Bestial Among the Flowers

29/07/2026

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Reinaldo Arenas’s autobiography Before Night Falls is full of the wildest exaggerations, but it doesn’t slip into the irrational; it merely insists on the improbable as Arenas informs us of his many, many lovers, eating dirt or having sex with animals. We might wonder if all his claims are true, yet they aren’t necessarily false. However, what about speaking of someone who can make their eyes change colour, has glowing hands and whose breathing when asleep sounded “...something like bells ringing, or more  like little bells jingling, tumbling over and over and falling...and then it would sound like they were just tumbling along like rocks, and plopping into the water”? This does indicate the unbelievable, the fantasic. Who can accept a grandmother who shrinks “to almost nothing, you could hardly believe it....and she would take shelter in the dead leaves and mud of the flowerbed”?
The Surrealist movement was born in France but found a congenial home in Latin America. “Some key European Surrealists, fleeing the Nazis, took refuge there, especially in Mexico, before and during World War II, and some of them stayed permanently.” John Dorfman adds, “In addition, a good number of Latin American artists took up the cause of Surrealism, either becoming bona fide members of the movement or, more frequently, creating works that owed a great deal to Surrealism without necessarily following all of its rules.” (Art and Antiques) This adaptation in literature became, of course, magic realism. Yet we ought to be just a little wary when saying writers like Borges, Marquez, Cortazar, Carpentier and Arenas are indebted to Europe. Machado de Assis was offering irrational, absurd stories in the 19th century, and Salman Rushdie was right to note “that Magic realism was not García Márquez’s invention. The Brazilian Machado de Assis, the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges and the Mexican Juan Rulfo came before him. García Márquez studied Rulfo’s masterpiece “Pedro Páramo” closely, and likened its impact on him to that of Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’.” (The New York Times) Invoking Borges and Rulfo would still leave the influence of surrealism intact. But Machado de Assis was dead before surrealism was born, and thus could be seen as the forefather of magic realism. There is no need to claim progeny rights in Europe.
Nevertheless, it might be reasonable to say that while surrealism continued in Europe and the US as the absurd (Beckett, Borchert, Heller and Ionescu), its other branch became the magic realism of the writers we have invoked. This doesn’t mean there isn’t another tradition that follows on from de Assis, one that includes Ernesto Sabato’s The Tunnel, some of Bioy Casares’s stories, and Salles Gomes P’s 3 Women, with its fretful logic and warped protagonists. It is to say that de Assis might deserve more credit than he generally receives for initiating the Latin American Boom so centrally focused on Marquez. By insisting that surrealism settled in Latin America is to offer a potentially colonialist discourse not too unlike one that insists the Europeans brought civilisation to the continent, no matter if what would have been brought in this instance was Europe at its most irrational. Whatever Arenas’s interest in defying reason in ‘Bestial Among the Flowers’, what comes through even more consistently, and which is so often present in his other work, is crudeness. Not so much a distaste for the body, but a taste for it at its most base. Bestial is a marvellous manifestation of the vulgar, a creature who on first appearances looks at the young narrator with a mixture of disgust and scorn, and then vomits. A minute later he is looking at our central character again with “unbearable love and understanding, like all of a sudden he’d seen a pimple full of pus and maggots on my face.”
Later, Bestial finds a nest of scorpions in the rotten body of a bird “and one by one he picked the scorpions off and stepped on them and squashed them,” before breaking the legs of the creature. To understand the story is to comprehend something of Arenas’ preoccupations: to turn disgust into an art form; to recognise the body as a site of desire that can take it any direction. Arenas is often a magic realist of the flesh, aware everyone has base needs and desires, and that civilisation is a veneer that needn’t be his concern. If literature is deemed part of that civilisation, Arenas would say so are Henry Miller, Jean Genet and Pier Paolo Pasolini, and part of the literary endeavour is to acknowledge lower as well as higher values, to find a language for the crudeness of experience. Arenas’ image structure could best be described as an accumulation of the ugly within the manifestation of the beautiful, with the flowers of the title specifically the marigolds the grandmother cultivates, while almost everything else is based on misery, hatred and stupidity. The narrator hates his grandmother, while Bestial reckons the narrator should kill his mother, just as his own is now dead. The grandmother says to his mother, that Bestial’s mum, “she goes and hangs herself and leaves this stinking little mess on our hands, and mean to boot.” When Bestial and the narrator go for a swim, it isn’t the little stream he expects, but a “a red-colored torrent of water, and the tallest trees you ever saw, pulled up by the roots, were floating down  it like bobs on the end of a fishing pole.” It is as if images defy reason, even while they may be a product of it. The night before there had been a terrible storm, with thunder and lightning and then endless rain. Causally, we might assume the earlier weather has turned the stream into a torrent, and this is why the trees are floating down it, and the reddishness, the mud from the banks. But the images seem to be products of more than nature, or that nature contains within it forces that can’t be understood rationally. Literature has various terms to describe the relationship between nature and the human — metaphor, simile, personification, pathetic fallacy, hypallage and, more broadly and philosophically, animism.
