“At the end of the 18th century, smallpox, dubbed ‘the worst minister of death’, spread terrifyingly across the globe, killing hundreds of thousands of people each year. Children were its most vulnerable and numerous victims. However, with the turn of the century, reasons for hope arose…”
With this note begins Javier Neveo’s novel “Los niños de la vacuna”, a splendid historical account of notable facts that were real in all their extension. The author places himself in the mind of one of the children who were taken on boats to test and spread vaccines around the world, Andrés Naya. In the departure of a handful of children including Andrés from the Casa de Expósitos orphanage in La Coruña, where they reside.
Together with the other children and, as I say, narrating it in the first person with the surprise, fright and even excitement of a nine-year-old boy, he and the rest leave with other adults from the port of La Coruña to the Caribbean, on board of the Corvette María Pita.
What does it mean for children who have no history, so to speak, because they are orphans, suddenly being led like heroes to sail in one of the greatest enterprises of humanity, of good humanity, the adults tell them, to fight a monster -smallpox-, going from the cruelest anonymity to the lists of human glories for it?
The story begins with this premise, which is tremendously addictive and very well narrated, so laced with tender, violent, bizarre, fantastic, terrifying situations…, that so with the voice of Andrés living the journey that little by little is discovering its true meanings, the reader will not be able to stop reading until the story is finished, the end of which brings a notable surprise (of which he will not say anything, of course); only that beyond the normal end of the story itself, the author makes a very avant-garde gesture that is very surprising and magnificent, at the same time those avant-garde gestures in the way of novelizing are seen throughout the story. Neveo intersects data and scenes that occurred in their exactness with modern feelings and thoughts, although they have already been experienced in all ages. It is thus that many of those who travel the sea in the heroic voyage are transformed, from the tremendously human nature of their dedication (they travel to save others, the more the better), and they take -especially the protagonist Andrés- a leap, even the narration, its substrate, from being a humanistic story, to also being one of love and respect for animals. Being that humans are also animals (mammals), the author makes use of recounting an event that occurred historically to weave into the sentimental and psychological plot the beginning of an era, that of the broad gaze of the most beautiful fraternity, the one that jumps from the anthropocentrism towards the rest of the species.
This is both a physical and a mental journey. Anyone looking for a first-rate historical novel, here it is. Also, whoever wants a book where the rights of animals in the mouths of the characters that appear are offered to be debated and even defended, this is his book.
I know that “Children of the vaccine” is being used as suggested reading and analyzed in schools.
Through the humanizing and animalizing moral story, Neveo achieves a total work where entertainment, culture and the meeting of ethical values come together; it ties the eighteenth century with our twenty-first century in a profound way, like the waters of two rivers converging in the sea. So that it is seen that the same circumstances, problems, fatigues and joys we suffer whatever time it is in which we are born; and that in the end, the solutions are the same. Perhaps not the solutions, but the precautions, the work so that misfortunes do not occur. Prevention. In the novel, scenes of animal cruelty are detailed, and not in a trivial way. Javier Neveo seeks the total connection: that is: from these dusts these muds. Everything in this living world is inextricably linked, from the smallest plant to the endless convex sky to the foot of a mosquito to the blood of all of us.
Little Andrés Naya, upon learning that some animals with whom he had established friendship and affection, have been killed to make group meals, decides that he will never eat lives again. And he becomes a vegetarian.
Likewise, at one of the moments of the tortuous journey of the vaccine children, as if by chance, Andrés is given to witness a bullfight, from which he will leave horrified but at the same time hopeful. I believe that in this passage, and in a few others, lies the substratic heart of the book. There are horrors, but there is also hope. We will receive damage, but there will be someone who will come with his hands to our darkness, with his voice.
This is not little. And it occurs in the novel at every point of it.
As I said, the scene of the bullfight observed together with the adults of the expedition by Andrés is presented as a grotesque where the reality of the entire experience of his passage through the paths of the human Earth materializes. Blindness, sadism… and heart.
