Francia, aka Magda to her clients, is a tall trans mixed race born Rubén, in Colombia, and who moved to Paris shortly after her transition.
She is one of the veterans among the Latin American trans women who prostitute themselves in the Bois de Boulogne. Since the adoption of the French law penalizing customers, they have been forced to go even further into the woods to continue receiving them, thus putting their own safety at risk.
As a prologue to the novel, Nancy Huston wonders what right she has to slip into the skin of a character who so little resembles her. “A priori,” she writes, “the TDS [travailleuses du sexe] trans from the Bois de Boulogne, that’s none of my fucking business. » The writer nevertheless decides to interfere in the story to tell a day in the life of Francia. A May day like any other, where, in 12 hours, Francia will deal with 17 clients; she will accept 14.
Despite her 20 years in Paris, Francia has still not succeeded in erasing “the shadows of Colombia” and the noises of the past still resonate in her head. Between two clients she welcomes in what she calls “her cambuche », she recalls her childhood marked by the fear of her father, her transformation, her first visits to Bogotá, the few stories of love and friendship which marked her life.
What makes the story special is that Nancy Huston alternately introduces us to Francia’s clients, just before they go to meet her. She delves into their most intimate thoughts to try to make us understand where they come from and what pushes them to go to the Bois de Boulogne on a beautiful Sunday.
And these 17 clients are all as different as each other, as if to distance us from the idea of any stereotype corresponding to this type of character. They are young, old, couples, exasperated fathers, American pastors or businessmen visiting the capital. But they all want the same thing: to dominate or to be dominated for a few moments – and with experience, Francia knows which ones will only bring her trouble.
On several occasions, Francia will evoke Vanesa Campos, a South American trans prostitute who was killed in the Bois de Boulogne in 2018, in the same area which is described in the novel and where a commemorative plaque pays tribute to her today. Which leads us to believe, throughout the story, that this is perhaps where Nancy Huston left to tell the story of how, despite their inexhaustible reservoir of resilience and their combativeness, these women remain at the height of vulnerability.
If her wish was to make them, through writing, less invisible for the duration of a novel, and to give them a humanity that is rarely granted to them, she succeeds without fail, no doubt about it.
France
Actes Sud / Leméac
304 pages