Señor Ministro de Salud
Scribbled by Atticus Bergman using Crayola crayons | 22”x30” | 2019
Señor Ministro de Salud
The phrase “Señor Ministro de Salud” comes from César Vallejo’s poem “Los Nueve Monstruos,” which was written roughly 45 years after the poet was born in the small town of Santiago de Chuco, Peru, at an elevation of over 10,200 ft. Given his hometown’s unusual proximity to outer space, the weather was often very cold. To ensure that her youngest child stayed warm, his mother would occasionally suck on César’s toes—a ritual which suggests that the most conspicuous feature of his childhood landscape was not the mountain beneath him, but rather the avalanche of familial liaisons that assailed him over the course of his youth, crushing him with their density and staggering abundance.
César Vallejo was the youngest of twelve children. Curiously, both of his grandfathers were Spanish priests whose vocational celibacy, for better or worse, didn’t really do much to impede their organization’s longstanding tradition of impregnating indigenous villagers. In time, the claustrophobia that defined Vallejo’s overstuffed household was further inflamed when the young man decided to fall madly in love with his niece, who had been raised in the same residence as him, at 96 Calle Colón.
Even so, it was not the face of his niece that appeared to him in the autumn of 1920, when Vallejo was overcome by a prophetic dream that allowed him to peer into his future and observe the day of his death. Instead, he saw a figure that he would later recognize as Georgette Philippart—the woman who eventually became his wife on October 11, 1934. When he first encountered this image, Vallejo had been hiding from the police for months—a stressful activity which ultimately induced a state of aggravated delirium. Three years later, his relationship with the Peruvian justice system had failed to improve. And so, after concluding that it would probably be more congenial to live in Paris than to live in prison, the poet embarked for Europe.
the deranged pets would pilfer milk from cows and then vomit the stolen milk into bowls
Meanwhile, when she was approximately 16 or 17 years old, Georgette Marie Philippart Travers was informed by a fortune teller that she was about to become involved with an ugly man who had travelled a great distance across the sea. Several months later, Georgette and César Vallejo began to spy on each other from their respective living room windows; however, it wasn’t until Georgette informed Vallejo that her mother had just died—leaving behind a legacy of 280,000 francs—that the two of them agreed to fall in love, an agreement which they proceeded to consummate with urgency, conviction and exceptional haste. At the time, Vallejo was living in abject poverty with his girlfriend, Henriette Maise. In order to facilitate the conjugal transition that was already in progress, he arranged for Georgette to speak with Henriette, so that his new partner could inform his old partner of what was taking place and, ideally, persuade her to pack her things and leave. Given that Georgette was a foul tempered woman who later drove Vallejo to despair, this was a task that she almost certainly accomplished with ease, if not with tact.
By the spring of 1938, Mr. and Mrs. Vallejo had run out of money and returned to a life of perilous destitution. That April, Vallejo’s health took a turn for worse. While he was languishing in the hospital, he contracted a debilitating case of the hiccups that his doctors were unable to cure. Fortunately, a man by the name of Pierre Pain was better prepared. For two hours, he held his hand exactly 40 cm above the poet’s head while concentrating intensely. To the astonishment of the specialists who had been recruited to improve his condition, Vallejo’s hiccups disappeared. Later, Pierre Pain was scheduled to return for a second session, during which he planned to continue Vallejo’s treatment. However, he was denied entrance by the hospital staff, at which point Vallejo promptly died at the age of 46.
it droops over the seal’s mouth, dangling in front of its bosom like a large, nasal crucifix or a locket on a chain
There is something profoundly satisfying about the way that the phrase “Señor Ministro de Salud” instantly conjures the essence of bureaucracy—an essence which also permeates the delicious redundancies that follow and which, furthermore, can still be sensed in the poem’s English translation:
Never, Mr. Minister of Health, was health so fatal nor did the headache extract so much forehead from the forehead!
From the perspective of literary analysis, I hope it doesn’t trivialize Vallejo’s genius to point out that, if the headache in his poem “extracts so much forehead from the forehead,” than—in the surrogate context of marine biology—so does the nose of the male elephant seal: a baffling organ that physically tugs entire handfuls of flesh from the space above the animal’s eyes and then, for whatever reason, pulls that flesh violently downward, so that it droops over the seal’s mouth, dangling in front of its bosom like a large, nasal crucifix or a locket on a chain.
Generally speaking, elephant seals employ their noses with the most tenacity during courtship, where they function as tubular megaphones that amplify the volume of their amorous bellowing. Unfortunately, while endeavoring to mate, elephant seals bellow so profusely that they release all their body’s moisture and thereby risk dying of dehydration. To address this problem, their noses have evolved to include special glands that permit the water in their breath to be reabsorbed into their body.
Much to the dismay of their mothers, newborn elephant seals often weigh as much as 80 lbs on the day of their birth. As they mature, one of their favorite foods is the meat of vanquished sharks—a formidable prey which presumably enriches the milk that female elephant seals produce when they are nursing. Either way, their milk is certainly in high demand, not only among their own offspring but also among several species of shorebirds, whose fondness for elephant seal milk is so outrageous that they suckle directly from the teats of nursing mothers, despite being lactose intolerant. In 2003, a colony of elephant seals consisting of 21 males and 182 females produced 1,324 pups. Collectively, these pups guzzled approximately 182,300 kg of milk over the course of several weeks. Also guzzling the milk were packs of feral cats that managed to access the seals’ teats by harassing their suckling newborns with such ferocity that the cats’ abusive behavior was not only observed by scientists but also documented, at length, in a subsequent paper.
Eighty-two years earlier, in 1921, an enterprising young blue tit—who lived in the suburban shrubbery of Swaythling, England—figured out that the cream at the top of milk bottles induces significantly less diarrhea in birds than the liquid underneath. Soon this discovery had spread across the island, inspiring blue tits all over the UK with a newfound greed for dairy products and, in the process, provoking a riotous, nationwide sanitary crisis that’s still remembered to this day. A few miles to the north, several Scandinavian countries also retain a cultural memory of systemic milk theft. According to various myths that have been passed down over centuries, there was a time in the past when certain elderly women knew how to manufacture rabbits out of human hair. After a few days of careful instruction, they would dispatch these animals to neighboring barns, where the deranged pets would pilfer milk from cows and then vomit the stolen milk into bowls, so that the old ladies wouldn’t have to suffer the inconvenience of leaving their homes to go shopping.
One reason why the historical trope of milk theft is so compelling has to do with the freakish level of intimacy that’s occasioned by the act of drinking a fluid that has, invariably, been squeezed from the nipples of lactating mothers. This intimacy naturally stimulates fantasies of transgression, as well as fears of violation—both of which have something to say about the rapacious appetites that sustain the perplexing brutality of life.
Never so much painful affection, never did distance attack so close, writes Vallejo in The Nine Monsters, before returning, once again, to this train of thought a few stanzas later, near the end of the poem. So much inversion, so much distance and so much thirst for thirst!
Mr. Minister of Health, what’s to be done!