Arenas’s story is full of their usage. “With a moon that showed no more than the edge, and sometimes seemed to have second thoughts and didn’t show anything at all, we stayed out there hiding in shadows and the scrub.” “He tells us that the “sun is “melting down all over the fields’ and that “the night loomed up again over by one corner of the house.” The grandmother is often associated with other species: “...my grandmother’s shriek rang out like the short bleat of a frog.” “I saw how my grandmother had begun to take the shape of a tired old bird.” Arenas offers the animistic as the story suggests that there isn’t a clear line between people and things, between humans and flowers as Bestial becomes a marigold. Earlier, miraculously, Bestial sat down in the flowerbed and began to read; later, the book, which was still propped against the stalk, was all the testimony remaining that the plant was Bestial. This is manifold nature and thus why we can see Arenas might be resistant to causality — which can seem the most extreme example of anthropomorphism — when he wishes instead to show a world humming with unlikely transformations.
It is as though we are stuck in a world of divisions that have little place if we understand the world through animistic pantheism, one that finds its paradoxical justification in the scientifically evident. “Even though genes only make up 2% of our DNA, it’s still surprising that half of the genes we have are also found in bananas. But animals and plants share a common ancestor – a single-celled life form which probably lived about 1.6 billion years ago. The genes that we share with bananas would have been present in that ancestor, and have been passed down to all animals and plants alive today.” (The Naked Scientists) This can seem like the product of soft thinking rather than hard science, but writers have long known what the scientist must endeavour to discover: that we are all part of one long chain of being.
Yet Arenas’s story is far from gently pantheistic; its messy, mangled prose proposes that everything isn’t peacefully at one but potentially, constantly at war. This is a world of strife rather than harmony and where all stems from a cry of pain made flesh, as if the human is the highest form of cruelty and despair available in the known universe. The narrator suggests so when saying: “I heard my mother from somewhere behind me, screaming that unearthly scream that came from some prehistoric time before anybody was alive...” It is there, too, in the constant brutality and savagery of Bestial, the mother and the grandmother. The grandmother early in the story picks Bestial “up by  the neck like he is a dead hen”, while the narrator tried “skipping and dodging my grandmother’s swats the best I could.” The grandmother is described as “rough and brutal”, yet she is at least cunning. The mother is “brutal and stupid”, and while the narrator is just a bother to his mother, “to my grandmother I was a worthless piece of garbage.” This is human life, similarly described in another Arenas short story: “When the great force created everything that is, she did also create the human race. But the moment she got an inkling of her creatures’ behaviour - this required only a few hours — she ascended in terror back to the heavens, fearing for her own existence.” (’The Great Force’)
Both the grandmother and the mother are usually uncaring with their hands, but the central character notices that his grandmother could be caring when it came to the marigolds. “You had to see it for yourself — the attention she gave to those flowers, which were the only ones for miles around...when she’d planted the seeds and watered them she lay down beside the flowerbed and she didn’t get up again until they turned into tiny little green needles poking up out of the ground...” Perhaps she has more faith in nature than she does in human nature, which, as a phrase, suggests a shoulder-shrugging acceptance of our cruelty to others. However, this contrasts with humanity, which indicates a love for our brethren. If there are writers of humanity (Dickens, Tolstoy, Ishiguro) and writers of human nature (Zola, Rulfo, Houellebecq), Arenas is one of the latter. This doesn’t mean there cannot be horrible cruelty in Dickens and Tolstoy; it is that they believe human betterment or the triumph of the spirit is still possible. In Zola and Rulfo it often reads like a demonstration of futility over amelioration, and Arenas would share such a position at least morally: as he says in Before Night Falls, discussing the early stages of the Cuban revolution, where anyone resistant to the movement was executed. “That is and still is the world”, he says, before adding of someone taking their own life: this was just “more suicide in our political history, which is an endless history of suicides.”
