye: the narrative core of the book is an event in which a body that is forcibly joined to the social identity of an individual (bios) is sacrificed so that the true self (zoē) is liberated from a world which, under a gnostic logic, is considered fake and spurious. Since the ritual burns and purifies the bios, understood as social and political life, to turn it into zoē, life in its most basic sense, Caviativá! reverses the juridical theatre that acts as the basis of the locus terribilis.

The result of the ritual, as in the case of devotus (0.12), is a “living dead” that should ideally inhabit a perpetual threshold between life and death, completely disappearing from the social and political order.² However, shortly after the collective suicide it becomes evident that the remains of the burnt corpses do not coincide with the ID’s found in the congregation’s headquarters and the macabre mechanism of vicarious sacrifice and immortality is revealed. Ultimately, the suicide described in the novel is another terrible place, a threshold that being unable to escape its own ambiguity becomes yet another prison.

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1. Mauricio Loza, ¡Caviativá! O como desparecer completamente, 135. ↩︎
2. In fact, the similarity between the ritual of devotus and the collective suicide of ¡Caviativá! go beyond producing a “living dead:” In both a consecration sacrifice is made—to the manes in the first case and to god’s kingdom in the second—and in both the “medium” of the ritual is an image, the signum in the case of the devotus and the corpse in the case of the suicide.↩︎