Heart because in the middle of all the horrendous process of torture of the bull, a character appears who restores hope in humanity to Andrés Naya, he is a poet who jumps between the animal’s aggressors, with the stands of the square full of thousands of spectators against him, screaming to be left alone. A poet known to all in that state and whipped a thousand and once for trying to stop situations of animal martyrdom. Here I thank Javier Neveo for turning me into a character in a novel, because that poet is me: Ángel Padilla.
One of the paragraphs where the appearance of the poet in bullfighting torture is discussed reads as follows:
“Who is that man?” Balmis seriously asked the viceroy.
-A poor devil. He calls himself Ángel Padilla and the people of this city know him as “the poet of the animals” because he has no better job than writing pathetic verses and giving ridiculous speeches about animal rights. Have you seen something so absurd? The viceroy replied.
Before doing so, the poet, to one of the animal’s tormentors who invites him to leave on pain of stabbing him with a sword, says: “I’d rather die than remain impassive like a coward.”
Here the counterpoint and the complement. In a story that is overflowing with humanity, Neveo has taken the opportunity to introduce a greater, more sublime and perfect humanity, which contains the same respect as that between individuals of the same species, to the rest of the species.
As I said, the reader will come out of this deep and wonderful adventure thinking… and I think a lot. Because the expedition was called the most humane and humanitarian event at the same time because it was risky (many of the children who traveled on ships died at some point along the way); demonstrating that Neveo was, but also much more because of the situations and experiences that he details and that are not arbitrary: the request for respect from the rest of the species is not something contemporary, it has already been debated and brought to the fore of human thought since the beginning of time, and by great and tired men and women who in their time suffered ostracism and neglect for showing this reality that makes us greater, that is installed within us (this greater respect), but that we must apprehend and put into practice.
The boy Andrés Naya at the beginning of the adventure carefully observes the captain of the ship, tanned by the sun of the seven seas, powerful, almost invincible. From the boring orphanage to sailing the seas in a corvette, it goes a long way, and more for the foaming and creative heart of a child.
Andrés Naya finally likes to go on that expedition and tells us that [al capitán] “Once at sea, I would ask him how I could buy a ship like that. I was starting to like the idea of having my own ship.”
Edit Pyrenees in 2013 the book. But I have also seen that it is published on Amazon with the same title. Javier Antonio Neveo Mateo (Zaragoza, 1976) has a degree in Hispanic Philology. In 1995 he published the book of poems “Under the foam of yesterday.” He collaborates with various literary and digital magazines and, currently, I don’t know what his creativity is working on. I will summon him to interview him in a future installment here in my libertarian, literary and animalist section ‘Yo, animal’, if you wish. In the meantime, I wish him the best of luck and I am infinitely grateful that he has turned me into a fictional character. The truth is that I already feel that I am, I have never fully believed reality, I transit between my thoughts and creations. But seeing myself in a book and doing some of the dangerous things (activism) that I do in reality, gives me a very happy feeling of duplicity, multi-existential. Like the one that the protagonist Andrés Naya finally felt, and if the reader reads the novel to the end he will know why I say this, what exactly I mean.
I also want to own a ship, to raise myself a pirate and knock down all the fishing boats. Finally, knock down all damage to individual and collective life that leads us to the situation we are suffering, the climate crisis, global warming, global pandemics like covid19 and those that will come (because nature is decomposed and emptied, devastated by the human, and through those ‘air’ doors all the bad things that happen to us enter). Clean seas, clean bodies. With a land at peace, there will be a tomorrow, in which innocents will not have to be used against their will (smallpox children were used to alleviate a problem produced by adults). Andrés Naya is the tortured bull as long as these violent practices continue, it is all the hungry children, it is all the chickens and pigs and cows dying of grief in animal farms, it is the sea full of plastics and the sky full of smog.
Let’s take care of the children. And the angels will come.