If this is human nature, who wouldn’t retreat into nature? This is what the grandmother does as she cultivates her garden, and turns a figure of human nature at its most base into a figure of nature at its most beautiful. Hence the film’s title. Overnight, Bestial has slowly turned into a flower, the creature that “smells like the very devil”, now smells fragrant. But its life is a short one. The grandmother pulls the marigold up from its roots, shows it to the sun, and then swallows it in one gulp. It might be an act of vegetarianism, but it seems we are back to the cruelty of human nature, and the story ends where it began. The mother, the grandmother and the narrator are together without the intrusive presence of Bestial, but the central character is reminded of what Bestial said to him when the narrator says that his mother said she loved him. “Kill her...kill her before she kills you.” Human nature indeed.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Bestial Among the Flowers

Reinaldo Arenas’s autobiography Before Night Falls is full of the wildest exaggerations, but it doesn’t slip into the irrational; it merely insists on the improbable as Arenas informs us of his many, many lovers, eating dirt or having sex with animals. We might wonder if all his claims are true, yet they aren’t necessarily false. However, what about speaking of someone who can make their eyes change colour, has glowing hands and whose breathing when asleep sounded “...something like bells ringing, or more  like little bells jingling, tumbling over and over and falling...and then it would sound like they were just tumbling along like rocks, and plopping into the water”? This does indicate the unbelievable, the fantasic. Who can accept a grandmother who shrinks “to almost nothing, you could hardly believe it....and she would take shelter in the dead leaves and mud of the flowerbed”?
The Surrealist movement was born in France but found a congenial home in Latin America. “Some key European Surrealists, fleeing the Nazis, took refuge there, especially in Mexico, before and during World War II, and some of them stayed permanently.” John Dorfman adds, “In addition, a good number of Latin American artists took up the cause of Surrealism, either becoming bona fide members of the movement or, more frequently, creating works that owed a great deal to Surrealism without necessarily following all of its rules.” (Art and Antiques) This adaptation in literature became, of course, magic realism. Yet we ought to be just a little wary when saying writers like Borges, Marquez, Cortazar, Carpentier and Arenas are indebted to Europe. Machado de Assis was offering irrational, absurd stories in the 19th century, and Salman Rushdie was right to note “that Magic realism was not García Márquez’s invention. The Brazilian Machado de Assis, the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges and the Mexican Juan Rulfo came before him. García Márquez studied Rulfo’s masterpiece “Pedro Páramo” closely, and likened its impact on him to that of Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’.” (The New York Times) Invoking Borges and Rulfo would still leave the influence of surrealism intact. But Machado de Assis was dead before surrealism was born, and thus could be seen as the forefather of magic realism. There is no need to claim progeny rights in Europe.
Nevertheless, it might be reasonable to say that while surrealism continued in Europe and the US as the absurd (Beckett, Borchert, Heller and Ionescu), its other branch became the magic realism of the writers we have invoked. This doesn’t mean there isn’t another tradition that follows on from de Assis, one that includes Ernesto Sabato’s The Tunnel, some of Bioy Casares’s stories, and Salles Gomes P’s 3 Women, with its fretful logic and warped protagonists. It is to say that de Assis might deserve more credit than he generally receives for initiating the Latin American Boom so centrally focused on Marquez. By insisting that surrealism settled in Latin America is to offer a potentially colonialist discourse not too unlike one that insists the Europeans brought civilisation to the continent, no matter if what would have been brought in this instance was Europe at its most irrational. Whatever Arenas’s interest in defying reason in ‘Bestial Among the Flowers’, what comes through even more consistently, and which is so often present in his other work, is crudeness. Not so much a distaste for the body, but a taste for it at its most base. Bestial is a marvellous manifestation of the vulgar, a creature who on first appearances looks at the young narrator with a mixture of disgust and scorn, and then vomits. A minute later he is looking at our central character again with “unbearable love and understanding, like all of a sudden he’d seen a pimple full of pus and maggots on my face.”
Later, Bestial finds a nest of scorpions in the rotten body of a bird “and one by one he picked the scorpions off and stepped on them and squashed them,” before breaking the legs of the creature. To understand the story is to comprehend something of Arenas’ preoccupations: to turn disgust into an art form; to recognise the body as a site of desire that can take it any direction. Arenas is often a magic realist of the flesh, aware everyone has base needs and desires, and that civilisation is a veneer that needn’t be his concern. If literature is deemed part of that civilisation, Arenas would say so are Henry Miller, Jean Genet and Pier Paolo Pasolini, and part of the literary endeavour is to acknowledge lower as well as higher values, to find a language for the crudeness of experience. Arenas’ image structure could best be described as an accumulation of the ugly within the manifestation of the beautiful, with the flowers of the title specifically the marigolds the grandmother cultivates, while almost everything else is based on misery, hatred and stupidity. The narrator hates his grandmother, while Bestial reckons the narrator should kill his mother, just as his own is now dead. The grandmother says to his mother, that Bestial’s mum, “she goes and hangs herself and leaves this stinking little mess on our hands, and mean to boot.” When Bestial and the narrator go for a swim, it isn’t the little stream he expects, but a “a red-colored torrent of water, and the tallest trees you ever saw, pulled up by the roots, were floating down  it like bobs on the end of a fishing pole.” It is as if images defy reason, even while they may be a product of it. The night before there had been a terrible storm, with thunder and lightning and then endless rain. Causally, we might assume the earlier weather has turned the stream into a torrent, and this is why the trees are floating down it, and the reddishness, the mud from the banks. But the images seem to be products of more than nature, or that nature contains within it forces that can’t be understood rationally. Literature has various terms to describe the relationship between nature and the human — metaphor, simile, personification, pathetic fallacy, hypallage and, more broadly and philosophically, animism.
Arenas’s story is full of their usage. “With a moon that showed no more than the edge, and sometimes seemed to have second thoughts and didn’t show anything at all, we stayed out there hiding in shadows and the scrub.” “He tells us that the “sun is “melting down all over the fields’ and that “the night loomed up again over by one corner of the house.” The grandmother is often associated with other species: “...my grandmother’s shriek rang out like the short bleat of a frog.” “I saw how my grandmother had begun to take the shape of a tired old bird.” Arenas offers the animistic as the story suggests that there isn’t a clear line between people and things, between humans and flowers as Bestial becomes a marigold. Earlier, miraculously, Bestial sat down in the flowerbed and began to read; later, the book, which was still propped against the stalk, was all the testimony remaining that the plant was Bestial. This is manifold nature and thus why we can see Arenas might be resistant to causality — which can seem the most extreme example of anthropomorphism — when he wishes instead to show a world humming with unlikely transformations.
It is as though we are stuck in a world of divisions that have little place if we understand the world through animistic pantheism, one that finds its paradoxical justification in the scientifically evident. “Even though genes only make up 2% of our DNA, it’s still surprising that half of the genes we have are also found in bananas. But animals and plants share a common ancestor – a single-celled life form which probably lived about 1.6 billion years ago. The genes that we share with bananas would have been present in that ancestor, and have been passed down to all animals and plants alive today.” (The Naked Scientists) This can seem like the product of soft thinking rather than hard science, but writers have long known what the scientist must endeavour to discover: that we are all part of one long chain of being.
Yet Arenas’s story is far from gently pantheistic; its messy, mangled prose proposes that everything isn’t peacefully at one but potentially, constantly at war. This is a world of strife rather than harmony and where all stems from a cry of pain made flesh, as if the human is the highest form of cruelty and despair available in the known universe. The narrator suggests so when saying: “I heard my mother from somewhere behind me, screaming that unearthly scream that came from some prehistoric time before anybody was alive...” It is there, too, in the constant brutality and savagery of Bestial, the mother and the grandmother. The grandmother early in the story picks Bestial “up by  the neck like he is a dead hen”, while the narrator tried “skipping and dodging my grandmother’s swats the best I could.” The grandmother is described as “rough and brutal”, yet she is at least cunning. The mother is “brutal and stupid”, and while the narrator is just a bother to his mother, “to my grandmother I was a worthless piece of garbage.” This is human life, similarly described in another Arenas short story: “When the great force created everything that is, she did also create the human race. But the moment she got an inkling of her creatures’ behaviour - this required only a few hours — she ascended in terror back to the heavens, fearing for her own existence.” (’The Great Force’)
Both the grandmother and the mother are usually uncaring with their hands, but the central character notices that his grandmother could be caring when it came to the marigolds. “You had to see it for yourself — the attention she gave to those flowers, which were the only ones for miles around...when she’d planted the seeds and watered them she lay down beside the flowerbed and she didn’t get up again until they turned into tiny little green needles poking up out of the ground...” Perhaps she has more faith in nature than she does in human nature, which, as a phrase, suggests a shoulder-shrugging acceptance of our cruelty to others. However, this contrasts with humanity, which indicates a love for our brethren. If there are writers of humanity (Dickens, Tolstoy, Ishiguro) and writers of human nature (Zola, Rulfo, Houellebecq), Arenas is one of the latter. This doesn’t mean there cannot be horrible cruelty in Dickens and Tolstoy; it is that they believe human betterment or the triumph of the spirit is still possible. In Zola and Rulfo it often reads like a demonstration of futility over amelioration, and Arenas would share such a position at least morally: as he says in Before Night Falls, discussing the early stages of the Cuban revolution, where anyone resistant to the movement was executed. “That is and still is the world”, he says, before adding of someone taking their own life: this was just “more suicide in our political history, which is an endless history of suicides.”
If this is human nature, who wouldn’t retreat into nature? This is what the grandmother does as she cultivates her garden, and turns a figure of human nature at its most base into a figure of nature at its most beautiful. Hence the film’s title. Overnight, Bestial has slowly turned into a flower, the creature that “smells like the very devil”, now smells fragrant. But its life is a short one. The grandmother pulls the marigold up from its roots, shows it to the sun, and then swallows it in one gulp. It might be an act of vegetarianism, but it seems we are back to the cruelty of human nature, and the story ends where it began. The mother, the grandmother and the narrator are together without the intrusive presence of Bestial, but the central character is reminded of what Bestial said to him when the narrator says that his mother said she loved him. “Kill her...kill her before she kills you.” Human nature indeed.

© Tony McKibbin